Page 11 of Doing No Harm (Carla Kelly’s Regency Romances #5)

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.”

“Hardly matters,” Douglas told her. “I’ve heard twenty-five years’ worth of quarterdeck sermons by any number of captains. Let me recommend Job chapter 19, verses 25–26.”

“You must know it by heart.”

“Aye.” He closed his eyes, remembering far too many burials at sea. “I can recite it from memory.”

“And I’ll have a verse too. Perhaps I shall sing.”

So it was that tiny Deoiridh Tavish, her brother watching from an upstairs window, received a lovely burial in a beautiful garden. The minister might not have deigned to attend, but the yard was full of Olive Grant’s pensioners grouped around the flower garden and the little hole.

His ribs pained him too much to lower the box into the grave, but two of the old men he was beginning to recognize did the honors, carefully tamping down the dirt. Olive Grant nodded to him when it was his turn and he stepped forward, thinking of so many other times.

“?‘For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God,’?” he said, wishing all funerals could be in such a lovely setting.

He stepped back into the circle of mourners and Olive Grant took her turn. He admired her hair, all orderly now, and the handsome plaid draped over her shoulder. As she began to sing, he felt a tiny bit of callous chip away from his heart, never mind that such a thing was medically impossible.

He shouldn’t have worried about the tears coursing down his cheeks. A surreptitious look around showed him to be in good company as Olive Grant sang Handel’s lovely alto solo from Messiah .

“?‘He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; and He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.’”

She sang, her voice pure and true. She clasped her hands at her waist, economical and tidy, and cocked her head slightly to one side, her eyes so kind.

Douglas felt his own battered spirits settle down.

For the first time in forever, his high-held shoulders, always tense, slowly relaxed.

He knew something wonderful was happening to him; what it was, he had no idea.

If he had been the creative type, he would have thought an august, cosmic hand had just turned a page in his book of life, leaving behind the pages of war and tumult.

But he wasn’t the creative type, Douglas Bowden reminded himself.

All was calm when she finished, even the gulls by the fishing boats silenced for once, giving smaller spring birds the chance to be heard. When Olive looked in his direction, he patted his heart, which made her tear up, for some reason.

The old people filed away until just the two of them remained in the garden. Douglas heard the upstairs window close, so he knew Tommy Tavish was back in bed.

“Thank you for doing this, Olive Grant,” he said. “I’ve been nothing but a bother to you since I came to town.”

“I daresay Tommy Tavish would call you a blessing,” she said. She knelt and patted the little mound among her spring flowers, flicking away an imaginary weed and smoothing down the soil. “I believe I will plant blue flax here, and perhaps some heather.”

“I promised Mrs. Tavish a headstone,” he told her. “Who should I see?”

“Will McCorckle, two doors down,” she said quickly. “I would say that we have been the bother to you, Mr. … Douglas Bowden.”

“If that is so—and I do not believe it for a minute—I’ll give Tommy two more days and— ”

“And then what?” she finished. “Send him back to starvation? And Mrs. Tavish? What of her?”

“It’s your village, not mine,” he said quickly, and then was immediately ashamed of so cavalier a comment. “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

She had turned away, and he didn’t blame her. It isn’t my problem , he thought and felt the tension return to his shoulders. He didn’t know what to say, so he watched the pleasant sway of her skirt instead.

She stopped walking but did not turn around. When she spoke, her voice was still kind. “If you feel up to it, Mr. Bowden, take a walk around Edgar and really look. Supper will be at six of the clock, as usual. Don’t overexert yourself, though.”

He did as he said. She called me Mr. Bowden , he thought, irritated with himself. And so I was, drat the matter .

He didn’t expect to see anything different from his previous sorties up and down the High Street, most memorably running with a bleeding boy in his arms, and more recently staggering back to the only refuge he knew in Edgar, wounded himself because he had never been much of a fighter.

If the Royal Navy had required men like him to board enemy vessels with a cutlass in hand, Englishmen would probably be speaking French now.

The thought made him smile and then laugh a little, driving away those carrion birds that circled ships after battle in places like the China Sea and flapped around him in his dreams. He touched his bound ribs, pleased to feel no worse than he expected.

His eye and cheek would be a colorful green soon, and then purple, but it would fade.

It was that time of the afternoon when even a quiet village like Edgar grew even more silent. The sun warmed the cobblestones and the few dogs about were content to loll in the warmth and give him no more than a passing glance, almost as if they were already used to him .

He walked to the little bay and stood there, seeing distant sails of fishing boats returning. He counted no more than ten boats on the horizon, a smaller number than the expansive docks were originally built for. This was no busy fishing port any longer. Where had the men and ships gone?

He stopped at Mrs. Cameron’s house, thankful he had remembered to put more coins in his pocket for the two women. Mrs. Tavish was sitting up in bed now. She gave him a ghost of a smile and took his hand when he told her of Deoiridh’s funeral.

“I’ll see to a small headstone before I leave Edgar,” he promised her. “Maybe her name, dates, and a little verse?”

Mrs. Tavish nodded.

“Any verse in particular?”

“Miss Grant will know,” Tommy’s mother whispered.

“I expect she will,” he replied, touched at everyone’s reliance on Olive Grant. “Tommy is doing well. I will probably shorten his splint tomorrow and let him sit up. We might even take soap and a cloth to him.”

Poor Mrs. Tavish didn’t know what to say to someone such as him, even as simple and ordinary as he knew himself to be.

She had likely been cowed and abused all her life.

Mrs. Cameron curtsied as he handed her more coins and assured him she was buying nourishing food for them both. He probably could not expect more.

And then he was out the door. A cautious glimpse inside the Tavish house showed no evidence of the man. Good riddance , Douglas thought and continued his walk.

He walked beyond the village in the direction he had come only two days ago. His attention had been claimed by Tommy at the time, but now he looked and was saddened by what he saw.