He stood for a long moment in the open door, looking at Edgar, with its lovely pastel-painted stone houses and businesses. Just beyond, he watched the fishing boats near the mouth of the River Dee, but on the seawaters of the Firth of Solway. He saw the ruined castle on the hill and a mansion a little closer to the village. A bell in the church tower rang two times. He watched a woman pruning her roses, nodding to a passerby on the other side of the low stone wall surrounding her tidy house. He looked up at seagulls wheeling overhead, then swooping down to thedockside to join the squabble of other gulls waiting less than patiently for the fishmongers to gut and clean the catch.
It was a village ordinary and poor, if people like the Tavishes existed, and pensioners found it cheaper to eat at Miss Grant’s Tearoom than manage their own kitchens. Probably things were better in the approaching summer, when little garden plots could be tended and provide some variety from what he suspected was a diet of oats and fish. Winter would be the hungry time, but he imagined this village at Christmas, when there would probably be carols sung and some kindness shown to the poor from those only slightly better off.
He shook his head. Edgar would never do, of course, but he wasn’t going to leave until Tommy was better. He would find a more prosperous village farther on. Still, the apple trees were in bloom in Edgar, and he did like the sound of the gulls. He saw little girls skipping rope and chanting a rhyme he couldn’t quite hear but which reminded him of his own dear sister, dead from childbirth, these ten years. He noticed other little girls standing in the shadows, just watching, not invited to jump rope. Perhaps they were Highland children.
Captain Douglas Bowden, surgeon, late of the Royal Navy, looked around and saw a simple village, one of thousands he had done his best to keep safe from Napoleon, and it touched his heart. “We did it for you,” he said to the distant little girls. “We would do it again.”
Thoughtful, he walked into the street and then back the way the coach had come. Tommy Tavish’s father still lay in a sodden heap, snoring off a monumental drunk as chickens pecked around him. Douglas came closer and toed him. Nothing. He squatted by the man’s head and put practiced fingers to a filthy neck, hunting for a pulse. He found it, and thought it almost a pity that such a man would sober up and likely get angry because his put-uponwife committed some non-existent infraction that warranted a kick or a slap, never mind that she was greatly pregnant. Punishment would follow dreary punishment until the end of their already sorry lives.
He stood up and found himself looking at whom he thought must be the constable, from the truncheon he carried. “What do you do with a man like this?” Douglas asked.
“Lately I just leave him in the street to come to himself. Sometimes it rains—this being Scotland—and I hope he will die of t’lung ailment.” The constable shrugged his shoulders. “A man can hope, anyways. Hasn’t happened yet, though.”
“I have to salute your plain speaking,” Douglas said. “Can a man like this be put away somewhere to rot?”
“Sadly, no,” the constable answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. “He would have to kill someone …”
He let the sentence trail away, but Douglas felt the unspoken chill. And who would die except his wife and son?
The constable seemed like a fount of realism. He could stand candid conversation. “At sea, someone could drop his worthless hide overboard during a night watch, to no one’s regret,” Douglas said. “Don’t think it hasn’t happened.”
The constable nodded. “The coachman, he told me you were Royal Navy, asking about doctors and such.” He peered at Douglas. “You patched up young Tommy. Stay here, laddie. We have a need.”
“I’ll stay here until Tommy feels better,” Douglas hedged.
The constable nodded, evidently philosophical as well as realistic. He stuck out his hand. “Let me at least thank ye for what you’ve done.”
They shook hands and Douglas continued to the Tavish hovel. He opened the door and stood a long while,contemplating the ruin within.I was better off at sea, he thought, wondering where a surgeon would start in a backward place like Edgar, or even if a surgeon—not him, of course—would have any power to deal with a sorry sack like Tommy’s father.
He heard scratching under a pile of reeking bedding and wondered for one terrible moment if there were other Tavish children hiding and hungry. To his relief, a rail-thin black pup nosed his way toward daylight and wagged his tail, ever optimistic in that way of dogs of a certain age.
Douglas held out his hand, and the pup edged toward him, suggesting to the surgeon that Tavish senior had already applied some well-placed kicks to the little fellow to cow him. In another moment Douglas rubbed the pup behind his ears, which made his tail wag at a velocity that nearly overset him.
Douglas debated about eight seconds whether to leave the little beast to the tender mercies of Mr. Tavish, who probably would have no memory of where his terrified family had gone and react accordingly. He made an executive decision, picking up the pup and tucking him in his arm.
“Miss Grant, you have just acquired an eventual watchdog,” he said.
Chapter 6
His was a thoughtful walkback down the High Street to Miss Grant’s Tearoom, encumbered as he was with a no-hoper pup without a single thing going for him, who still managed to wag his tail. The encumbrance came with the realization that Miss Grant might not care for a dog on the premises, especially one as bedraggled as the Tavishes already in temporary residence.
He held the dog out for a better look. “I will tell Miss Grant that you leaped into my arms to escape bears,” he said, glancing around first to make sure that no one stood close by to hear him talking to the malnourished little scrap. “You could use a bath and a haircut.” He chuckled. “Come to think of it, so could I.”
He had second and third thoughts about his impulsive act. Since Edgar was a small village, there wasn’t time for fourth thoughts before he opened the door to Miss Grant’s Tearoom. “Here goes, you mutt,” he whispered. “Look sagacious and competent.”
“You’re talking to a dog,” was Miss Grant’s firstcomment, as she eyed the trembling little beast in his arms. “And he doesn’t smell good.”
Oh, what now?he thought, not knowing this freckled woman well enough to throw himself on her mercy, especially as she was already housing his first patient in Edgar. And there he went again, implying that Edgar was going to be his future home.
He took a closer look at her in better light than upstairs and was instantly charmed. “My stars, Miss Grant, you’re heterochromatic.”
He could have slapped his head, but he chose honesty, since nothing else was going to succeed.
“I am an idiot too,” he said. “All that means is that you have a …” He looked closer, because it wasn’t so obvious. “… a blue eye and a brown one: heterochromia.”
She stared at him, and then laughed. “I never knew it had a name. There was an old herb woman in Edgar once who crossed the street to avoid me.”
“It’s certainly not contagious,” he said, happy she was ignoring the pup squirming in his arms now. “Although if that had happened six hundred years ago, you might have been burned at the stake. A pity, but there you are.”
