“He’s my husband,” was her quiet reply. She bent over Tommy awkwardly and kissed his forehead, and then went downstairs. When the door closed so quietly, Douglas felt his heart sink.
Douglas didn’t even want to look at Miss Grant. “Sometimes I am ashamed of men,” he said, embarrassed.
Miss Grant tidied Tommy’s bed, apparently not willing to look at him, either. “We keep hoping that Joe Tavish will catch his death some night …”
“There’s no … no … squire or man of consequence to deal with someone such as that man?”
“No laird,” she said. “Lady Mary Telford lives in that large manor near the old castle, but she is English and doesn’t concern herself with us.”
She gave him a hopeful look. He knew he had to squelch any designs on her part. He was not the man to change things in Edgar. Useful as he might prove, he had no standing in a village such as this, where even useful new arrivals were probably considered foreigners forevermore.
“Miss Grant, I have no intention of staying in Edgar any longer than to see Tommy on the mend,” Douglas announced, feeling remarkably foolish, for some reason. He had barked orders to pharmacist’s mates and other surgeons for years, but he felt painfully like an ungrateful idiot.
To his relief, if not strictly balm in Gilead for his conscience, Miss Grant took his declaration in stride. “We are all grateful that you were here this day to save a little boy’s life,” she assured him.
She had the cutest freckles, freckles all over her faceand what he could see of her neck—little faded freckles that must have been much more pronounced when she was a child, but now a shade just this side of charming. Coupled with her heterochromia and deep red hair, she was a colorful woman. What was that word …
“Ephilides!” he exclaimed. “It’s been nagging at me since I first saw you.”
Tommy stirred. Miss Grant took Douglas by the arm and led him out to the landing. She stared at him and then gave him that patient look he had seen once in a great while, since he had never spent much time on land to observe the fair sex.
“You’re so kind to suffer this fool gladly, Miss Grant. Ephilides is the scientific word for freckles.”I’ve done it again, he thought in desperation. Might as well blunder on so she will be glad to see me leave. “You have as charming a set of ephilides as I ever hope to see.”There. Call me an idiot to my face.
To his amazement, she clapped her hands in delight. “Heterochromia and ephilides? Da always said that my eyes were evidence that God Almighty has a rollicking sense of humour. Mam told me that a host of angels kissed me and freckles are the result. It’sbricíníin Gaelic, by the way.”
“You must think me an idiot,” he said in apology.
“Since we are into plain speaking, I think you remarkably kind to help Tommy Tavish,” she said simply. “Certainly we wish you would stay, but Edgar isn’t for everyone.”
“It’s for you, though?” he asked, grateful to have bumbled through his lack of manners, and in addition, be given an easy exit from the village.
“I’m needed here, and it is my home. Now then, Mr. Bowden, will you be wanting to stay here tonight?”
“If it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Will the room across the hall do?”
Her offer sounded sensible, except that a more martyr-like approach to Tommy Tavish’s care might further atone for his blunders. “Better I sleep in his room. He might be afraid if he wakes up alone.”
“Very well, then,” she said. “I need to see to dinner. There are usually only a few pensioners, so it is mainly soup and bread.” She started down the stairs, so he followed. “I suggest you take a walk around my little village. As villages go, it is modest in the extreme, but there are some of us who love it.”
He did as she suggested, shutting the door on Miss Grant and her charming tearoom. The lowering clouds had cleared away to demonstrate that southwestern Scotland did have blue skies. Hand in his pockets, he walked the length of the High he had not traversed yet, which took him past the posting house name of the Hare and Hound, the ubiquitous Presbyterian church, and what looked like a combination tobacconist and lending library. On a whim, he stuck his head inside to inquire about the annual fee for borrowing books and was pleasantly surprised.
A smaller road angled away from the High in that manner of village roads, which meandered where people did, and eventually turned into actual byways. He remembered such roads from his childhood in Norfolk, spent largely in his father’s workshop and barrel yard, helping make kegs of all sizes, many intended for the holds of Royal Navy ships.
The only boy with two older sisters, he had left home in shocking fashion. The death of his mother had rendered him melancholy, but with no one to discuss the matter. Papa just worked harder, his face more set, and the vicar in his local parish reminded him that he and others in Norfolk, at least, were born to trouble as the sparks flew upwards.
It wasn’t enough to assuage a twelve-year-old boy’s heart. The day Papa entrusted him to take a load of kegsto the Great Yarmouth docks was the last day he saw his father. He fulfilled his assignment, sent the money carefully wrapped and addressed to Nahum Bowden’s Cooperage in Walton, Norfolk, and offered himself to the Royal Navy.
He was given the choice of powder monkey or loblolly boy, and he took the latter, because medicine interested him. Dumping emesis basins and urinals began his hard school, but his absolute, unyielding calmness in the face of terror moved him quickly to pharmacist’s mate. One year in a Spanish prison rendered him nearly fluent in the language, which eased his escape and reunion with the Royal Navy’s White Fleet, off anchor on blockade duty.
On the surprising endorsement of a fleet physician, after five years, he spent two years in London Hospital, learning the trade he practiced for the duration of Napoleon’s wars. He was skilled, talented, and footloose now.
Walking felt so good. Why seeing water still meant so much to him, he could not have said. He climbed higher up the road, moving aside for wagons, horsemen, and one carriage. When he came to a spot where the road widened, he turned to look down on Edgar. He watched the docks and the fishing vessels, clouded now by competing gulls, which meant the day’s catch was ashore.
He studied the High Street until he located the tearoom. A small figure in the back garden, probably Maeve, was pulling laundry off the line. He admired the graceful arch of the stone bridge that crossed the River Dee, and the ruined castle on the opposite height from where he stood. Miss Grant had mentioned a manor of sorts belonging to an Englishwoman, and there it was, easily the most elegant building in town. Just this side of the Dee, he noticed a smaller two-story stone house, painted a soft yellow. No smoke curled from the chimney, even though it was approaching suppertime, and the windows had no curtains.
Maybe the house was empty. Maybe he could start a practice in Edgar. Two rooms on the bottom would suffice for an anteroom-office and a surgery, and there was likely a kitchen, which would be useful for the pharmacology part of his business. He could live upstairs. He reminded himself that he had entertained this same fiction in Pauling.
