Page 56 of Doing No Harm
Douglas exchanged glances with Olive, who moved closer to him, still out of reach, but closer.
When Tavish shivered, Douglas put a blanket around his shoulders. Olive followed that with a pillow. When she sat down again, she was even closer.
They waited in silence as Joe Tavish—a forgotten, wounded, hungry, misunderstood man—marshaled his puny forces. “We weren’t doing anything out of theordinary, but one day two men came riding into our glen, one by the name of Patrick Sellar.”
Olive started in fright when Joe Tavish spat.
“Sorry, mam,” he said. “I hope Patrick Sellar dies a painful death some day, but likely he will only grow richer. If I didna know then how the world works, believe me, I know now.”
“What did he do?” Douglas asked.
“You really don’t know, do you?” Tavish asked. He shrugged. “Neither did we.” He took a deep breath. “How can I forget? I was outside the croft, mending a chair when he walked up my lane and handed me a writ.” He grunted. “Just like that. He gave a little salute and walked back down my lane.” He voice broke. “I see him walking yet in my dreams, but he grows taller and taller with each step until he is looking down on us from our own crags and mountains, like an awful demon.” He shuddered.
I do understand dreams, Douglas thought.
The story poured out of Joe Tavish then in a monotone, as though he were living the events through someone else’s eyes. Three months to leave his beloved glen, and go where, how, and with what?
“Why?” Douglas asked.
Joe tried to speak. His mouth opened and nothing came out. Olive put her hand on Joe’s arm. “This much I know,” she told Douglas. “The Countess of Sutherland decided that her Highlands land would pay far more in taxes and revenue if she ran sheep.”
“But surely those are clan lands. I know that much,” Douglas said, genuinely puzzled. “Have people like Joe no rights?”
Joe picked up his own story. “At one time, aye, we did. Through the years, the clan chief began to look on us as free labor.”
“But the Countess of Sutherland?”
“Scottish landowning is a murky matter,” Olive saidwhen Joe fell silent. “The clan chiefs became landlords, if you will. After the Battle of Culloden Moor, more land ownership was shuffled around until the Gordons owned most of the Highlands. Elizabeth Gordon and the Countess of Sutherland are one and the same.”
They sat in silence. No one had an answer, because Douglas knew the three of them were the little people, be he from Norfolk in his case, Galloway in Olive’s, or the Highlands in Joe’s.
“And the writ was an eviction,” Douglas said finally. He knew that it was impossible for blood to run cold, but his did as he stared at the pain in Joe Tavish’s eyes. “Did … did anyone leave the glen as Sellar demanded?”
Joe shook his head. “From time to time, Sellar came back with other agents, who assured us that we could find work along the coast, cleaning and gutting fish. Fish! No one wanted that so we ignored him.”
Except that the writ didn’t disappear, did it?Douglas thought. “And then they returned and brought troops?”
“Aye.” Joe looked him in the eye briefly, then bowed his head on his chest, as though ashamed of his own gullibility. “?‘We told ye three months ago,’ Sellar shouted at my door. ‘Thirty minutes now or we fire it with you inside.’ ”
“He wouldn’t,” Douglas said.
“He did. Rhona and Tommy and I grabbed and ran, but t’deaf widow next door, an old ancient of days …” He shook his head vigorously, as if trying to throw out the image lodged there. “I’ll hear her scream until I die.”
Joe wrapped his arms around his updrawn legs and hugged himself for comfort.
Olive reached out her hand and touched his arm, but he shook her off. “Lice.”
“This can wait for another day,” Douglas said.
“Nay, you’ll have it all now because I won’t speak of it again,” Joe told him. “All over the glen, cottages burned. Sellar and his troops set so many fires that the air wassmoky. We got away with our clothes, a Bible, a few dishes, and two candlesticks. They herded us like dogs toward the coast.”
Olive leaped to her feet and ran from the shed. Joe retreated inside himself again. Douglas remembered coastal Spanish and Portuguese towns where one army or the other displaced ordinary people with the misfortune to be caught in the middle. A more compassionate captain had set him and his pharmacist mate ashore near Gibraltar to tend to the bruised, battered, and bewildered who had taken refuge in a convent. He had tended to their physical needs but was powerless to calm their minds or give them a reason to live. He still had nightmares from watching perfectly able-looking young women and children simply slide sideways and drop dead.
He looked up from contemplation of his hands to see Joe Tavish staring at him.
“What, no sympathy? No advice to read our Bibles and take comfort that things are better in heaven?” Joe asked, his voice thick with bitterness. “That’s w’the English told us on the docks. Smug and sanctimonious the lot ’a ye.”
“Give me some credit, Joe,” he snapped. “Lapdogs in English sitting rooms are treated better than you were. Don’t paint me with that brush because I do not deserve it.”
