Page 20 of Doing No Harm (Carla Kelly’s Regency Romances #5)

O live stayed a few more minutes , after making Douglas taste one of the biscuits she had brought.

“I told Flora to test one and see if they weren’t too stale,” Olive said, when Flora was sitting up and listening to her.

“It’s fine,” the child said, her eyes on the bag. She took one out, looked at it, and handed it to him. “You try one, Mr. Bowden.”

Douglas took the biscuit. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Olive give a slow wink with one of her heterochromatic eyes. You are a sly one , he thought. He took a bite and recoiled. He held it out to Flora.

“I have never really enjoyed biscuits made with anise,” he told her. “Begging your pardon, Miss Grant, but Flora is going to take these home to her gran.”

Olive sighed. “Flora, do me a favor and take them. If your gran complains, she can take it up with me.”

“She won’t,” Flora said in a small voice.

He could tell Olive wanted to stay. He wanted her to stay, but there were probably social rules that made her give him a bright smile and close the bag. “Don’t forget these, Flora. Mr. Bowden, I’ll think about what you told me.”

“Do it.”

He saw her to the door and watched her cross the street.

She waved at him from her own stoop. He stood there a long moment, looking down the street to see Tommy Tavish making his way to Mrs. Cameron’s house, rollicking along at a clipping pace on his crutches.

Douglas turned and looked at Mrs. Aintree’s tidy place next to the tearoom, wishing he could convince the woman to do a great service for a little family hanging on by a thread.

He thought of Mrs. Campbell, who had sat with Tommy when he couldn’t and whom Olive paid with meals.

Tommy managed on his own now, and Mrs. Campbell had returned to her own cottage, back to meals of weak tea and toast. And he knew that for one Mrs. Campbell, there were others in want, and not just the Highlanders. Life was less complicated at sea.

Maybe Olive was right, and why not? She knew her village better than he did. Maybe everyone in a poor village would look with suspicion on their own countrymen from far to the north until the refugees died off or crept away to become someone else’s challenge. The pie only had so many slices.

Flora proved to be an excellent nurse, petting her little patient, singing to her, and then feeding her the thin gruel. He stood in the doorway and watched Pudding lap up the gruel, then curl up in her blanket-lined box and go to sleep.

“Flora, I have something you can do to help me,” he told her, holding out his hand to her. He walked her into the surgery and pointed to two boxes on the floor. “I’ll carry these into my waiting room, where I want you to organize them into piles. ”

She nodded and followed him back into the waiting room. He pried up the box top and indicated that she come closer.

He enjoyed her sharp intake of breath.

“Mr. Bowden, where did you get these?” she asked, touching the shells with the same delicacy she had used on Pudding.

“When I was only seven or eight years older than you, I started collecting shells,” he told her. “Before us are shells from all of the seven seas.” He set down three squares of ship’s cloth. “Small, medium, and large will do for now, until I figure out what to do with them. Will you help?”

“Aye, but it’s not enough to pay my debt for Pudding,” she said, and followed that announcement with a solemn shake of her head.

“It will do for right now,” he assured her.

He saw three patients that day, two of whom were able to pay his modest fee, and the third who brought him fish, which did perk up Pudding for a brief spell. He took a thoughtful walk to the greengrocer’s to find mother and son doing well.

Lunch was fish soup at the tearoom, where he sat in the corner and watched Olive Grant with her diners.

They paid so little, but Olive smiled at each one, stopping to chat before she went to the next table, and the next.

He had enough left of his own luncheon to share with Flora across the street in the kitchen that had become Pudding’s convalescent home.

Only with difficulty could he convince Flora that Pudding needed to stay overnight and that she should return home.

He walked her down one of Edgar’s narrow closes and into a row of decrepit stone shelters barely deserving the title of homes.

Olive had told him those were the poor houses, provided by the Church of Scotland.

Flora hung back, her eyes apprehensive, as she took a scolding from Gran .

“I told her to drown the wee beast,” Gran said and shook her finger at Flora. “She was not t’bother thee.”

“No bother,” Douglas assured the old woman. “I’m not too busy yet, and it seemed a pity to drown a perfectly good kitten.”

“There’s always more where that one came from,” Gran told him with a sigh. She lowered her eyes, and Douglas felt the shame that filled the little room that appeared to be parlor, bedchamber, and kitchen for Gran and her dead daughter’s child.

He felt a sudden burning anger at the Duchess of Sutherland and her progressive estate managers, who had convinced her that her Highland holdings could be squeezed for profit.

He knew enough about the woman to know that her husband, the Marquess of Stafford, was England’s wealthiest man.

He wondered if the countess had any idea of the misery she had unleashed on her own people, many of them now as helpless as the kittens he saw kneading and nursing the equally tired mother cat in a corner of the room.

He swallowed his anger, determined that Flora not think he was angry at her. “You have a fine granddaughter,” he told the old widow. “She took good care of Pudding after I finished.”

“We’ll pay you when we can,” the widow murmured, her eyes still on the dirt floor.

“I’ll think on the matter and find a way for Flora to pay me,” he said. He touched Flora’s shoulder. “And you’ll report to Miss Grant tomorrow morning for more porridge for Pudding.”

Flora nodded. “Thank’ee,” she whispered. “I knew you would help me.”

He had spent a lifetime helping men with great and unmanageable wounds.

He had heard other heartfelt thanks, which he had brushed off because he was too busy and too hardened by suffering to dare them to sink in.

An old surgeon ready for retirement had told him when he was newly back in the fleet as a surgeon that it wouldn’t do to get too close to his patients.

“If you care too much, you’ll go mad, laddie,” the surgeon had told him.

And here he was, caring with all his heart, and his patient was a kitten. He shook his head at his own folly. “I was glad to help, Flora. Good night to you both.”

He stood a long while on the bridge, looking up at Lady Telford’s mansion, where one wealthy woman lived, and then down the river toward the fishing docks, where the boats had been buttoned up for the night. He looked at his own place and then across the street to the tearoom.

A breeze came up and set the wind chimes outside the door to Miss Grant’s Tearoom in motion.

He smiled at the sound, thinking of years of creaking timbers and violent motion in his other homes.

He recalled the high-pitched whine in the rigging when the wind was stiffening and the crash of waves onto the deck during storms at sea.

All told, he preferred Olive Grant’s wind chimes, both soothing and predictable.

Inside his house, he assumed the duties of mother cat and cleaned up his little charge.

Pudding offered only a squeak in protest before sinking back into the kind of sleep he was familiar with, that of patients lying in their hammocks in that stupor of the wounded.

He gathered up the kitten and box and carried them upstairs because he was a conscientious surgeon who had spent many nights in service to his patients.

He raised the window because the upstairs air needed to circulate.

He didn’t bother with a light as he stripped and pulled on his nightshirt, happy to surrender to the mattress again.

With his hands behind his head in his thinking pose, he considered what to do about Tommy Tavish, who had pleaded with him only that morning in the cow bier to be allowed to return to his mam in their wretched cottage.

Douglas thought he had won that round, firmly telling the boy that his stitches needed to come out in a week, but not in a place as dirty as the Tavish hovel, where foul humours and infections ruled.

“I won’t have you undoing all my work,” he had told the boy.

Whether Tommy listened to him remained to be seen.

Other patients had ignored him, usually with lamentable results.

He rehearsed in his mind the surgery planned for Mrs. Aintree’s fused fingers. At least her house was spotless and far less susceptible to germs. Once she was on the mend and her wounds healed, he could leave Edgar in good conscience, knowing he had helped.

Why did the knowledge have no appeal? Tommy would be healing, Mrs. Aintree as well, and Flora would be happy that little Pudding would be gimping about on three and a half legs.

The grocer’s wife had friends and relatives to assist her if she needed help, which he doubted.

Women and mother cats had a fine instinct for child care.

Miss Grant would smile her patient smile and wave good-bye, even as he knew she was staring down her own ruin in a year’s time when her legacy ran out, all because Olive had a conscience and the Duchess of Sutherland did not.

Discontented in the extreme, he sat up and looked out the window, elbows on his knees, chin in his palms. He listened to the mellow chimes and suddenly had an idea so brilliant that he flopped back on his bed and laughed at the ceiling.

It was a modest idea, one so tiny and inconsequential that he knew if he over-thought the matter, he would toss it onto the ash heap of ideas better left to die aborning.

He padded downstairs to his surgery waiting room, where Flora had left his three piles of shells.

He sat down cross-legged on the floor, wincing a bit as his bare parts met the cold wood.

The moon shone on the shells, rendering them all white and gleaming, where he knew them to be multi-colored, exotic, and a far cry from a place as tired as Edgar .

He selected three shells, large, medium, and small, and took them into his surgery.

He lit the lamp and searched until he found his smallest drill in his trephining kit, knowing in his heart that he would never tell Olive where he got it, even as it made him chuckle, thinking of the times he had used it to drill tiny holes in skulls.

He did a quick inventory of his catgut before he unrolled a modest length from the spool.

Largest first or smallest first? He debated, then drilled holes through the largest shell at the top and bottom, then ditto with the others.

He threaded through the largest shell, catgut behind, and made a small knot before he repeated the steps.

One more trip to the waiting room and he had three threaded shells.

For want of anything better, he hung the three-shelled strands from the little hearth broom, using more catgut.

Then he set it swaying. The sound bore no resemblance to Olive’s metal wind chimes; it was a tantalizing rustle.

He knew when the light struck his shells in the morning that the colors would glow, some almost iridescent, others pale and mysterious.

He held out the impromptu chimes and announced, “Flora, you are going to pay me with wind chimes. You’ll make one for the kind lady too. And then we’ll see who else wants them.”

Olive rubbed her eyes and sat up in bed.

She yawned and opened her eyes. There was the sound again, pebbles against her window.

I’m too old for pebbles against the window , she thought and would have gone back to sleep, except for the “P’ssst!

Olive!” that came next, a whisper in a lower register that she couldn’t ignore.

She looked out the window, laughed, and opened it, astounded at the sight of Douglas Bowden, dignified surgeon, standing there in what looked like his nightshirt, holding out something that glittered in the moonlight.

“My blushes, Douglas,” she whispered and tried not to laugh. He obviously had no idea that moonlight did curious things to cotton nightshirts. Luckily no one else was out at midnight. It wouldn’t do for the constable to call Douglas up on charges of indecency or insanity or both.

Olive pulled on her robe, didn’t bother with slippers, and hurried down the stairs, careful not to waken Tommy and Duke in the next bedchamber. She let herself out the front door and stood in the street with a lunatic.

He was nearly hopping up and down in his excitement. She just stared at him.

“It’s a wind chime, or sort of!” he said, holding out the hearth broomstick to her. “Well, it will be when I have Flora and other children find just the right lengths of driftwood. I’ll have her make me one to pay me back for Pudding’s surgery.”

“I want one too,” Olive said, admiring the delicate shells and trying not to stare at the surgeon’s hairy but handsome legs. For certain she would never stare at his nearly thigh-high nightshirt. Well, maybe just a peek.

A quick glance, and then she looked into his eyes, because that was safer. He had an inquiring expression, as though he expected her to think his thoughts. Amazingly, she did. She put her hand to her mouth because the idea was so audacious.

“We can get Flora and maybe other children to make more,” she said, “and—”

He interrupted her in his enthusiasm. “—take a few to the Hare and Hound, where coach riders and the touring trade will see them—”

“—and want one of their own as a souvenir! Douglas, you are a genius.”

“Not yet,” he declared, taking back the shells. “If she only makes a few pence a day, it’ll keep her and Gran fed and their pride intact. ”

He continued to look at her in that inquiring manner. “You have something bigger in mind, don’t you?” she asked.

“I just might.”

He seemed to have recalled where he was standing and in what stage of undress. “Beg your pardon, Miss Grant.” He started to back up. “Flora’s coming over for oats tomorrow … well, this morning. Can you ruin some more porridge?”

“Mr. Bowden, this is a strange conversation,” she said with a laugh. “I will ruin some more porridge.”

He gave her such a grin then, the boyish kind she had seen earlier. He gave her a salute, turned on his bare heels, and walked back across the street. She watched him go. If he was going to caper nearly naked in the street at midnight, she might have to suggest flannel.

Or not.