Page 34 of Doing No Harm (Carla Kelly’s Regency Romances #5)
Midafternoon was Olive’s favorite time of the day.
The luncheon rush was over, and whatever more modest items she had prepared for dinner—lately, these had been less modest—were either cooking in the oven or simmering on the hob.
She had sent Maeve to the greengrocer with a list and a basket over her arm.
After a shy introduction, Flora and the MacGregor girls had taken their own basket to hunt for driftwood.
The tearoom was blissfully empty and the green tea the right temperature.
Mrs. Fillion understood the unspoken need to explain herself.
She told Olive about the Drake, a three-story hotel and dining room located in Plymouth’s old Barbican, home to a generation and more of Royal Navy officers back from the sea, if only briefly.
They both chuckled over the perpetual whist game that never seemed to lack for players.
“Was Mr. Bowden among them?” Olive asked.
“Never. He would watch and sit with fellow officers, but he did not play and he never gambled,” Mrs. Fillion said.
“Douglas is a careful man.” She took a sip of tea and regarded Olive over the rim of the cup.
“I cannot imagine him actually striking a man and engaging in any kind of rough and tumble.”
Her own tea grew cold as Olive told the interested woman of Tommy Tavish, bleeding with a compound fracture, carried by his mother, nine months gone with child, into the path of the coach.
“Those who saw it told me that Mr. Bowden was out of the carriage before it even stopped, tugging at his neckcloth to quench the bleeding.”
“That he would do,” Mrs. Fillion agreed. “I never saw a man quicker to react than our Douglas.”
She spoke with such a degree of familiarity that Olive wondered at the connection, then asked herself why it was any business of hers.
Mrs. Fillion seemed to know what she was thinking.
She rested her hand on Olive’s for a moment, just a gentle touch.
“Miss Grant, you must understand that these exalted officers were all my boys.” She swallowed and her eyes filled with tears.
“They came, they slept in my hotel, they played cards, they drank, and they went back to sea where many died in battle or drowned in storms.”
She must have felt that the burden of those wartime years needed to be lighter because she laughed and shook her head. “And you tell me that Douglas beat the boy’s father? That is not our Douglas.”
Olive could tease in turn. She had to, because her heart was near to breaking, just hearing the wistfulness and affection in Mrs. Fillion’s voice for men gone too soon.
“I rather believe it is the same man—tall enough, brown hair with considerable gray in it, brown eyes, and a flat East Anglia accent? He grinds his Rs?”
“The very one,” Mrs. Fillion agreed. “A true Anglian. The same one who assured me that he was going to find a village far from the ocean.”
“He will yet find it,” Olive said, keeping her voice light because she did not want to weep before this near-stranger. “He reminds me that all the good he is doing here will last until he feels satisfied that Edgar is a better place. Let me show you what this quiet man you speak of is doing.”
They walked to the dock and on toward the empty shipyards.
“Oh my,” Olive said as she looked upon a ragged little army busy cleaning the place, hauling off debris. Supervising the cleanup was the MacGregor girls’ father, dressed in rags but obviously in charge. He waved to her and walked in their direction.
“Miss Grant, our surgeon set me onto this work before he left.” He looked around and Olive saw the pride in his eyes, this man who had herded cattle in a Highlands glen and was now remaking himself.
“Told’m we’d have it shipshape by the time he returned with a builder.
” He touched his hand to his cap and returned to his equally shabby crew.
Olive took a deep breath. “And that quiet man you speak of has endowed my puny victual and drink account with enough funds to feed the workers and their families as a condition of their employment.” She dabbed at her eyes.
“I was running out of my inheritance, seeing that the Highlanders dumped here and left to die at least had food.”
“I suppose I do know this side of him,” Mrs. Fillion said, her voice equally soft. “He saved my son Michael’s life, he did, when the boy developed pneumonia.”
“I’ll wager he did not leave the child’s side. ”
“Not once, until he was breathing better.” Mrs. Fillion looked back where they had come. “My boy became a sailor, too, and those are Michael’s shells.”
“Please tell Michael how much we appreciate them,” Olive said.
“I wish I could. He died at Trafalgar,” Mrs. Fillion told her, holding tight to her hand. “My older son helps me with the Drake now. He stumps about on one leg, but he lives.”
The two women stood there with their arms around each others’ waists. They started back toward the docks, where the first vessel of the fishing fleet was tying up.
“All of your boarders—your sons?” Olive asked. Her heart was full as the entire cost of war landed on her. “You knew them better than most.”
“I felt that way about them,” Mrs. Fillion said, when she could speak. She tucked her handkerchief back in her sleeve. She stopped, faced Olive, and sat with her on a bench by the poorest end of town.
“I have never told anyone this,” she began and then looked down at her shoes. “I would walk the halls of my hotel at night. Well, the officers’ wives who were able to meet their husbands in Plymouth—I put them in quieter lodgings on the top floor and did not venture there. My, you can blush!”
Olive touched her warm cheeks. She had long resigned herself to spinsterhood, but she could see those rooms with closed doors.
She imagined couples behind them, relieving themselves of worry and war, even if for a brief time, taking a moment to fall asleep in each others’ arms, and then leaving too soon, as duty called and the tides and winds made their own demands.
“I shouldn’t tease you,” Mrs. Fillion said.
“I walked the other halls late at night, listening to sleeping men singing drunken songs, some of them. Others were in the grip of different nightmares. Some wept. Some seemed to be arguing with fate or the French. Douglas talked, quietly at first, and then louder. I think he woke himself up and managed to put himself back to sleep. Others did the same. There was no one to fix them.”
I touched his arm a few times and we kissed , Olive thought, but that is my memory and I will not share it .
Mrs. Fillion looked up, her face so worn, telling Olive without words how much she must have cared for her self-declared sons of the Royal Navy through years of national alarm. It was Olive’s turn to take the woman’s hands in her own.
“I wanted to gather them up in my arms, every one of them, but it was not my place to do anything of the sort. I ran a hotel, after all, and not a hospital or a confessional. And so I wore myself out walking down my halls, cursing Napoleon and counting a cost so high that I could not see the end of it.”
They sat in silence then. Olive thought of all the ways that war had touched every small village and large city in Britannia.
She thought of the indifferent cruelty leveled on the Highlanders, many of whose sons had served king and country through war.
Her heart recoiled at all the evil in the world, and she was not surprised at her own weariness or that of the woman sitting beside her.
“We’ve pretty much forced Doug to pick up our burden here in Edgar,” she said, not caring that Mrs. Fillion heard the familiarity of his name. “All he wants to do is get away, and we haven’t let him. We are wrong, I suppose, but we are desperate.”
“He is used up,” Mrs. Fillion warned.
“I know, but our need is so great,” Olive said quietly. She waved her hand toward the shipyard, where change was coming. “He’ll be here with a shipwright, I have no doubt. There will be order, and he will leave us.”
“Are you so certain?”
“That he will succeed? ”
“No, Miss Grant—that he will leave you. My dear, he wrote about you to me.”
It was past time to be cautious. Olive tightened her grip on the woman who had come so far with shells because her life was entwined with her hotel patrons.
“I love Douglas Bowden,” Olive confessed. “I don’t know what he is thinking, though, beyond the need to be gone from here and to find a quiet medical practice that probably does not exist.”
“It may be that he will have to keep looking before he realizes what was right under his nose in Edgar,” Mrs. Fillion suggested.
Olive considered her words, wondering if she could bear the pain of waving good-bye to Douglas Bowden, “our surgeon,” as the people of Edgar already called him. And once he was gone, would he think twice and return? As much as she would wish it, she knew that people seldom returned.
“Life was easier when I had no expectations,” she admitted to Mrs. Fillion. “If this is love, it is not a pleasure.”