“Nay. A physician there would get no more than herring and neeps in payment.”
Douglas gave the grimace that he knew was expected of him, but didn’t cross Edgar off his mental list. He could at least try Miss Grant’s lemon curd on some toast so the stop wouldn’t be a total waste.
The coachman glanced at his timepiece and evidently discovered he had no more time to discuss Scotland’s more obscure destinations. He hurried three old ladies into his carriage and asked Douglas to help him heave his traveling case and duffel on top, where they were strapped down. He shook his head over the odd-shaped hatbox with the Royal Navy fouled anchor embossed on the side. “What in blazes is this?” he asked as he tied it down.
“My bicorn. I’m recently severed from the Royal Navy,” Douglas said. “Looking for a place to settle down.”
“And ye came here?” the coachman asked in amazement. “Laddie, good thing I warned ye about the fish and rain and poor folk.” He chuckled and climbed into his box. “Weren’t you listening to me?” he called down.
Maybe I should consider Whitby, where only half the people are daft, Douglas thought, wondering why a reasonably intelligent man should suddenly turn stupid once out of the Royal Navy. He seated himself next to one of the ladies, a thin one, who still frowned at the space his medical satchel took up. He sighed inwardly and put it onhis lap, vowing to travel north to Glasgow tomorrow and inquire about passage to Canada.
Still, he found his gaze lingering on the view outside the little coach’s window: low hills that particular shade of green that meant spring in the British Isles, a sight he had not seen in years. To look the other way meant to watch the firth, which would do for the ocean. He saw fish and kelp drying on racks and children running along the shore barefoot, for the most part, even though the air was chilly and damp.Tough people, these Scots, he thought.
The hour lacked half to noon when they turned slightly north and paralleled a river. They crossed on a stone bridge that arched so prettily over the water. The arch was pronounced enough to suggest that fishing boards could likely travel underneath.
Still training north, the carriage bumped over a marginal road for another vertebrae-compressing mile, then slowed. He tried to peer ahead and was rewarded with the view of a village, nothing as charming as Dundrennan, with its competitive physicians. This was a sturdy, no-nonsense-looking town, but with pastel-colored stone houses that surprisingly reminded him of the Italian coast.
He looked at the thin woman seated next to him. He hadn’t said a word to her or any of them, because they hadn’t been introduced, but he asked, “Is this Edgar?”
She nodded, and no more. He tried his luck again. “And the river?”
“Dee,” she said, either marvelously frugal with words, or determined not to speak to an upstart she didn’t know; probably it was both.
He smiled inside, wondering that if it had been the Albemarle River if she would only have said “Alb,” figuring that was all courtesy demanded.
“Home of Miss Grant’s peerless lemon curd?” he asked the other travelers in general, idly wondering if any of these serious-faced ladies would unbend.
One of them opened her mouth—whether to reply or shush him—when the coachman pulled to a sudden stop. Douglas looked out the window, drew in his breath, and was out the door before the wheels quit rolling, already yanking at his neck cloth.
A woman far gone in pregnancy stood in the road, screaming for help, as she carried a boy too big to lift, but whose oddly bent leg spurted blood.
“Set him down,” Douglas demanded.
The woman stared at him with terrified eyes, almost as though she did not understand what he demanded. When she made no move, Douglas grabbed the boy from her and laid him in the road, swiftly tightening his cravat two inches above the wound where a snapped bone protruded. The boy, pale as milk, stared at him, then quietly fainted.
“I’m a surgeon,” he told the woman as she tugged at his arm. “Leave me be!”
She understood him now. She sank down beside him, her bloody hands to her face. “I’ve been telling and telling my man to fix the stone steps to the cellar, but does he ever do anything but drink?”
By now, heads were popping out of store doorways. They drew back in as a man staggered toward Douglas, a stick in his hand, which he slammed down on the woman’s back, shouting in a language Douglas recognized as Gaelic.
Douglas leaped to his feet and grabbed the stick, forcing the man backward until he fell down in a sodden heap and made no move to get up. Douglas handed the stick to the woman, probably the drunkard’s wife. “Use it on him if he makes a move.”
“I daren’t,” she said softly.
“I wouldn’t mind,” the coachman said as he got down from his box and took the stick from her.
Douglas turned back to his unconscious patient, relieved to see that his jury-rigged tourniquet had done its duty. He took a long look at the compound fracture.
“I can reduce this,” he told the boy’s mother. “Which is your house?”
She pointed to a stone building with an unpainted door open and hanging onto its hinges for dear life. She struggled to her feet until Douglas gave her a hand up. Disturbed, he looked around at the small crowd, wondering why no one offered to help.
“What’s the matter with people here?” he asked the coachman in a low voice.
“No one lifts a finger for Highlanders,” he replied. “Nobody wants them.”
“I was better off at sea,” Douglas muttered under his breath. He picked up the boy and carried him toward the hovel faintly disguised as a house.
