Doing No Harm (29 page)

She drew away first; he had no immediate plans to ever move. “My goodness, but I react boldly to good news,” she said. Her face was fiery red now, and he supposed his was too. “I should perhaps apologize?”

He shook his head, dazed with feelings he had thought belonged to a younger man.
You’re not eighty, you dolt
, he scolded himself, struck by the fact that for the first time in decades, he didn’t feel eighty. This bore some private thought.

“I don’t think it’s necessary for either of us to apologize for exuberance,” he said, acutely aware how stupid he sounded.
Great gobs of monkey meat, I am Dougie again
, he thought, thankful that Lady Telford wasn’t watching. “Besides, I started it.” He tugged her curls. “And I have no plans to apologize. Olive, Edgar’s fortunes are looking up.”

Maeve giggled when they came back inside, and he knew she had watched out the window. All a man could do was forge ahead and pretend nothing had happened. He sat down for stew and ate quickly. “I’ll take some of this to Joe Tavish, along with whatever of that stiffer paper that remains. Do you have a pencil or two?”

She did and fetched it as he finished eating. “I hope he is feeling better this afternoon because he needs to sketch the …” He paused as the enormity of the project suddenly landed on his head like an ostrich egg, cracked, and dribbled down his temples. “… the Telford Boat Works. Hadrian’s Wall! I’ll take the drawings with me to Plymouth and see how persuasive I am.”

“I have no doubt that you will convince any number of shipwrights to follow you up north to this country,” she said.

After that kiss in the garden, he saw no reason to be suddenly coy. “Olive, I don’t do things like this! I don’t create corporations or make grandiose plans. I’m a surgeon, for heaven’s sake.”

“Have a little faith, Doug,” she said simply.

He spent the rest of the afternoon removing a splinter from the palm of a child who wanted nothing to do with him, and then making an emergency house call to the grocer’s. Maintaining a calm sort of professionalism when he wanted to slap his knee and laugh, he reassured a worried Mrs. McDaniel that, yes, indeed, the umbilical cord stump was supposed to fall away just like that.

The walk back to his house meant stopping to chat with the fishmongers again and then taking tea with an elderly lady whose name he could not recall, who just wanted to talk. He listened, offered a little advice about dry, itchy skin, and returned home with a smile on his face.

He lay down then and tried to sleep because he couldn’t remember when he had last done such a thing. This enforced stay in Edgar was beginning to resemble a fleet action.

He dozed, fearing bad dreams as usual, but instead enjoying the pleasure of Olive Grant’s breath on his neck and the edgy comfort of her softness. He imagined her wearing nothing but a shimmy, which meant he had to get up and walk around a bit, wondering about himself.

On the tenth back and forth pacing, he stopped and looked into his shaving mirror, as though to ask himself, Who is this man? The usual face looked back at him, but the mirror Douglas Bowden smiled.

He spent an hour with Joe Tavish in the shed, which had been swept clean and equipped with a cot found somewhere. He tended the infected wound on the man’s forearm, happy to see it no worse today, and told Joe what he needed and why.

“I want you to come with me in the late afternoon to the old shipyard and sketch it.” To Joe’s unasked why, he told him about the Telford Boat Works and his plans for the corporation to employ every man in Edgar who wanted to work.

“We aren’t carpenters or shipwrights,” Joe argued. “We’re crofters and cattlemen.”

“Can you change?” Douglas asked. “The man I have in mind to manage the yard is a fine teacher. The corporation will pay you well as you learn a new trade.”

“But it’s not—”

“—and it never will be the Highlands again,” Douglas snapped, out of patience. “And, no, I’m not doing this for Olive Grant!”

“I didn’t say—”

“I see it on your face,” Douglas said. “Stop your nasty leering! I’m doing this because I hate the waste of human life. I held little Flora MacLeod on my lap while the horror of her experience took over her brain and she told me through her tears, ‘All we needed was a little help.’ I have no proof against that, Joe Tavish. I need your sketches and I will pay you for them. Whether you want to work in the boatyard is your business. Just don’t get in my way.”

He knew he had spoken too loud because the Highlander stared at him, his face drained of color. “It’s not for a woman?”

Douglas considered the question. “I admit it is, as well. Do any of you realize that Miss Grant has used up nearly all of her inheritance to feed people?”

“I didn’t know,” Joe mumbled. “I … maybe I just thought she was lording it over us, making us feel poor.”

“Olive Grant hasn’t that capacity, and you know it,” Douglas said, suddenly weary of arguing with an idiot. He picked up the paper and pencils. “I need your help and I need it now. Don’t hem and haw and turn away because things have not gone your way, Joe Tavish!” There he was, shouting again. Who was this shrill man occupying his usually calm body? Douglas took a deep breath and another, not trusting himself. “If you will not help me, I’ll draw my own sketches.”

He left the shed, angry with himself for shouting at someone as beaten down and demoralized as Joe Tavish. Maybe the only thing he would ever accomplish in Edgar was Seven Seas Fancies. He had never thought of himself as a leader; maybe he wasn’t.

Shadows were lengthening across the empty shipyard when he arrived there, out of breath and angry. He stood still a long moment, trying to decide where to start, he who had not one single ounce of artistic ability in his whole body.
Do it for Flora. Do it for Olive
, he thought and took heart.

He walked around the graving docks—Olive’s bathtubs—until he felt less like throttling Joe Tavish. He reminded himself to ask Lady Telford for the key to the enormous padlock on the one-story stone building that ran nearly the length of the yard.

The tide was in and water filled the one graving dock where the massive wooden gates remained open.
I can see it in my mind
, he thought, at odds with himself. A yacht so sleek and stylish being built right here.
If I touch the pencil to this paper, my sketches will look like cats mating
.

He decided to begin right where he stood. He could probably sketch the graving dock with some portion of the shed behind it, so the Plymouth shipwright he had in mind could get some clue about the yard’s layout. He poised a pencil over the paper, nearly paralyzed by his inadequacy.
Give me an amputation any day
, he thought and began to sketch.

“Nay, Mr. Bowden. The light’s better here. Give that to me before ye waste a sheet of paper. Paper is dear, don’t you know?”

Douglas looked up, startled. Joe Tavish stood there shaking his head.

“ ’Tweren’t joking. Thou really doesn’t have a drawing bone anywhere.”

“Not one.” Douglas handed over the paper. “I want to get this graving dock with the shiphouse in the background.”

Joe nodded. He looked over his shoulder to a row of men who hesitated by the long shed. “I’ll draw that while you talk to them.”

Douglas looked, too, striving to be casual and matter-of-fact when he wanted to click his heels and dance around like a maniac. As he walked toward the ragged men, some of them in trousers, others in kilts, he saw more Highlanders joining them, some with their wives. Joe must have gone calling.

Douglas perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the abandoned … No, the Telford Boat Works. “Come closer,” he said, gesturing. “I have this plan …”

Chapter 27

O
live Grant saw Douglas Bowden
off on the morning coach a day later, a pasteboard box full of drawings tucked under one arm and his ever-present medical pouch slung over the other. She saw the resolve in his deep-set eyes and she loved him.

After he left, she wondered if she loved him for the good he was attempting to do for Edgar and for the displaced families from the Highlands. Was it because he was also trying to save her from ruin? Or did she love him simply because he was Douglas Bowden, the man she had waited to give herself to, after all these years; the man she wanted to make her children with; the man she knew she would do anything for, if he only asked?

These were new emotions, easy enough to brush off because nothing remotely resembling this had ever happened to her before. Maybe she was confusing love with pity or earnest effort. How would she know? When had something like this ever happened to her?

She stood on the steps of the tearoom long after a simple wave of the hand would have sent most people inside again, especially since it was raining. She stood there, back straight as always, watching as the coach took the little curve that followed the bend of the bay. To her delight, he looked back on that curve, and she waved again. She laughed when he took off his hat and waggled it out the open window.

Even then, Olive didn’t want to go inside. The girls had spread the remaining shells across three tables, with hunks of driftwood occupying a table of their own. She wanted to walk somewhere and think about what she felt.

She thought it had begun with the totally impromptu kiss in the backyard, when her arms had so naturally circled his body, pulling him close as he did the same. Papa would have looked askance to see no space between one body and the other; Mama would probably have smiled and then taken her quietly aside for a discussion on what usually happens next when two people did that. That thought made her smile, because she had an excellent idea of what happened next.

But it had begun much earlier, maybe even in the first days when she barely knew Douglas Bowden, and he had started to talk in his sleep, his voice deepening in intensity until he whimpered. A simple hand to his shoulder had ended his nightmare each time and usually led to deep, peaceful sleep, his cheek resting against her hand, until she moved it and returned to her own narrow bed. He had thanked her once in that straightforward, clinical way of his, and then never mentioned the matter again because he was too busy taking care of too many people and dealing with issues he had never encountered at sea, unless the dratted Countess of Sutherland had found a way to ruin lives on-board vessels of the Royal Navy too.

Olive had quickly discovered him for what he was because he said so: a retired surgeon looking for a trouble-free place to establish a country practice. She knew he had earned such a place because his nightmares told her so. She wanted such a place for him, up to the moment when she knew that if he left Edgar, she would never be the same again.

Reading the occasional novel had suggested to her that finding the right man led to tranquility and harmony. The reality was far more wrenching, especially if the right man for her had no idea what he wanted.

“You have to leave it at that,” she advised herself in the mirror that morning. She knew she must tell herself that every morning, up to and beyond the inevitable morning when he climbed aboard the coach and left for good. She would probably tell herself that every morning and watch the woman in the mirror grow gray and wrinkled. She had found the man she loved; there was never any guarantee that such a fellow would reciprocate. The kiss indicated strongly that he might, but there was a much bigger issue at stake in Edgar, and they both knew it.