“I told you it would be hard, but you need to do this,” he said, when Euna was silent.
No one questioned why. They seemed to understand exactly what he meant. Olive looked to the older children, a wordless prayer in her heart, as they were first to obey, taking a piece of paper and then a pencil. She thought they would sit together at the tables, but they scattered to thecorners of the room, their backs to each other, seeking a private place for their misery.
Sixteen children began to draw. Douglas went to the window and looked out, giving their privacy dignity. Olive and Mrs. Dougall went into the kitchen and closed the door.
“He wants them to face their terror, doesn’t he?” Brighid asked quietly.
Olive nodded.
“There’s more to this, though,” the woman said.
“Much more.” Olive could barely get out the words. The two of them held hands.
Time passed. The tearoom was silent except for the scratching of pencils, and an occasional sob. Brighid put her hands to her face.
“We could have been kinder to them when they first came here,” she said. “We could have been as kind as you, Olive.”
“Never mind that,” Olive said. “We here have learned our lesson too. We know better now. Maybe many of them speak little English and have strange Highland ways, but we are all Scots.” She touched the woman’s cheek. “Let’s not forget that.”
Nearly an hour passed, during which time Olive and her helpers who filed in through the back door finished preparing soup and bread for luncheon. Olive heard firm footsteps cross the room and a knock on the kitchen door. She opened it to see the children all seated again, their faces so serious, but with the addition of pride. Not the pride that speaks of power or ownership, but the pride of shared experience and survival.
Douglas held the pictures. He shook his head as he looked at them and even grew pale. He placed one on top of the pile. Olive stared at the picture, a crude drawing, but explicit. She held her breath to see a croft on fire, troops outside, if those stick figures held muskets andbayonets as she thought they did, watching a woman burn to death inside.
“Mary MacKay,” a little boy said. “We watched and no one helped her.”
“She wouldna leave her home,” a small girl chimed in. “My da, he tried to tell the soldiers she wasn’t right in the head and mostly deaf, but they only laughed.”
“That should never have happened,” Douglas said. “Who wants to tell me about this picture? And this one?”
His gentle questions opened a floodgate as the children took turns with their own pictures, describing cattle slaughtered, chickens with their necks wrung, fathers and uncles beat down to the ground when they tried to resist, and other soldiers herding women and children like animals. His face more serious than a judge, Tommy had drawn a tarpaulin draped over tombstones as he and his mother cowered within. It was a good rendering of misery of the acutest kind; Joe Tavish’s artistic talent had touched his son.
Flora sat on Mrs. Dougall’s lap again, her drawing in her hands. The child had drawn a woman lying on a mattress, with streaks of pencil rain pouring down. Olive looked closer in horror and then turned away, her mind reeling. Another figure lay on top of the dying woman. She thought at first it was Flora, but it was a soldier with a musket beside him. She caught Mrs. Dougall’s wild-eyed glance and held it.
“He blacked my eye just like yours,” Flora was whispering to Douglas, who knelt beside her now. “I tried to pull him off Mam, but he wouldn’t listen. Mam screamed and screamed, but he didn’t care.” She drew a breath that caught and became a sob. “Then he left her and he laughed at us.” She put her hands on Douglas’s cheeks, drawing him close. “We needed help! Where were you?”
Chapter 34
Douglas knew he would notsleep that night, which came as something of a relief. He was tired of his own demons, the ghosts of men he had tried to save and failed, as they raised their arms to him night after night, seeking what he could not give. He sometimes tried to reason with them, speaking in calm tones as he described the ferocity of their wounds, and explained logically why a man cannot survive with half a head, or with most of his entrails lying next to the guns on the deck.
They weren’t interested in logic, his wraiths and haunts. They only wanted to live a little longer, to return to their parents or their wives and children all in one piece, not sewn into their hammocks, weighted with lead shot and slid off a board into the ocean, after a prayer and a verse. He had sat with each one of these men and watched them struggle for one more breath. He had closed their eyes, called the time of death to his pharmacist mate, who carefully wrote it into his medical log. John McIntyre, Scotland, carpenter’s mate, Nov. 18, 1815, off the coast of Spain. Cause of death: perforated bowel. And on andon through years of war. His logical brain reminded him occasionally of the many more sailors and officers who owed their lives to him. He knew it was so, but always standing behind them were the dead, not so much accusing him, but sorrowful that he could not have done more.
He sat alone in his surgery and grew angry at those ghosts. “You do not understand that I wish I could have done more,” he said, his voice firm. “There was not enough medical science to cure you. If there had been, I would have.”
He couldn’t possibly appease his demons. He never wanted to face Olive Grant again, she who knew what his dreams consisted of and who probably thought him a maniac and a weak man. He understood how much he loved her, the kind lady who fed people and risked her own inheritance. The woman with a blue eye and a brown one, and red hair and freckles, and a heart so big that it just might include him, if he weren’t so cursed by his own dreams. He could never wish that on a wife. Wouldn’t such a woman grow weary of sharing her bed with ghosts? Would love turn to disgust? Better not to chance it.
He slept finally, simply because the body craves sleep after too many hours without it. Mercifully, he slept alone this night, beyond the occasional shriek and mutter from the more persistent ghosts. When he woke, his bedroom was empty as always. He dragged his timepiece from the table by his bed, amazed that it was nearly noon.
He lay there on his back, staring at the ceiling as he used to stare to the deck above, thinking through his duties of the day, and reminding himself of one more remedy he might attempt, one more procedure. This time he thought about his patients in Edgar, his friends now. He shook his head, thinking how they called him “our Mr. Bowden,” possessive already.
Mrs. Aintree’s fingers would continue to heal. He had watched her move them yesterday, pleased to know thatthere was enough skin to permit the joints to bend. Rhona Tavish would keep her exercising those fingers.
He had removed the splints from Tommy Tavish’s leg two days ago and unwrapped the stiff bandages. Tommy had been reluctant to put his weight on the leg at first, but with a little coaxing from Olive the kind lady, he put down some weight and then more. Douglas had told Rhona exactly what to do there too. The boy who had been the reason for his several months in Edgar was on the mend.
The grocer’s wife would probably always be a little worried about her baby until she realized that he was fine and healthy, and destined to live. Maybe all new mothers were that way. She would learn. Just yesterday morning he had seen her talking so earnestly in the store with a Highland mother of four. All was well.
He wanted to do more for Lady Telford, but he didn’t know what it would be. She was aware she was failing, and that her little bouts of apoplexy would only increase. Maybe the best cure for what ailed her was something she had begun to do already of her own volition. More than once he had seen her leaning on Maidie’s arm and walking to the shipyard, where Homer Bennett always seated her in a prominent place and let her watch the growth of the yacht. If he had time, Homer would escort her to Miss Grant’s tearoom for green tea and biscuits.
He thought of Olive Grant, the woman he wanted to marry and have his children by. Better he spare her the complications of life with Douglas Bowden, retired surgeon who could not let go of his ghosts. He knew her hopes for finding a husband were not sanguine, not because she wasn’t pleasing or kind, but because she was thirty and had no real inheritance now, thanks to the Countess of Sutherland, determined to improve the little people right off her land because sheep were more profitable.
