Page 8 of Doing No Harm (Carla Kelly’s Regency Romances #5)

T ommy woke only long enough to ask for a urinal, mutter something, pluck at his arm, and swallow another sleeping draught.

The pallet Miss Grant had provided was surprisingly comfortable.

Douglas thought of other nights standing on a sand-covered deck in his surgery to keep from slipping on blood, and decided quickly that Miss Olive Grant’s tearoom was vastly superior.

I do not miss that , he thought, to no surprise. Once Tommy’s needs were met, he returned to sleep, only to wake hours later with a soft hand on his arm. His muscles tensed, but he did not move.

“Miss Grant?” he whispered finally, not sure if he should be chagrined or pleased that she was touching him. She seemed much too proper for what sprang immediately to mind.

“You were calling out and muttering in your sleep,” she whispered back. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“No, I …” He stopped, and indulged in the truth. “I have bad dreams.” He took a deep breath and said something he never thought he would say to anyone, let alone a lady he barely knew. “Would you mind awfully just keeping your hand on my shoulder until I return to sleep?”

What on earth was he asking? He closed his eyes in the deepest humiliation, ready to cry, except he was too old for that, too long at this war business.

She said nothing, but increased the pressure of her hand on his shoulder. He didn’t mean to, but his head seemed to naturally incline toward her hand. The last thing he felt was his shoulders relaxing. When he woke next, it was morning.

He took a deep breath and smelled wonderful fragrances from the kitchen below. Shame covered him as he remembered what had happened last night, and he knew he could never go downstairs again in this lifetime.

“Sir? Sir?”

Douglas sat up, instantly alert. He looked into brown eyes about on the level of his own brown eyes. He got to his knees and automatically put two fingers on Tommy’s neck and then smiled.

“I am going to live?” the boy asked in all seriousness.

“Your regular pulse would indicate precisely that,” Douglas replied. He felt the boy’s forehead, which was cool. “Are you hungry?”

“I could eat a seagull, feathers and all,” Tommy assured him, which made Douglas laugh.

“I don’t think it will come to that.”

Douglas got to his feet and stretched, fully confident that his days of sleeping on a pallet were numbered. A young surgeon could do it, but he wasn’t a young surgeon anymore. “I’ll get you something from downstairs after you do your duty with this.”

Tommy obliged him, muttering something about being perfectly capable of standing up.

“Not yet, you’re not,” Douglas replied. “Two more days with this extra-long splint, and then we’ll see. Steady as you go. ”

Douglas took a long look at his surgical handiwork, relieved to see no redness. He sniffed the bandage. Other than the fact that Tommy Tavish was long overdue for a bath, there were no telltale signs of rot.

“Would you at least let me sit up?” the boy asked.

“That I will do and we’ll see how you like it.”

Gently he pulled Tommy into a semi-recumbent position, listening to the boy’s sharp intake of breath and barely stifled groan.

“Maybe not just yet. Agreed?”

Tommy nodded with no argument. He closed his eyes when Douglas lowered him down. “Me mam?”

“She said she was going to stay with a Mrs. Cameron. Is she … will she do?”

Tommy nodded again. “She’s a good’un. Me da?”

“Hard to say, lad. Let me get you some food.”

There was nothing else Douglas could do but go downstairs to the kitchen. Had there not been a patient involved, he was certain he would have gathered his belongings together and slunk out the front door, never to be seen again in Edgar. He took a deep breath and opened the kitchen door.

Her red hair gathered into an untidy topknot, Miss Grant was just preparing one of six loaves of bread for the oven. She smiled at him, not a hint on her face of embarrassment. Her cheeks were rosy, but the kitchen was warm.

“How is our patient?” she asked, and somehow that made all the difference. She was inviting herself into his world, and he was happy to let her in.

“Wanting some food,” he replied. “Said he could eat a seagull, feathers and all.”

“Too fishy for a convalescent,” she said. “Tell him I said no. Baked oats will do, with cream on top. Some for you too? I have boiled eggs, as well. That’s what my breakfast crowd likes. Sit a minute.”

He did as she asked and felt his face grow warm when she sat across from him. With no hesitation, she took his hand in hers.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Bowden. How on earth could anyone go through a lifetime of war and not have a bad dream or two?

” She released his hand and just looked at him, her face so pleasant, even with freckles and funny eyes.

He couldn’t think of a time he had seen such kindness, which made her face nearly beautiful.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “If … if that happens again, just leave me be. I’ll wake myself up and go back to sleep.”

She shook her head slowly. “Not under my roof you won’t,” Miss Grant said, her voice low and full of emotion. “My father was a minister, and he didna raise me to ignore suffering.”

Douglas swallowed. “It’s not much suffering, not in the great scheme of things.”

He tried to turn his nighttime anguish into a joke, but she wasn’t buying it.

“Not under my roof,” she repeated, but softer now. “Let me fix a tray for Tommy and you.”

She did an odd thing then, something he never expected. Without a blush or qualm, she took him by the chin and held his head steady so she could look into his eyes. “Do we understand each other?”

He nodded and she released him.

“This will not come up for debate or discussion again, Mr. Bowden.” She shook her head, as though vexed with herself. “You must think me a dreadfully managing sort.”

“I wish you had been my pharmacist mate in any number of battles,” he told her, which did bring out the red in her cheeks, making her even more colorful. “Done and done, madam. How about that food, and handsomely now.”

Miss Grant laughed and moved quickly to do his bidding. He poured some coffee and filched a piece of cold toast .

“Try my lemon curd on it,” Miss Grant said as she sliced two squares of baked oats and poured cream over them.

He had no plans to ever argue with Miss Grant again, so he did as she said, which meant he ended up licking the knife too.

He had never eaten anything so good in his life.

“Magnificent,” he said. “The coachman mentioned it yesterday. I was skeptical because I have been nearly three days in Scotland and my taste buds died when I crossed the border.”

“Wretched man,” she joked, which made him smile, because she rolled her Rs even better than other Scots he knew. Maybe it just sounded better, coming from a lady.

And so it was with good humor and calm heart that he took a tray of food upstairs for a brave boy and a man beginning to suspect that peace had its perquisites.

But he had forgotten about the horribly named Duke, who looked at him, ever hopeful, when he came into the room with the tray. “Oh,” was all he said, because Miss Grant came up the stairs right behind him with a bowl of scraps.

She held it under Duke’s twitching nose, his tail wagging rapidly, and then walked with it into the hall and down the stairs, the pup in hot pursuit.

“I’ll bring him back when he has had a turn in the garden,” she called, making it sound for all the world like Duke was a valued guest who needed to take the air.

“Amazing lady,” Douglas said as he set the tray on the bedside table and helped Tommy into a sitting position.

The boy was so hungry that he forgot his pain. He wolfed down the baked oatmeal and inhaled the blood pudding Miss Grant had added. He looked around, still hungry, at the same time Douglas declared that he couldn’t eat another bite and offered the remainder of his breakfast to the boy.

“Life is hard for you, lad,” Douglas commented, knowing he did not ask a question.

“Aye, mister,” the boy replied. “Me mam … Sir, please. ”

“I’ll go find this Mrs. Cameron and see how she fares. Do you have a direction?”

“Behind me house and over one,” the boy said as he finished the last of Douglas’s blood pudding and leaned back, exhausted.

Without a word, Douglas gave him a lesser draught, lowered him down again, and sat beside Tommy until he gave a long sigh and surrendered to poppy sleep.

Douglas sat there a moment, knowing that he could leave Edgar right now, and Miss Grant would keep Tommy Tavish alive.

He closed his eyes and smiled over the heterochromatic beauty that a woman with red hair, almost a burgundy color, and faded freckles, blue and brown eyes, and a nose just shy of being labeled masterful could possess.

He had no argument with her figure, which he would characterize as comfortable, an attribute probably most pleasing on a cold Scottish night.

He already knew she had more brains than a roomful of females.

Oh hang it, likely more gray matter than most men.

“But I swore an oath and she didn’t,” he told the sleeping boy.

He paused another minute, knowing he had more than fulfilled his oath, as far as his unexpected stay in Edgar warranted.

“All right then.” For the second time in as many days, he took out that same coin and flicked it, stepping back so it would land flat and not roll.

“George, if I see you, I am free to leave.”

Again, the coin landed with George staring bug-eyed up to the ceiling. And again, he pocketed the coin and went down out the door to find Mrs. Tavish.

She was precisely where Tommy had said she would be found, also staring at the ceiling, her face a sickly pallor and with eyes so hard he knew what had happened even before Mrs. Cameron ushered him into the hovel.

Mrs. Tavish lay so still that he went directly to her bed and pressed the back of his hand against her neck. Her pulse was slow and thready, and probably only still beating because she looked like a woman with a grievance.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tavish,” he said softly. He turned to Mrs. Cameron in sudden anger, even as the logical part of his own brain told him he was inappropriate. “Could you not have called me, at least? Perhaps I could have done something!”

Mrs. Cameron didn’t suffer fools gladly. She seized his arm with a surprisingly strong grip and jerked him to the corner of the room, so he could stare down at a baby so small and thin that no art of the surgeon could have changed the outcome.

He had the good sense to apologize, even as he pulled back a surprisingly clean towel to take a good look at what happens to a malnourished infant from a malnourished mother.

“I doubt my friend Rhona Tavish has had a decent meal in two years,” Mrs. Cameron said, her voice low with emotion. She stuck her face in his. “Mister or Captain or Surgeon or whoever you are, does it ever shame you to be a man?”

“Almost on a daily basis,” he replied, which made the woman lower her eyes and step back.

“My boy?” he heard from the bed, even though Mrs. Tavish spoke no louder than a whisper.

“Tommy will live and walk again, Mrs. Tavish,” Douglas said, returning to her bedside. “What would you like me to do with your daughter?”

How was it possible for even tears to look exhausted? Touched almost to his heart’s core, he who had seen so much, Douglas dabbed at her eyes.

“No money for cladh ,” she whispered. “No potter’s field either, please no.”

Where did all his nerve come from? “Miss Grant has a pretty little garden behind her house. Do you … do you have a name for your daughter? ”

“Call her Deoiridh—pilgrim—for she was a pilgrim passing.” Mrs. Tavish sighed and slept.

Miss Grant, I am going to keep trying your good will, it appears , he thought. He turned to Mrs. Cameron. “This nice towel, please. I’ll get you another.”

Mrs. Cameron nodded and went to work shrouding the tiny body. She bound it neatly with cloth strips, offering no protest when Douglas lifted the bedcovers and examined the sleeping Mrs. Tavish.

“You took good care of her,” he said finally. He reached in his pocket and pulled out three coins that made Mrs. Cameron’s eyes widen. “Buy food for both of you and there will be more.”

She put the feather-light infant in his arms and he turned to go. He stopped and handed the child back. “One moment.”

In a fury, he crossed the noisome yard into the Tavish’s ruin of a house, where Mr. Tavish, sober now and eyes burning like two coals, sat at the table.

“A man takes care of his family!” Douglas shouted, wondering whose voice was so menacing, before he realized it was his own. “I have no power to do anything to you, but take this!”

He picked up a stick by the door, probably the stick that Tavish used to beat his wife and son, and cracked it against the side of the man’s head.

Tavish grunted, shrugged it off, and slammed Douglas to the ground.

The last thing the surgeon remembered was a foot crashing into his ribs, and his own fervent relief that Tavish must have pawned his very boots for one more drink. Shoes would have cracked his skull.