“Bless you,” she said quietly.
“I assume you know somewhere I can get a mattress, and somewhere else I can find a man handy enough to make me a table and chairs, and a surgery table?”
“Aye and aye,” she said.
They started toward the road. He tried to look at Edgar with new eyes, but he still saw the same shabby village. Worse, the tide was out and the odor ferocious.
“Anything else, sir?”
“I’ll make a list.”
The road was slick and muddy so Douglas crooked out his arm. Olive twined her arm through his, even though he knew she was capable and in no danger of slipping. He walked slowly, so she did too. He thought about the letter he would write to Mrs. Fillion, requesting his trunk and that box of shells. He knew there would be a visit to Dumfries soon to round out other needs and wants for a short stay in a slightly haunted house.
He also knew he had to do something about Edgar.
Chapter 14
Precisely how he knew that, Douglas Bowden couldn’t have said. He did know this: the more thought he devoted to Edgar’s problems, the less his nightmares bothered him. Olive had said as much at the end of the week, with only a little tinge of rose to her complexion. She blushed and confirmed what he suspected.
“There has been no cause for me to keep half an ear open for you,” she had told him one morning as he finished his coffee and prepared to tackle his house again. “See there? Edgar is good for you.”
He nodded, although he did not agree with her. She saw that too, commenting, “You’re a wee bit too skeptical, Mr. Bowden,” as she retreated to the kitchen. He already knew she only called him Mr. Bowden when others were present or when she had a bone to pick. She was an easy woman to feel comfortable around.
Olive Grant had been as good as her word. In the time Douglas had taken to re-splint Tommy Tavish’s leg and compliment the lad on his courage and stoicism through the ordeal, Olive had assembled a working crew in thedining room. By the end of the week, he was ready to move in.
Douglas decided that “slightly haunted” was probably one of Olive Grant’s few attempts to stray to the shady side of truth. When he teased her about it, she merely smiled.
“I don’t object to a little fib now and then,” he told her. “The thought of ‘wee hants,’ as Mrs. Campbell said, apparently was enough to tip the scales in my favor.”
He had to admit that the house by the bridge suited his temporary needs completely. With the key safely in his pocket now, he felt a certain pleasure each evening after the cleaners left to walk through the rooms and realize that he had a place of his own, one that didn’t shift about at the whim of the ocean or the Royal Navy.
He even wondered if the long-empty house had been built specifically with a surgeon in mind, although Olive told him it was not. The small kitchen off the back of the house was perfect for compounding and rolling pills. To his surprise, the room he had designated for his combination office and surgery already had that wall of built-in shelves and drawers. Even the minister, perhaps chagrined that he hadn’t been Christian enough to say a few words of comfort over Tommy’s tiny sister, found a suitable desk and chair for that room. Once the man who had crafted crutches for Tommy finished the surgery table, the room looked like exactly what it was, right down to the smell of carbolic, part of his haul from Dumfries’ apothecary, which took him away for a day of scouring the town to furnish his surgery.
Between Olive, Mrs. Aintree, and other neighbors whose aches and pains he had addressed, he soon had chairs enough for a waiting room adjacent to the surgery, plus a threadbare but clean carpet underfoot.
Upstairs was his own area, complete with sofa that could easily convert to a bed, if he had a patient who needed closer supervision. Mrs. Aintree insisted she hadno use for a handsome wingback chair and small table. “It’s a chair for a man,” she said, her tone of voice brooking no argument. (What is it about Scottish women?he asked himself.) “Mr. Aintree has been gone long years now. He’d be pleased to see it put to good use.”
After some rudimentary lessons on the management of crutches, Tommy made a halting beeline to Mrs. Cameron’s hovel and spent the afternoon with his mother. As shadows began to lengthen across Edgar, Douglas walked to the hovel to retrieve Tommy and to think about what he saw there. Only that day, Olive had told him more about the Highland Scots from the Duchess of Sutherland’s district who literally washed ashore two years ago, the Tavishes among that number.
He had gone to her kitchen to beg the loan of some tacks to anchor a rug that had appeared on his doorstep. A better rug than most, he wondered out loud if Lady Telford had seen to its arrival that morning. It was too good a rug to have crawled there to die, he had joked to Olive Grant as she kneaded bread.
“Please don’t use that phrase,” she had said, giving the dough an extra punch and wallop. “You are reminding me of the first of the Sutherland crofters only two years ago.”
“Tell me,” he said, wanting to know more.
Her gentle face still registering the horror of that day, she told him of the storm that had capsized a small vessel already dismasted by a fickle spring storm. “It happened at night, and none of us knew anything until the next morning.” She stopped her kneading and stood there, wrists deep in dough. She looked at him and her eyes filled with tears.
“Douglas, we could have used you then.” She passed her hand in front of her eyes, leaving flour on her forehead.
Douglas promptly took a damp cloth and wiped her face. He didn’t imagine that she would lean into his shoulder, and he didn’t object. He put his arm around her.I have done this to many a patient, he thought.None of them smelled this good, though.
She moved away so he released her. “Papa was still alive then. He opened the front door, and there they were, a few survivors, crawling down the street, too wounded and weary to cry for help.”
He shook his head, thinking that such sights had been his lot in wartime, but in England? “Where were they going?”
“They didn’t even know,” she said, giving the dough a savage punch. “Several of them spoke only Gaelic. My father could understand them, but just barely. From what he pieced together, these crofters from somewhere in the Grampion Mountains had been herded to Fort William and told they were going to Prestwick south of Glasgow, to take up the fishing trade. Fishing! They knew nothing of fishing.”
She slammed the dough into a pan and covered it, then sat down with a thump, her eyes bleak. “They had never even been on a boat before, so you can imagine the seasickness. And then a spring storm came up, and the captain was blown south and sought shelter in our estuary.”
