Page 31 of Doing No Harm (Carla Kelly’s Regency Romances #5)

M aidie, is your mistress home ?” he asked Maeve’s older sister, who dropped him a curtsey.

“Aye, Mr. Bowden, she is always home,” Maidie began. She put her hand to her mouth. “Blast and dash! I am supposed to say, ‘I will inquire within.’?”

He kept his smile to himself. “I am here to tell you, Maidie, that if she insists that you inform me that she is not at home, I’m going to stay here anyway.”

“Is it a matter of grave importance?” the maid asked, her eyes wide and worried.

Was it? Douglas decided the answer was yes, if Edgar was ever going to regain even a speck of its prominence.

“I believe it is. Yes, I am certain. And you had probably better tell your mistress right away,” he added gently, when she appeared transfixed by the idea of anything of grave importance ever happening in Edgar.

“Oh, aye,” she said and bounded off, without showing him to the sitting room. Douglas doubted that Lady Telford had overmuch company, considering how little Maidie knew what to do .

Douglas stood in the entryway a long moment. He was staring up at the elaborate plaster whorls in the ceiling when he heard a massive throat clearing behind him. Odd how that sound could transport him back some three decades.

He turned around and there she was, Elsie Glump, wearing an even more colorful turban today, and a dress in which someone much younger would appear to great advantage. Do I pretend I don’t know who she really is? he asked himself, suddenly at a loss.

She solved the dilemma for him. She executed a perfunctory little bow for someone who still considered herself far superior to the little son of a cooper.

“Dougie Bowden,” she exclaimed in that booming voice he remembered.

I can play this too , he thought as he gave her a better bow. “Mistress Elsie Glump. I never thought to see you on England’s far side. I remember you last in a butcher shop not too far from my father’s cooper yard.”

She gave him a thoughtful stare, and heaven help him if he didn’t start feeling younger and less confident by the moment.

He remembered that stare, especially during a hard time in the barrel business when the Bowdens were eating little meat and only the cheapest cuts.

He stared back gamely and watched the hard light leave her eyes.

She indicated a seat, plumping herself down. He followed suit.

“I thought you must know who I am,” she said finally.

He didn’t think he imagined the glimmer of fear in those eyes now, just a small glint, but enough to suggest that the road between Glump and Telford might have been unexpectedly rocky.

“I do.”

“Then I thank you for not giving me away to Miss Grant,” she replied.

“Not I,” he said, unwilling to ruin the woman’s life by even hinting that everyone in Edgar already knew who she was. “I came here for two reasons. The first is that I am concerned about the way your eye droops. It looks more pronounced than on my first visit here.”

“I have a physician,” she informed him, obviously inclined to toss out a better title than mere surgeon. “Sir Rodney Follette of Edinburgh, who sees quality clientele.”

“I am relieved,” he said, wondering what game she played. “I would suggest that you pay the man a visit soon.”

He could tell she had no intention of doing that. He also thought she had no real desire to talk to him, which made him wonder why she had agreed to seat him in her parlor.

“And your second reason?” she asked, her tone frosty.

“It can wait,” he said, even though he knew it couldn’t. “I really would like to know the happy set of circumstances that took you from a butcher’s shop to Lady Telford.” He gestured around the overdone room. “You and Sir Dudley have evidently done well.”

Her eyes filled with tears. Whether that came from his mention of her late husband or some other source, he couldn’t be certain. From what he remembered of Dudley Glump, a coarse and overbearing bully, he thought it must be the latter.

But she was a woman suffering from something, and his bedside manner overpowered his hesitation. He joined her on the sofa and took her hand. “Lady Telford, kindly tell me what is bothering you.”

“Nothing,” she said immediately, but she did not withdraw her hand from his. Never mind. He could wait her out. “Perhaps there is something,” she said, after only a short pause, “but you must swear yourself to secrecy on that … that hypocritical oath.”

“Confidentiality is for medical matters,” he explained, as he swallowed down a laugh of epic proportions, “but I will never tell anyone anything, if that is your wish. ”

“Aye, it is.” She looked around elaborately, perhaps making certain that no enemy agents or members of the peerage lurked. “Dudley—Mr. Glump—sold a boggy piece of property to a gent buying up land for a canal scheme.”

“Plenty of boggy land in Norfolk,” Douglas agreed. “Did Mr. Glump buy more land then and increase his fortune that way?”

Lady Telford shook her head so vigorously that her turban shifted a bit on its axis. “He wanted to, but I told him about a joint stock company in the slave trade, name of the Royal African Company, and made him put it there.” She looked at him, triumph in her eyes now. “We made a pile of money.”

On black men and women’s bones , Douglas thought, more than a little disgusted.

He recalled one memorable afternoon when their frigate had come upon a slave ship becalmed in the doldrums. The stench across the water had been unbelievable.

The ship had run up signals requesting a surgeon, and his captain sent him aboard.

He did what he could among the dead and dying, felled by dysentery and starvation, but mostly loss of hope.

Months passed before he could close his eyes and not see mothers chained to the deck and holding out their dying babies to him.

“I suppose you did,” he said, merely because she seemed to expect some commentary. “Made you wealthy, did it?”

“More than,” she crowed, and the satisfaction on her face turned to something less joyful. “This brought Dudley to the attention of Prinny, himself.”

And he needed money in the worst way , Douglas thought, recalling wardroom stories about the Prince of Wales’s constant penury. “Let me guess: Mr. Glump loaned him a healthy sum, in exchange for a title.”

“A baronetcy,” Lady Telford said. She looked at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to congratulate those shrewd Glumps.

“Why Telford?” he asked, unwilling to congratulate her on a title handed out by the Prince Regent like sweets at Christmas, all to cover his own debts and with no regard for the country’s well being.

“You remember that pretty manor house near Walton,” she said.

“I do. Name of Telford. I remember the street with that same name.”

“We even paid the Telfords for the name, and they disappeared from the district,” she declared. “They had fallen on hard times and were only too happy to take our money.”

Douglas sat back in the sofa, knowing precisely where this tale of sudden riches and greed was heading.

He had known some titled men in frigates and men-o’-war —most of them good enough at their duties, some even exceptional, but through their veins ran, in addition to blood the same color as everyone else’s, a vast superiority that had no equal in the Royal Navy.

They took his skills when they needed them, and otherwise ignored men like himself.

Lady Telford was silent now, vulnerable.

Douglas began to pity her, an ignorant woman shrewd and unprincipled enough to know how to make shady money, but unable to command anyone’s respect with a mere purchased title.

She and coarse Dudley no longer belonged among their own kind in decidedly unfashionable Norfolk and certainly not among the titled people they so wanted to impress.

The only sounds in the room were a clock ticking and Lady Telford’s labored breathing, which smacked of congestive heart failure and not in the distant future.

He considered all the angles before he spoke because he did pity her.

Thank the Almighty that his own ambitions ran to becoming a surgeon second to none and not a toady of the titled. He knew his merits and his limits.

“You tried to enter their society and they laughed,” he said, keeping his voice low .

She nodded, her eyes glistening again. “Right to our faces, drat their hides,” she said, with considerable venom. Her head came up and he saw her pride. “So we moved here and bought this mansion. Dudley bought up property, and no one is the wiser about our beginnings. They believe we are Quality.”

So you think , Douglas told himself. “Do you … do you mingle at all with the people of Edgar?” he asked.

“Mercy no,” she scoffed. “After all, I am Lady Telford.”

“I don’t think you are happy,” he said, after more consideration. “Everyone needs friends. There are some fine people in Edgar.”

It struck Douglas that he had found friends aplenty in Edgar, friends he would miss, when he left.

She had no answer for him, no retort. She was too proud to admit that he was right and she needed friends. Everyone did.

“Lady Telford, would you be interested in leaving a wonderful legacy right here in Edgar?” he asked. “The kind of a legacy where word would get out to other towns and shires until no one in places like Edinburgh or London would ever laugh again?”

She gave him a suspicious stare and her hand hovered over the bell, perhaps to summon Maidie and have him shown out.

“Of course, I can understand if you have someone to leave your fortune to, or another way to be remembered with real affection, long after you are gone,” he added, sitting back.

She put her hand back in her lap and raised her head enough to look down her nose at him.

He smiled inside because he no longer felt like Dougie Bowden, sent to the butcher and clutching a small coin, ready to palm his dignity for some below-standard meat.

He was Douglas Bowden, surgeon, Royal Navy retired, and it suddenly felt so good .

“What do you have in mind?” she asked.

“Your unused shipyard, Lady Telford. I have some money, courtesy of Napoleon, I suppose. Every man aboard a Royal Navy ship is entitled to shares in the purchase of captured vessels and cargo. As a surgeon, I have one-eighth of a share for each such transaction. This added up to a more-than-comfortable sum.”

He glanced at Lady Telford, pleased to see he had her attention. Dudley certainly had not been the brains of their marital partnership. As repugnant as Douglas found her willingness to make money on African slaves, he had to admire her ability.

“My money resides with Carter and Brustein in Plymouth, making me more money.” He took a deep breath.

“I propose that you and I form a corporation and call it the Telford Boat Works. We will build yachts and fishing vessels and employ the less fortunate folk of Edgar. This would include the Highlanders dumped here and left to rot by those titled gentry and nobility who laughed at you and Dudley Glump.”

She sat back, her mouth open. He saw the shrewd gleam in her eyes, one of which had a cataract. He knew he had her when she asked, “Why not the Telford-Bowden Boat Works?”

“I have no plans to remain in Edgar, beyond tending to some patients of mine, and seeing that an enormous wrong is righted, at least here,” he said. “All I want is a peaceful country practice in a charming village somewhere.”

She smiled then, and he was struck by how such a simple shift of muscles shed the years from her puffy face. She even leaned toward him like a conspirator, which he found a wonderful omen. “We will agree that Edgar is not charming.”

They laughed together.

Her shrewd look skewered him. “Dougie, I know that everyone wants a reward. I applaud your desire to help these people. What is it you want? ”

“Am I that transparent?” he asked, deciding that he had underestimated Lady Telford.

“Perhaps,” she hedged. “I have had some experience in making money, which sometimes involves looking deep. What else do you want?”

“I intend to find other investors in the Telford Boat Works,” he said, “but I want a guarantee that Miss Grant’s Tearoom will be funded so she can feed the workers and their families, without having to dip into her inheritance, which I fear is slight.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

It was a woman’s question. He could be honest. “I do. She is charming and kind and heading to the poorhouse herself by feeding people.”

“That is all?”

“For now.” He could be cagey too. He had started this trip north to find a place to settle, not anticipating so many complications to a simple quest. He felt the warmth begin somewhere around his pectoral muscles and spread north to his forehead.

He saw the growing amusement on Lady Telford’s broad and plain face, and he felt like Dougie again.

But that was silly; this was a business proposal and nothing more. He smiled at her, thinking he would do almost anything to convince Lady Telford that his scheme was a good one, for whatever reason. No, for the reason that Flora MacLeod’s kind lady deserved someone to watch over her.

He looked at Lady Telford; she stared back at him, the warmth in her eyes touching his heart. “It’s a legacy worthy of the wife of a baronet,” he told her. “This corporation will change lives for the better. What say you, Lady Telford?”

She did not hesitate. She put out her hand and he shook it.

His hand still in hers, he said, “You are certainly capable of drawing up terms. Do that. In a day or two I will go back to Plymouth and find us a shipwright. When I return, we will sit down with your solicitor and go over this contract between you and me.”

The pressure on his hand was firm. “Will you find such a man?”

“I will. This I do not doubt.” He looked at his timepiece. “I leave you to think about the matter. I have a patient who needs my attention.”

She showed him out herself, her hand on his shoulder, which he found oddly comforting, even if she was an old rip who had frightened him as a child. He was no child now.