Doing No Harm (9 page)

He heard a whine and looked toward the door to see scrawny little Duke eyeing him, then retreating to Tommy’s room, then returning to cock his head and wag his tail.

“You’re obviously smarter than I am,” he told Duke. “Go tell Tommy I will be there in a moment.” When the dog immediately returned to the room across the hall, Douglas couldn’t help smiling.

He made a face when he sat up, but at least he didn’t cry out. The footboard of the bed was tall enough to lean on, so he made it to his feet, where he stood, blinking for a moment, trying to remember where he was.

The memory of the humiliating beating administered by Tommy’s father made him frown and then regret even the movement of his eyebrows. He touched the eye that throbbed and understood why his vision was faulty.
Good thing I swallowed the anchor and left the Fleet
, he thought.
I could never live this down in the officers’ wardroom
.

Walking was easy enough, if he moved slowly. He leaned against the doorframe to Tommy’s room. “What’ll it be, lad?” he asked. “The pisspot? Some luncheon?”

Tommy gaped at him, his mouth open. “Sir, your eye!” he exclaimed. “Maybe you should sit down.”

“Oh, no. I’m on my feet after some effort, and I shall remain upright. First things first.”

The matter of easing Tommy was quickly accomplished, with the boy alert enough now to manage the earthenware jug himself. By the time Tommy was tidy, Miss Grant came up the stairs with a tray holding two bowls and bread. She looked at both of them and pointed to the chair.

“Sit, Mr. Bowden,” she ordered.

He did as she commanded, knowing enough about women to be certain his life would run smoother if he obeyed. To his amusement, he noticed that Duke sat too.

She handed Douglas a bowl of lamb stew and a spoon, then dipped a slice of bread in it. She did the same for Tommy, after helping him into a sitting position. There was even a smaller bowl for Duke, the smart dog.

As she helped Tommy, Douglas watched his patient, pleased to see that his color had returned and his eyes were alert.
More alert than mine
, he thought, and wondered,
What must you think of me, Miss Grant?

Miss Grant quickly proved herself kinder than he deserved. “Don’t berate yourself, sir. All day people have been stopping by to ask me to thank you for ridding Edgar of a bad egg.”

She colored and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, I  …”

Tommy proved to be brighter than all three of them. “Did my da give you the black eye?” he asked Douglas.

Douglas nodded. “We had a bit of a brangle. He won.”

“Me da is the bad egg?”

“Aye, laddie. I can’t deny it,” Olive said quietly.

Tommy frowned and returned his attention to Douglas. “Sir, you would only try such a thing if he made you very angry, think on.”

Just tell him
, Douglas thought.
Let’s get it over with
. “He did make me angry. In the first place, I suspect he was the cause of your accident and not what your mother said.”

“Aye,” Tommy said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I didna move fast enough for him, and he has this stick. Did he … did he do something to me mam?”

Suddenly there was no tough boy, but a child with tear-filled eyes.

“Not as such, Tommy, but I must tell you: your mother was confined last night and your little sister did not live.”

Miss Grant sat on the bed and held out her arms, gathering to her heart a boy in tears. She spoke to Tommy, but her eyes were on Douglas. “Your mam is well, but weak from hunger. Mrs. Cameron is taking care of her, and we are taking care of you.”

How lovely that sounded to Douglas. He looked into Tommy’s face and saw a near tidal wave of relief wash over him. The boy’s shoulders relaxed and he rested his head against Miss Grant, who held him close.

“We are taking care of you, indeed,” Douglas said. He touched Tommy’s head. “Your mother wanted us to bury your little sister in Miss Grant’s pretty backyard.”

“With a headstone and everything?”

“Headstone and everything,” Douglas echoed, thinking of so many burials at sea. He didn’t think he sounded ragged and needy, but Miss Grant spoke up so promptly that he wondered.

“You can pick my flowers, when they bloom, and leave them for her. There’s already a little bench where your mam can sit,” Miss Grant said. “I can’t think of a lovelier place.”

Tommy seemed to turn inward. He lay back down and looked beyond Miss Grant into another time and place. Douglas had seen such a look on any number of patients, hardy veterans of battle. “Lad?” he asked.

Tommy opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He looked from Douglas to Miss Grant and took a deep breath. “Miss Grant, I stole a blanket off your line last fall. I think you left it out to air. I’m sorry.”

Douglas glanced at Miss Grant, knowing Tommy was ripe for a scold. Miss Grant was made of kinder fabric, apparently.

“Did you take it because you were cold, Tommy?” she asked, her voice quiet but not one to be ignored.

“We had a long winter,” he said simply.

“Aye, we did,” she agreed. “Did you wrap up tight in it?”

He nodded. “It smelled of something wonderful.”

Douglas thought of his visit to the Tavish hovel, where nothing smelled wonderful.

“It’s called lavender,” Miss Grant said. “This summer I will put you to work gathering lavender heads. Perhaps your mother can help me make lavender sachets. I like to keep one under my pillow.”

Well done, Miss Grant
, Douglas thought.

“On board ship, he’d have been flogged senseless for theft,” Douglas told her, after a lesser administration of laudanum put the boy under again.

“And what did that ever accomplish?” she asked as she helped him across the hall to his own bed.

“Very little,” Douglas admitted. “I patched up some torn backs but I could not do much for their spirits. Don’t let me make you blush, but upon my word, Miss Grant, you are amazing.”

She blushed anyway, and tried to wave away the compliment. His laugh turned into a groan that took her right out of her embarrassment and back to the practical woman he already appreciated.

“This state of affairs will not do, Mr. Bowden,” she said, all business again. “Your ribs might not be broken, but you know you will feel better if I wrap them.”

“I won’t deny it,” he said. It was his turn to blush.

“Don’t let me make you blush, sir,” she teased. “I have seen a rib cage before.”

Without a word, he unbuttoned his shirt and let her help him out of it.

“Where, in particular?” she asked.

He pointed to the spot in question. “The extra strips from your sheet are next to my medical bag, where you will also find little clamps in a small box that remarkably says ‘clamps.’ ”

She went across the hall and returned with the items in question. “My goodness, Mr. Bowden, I am not the only colorful person,” she said, and there was no disguising her amusement, even if he could not see her face. He knew she was staring at his back. “What on earth is it?”

“That, Miss Grant, is a Fiji islander’s interpretation of a medical caduceus. And, yes, I was far gone, wasted, and three sheets to the wind. And young too. Why else would a man get a tattoo?”

“A dare, perhaps?” she asked. “Did it hurt?”

He laughed and groaned. “Not at the time! Once the kava wore off, I was in agony for a few days.”

“I hope you learned a lesson,” she said, sounding so Scottish that he couldn’t help smiling.

“I did. Madam, that is my only tattoo. You may search far and wide, but you will find no more,” he said firmly.

“I didn’t intend to,” she said. “Where do I start? Your ribs, I mean.”

She was still smiling as she wound the sheet bandage around him, pulling it tighter at his orders, until he was satisfied. She helped him into his shirt, buttoned it for him, and told him to lie down.

He surrendered happily to someone else’s doctoring. He watched her roll up the rest of the sheet bandage, impressed with her kindness. She turned to leave the room. “Miss Grant?”

She looked back at him, waiting.

“You have seen both my tattoo and my ribs,” he said, wondering if she might slap his chops even harder than Tavish had, but determined to forge ahead anyway. “I realize that our acquaintance is brief, and I won’t be here long, but perhaps you could call me Douglas, all things considered.”

She had pretty, even teeth that showed to great advantage when she laughed.

“And I am Olive,” she said. “Close your eyes for a while now. I have work to do. Douglas.”

Chapter 9

O
n the third day of Douglas’s
enforced sojourn in Edgar, tiny Deoiridh Tavish was buried in Miss Olive Grant’s own christening gown. “I am thirty years old and unlikely to need it for a bairn of my own,” she said quite frankly to Douglas, who wondered about shortsighted Scottish men.
Not my business
, he thought.
Moving on soon
.

The delicate lining of the little box had been anchored in place with the tiny stitches of a true seamstress. Douglas almost had to smile to see the pride on the face of the old woman who had done the stitching.

“Lovely work,” he said to the old antique, who blushed, to his delight.

“Now how would you know about good stitching?” she teased.

He held up his hands. “I’d almost wager that I have thrown in as many stitches as you have. I’ll call mine sutures. Yours are neater though, and mine were generally sewn on a bobbing deck.”

He thought she might chuckle at that, but she patted his arm instead. “Good lad,” she murmured. “Took a mighty toll though, eh?”

“Not really,” he told her. “I’m alive and quite a few of those men I stitched are too.”

She looked at him as she might look at an equal, and he was flattered all out of proportion to the occasion. And then she told him something that made him understand the wisdom of women.

“It’s in your eyes, lad. They tell a different story.”

She said it quietly and patted his arm again, before turning to Miss Grant, who held the baby. Douglas had a sudden urge to find a looking glass, which he laughed off. He tried to remember the last time he had really looked into anything beyond a shaving mirror and came up empty.

When all was ready, Douglas carried the pitifully small coffin upstairs, so that Tommy, awake now and more alert, could bid hail and farewell to his sister.

The boy had cried to go downstairs and into the garden with the others, but Douglas had firmly vetoed his request. Olive solved the problem by commandeering two of her pensioners, who held Tommy upright by his window so he could watch the simple burial.

Mrs. Tavish must have been in the tearoom’s backyard before, maybe stealing blankets with Tommy, because she had chosen her daughter’s plot well. The hawthorn bushes had begun their blooming, along with some brave daffodils. Summer here would be a choice place to rest on the bench and think about Deoiridh’s brief pilgrimage through a hard world, rendered easier because her time had been so short.

Olive had first thought to ask the minister to do the burial, but he had refused. “It’s not consecrated ground,” Olive had fumed when she came back from St. Barnabas. “ ‘Use the pauper’s field,’ he told me. “Wretched man! My father would never have done that, were he still the minister in Edgar.”