Doing No Harm (13 page)

W
hat do you know of Scotland
?” she asked, after he had wiped wet leaves off the bench and she seated herself.

“A broad question,” he began, smiling a little, until he saw how serious she was. “Not much. I am from East Anglia—Norfolk—and my father was a cooper. I went to sea at twelve years, and my life has been taken up with war ever since.”

She gave him a look of great compassion, which made him wonder if Olive Grant’s role in life was to do battle with all the evil in the world. He knew that was impossible, but something in her expression assured him that she was going to spend her life trying.

“Olive, I am fine,” he assured her.

“No, you are not,” she said just as promptly. “Are you even aware that I have been in your room every night since you arrived and put my hand on your shoulder until you are quiet again?”

He felt his face go hot. “I remember the first night. I do apologize.”

“No need,” she said. “What control can you possibly have over your mind when you sleep? Don’t tell me tales, Douglas Bowden. Don’t ever do that.”

He nodded, sufficiently chastened. All the more reason for him to find his own dwelling quickly, no matter how temporary. To his relief, she plunged immediately into the story he wanted.

“Have you at least heard of the Clearance?” she asked, turning slightly on the bench to give him her entire attention.

“Vaguely,” he began, not a little embarrassed by his lack of knowledge. “Something about landowners far to the north of your country changing from cattle to raising to sheep? It sounds simple enough.”

“Who tended those cattle?” she questioned.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head, chagrined at his ignorance. “I obviously know more about splinting legs than I do about Scotland.”

“For centuries, the Highland clan chiefs parceled out land, small holdings their people rented, to raise cattle and paltry crops. Somehow, through the years, the chiefs came to control the land and kept their own people in near bondage.”

“I didn’t know,” Douglas said.

“No one pays much attention to the poor,” she said. He saw a militant look in her eyes, which told him worlds about her father and his ministry in the Church of Scotland. “Yes, the Highlands were overpopulated, and yes the people were more ignorant than we are here in the Lowlands, but nothing can excuse what happened next. It is still going on, even as we sit here.”

A seagull swooped close to the bridge and screamed. Douglas jumped.

“I’ve watched you around sudden noises,” Olive said.

He knew better than to comment. She had him. Between sudden noises and nightmares, she had him.

“It all comes down to power and land,” she continued, not giving him the chance to feel embarrassed. “People in power passed the Enclosure Acts, which drove the crofters off their little holdings entirely. Let us add money to that unholy brew. Sheep make more money than cattle and require only a few shepherds and some dogs to control them.”

She frowned down at her hands then. When she spoke, he heard the tremble in her voice. Whether it was anger or tears he could not tell.

“Some were given a mere week’s notice to vacate their homes. If the people objected or dragged their feet, the houses were burned down, some with people still inside. Or so I have heard.”

Silence. She swallowed a few times. Her voice became so soft that he had to lean closer to hear her.

“The poor folk of the Highland clans were rounded up like their cattle, stuffed into ships, and dumped here in Lowland Scotland. Some were sent to Canada and Australia, whether they wanted to go or not.”

Shocked, he thought through the matter, looking with new eyes on the hovels at the other end of town where no one tended roses or had a cow that gave excellent cream and butter. He thought of the Tavishes and Mrs. Cameron, and the others that flitted around like wraiths, not even seeking his medical help for anything because they had no hope. He had ignored them too.

How to phrase this? Olive obviously belonged to the tending-roses faction of Edgar, the people who had lived here for a century or likely more, modest but comfortable. “I gather that the good people of Edgar were not eager to see their own Scottish brethren from the north dropped on their doorstep,” he commented. “Pardon me, but in Edgar you do have a small pie to divide amongst your own.”

“That may be, but it does not excuse what happened. It is our everlasting shame that some of the townsfolk turned a deaf ear to the sermons my father preached about charity being kind and not puffed up,” Olive said.

“When did this begin?”

“Some years ago,” she answered. “We in Edgar have only been affected by the more recent clearances. I regret that any help given to them was provided grudgingly. Some of the women work on the dock cleaning fish. A few of the men went to sea and never returned. A few of the men are scavengers.”

“Scavengers?”

Spots of color bloomed among her freckles. “They clean the vaults under the necessaries, when they grow full and start to reek.” She paused to let him absorb that one. “Some Highlanders took to drink, like Joe Tavish. My father did all he could to feed them.” She bowed her head and her voice became scarcely audible. “He died about the time the first Highlanders straggled here two years ago. I have continued his work.”

He knew Olive was a plain speaker. He was too. “What happens when you finally run out of your own money?”

His blunt question did not seem to surprise her. “I have another year or two before that happens,” she said, and no more. That was her answer. She looked straight ahead then, avoiding his eyes.

“What about the empty dry dock or shipyard?”

“The men with skill to run it moved to Glasgow, and some to your country, to build man o’ wars to challenge Napoleon. The fishing fleet is greatly diminished because press gangs came this far north to kidnap seafaring men for the Royal Navy. They have never returned either.”

He winced inwardly, knowing the truth of what she said. As a ship surgeon, it was his duty to pass judgment on the general health of those men clubbed into the navy by press gangs. Some were too feeble and he dismissed them. Where they went after that, he did not know, but it seemed unlikely that the Royal Navy escorted them home again to Scotland. He looked at Olive Grant with even more respect because some sense beyond the usual six told him that if Olive had been on the docks in Plymouth or Portsmouth, she would have fed those forgotten men and gotten them home somehow.

“Why do you do this?” he asked her.

She seemed surprised by his question, even flustered, which he found endearing. And when she spoke, he felt the tiniest grain of hope squeeze into his heart. “I’m the same as you,” she told him. “We just try to do some good wherever we can.”

He felt his face grow warm. “Olive, I have always been paid for doing good,” he reminded her. “You appear to be going through your own inheritance to do good.”

“No one paid you to mend Tommy Tavish’s leg,” was her quiet reply.

“But …” He stopped, knowing full well that he had money and she did not. He couldn’t pursue this discussion, so he stood up. “Come, come. I am looking for a house to let. Lady Telford awaits, even though she doesn’t know it,” he told his … his what? He considered the matter, suddenly bowled over with the unvarnished reality that he had a friend in Edgar. “See here, Olive Grant,” he said impulsively. “Will you be my friend?”

Her smile could have lit a lighthouse, which flattered him right down to his shoes. “I’d like nothing better, Douglas Bowden.”

She meant it. Olive tried to recall her last chum, which meant scrolling through her brain for ten years, as she had watched her childhood friends flirt, marry, have children, and discover they had nothing in common anymore. She had become an afterthought to those who had invited her to parties and teas and who had swung with her in the swing behind the vicarage.

A friend at thirty would be a different sort of friend. She also knew he had no plans to stay long. Still, even a temporary friend was better than none at all. The retired surgeon would be a friend to remember long after he was gone.

“Good,” he said. “Bring on this Lady Telford. What should I expect?”

How to describe Lady Telford? “She is crabby and complains a lot, according to Maeve Gibson’s sister, who works for her,” Olive said, not one to mince words, which had probably cost her at least one suitor. “There is an air of pretension about her because the late Sir Dudley was a baronet and we are remarkably common.”

“Any lingering, mysterious illnesses that I can save her from and earn her undying gratitude?” Douglas joked. “Or is that what only happens in bad novels?”

“Bad novels,” Olive agreed. “She likes money, I have heard, so she will overcharge you for that house.”

“Can I appeal to her better nature?” he persisted.

“She has no better nature. I am sorry to disappoint you,” Olive assured him. “Prepare to be cheated on the rent.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Gossip,” Olive replied, which made him laugh. “She keeps to herself, and we don’t interfere.”

“Coward.”

Oh, this was good. No need for him to know that she had a few qualms about the visit, not the least of which dated back to the time Lady Telford scolded her father for wasting so much of his resources, not to mention his strength and energy, on people who would never appreciate his efforts. Olive felt braver already because she wasn’t fighting this little battle by herself. She had a friend now.

“She frightens me a little,” Olive said, just to warn him.

“My dear Miss Grant, I have been hip deep in a sinking ship, with a wounded man on my back, trying to take him topside to a cutter. I can probably survive being cheated on the rent.”

He stopped with her outside the iron gate, looking dubious. “Does she … does she have patrolling watch dogs?” he asked.

Olive laughed out loud. “Hip deep in sea water and what else was that?”

“I don’t care for dogs,” he said. “Give me a cat any day.”

“I won’t tell Duke,” she teased as she pushed open the gate. “I’ll protect you.”

And she did, stepping in front of the surgeon when Lady Telford’s fat and waddling, thoroughly nondescript geriatric dog threw himself off the stoop and lumbered toward them, wheezing, his tongue hanging out. As the surgeon chuckled, the dog flopped on the walk at Olive’s feet and bared his stomach to her.

“Do you feed him, too, at Miss Grant’s Tearoom?” he asked, crouching down beside the brute to scratch his stomach.

“Upon occasion. He seems to know when cod is on the menu. Lady Telford calls him Xerxes.”

“That’s a heroic name,” Douglas said. “Perhaps overly ambitious. This is the kind of dog I like—too fat to run and too old to feel so inclined.”

Olive scratched Xerxes, too, which made him sigh in an almost human way. “The surgeon here is saying terrible things about you,” she told Xerxes, who belched loud and long.

Douglas leaned back and shook his head as though to clear it. “That fragrance would evacuate a room,” he said. “I suspect dental decay, but I will not make him a patient of mine. He couldn’t even pay me in butter or cream.”

Olive laughed out loud and let the surgeon help her to her feet. “Brave man,” she said. She mounted the steps and wielded the doorknocker. She listened for footsteps and stepped back.

“Maidie,” Olive said. “Is your mistress in?”

A plain, honest face grinned back at her. “Tha knowest t’auld biddy is in,” she whispered. “Who in Edgar is her equal to visit? But I’ll go look. C’mon in, Miss Grant.”

Olive glanced at Douglas, who was doing his dead level best not to laugh. His lips were pressed tight together, but his eyes were merry.

“Douglas, this is Maeve’s sister Maidie Gibson. We’ll wait in the hall.”

The maid put her hand to her mouth. “I keep forgetting.” She opened the door wider and drew herself up. “Wait right here, dearies.” She hurried off in a purposeful lock step as Xerxes waddled along behind.

“I gather it was hard for Lady Telford to get reliable staff to move to the wilds of Scotland?” the surgeon asked as soon as Maidie was out of sight.

“Rumor says that no one from an employment agency lasts more than two weeks,” Olive whispered.

She looked around the entranceway, wondering what Douglas Bowden thought of the homemade entry table flanked by two chairs carved to resemble Anubis, an Egyptian god.

He stared at the thin and menacing wooden dogs, then up at the barely dressed plaster nymphs in the ceiling. “Words fail me,” he said at last.

“Just as well,” Olive whispered back. “Lady Telford prefers that guests be seen and not heard.”

She could have said more, but here came the lady in question. Olive made a sufficiently deep curtsey, and the surgeon surprised her with an elegant bow. Impressed, she watched him, which meant she saw the sudden surprise on his face when he took a good look at Lady Telford.

“Mr. B … Bowden,” Olive stammered, wondering at the man’s wide eyes and sudden bloom of color from his neck up. “Do allow me to introduce Lady Telford.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Olive thought she saw a warning stare directed at Douglas Bowden from the baroness, followed by bland complacency.