Doing No Harm Read online

  She nodded, tears in her eyes. “Do you ever want to help the whole world, Captain?” she asked.

  “Only my entire life,” he assured her. “We’ll start small here in Edgar.”

  What in blazes am I implying? he asked himself, horrified, as Miss Grant and Maeve covered the plates with cloths and left the kitchen. Hungry himself, he looked in the largest pot and salivated to see meat, onions, and potatoes in a brown sauce. He found a bowl and spoon and helped himself.

  “You’re useful and you cook,” he said softly. He finished and left a handful of coins on the serving table.

  He stayed in the kitchen, nodding to the earnest ladies serving Miss Grant’s noontime meals to what probably constituted her usual clientele, older men and women of modest means who relied on the capable woman with the soft heart. He didn’t see more than small coins left on tables.

  Miss Grant and Maeve came into the kitchen in short order. She quickly put the scullery maid to work gathering dishes from the dining room and then sat down at the serving table. He watched her struggle, and then handed her his handkerchief.

  She kept the cloth to her face for a long moment and finally blew her nose. “Mrs. Tavish couldn’t even wait until we left the room. Oh, Captain, she almost fell on that food!” She put her hand to her mouth until she gained some control. “And Tommy—he’s in such pain, but he is hungrier.”

  “It’s a poor village,” he said.

  He took a liberty and got another bowl from the cabinet. He filled it with stew and set it in front of Miss Grant. “You’re an excellent cook, by the way,” he told her.

  “Just a simple stew for the middle of the week,” she replied, but he heard the pride in her voice. “I cook mainly for pensioners, Highlanders who aren’t too prideful, and the odd visitor who drops by and saves a little boy’s life.”

  “So I am the odd visitor,” he teased.

  She laughed. “Oh, you know what I mean!” Her face grew serious and she set down her spoon. “I do not know where you are going, Captain, but I do hope you can remain here a few days for Tommy.”

  “Certainly I will,” he replied, startled that she would think anything else. She blushed and he realized she had never had any dealings with doctors. “It’s what sawbones do, Miss Grant,” he explained. “I would no more leave now than walk barefoot on spikes.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply and picked up her spoon again.

  “Highlanders?” he asked. “Here?”

  “They were dumped on Edgar two years ago, and no one quite knows what to do with them. I feed some, but the others are so proud, or shamed.” She shook her head and he saw her frustration. “We don’t understand them.”

  Dumped here? Douglas realized he knew nothing about Scotland. He left Miss Grant to eat in peace and went through the dining room, looking for the coachman. One of the diners told him the man was long gone. His luggage had been left in the tearoom’s snug entry hall.

  He stood for a long moment in the open door, looking at Edgar, with its lovely pastel-painted stone houses and businesses. Just beyond, he watched the fishing boats near the mouth of the River Dee, but on the seawaters of the Firth of Solway. He saw the ruined castle on the hill and a mansion a little closer to the village. A bell in the church tower rang two times. He watched a woman pruning her roses, nodding to a passerby on the other side of the low stone wall surrounding her tidy house. He looked up at seagulls wheeling overhead, then swooping down to the dockside to join the squabble of other gulls waiting less than patiently for the fishmongers to gut and clean the catch.

  It was a village ordinary and poor, if people like the Tavishes existed, and pensioners found it cheaper to eat at Miss Grant’s Tearoom than manage their own kitchens. Probably things were better in the approaching summer, when little garden plots could be tended and provide some variety from what he suspected was a diet of oats and fish. Winter would be the hungry time, but he imagined this village at Christmas, when there would probably be carols sung and some kindness shown to the poor from those only slightly better off.

  He shook his head. Edgar would never do, of course, but he wasn’t going to leave until Tommy was better. He would find a more prosperous village farther on. Still, the apple trees were in bloom in Edgar, and he did like the sound of the gulls. He saw little girls skipping rope and chanting a rhyme he couldn’t quite hear but which reminded him of his own dear sister, dead from childbirth, these ten years. He noticed other little girls standing in the shadows, just watching, not invited to jump rope. Perhaps they were Highland children.

  Captain Douglas Bowden, surgeon, late of the Royal Navy, looked around and saw a simple village, one of thousands he had done his best to keep safe from Napoleon, and it touched his heart. “We did it for you,” he said to the distant little girls. “We would do it again.”

  Thoughtful, he walked into the street and then back the way the coach had come. Tommy Tavish’s father still lay in a sodden heap, snoring off a monumental drunk as chickens pecked around him. Douglas came closer and toed him. Nothing. He squatted by the man’s head and put practiced fingers to a filthy neck, hunting for a pulse. He found it, and thought it almost a pity that such a man would sober up and likely get angry because his put-upon wife committed some non-existent infraction that warranted a kick or a slap, never mind that she was greatly pregnant. Punishment would follow dreary punishment until the end of their already sorry lives.

  He stood up and found himself looking at whom he thought must be the constable, from the truncheon he carried. “What do you do with a man like this?” Douglas asked.

  “Lately I just leave him in the street to come to himself. Sometimes it rains—this being Scotland—and I hope he will die of t’lung ailment.” The constable shrugged his shoulders. “A man can hope, anyways. Hasn’t happened yet, though.”

  “I have to salute your plain speaking,” Douglas said. “Can a man like this be put away somewhere to rot?”

  “Sadly, no,” the constable answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. “He would have to kill someone …”

  He let the sentence trail away, but Douglas felt the unspoken chill. And who would die except his wife and son?

  The constable seemed like a fount of realism. He could stand candid conversation. “At sea, someone could drop his worthless hide overboard during a night watch, to no one’s regret,” Douglas said. “Don’t think it hasn’t happened.”

  The constable nodded. “The coachman, he told me you were Royal Navy, asking about doctors and such.” He peered at Douglas. “You patched up young Tommy. Stay here, laddie. We have a need.”

  “I’ll stay here until Tommy feels better,” Douglas hedged.

  The constable nodded, evidently philosophical as well as realistic. He stuck out his hand. “Let me at least thank ye for what you’ve done.”

  They shook hands and Douglas continued to the Tavish hovel. He opened the door and stood a long while, contemplating the ruin within. I was better off at sea, he thought, wondering where a surgeon would start in a backward place like Edgar, or even if a surgeon—not him, of course—would have any power to deal with a sorry sack like Tommy’s father.

  He heard scratching under a pile of reeking bedding and wondered for one terrible moment if there were other Tavish children hiding and hungry. To his relief, a rail-thin black pup nosed his way toward daylight and wagged his tail, ever optimistic in that way of dogs of a certain age.

  Douglas held out his hand, and the pup edged toward him, suggesting to the surgeon that Tavish senior had already applied some well-placed kicks to the little fellow to cow him. In another moment Douglas rubbed the pup behind his ears, which made his tail wag at a velocity that nearly overset him.

  Douglas debated about eight seconds whether to leave the little beast to the tender mercies of Mr. Tavish, who probably would have no memory of where his terrified family had gone and react accordingly. He made an executive decision, picking up the pup and tucking him in his arm.

  “Miss Grant, you have just acquired an eventual watchdog,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  His was a thoughtful walk back down the High Street to Miss Grant’s Tearoom, encumbered as he was with a no-hoper pup without a single thing going for him, who still managed to wag his tail. The encumbrance came with the realization that Miss Grant might not care for a dog on the premises, especially one as bedraggled as the Tavishes already in temporary residence.

  He held the dog out for a better look. “I will tell Miss Grant that you leaped into my arms to escape bears,” he said, glancing around first to make sure that no one stood close by to hear him talking to the malnourished little scrap. “You could use a bath and a haircut.” He chuckled. “Come to think of it, so could I.”

  He had second and third thoughts about his impulsive act. Since Edgar was a small village, there wasn’t time for fourth thoughts before he opened the door to Miss Grant’s Tearoom. “Here goes, you mutt,” he whispered. “Look sagacious and competent.”

  “You’re talking to a dog,” was Miss Grant’s first comment, as she eyed the trembling little beast in his arms. “And he doesn’t smell good.”

  Oh, what now? he thought, not knowing this freckled woman well enough to throw himself on her mercy, especially as she was already housing his first patient in Edgar. And there he went again, implying that Edgar was going to be his future home.

  He took a closer look at her in better light than upstairs and was instantly charmed. “My stars, Miss Grant, you’re heterochromatic.”

  He could have slapped his head, but he chose honesty, since nothing else was going to succeed.

  “I am an idiot too,” he said. “All that means is that you have a …” He looked closer, because it wasn’t so obvious. “… a blue eye and a brown one: heterochromia.”

  She stared at him, and then laughed. “I never knew it had a name. There was an old herb woman in Edgar once who crossed the street to avoid me.”

  “It’s certainly not contagious,” he said, happy she was ignoring the pup squirming in his arms now. “Although if that had happened six hundred years ago, you might have been burned at the stake. A pity, but there you are.”

  She shook her head, her heterochromatic eyes merry. “Captain …”

  “Mister …”

  “… Mister Bowden, is this what passed for small talk in your ship’s wardroom?”

  “No. Only in Stonehouse, where surgeons congregate and have as little small talk as I.” He looked down at the pup. “I stopped at the Tavish’s miserable house just as this pitiful specimen burrowed out from under truly nasty blankets.” He remembered his own childhood. “Miss Grant, may I keep him?”

  She didn’t try to hide her smile, so he knew she must have used the same ploy on her parents, years ago. “Only if you promise to take care of him.”

  “I couldn’t leave him there. He’s as thin as the rest of them, and I don’t think Mr. Tavish will be inclined to charity, when he finds his family gone.”

  “Set him down, Mr. Bowden. I think he …”

  They watched as the nameless pup sniffed the air, probably breathing in wonderful fragrances from the kitchen, even though the luncheon hour had long passed. But no, another sniff, and he headed for the stairs, doing his purposeful best, even though he wobbled with hunger and ill-use.

  “He’s a loyal little brute,” Miss Grant said softly. “He’s starving, but he’s trying to find his boy. Pick him up, Mr. Bowden, and take him upstairs. I will find some kitchen scraps and follow you.”

  Douglas did as she said, marveling yet again at the kindness of women. He opened the door quietly to see Mrs. Tavish dozing, and Tommy squinting at the ceiling as though he ached even to open his eyes all the way. He glanced sideways, in too much pain to even turn his head.

  “Looks like I’m not a minute too soon, lad,” Douglas whispered. “I brought you a friend.”

  He set the pup down on Tommy’s bed, hoping the critter wouldn’t jostle the boy, but trusting in the kindness of dogs.

  His trust was not misplaced. After a sniff of the splints, the pup heaved a sigh that shook his skinny frame and curled up on Tommy’s good side, well within reach of the boy’s hand, which came down heavily and stayed there.

  “How is it they know?” Miss Grant said from the doorway, bowl in hand. She set it on the bed, close to the pup, who fell on the food almost as eagerly as the Tavishes had devoured their meal. “What’s his name, Tommy?”

  “Duke,” the boy said through clenched teeth. “After Wellington.”

  “That’s a lot of name for not much,” Douglas said as he washed his hands and dried them on a towel which Miss Grant, thoughtful woman, had brought upstairs with her. “You have the makings of an excellent pharmacist’s mate,” he told her.

  Miss Grant rolled her heterochromatic eyes at him. “I am no nurse! Your small talk truly leaves a great deal to be desired.”

  “It’s not likely to change,” he admitted. “I am thirty-seven and set in my ways.”

  She was a tease. “I would have thought you older, Mr. Bowden,” she told him, taking back the towel and draping it over the footboard to dry.

  Joking or not, she knew just what to do when he approached the bed with a glass of dark liquid in his hand. She put her hand behind Tommy’s head and raised him up so gently that he scarcely had time to groan. Down went the draught, and not a drop spilled.

  “That’s it for now,” he told Tommy, his hand on the boy’s forehead. “You’re going to sleep for a long while, and when you come up, I’ll put you under again. You need to sleep and heal.”

  Tommy nodded. A few minutes later, his eyes closed, and Douglas felt his own relief.

  “Will … will he die?”

  Douglas turned to see Mrs. Tavish watching them, her eyes troubled. He knew it was time for plain speaking.

  “He will die if he returns to the miasmic air and foul humours in your house,” Douglas said. He moved to take her by the arm and help her to her feet because she was struggling to rise. She shrank back in the chair, telling him worlds about her own treatment by the lump of sodden carrion probably still snoring on the High Street.

  “I shouldn’t stay here. Joe will miss me.”

  He stepped away from Mrs. Tavish and let Miss Grant help her to her feet.

  “Do you have a place you can stay until Mr. Tavish … feels better?” Miss Grant asked.

  “Aye. My neighbor Mary Cameron,” Tommy’s mother said. “She’s done it before.” Big sigh. “And probably will again, mind.” Her eyes turned wistful. “We were neighbors back home in the glen.”

  “Mrs. Tavish, you would be better off leaving such a man,” Douglas said, unable to help himself.

  “He’s my husband,” was her quiet reply. She bent over Tommy awkwardly and kissed his forehead, and then went downstairs. When the door closed so quietly, Douglas felt his heart sink.

  Douglas didn’t even want to look at Miss Grant. “Sometimes I am ashamed of men,” he said, embarrassed.

  Miss Grant tidied Tommy’s bed, apparently not willing to look at him, either. “We keep hoping that Joe Tavish will catch his death some night …”

  “There’s no … no … squire or man of consequence to deal with someone such as that man?”

  “No laird,” she said. “Lady Mary Telford lives in that large manor near the old castle, but she is English and doesn’t concern herself with us.”

  She gave him a hopeful look. He knew he had to squelch any designs on her part. He was not the man to change things in Edgar. Useful as he might prove, he had no standing in a village such as this, where even useful new arrivals were probably considered foreigners forevermore.

  “Miss Grant, I have no intention of staying in Edgar any longer than to see Tommy on the mend,” Douglas announced, feeling remarkably foolish, for some reason. He had barked orders to pharmacist’s mates and other surgeons for years, but he felt painfully like an ungrateful idiot.

  To his relief, if not strictly balm in Gilead for his conscience, Miss Grant took his declaration in stride. “We are all grateful that you were here this day to save a little boy’s life,” she assured him.

  She had the cutest freckles, freckles all over her face and what he could see of her neck—little faded freckles that must have been much more pronounced when she was a child, but now a shade just this side of charming. Coupled with her heterochromia and deep red hair, she was a colorful woman. What was that word …

  “Ephilides!” he exclaimed. “It’s been nagging at me since I first saw you.”

  Tommy stirred. Miss Grant took Douglas by the arm and led him out to the landing. She stared at him and then gave him that patient look he had seen once in a great while, since he had never spent much time on land to observe the fair sex.

  “You’re so kind to suffer this fool gladly, Miss Grant. Ephilides is the scientific word for freckles.” I’ve done it again, he thought in desperation. Might as well blunder on so she will be glad to see me leave. “You have as charming a set of ephilides as I ever hope to see.” There. Call me an idiot to my face.

  To his amazement, she clapped her hands in delight. “Heterochromia and ephilides? Da always said that my eyes were evidence that God Almighty has a rollicking sense of humour. Mam told me that a host of angels kissed me and freckles are the result. It’s bricíní in Gaelic, by the way.”

  “You must think me an idiot,” he said in apology.

  “Since we are into plain speaking, I think you remarkably kind to help Tommy Tavish,” she said simply. “Certainly we wish you would stay, but Edgar isn’t for everyone.”

  “It’s for you, though?” he asked, grateful to have bumbled through his lack of manners, and in addition, be given an easy exit from the village.

  “I’m needed here, and it is my home. Now then, Mr. Bowden, will you be wanting to stay here tonight?”

  “If it isn’t too much trouble.”