Page 63 of Doing No Harm
“Flora, who wouldn’t?” he asked and felt his heart grow larger—a medical impossibility.
Happy with that homely victory, he went into the kitchen. Her face flushed, her hair curling everywhere because of the steam, Olive stood over that evening’s stew. She looked at him, and he was struck with the kindness in her eyes. He liked to think it was for him, but he knew she was kind to everyone.
On wild impulse—Maeve was watching, after all—he took Olive’s hand and pulled her out the back door and into the yard. When she was down the stairs, he put his hands on her shoulders and told her everything he had done at Lady Telford’s. Her hand went to her mouth and tears came to her eyes.
“Your tearoom will become the corporation’s dining room,” he concluded. “You will have an ample allowance for food and more staff.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. “I have been praying about this. Doug, I am nearly without funds.”
“I feared that,” he said, flattered to his heart’s core at his nickname.
He looked into her honest, true, multicolored eyes and knew he needed to lighten the load a bit. He was getting almost sentimental. “Olive, I find myself looking more into the brown one than the blue one. Odd, that.”
She laughed and slapped his head, which made him grab her and kiss her, not on the forehead this time. Her arms went around him as though they did this every day, and they stood together in a tight embrace.
She drew away first; he had no immediate plans to ever move. “My goodness, but I react boldly to good news,” she said. Her face was fiery red now, and he supposed his was too. “I should perhaps apologize?”
He shook his head, dazed with feelings he had thought belonged to a younger man.You’re not eighty, you dolt, he scolded himself, struck by the fact that for the first time in decades, he didn’t feel eighty. This bore some private thought.
“I don’t think it’s necessary for either of us to apologize for exuberance,” he said, acutely aware how stupid he sounded.Great gobs of monkey meat, I am Dougie again, he thought, thankful that Lady Telford wasn’t watching. “Besides, I started it.” He tugged her curls. “And I have no plans to apologize. Olive, Edgar’s fortunes are looking up.”
Maeve giggled when they came back inside, and he knew she had watched out the window. All a man could do was forge ahead and pretend nothing had happened. He sat down for stew and ate quickly. “I’ll take some of this to Joe Tavish, along with whatever of that stiffer paper that remains. Do you have a pencil or two?”
She did and fetched it as he finished eating. “I hope he is feeling better this afternoon because he needs to sketch the …” He paused as the enormity of the project suddenly landed on his head like an ostrich egg, cracked, and dribbled down his temples. “… the Telford BoatWorks. Hadrian’s Wall! I’ll take the drawings with me to Plymouth and see how persuasive I am.”
“I have no doubt that you will convince any number of shipwrights to follow you up north to this country,” she said.
After that kiss in the garden, he saw no reason to be suddenly coy. “Olive, I don’t do things like this! I don’t create corporations or make grandiose plans. I’m a surgeon, for heaven’s sake.”
“Have a little faith, Doug,” she said simply.
He spent the rest of the afternoon removing a splinter from the palm of a child who wanted nothing to do with him, and then making an emergency house call to the grocer’s. Maintaining a calm sort of professionalism when he wanted to slap his knee and laugh, he reassured a worried Mrs. McDaniel that, yes, indeed, the umbilical cord stump was supposed to fall away just like that.
The walk back to his house meant stopping to chat with the fishmongers again and then taking tea with an elderly lady whose name he could not recall, who just wanted to talk. He listened, offered a little advice about dry, itchy skin, and returned home with a smile on his face.
He lay down then and tried to sleep because he couldn’t remember when he had last done such a thing. This enforced stay in Edgar was beginning to resemble a fleet action.
He dozed, fearing bad dreams as usual, but instead enjoying the pleasure of Olive Grant’s breath on his neck and the edgy comfort of her softness. He imagined her wearing nothing but a shimmy, which meant he had to get up and walk around a bit, wondering about himself.
On the tenth back and forth pacing, he stopped and looked into his shaving mirror, as though to ask himself, Who is this man? The usual face looked back at him, but the mirror Douglas Bowden smiled.
He spent an hour with Joe Tavish in the shed, which had been swept clean and equipped with a cot found somewhere. He tended the infected wound on the man’s forearm, happy to see it no worse today, and told Joe what he needed and why.
“I want you to come with me in the late afternoon to the old shipyard and sketch it.” To Joe’s unasked why, he told him about the Telford Boat Works and his plans for the corporation to employ every man in Edgar who wanted to work.
“We aren’t carpenters or shipwrights,” Joe argued. “We’re crofters and cattlemen.”
“Can you change?” Douglas asked. “The man I have in mind to manage the yard is a fine teacher. The corporation will pay you well as you learn a new trade.”
“But it’s not—”
“—and it never will be the Highlands again,” Douglas snapped, out of patience. “And, no, I’m not doing this for Olive Grant!”
“I didn’t say—”
“I see it on your face,” Douglas said. “Stop your nasty leering! I’m doing this because I hate the waste of human life. I held little Flora MacLeod on my lap while the horror of her experience took over her brain and she told me through her tears, ‘All we needed was a little help.’ I have no proof against that, Joe Tavish. I need your sketches and I will pay you for them. Whether you want to work in the boatyard is your business. Just don’t get in my way.”
He knew he had spoken too loud because the Highlander stared at him, his face drained of color. “It’s not for a woman?”
