Page 32 of Doing No Harm (Carla Kelly’s Regency Romances #5)
M rs. Aintree’s hand showed no signs of infection, to Douglas’s relief.
Mrs. Tavish’s solicitous care of the lady impressed him.
Tommy’s sutures came out easily. Mrs. Aintree had insisted that Douglas perform that bit of business right there in her room so she could watch, which told him worlds about the widow’s growing interest in the Tavishes.
Tommy was stoic and steadfast as Douglas cut and tugged, probably because his mother and Mrs. Aintree watched him so anxiously. Douglas gave him a wink the women couldn’t see and told the boy to keep breathing, which made him laugh.
“That is it,” he said as he applied another bandage, encasing Tommy’s leg from knee to ankle as before, and attaching the splints again. “You will continue to exercise some caution,” he admonished, knowing full well that Tommy had no such plans.
“Aye, sir,” the rascal said.
It was time to lower the boom, probably past time, but Tommy Tavish was an engaging rascal, and Douglas admitted to other distractions.
He stood up, giving himself at least the advantage of height.
He had no trouble remembering his Royal Navy days, because it hadn’t been that long ago.
He tapped the boy’s chest to gain his full attention, looked down his nose, and frowned.
“Listen, Thomas. If, in my professional opinion, I see you disregarding all caution, I will reapply that splint that ran from your ankle to your armpit. Don’t even try me.”
Tommy gasped. “You wou …” He stopped and saw no sympathy in anyone’s eyes. “You probably would,” he admitted.
“I can guarantee it. Do we understand each other?”
“Aye, sir,” Tommy said most reluctantly. He sighed, very much a small boy again, and left the room with considerable dignity, muttering to himself.
Douglas turned his attention to the women in Tommy’s life. “Ladies, if you see any infractions, just let me know. I will do as I promised.”
He sat down again and turned Mrs. Aintree’s hand over gently, pleased with what he saw. He tried a different tactic with the widow and kissed her cheek, which made her blush like a maiden.
“And you, dear lady, stay in bed another day. Tomorrow is soon enough to try out the sling and move about.” He smiled. “I trust you considerably more than I trust Tommy.”
Mrs. Tavish walked him down the stairs. He spent a quiet moment with her in the kitchen, inquiring after Joe Tavish.
He watched her eyes for wariness or disgust and saw none.
“Thank you for tidying up that man of yours, Rhona,” he said, unsure how to proceed because he had never been married, and certainly never gone through anything resembling the Tavishes’ experience.
“I prefer that he remain in the shed, but if you have other ideas …”
“Not at the moment, although he is my husband and I care a great deal for the man, as difficult as he may be,” she said honestly. “I’ll see that he has food from Miss Grant’s Tearoom, unless Mrs. Aintree feels charitable enough to include him in her kind stewardship.”
He gave her a bow, grateful for the ladies. He doubted that he would have been so forgiving.
Flora MacLeod grabbed him in a monstrous hug as he entered Miss Grant’s Tearoom.
She held out a little drawstring bag that she said Brighid Dougall had presented to her.
Flora made him heft it, delighting him that his first modest enterprise in Edgar was bearing good fruit, if the weight of the pouch was any indication.
“Mrs. Dougall put up a bigger sign in her window too,” Flora said. “Both MacGregor sisters are helping me now.”
He handed back the pouch. “Keep it safe, Flora. Maybe give it to Miss Grant. No, give it to Mrs. Dougall for safekeeping.”
Flora nodded. “I think she likes me.”
“Flora, who wouldn’t?” he asked and felt his heart grow larger—a medical impossibility.
Happy with that homely victory, he went into the kitchen.
Her face flushed, her hair curling everywhere because of the steam, Olive stood over that evening’s stew.
She looked at him, and he was struck with the kindness in her eyes.
He liked to think it was for him, but he knew she was kind to everyone.
On wild impulse—Maeve was watching, after all—he took Olive’s hand and pulled her out the back door and into the yard. When she was down the stairs, he put his hands on her shoulders and told her everything he had done at Lady Telford’s. Her hand went to her mouth and tears came to her eyes.
“Your tearoom will become the corporation’s dining room,” he concluded. “You will have an ample allowance for food and more staff.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. “I have been praying about this. Doug, I am nearly without funds. ”
“I feared that,” he said, flattered to his heart’s core at his nickname.
He looked into her honest, true, multicolored eyes and knew he needed to lighten the load a bit. He was getting almost sentimental. “Olive, I find myself looking more into the brown one than the blue one. Odd, that.”
She laughed and slapped his head, which made him grab her and kiss her, not on the forehead this time. Her arms went around him as though they did this every day, and they stood together in a tight embrace.
She drew away first; he had no immediate plans to ever move. “My goodness, but I react boldly to good news,” she said. Her face was fiery red now, and he supposed his was too. “I should perhaps apologize?”
He shook his head, dazed with feelings he had thought belonged to a younger man. You’re not eighty, you dolt , he scolded himself, struck by the fact that for the first time in decades, he didn’t feel eighty. This bore some private thought.
“I don’t think it’s necessary for either of us to apologize for exuberance,” he said, acutely aware how stupid he sounded.
Great gobs of monkey meat, I am Dougie again , he thought, thankful that Lady Telford wasn’t watching.
“Besides, I started it.” He tugged her curls.
“And I have no plans to apologize. Olive, Edgar’s fortunes are looking up. ”
Maeve giggled when they came back inside, and he knew she had watched out the window.
All a man could do was forge ahead and pretend nothing had happened.
He sat down for stew and ate quickly. “I’ll take some of this to Joe Tavish, along with whatever of that stiffer paper that remains. Do you have a pencil or two?”
She did and fetched it as he finished eating.
“I hope he is feeling better this afternoon because he needs to sketch the …” He paused as the enormity of the project suddenly landed on his head like an ostrich egg, cracked, and dribbled down his temples.
“… the Telford Boat Works. Hadrian’s Wall!
I’ll take the drawings with me to Plymouth and see how persuasive I am. ”
“I have no doubt that you will convince any number of shipwrights to follow you up north to this country,” she said.
After that kiss in the garden, he saw no reason to be suddenly coy. “Olive, I don’t do things like this! I don’t create corporations or make grandiose plans. I’m a surgeon, for heaven’s sake.”
“Have a little faith, Doug,” she said simply.
He spent the rest of the afternoon removing a splinter from the palm of a child who wanted nothing to do with him, and then making an emergency house call to the grocer’s.
Maintaining a calm sort of professionalism when he wanted to slap his knee and laugh, he reassured a worried Mrs. McDaniel that, yes, indeed, the umbilical cord stump was supposed to fall away just like that.
The walk back to his house meant stopping to chat with the fishmongers again and then taking tea with an elderly lady whose name he could not recall, who just wanted to talk. He listened, offered a little advice about dry, itchy skin, and returned home with a smile on his face.
He lay down then and tried to sleep because he couldn’t remember when he had last done such a thing. This enforced stay in Edgar was beginning to resemble a fleet action.
He dozed, fearing bad dreams as usual, but instead enjoying the pleasure of Olive Grant’s breath on his neck and the edgy comfort of her softness. He imagined her wearing nothing but a shimmy, which meant he had to get up and walk around a bit, wondering about himself.
On the tenth back and forth pacing, he stopped and looked into his shaving mirror, as though to ask himself, Who is this man? The usual face looked back at him, but the mirror Douglas Bowden smiled.
He spent an hour with Joe Tavish in the shed, which had been swept clean and equipped with a cot found somewhere. He tended the infected wound on the man’s forearm, happy to see it no worse today, and told Joe what he needed and why.
“I want you to come with me in the late afternoon to the old shipyard and sketch it.” To Joe’s unasked why, he told him about the Telford Boat Works and his plans for the corporation to employ every man in Edgar who wanted to work.
“We aren’t carpenters or shipwrights,” Joe argued. “We’re crofters and cattlemen.”
“Can you change?” Douglas asked. “The man I have in mind to manage the yard is a fine teacher. The corporation will pay you well as you learn a new trade.”
“But it’s not—”
“—and it never will be the Highlands again,” Douglas snapped, out of patience. “And, no, I’m not doing this for Olive Grant!”
“I didn’t say—”
“I see it on your face,” Douglas said. “Stop your nasty leering! I’m doing this because I hate the waste of human life.
I held little Flora MacLeod on my lap while the horror of her experience took over her brain and she told me through her tears, ‘All we needed was a little help.’ I have no proof against that, Joe Tavish.
I need your sketches and I will pay you for them.
Whether you want to work in the boatyard is your business. Just don’t get in my way.”
He knew he had spoken too loud because the Highlander stared at him, his face drained of color. “It’s not for a woman?”
Douglas considered the question. “I admit it is, as well. Do any of you realize that Miss Grant has used up nearly all of her inheritance to feed people? ”
“I didn’t know,” Joe mumbled. “I … maybe I just thought she was lording it over us, making us feel poor.”
“Olive Grant hasn’t that capacity, and you know it,” Douglas said, suddenly weary of arguing with an idiot.
He picked up the paper and pencils. “I need your help and I need it now. Don’t hem and haw and turn away because things have not gone your way, Joe Tavish!
” There he was, shouting again. Who was this shrill man occupying his usually calm body?
Douglas took a deep breath and another, not trusting himself.
“If you will not help me, I’ll draw my own sketches. ”
He left the shed, angry with himself for shouting at someone as beaten down and demoralized as Joe Tavish. Maybe the only thing he would ever accomplish in Edgar was Seven Seas Fancies. He had never thought of himself as a leader; maybe he wasn’t.
Shadows were lengthening across the empty shipyard when he arrived there, out of breath and angry. He stood still a long moment, trying to decide where to start, he who had not one single ounce of artistic ability in his whole body. Do it for Flora. Do it for Olive , he thought and took heart.
He walked around the graving docks—Olive’s bathtubs—until he felt less like throttling Joe Tavish. He reminded himself to ask Lady Telford for the key to the enormous padlock on the one-story stone building that ran nearly the length of the yard.
The tide was in and water filled the one graving dock where the massive wooden gates remained open. I can see it in my mind , he thought, at odds with himself. A yacht so sleek and stylish being built right here. If I touch the pencil to this paper, my sketches will look like cats mating .
He decided to begin right where he stood.
He could probably sketch the graving dock with some portion of the shed behind it, so the Plymouth shipwright he had in mind could get some clue about the yard’s layout.
He poised a pencil over the paper, nearly paralyzed by his inadequacy.
Give me an amputation any day , he thought and began to sketch.
“Nay, Mr. Bowden. The light’s better here. Give that to me before ye waste a sheet of paper. Paper is dear, don’t you know?”
Douglas looked up, startled. Joe Tavish stood there shaking his head.
“?’Tweren’t joking. Thou really doesn’t have a drawing bone anywhere.”
“Not one.” Douglas handed over the paper. “I want to get this graving dock with the shiphouse in the background.”
Joe nodded. He looked over his shoulder to a row of men who hesitated by the long shed. “I’ll draw that while you talk to them.”
Douglas looked, too, striving to be casual and matter-of-fact when he wanted to click his heels and dance around like a maniac. As he walked toward the ragged men, some of them in trousers, others in kilts, he saw more Highlanders joining them, some with their wives. Joe must have gone calling.
Douglas perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the abandoned … No, the Telford Boat Works. “Come closer,” he said, gesturing. “I have this plan …”