She took his hand in hers so gently that he had to remind himself to breathe. “Douglas, you have done the thing.” She leaned forward and rested her forehead on his arm. “Come by tonight for supper, and I will tell you all about Mrs. Fillion’s visit.”
“I have some ideas. I stayed at the Drake and her son told me she had gone north. He told me you would have a sur …”
He was facing Olive, but now she was looking over his shoulder at the street. “Oh, dear, it is William Lacey from theMaid of Galloway,” she interrupted, back to business as she took her old plaid from him and draped it over the paisley shawl. “He has worry in his eyes and I think your village needs you again. Poor Douglas. You’ll tire of us yet.”
Chapter 30
This was hardly the time to hearabout Olive’s visit with Mrs. Fillion, not with the first mate of theMaid of Gallowaylying near death, his skull fractured when a mainmast yardarm gave way in yesterday’s squall and landed on him.
It was the kind of injury that Douglas hated because the outcome was invariably death. He drilled a few small holes in the poor man’s skull, grateful that he was unconscious, but doubting that he would ever wake.
“His brain will swell, and this might relieve some of the pressure,” he said to Rhona Tavish, who had not hesitated when Olive asked her to help. “It might not, too.”
“What do you do now, Mr. Bowden?” Rhona asked as she gathered his medical tools. He had already extracted a promise from her to wash them in scalding water, dry them, and return them to their proper places in his surgery.
“I will sit here with our patient. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Tavish,” he said as he pulled up the chair closer to the bed. “You didn’t flinch and you don’t look green.”
She allowed herself a tiny smile. “We all know thatMiss Grant is too tender-hearted for this sort of thing. I was glad to help.”
After a few quiet words with the poor man’s wife, Rhona Tavish, exiled Highlander and a woman with her own problems, let herself out of the house. Douglas covered his eyes with his hands, an old sea habit, that gave him a second’s worth of privacy. He knew no one ever bothered him when he did that, and it gave him time to work through everything he had done and ask himself if there was something more, some little thing he could do, to change the probable outcome. He could think of nothing, but he kept his hands in front of his eyes a little longer, enjoying the peace.
When he removed them, Olive Grant sat on the other side of Brian Hannay’s bed. She did look a little green, but her presence gave him heart. Maybe she had known it would. He knew she had no love for the sickroom.
“Am I the last person you expected to see here?” she asked, studiously avoiding looking at the dying man, even as she held his limp hand. “You know I am not much good for the cutting part, but I don’t mind the vigil part. Does he have even a chance?” She said this last in a whisper, because Brian’s wife stood just beyond the open door, her children clutched to her.
He shook his head ever so slightly. “I’ll be here until the end.”
Olive reached across the bed, and he held her hand briefly, giving it a squeeze.
“Why are you here?”
“You need to know what Mrs. Fillion did.” She looked at the unconscious seaman then, her gaze so tender. “She said you did not leave her son, during all the struggle for his life.”
He shrugged and looked away. “He died ten years later at Trafalgar. I wonder how the whole turn of events did not render her bitter.”
“You don’t know mothers, do you?” she asked. “She told me how grateful she was that you gave the two of them ten more years that they would not have had otherwise. And she invested eight thousand pounds in the Telford Boat Works.”
“Such a sum,” he said, when he had fully absorbed the enormity of her gift. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes on Olive, who looked back with the same tenderness. “I merely did what any surgeon would have done.”
“I doubt that, Doug,” she contradicted. “You’re just the best man.”
She said it with no sentimentality, as though she merely stated a fact. Her face had gone a bit rosy because it wasn’t something a woman without a commitment, tie, or promise said to a man. In a sense, she had opened her breast, removed her heart, and held it out to him. He had never been so flattered in his life, and humbled, at the same time.
“I’m sitting here, staring at failure, and you say that.”
“You canna cure them all, Douglas Bowden,” she replied, her tone a little sharp now, which was precisely what he needed. She gestured to the man lying between them. “If by some miracle he survives, what then?”
He lowered his voice even farther. “He will never be Brian Hannay again, not the Brian they remember.”
“Does he know you are here?”
He shook his head.
“And yet you stay,” she said in a voice close to wonder now. “I stand by my statement.”
Why he should suddenly feel better, he could not have told anyone, let alone himself. He thought of all the dreary watches just like this one that only ended in death. On the surface of it, this was no different. In actuality, he felt at peace simply because Olive Grant stood the watch with him.
“Stay here, will you?” he asked, feeling needy.
