She did as he asked, dazed at her good fortune, where none had been expected. She turned to Mrs. Fillion, who seemed to be enjoying this cut and dried legal wrangle. “I suppose we can leave now.”
“Not yet.” The owner of Plymouth’s most prosperous hotel took a sheet of paper from her reticule. She handed it to the solicitor, who read it, his eyes even livelier now. “ ’Pon my word, Mrs. Fillion, you intend to become an investor in the Telford Boat Works!” He looked at the paper, which Olive could tell had been crimped by a notary. “And for a … my, my … a tidy sum.”
Olive gasped and grabbed Mrs. Fillion’s hand. The woman squeezed back and her eyes became tender. She swallowed and pressed her hand and Olive’s to her bosom.
“Douglas Bowden sat with my little boy for hours. He did everything he could. As it turned out, he bought us another ten years of life together as mother and son. Could I do any less?” She bowed her head over their twined hands.
Olive leaned against her shoulder. “You don’t even know these people, these Highlanders, you are helping,” she whispered.
“I know they are little people, as we are,” she said. “They are common and frightened and angry and deserve so much better. Do I need to know anything else?”
Olive shook her head. She swallowed her own tears as she saw, in her mind’s eye, Joe Tavish grubbing in a hole in a dirt floor for oats and cow’s blood to keep him alive one more day. She heard Flora’s plea for someone to help her and her mother and Gran. She could almost see Patrick Sellar and his troops driving out hardworking crofters from their glens and slaughtering their cattle, all because the Countess of Sutherland wanted sheep.
She waited a long minute, glancing at Lady Telford to see eyes less hard now. From the sound of the solicitor, deep in his handkerchief, he was not a man inclined to cynicism.
She had to try, which meant several breaths, and the deepest wish of her heart that Douglas sat there too. “Before my father died, he told me to wait upon the Lord,” Olive said. Her voice cracked like a schoolchild’s, but how could that matter? “I did not understand what he meant. I do now.”
Chapter 29
Douglas Bowden closed his eyesagainst a headache so powerful that everything from his neck up seemed to throb. He knew it wasn’t a migraine. It was just the kind of headache that had been his lot after days of battle and surgery and no rest, and shirt and trousers, despite his apron, soaked with other men’s blood.
He had swallowed the anchor by retiring and assured himself as he left London that those days were done.I am an idiot, he thought.
Perhaps he was too hard on himself. All he had to do was look across the narrow space in the post chaise to contradict that he was far from being an idiot.
Even now in a bumpy chaise, Homer Bennett, shipwright, was sketching plans for a yacht. And farther back on the Great North Road, Homer’s two journeymen and one apprentice were making do on the mail coach. Under Homer’s directions, Adam Pine, first journeyman, had been given the assignment to locate the other two, promise them more-than-adequate wages, and point them north to Scotland.
Homer had batted away Douglas’s worries that the men might not wish to inflict Scotland upon themselves. “Look here, friend, and make no mistake: As disagreeable as war was, at least it employed all of us.”
That same man—the competent, even-keeled Devonport shipwright Douglas had known for years—had confessed to Douglas in the quiet of his bookroom that retirement was proving to be a harder mistress than war. “But don’t tell Amy,” he had whispered, even though his wife of some thirty years was playing piquet with her best friend three blocks over on Granby Street. “She thinks I am satisfied to be home and doing next to nothing. Blast and dash it all!”
Despite his headache, Douglas had to smile at another whispered conversation he had that same evening with Mrs. Amy Bennett herself, begging Douglas to find something for her husband to do. “He wears a hang-dog expression all day, and mopes, positively mopes, and overeats,” she had told Douglas, after swearing him to silence on the matter.
Since he knew nothing of marriage politics, Douglas had cut through the Gordian knot by taking both husband and wife by the hand and sitting them down in their own parlor, where he explained his need for a shipwright in far off Edgar, small village in the shire of Kirkcudbright. “Homer, you are bored,” he had said. “Amy wants you to be busy. Admit to each other what you have both disclosed to me.”
Both husband and wife had stared daggers at him and he had stared back, arms folded, wondering if Olive Grant would ever resort to such silliness. He decided she probably could, because most females had a curiously devious nature, rather like cats. The matter was moot, however, because he would never be bored. The scope of his thoughts took his breath away, because his mind was wandering farther afield than ever before. What had OliveGrant to do with his happiness? Never mind; the matter at hand was to get the Bennetts on the same even keel.
He had faith in good friends. In a few moments, the thought-daggers lobbed his way had mellowed. Douglas knew Homer Bennett to be a realistic man. How could he have been otherwise, when for years he was saddled with relentless deadlines upon which the fate of the nation seemed to hang?
“He’s right, Ames,” Homer had said finally to his wife. “I am filled to the brim with boredom. Not with you,” he hastened to add and then sighed. “It’s harder than I thought to let go of a career.”
Amy Bennett was a bright woman. Douglas thought she could probably read frigate blueprints as well as her husband. Heaven knows that shipbuilding had probably been the chief discussion around the Bennett dinner table during years of national emergency.
“He’s not a young man,” she had said to Douglas, by way of preamble. “He shouldn’t have long hours.”
“Indeed no,” Douglas had assured her. “This is strictly an eight to six o’clock day. He’ll be building and teaching at the same time, which will require the patience of Job.”
And then the Bennetts were holding hands and listening as he laid the dubious charms of Edgar—misty days, horrendous odors when the tide was out, and nowhere of interest to shop—side by side with the utter need of hardworking men rendered impotent by expulsion from their distant glens to find meaningful work. “Amy, your man will be busy, paid well, and providing a desperately needed service.”
He could tell from the expression on her face that she hadn’t heard any word beyond “busy.” He knew the Bennetts were comfortably well off, thanks to war. Homer didn’t need the work, except that was precisely what he did need. Idle days stretching into idle weeks could put a man into the grave almost as fast as gas gangrene.
By the time bedtime rolled around, Homer Bennett had agreed to resurrect Edgar’s shipyard and train his workers. Before she closed the door to the bedchamber she shared with a much happier man now, Amy Bennett had kissed Douglas Bowden’s cheek.
“I’ll be there as soon as a house is ready,” she assured the blushing Douglas. “Truth to tell, I am bored too. A lady can only play so much piquet.”
“Doug? You’re woolgathering,” he heard from the man seated across from him in the post chaise. “Twice now I’ve asked you about lumber.”
“Beg pardon. I will suggest that when your number one journeyman arrives, that the two of you spend several days in Glasgow. Olive—Miss Grant—tells me there is a mighty rope works there, as well, to answer your rigging needs. They’ll provide you with no false leads, since the Telford Boat Works is no competition.”So I hope, he thought, and crossed his fingers.
