Doing No Harm, page 17
“Uh, what?” he asked, groaning inwardly at how stupid he sounded. Stupid tired, more like.
“I told Lady Telford that your house was haunted, so you could get a better deal,” she reminded him.
What was she up to? “You are a rascal.”
“Take a look over there in the shed,” she said, lowering her voice. “A good look.”
He looked, straining his eyes to see into the midnight gloom, compounded by that dratted light mist that seemed to be Edgar’s lot in life and geography. He looked, squinted, and saw the flickering light.
“Should I wake up the constable?” she whispered.
No, let’s allow the poor fool to get his rest, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. Olive Grant probably meant well. “Not if it’s ghosts,” was the best he could come up with.
“Aren’t you concerned?” she asked.
He wasn’t. “Mostly I am tired, Olive Grant, kind lady,” he teased. “Let’s take a look.”
He walked across the street to the stone shed close to the bridge and behind his house that Lady Telford had assured him was his property too, for the next two months. The way the bank slanted, he wouldn’t have noticed the light.
He opened the door and his life changed again.
Joe Tavish stared back at him, his eyes dark with misery. Olive sucked in her breath and prudently stayed behind Douglas. The man held the stare for an uncomfortable, silent time, then sighed and returned his attention to what looked like a small pile of black oats. By the light of that single flickering candle, Douglas watched in horror and then in deep compassion as the silent man finished stirring something dark and sludgy around in a hole he appeared to have dug into the dirt floor of the shed. He had no bowl or spoon, only a dirt hole.
“Throw me out when I’m done,” Joe Tavish muttered, his voice rusty, as though he had not spoken to anyone in a long time. He dipped his hand in the nasty mess and ate. He gagged, but he did not stop.
Remembering his last beating, Douglas hesitated. He watched Joe’s dirty hand as it shook, traveling the short distance from the hole to his mouth. “I could probably push him over with one finger now,” he whispered to Olive. “Olive?”
We are two easy marks, he thought, listening to Olive sniff. He reached behind him and took her hand.
“Go get him some food,” he said, loud enough for Joe Tavish to hear.
Joe’s shaggy head went up. Even in the gloom of the shed, Douglas saw that same expression of pride that he had seen only minutes before on his son Tommy’s face.
“No charity,” he spit out.
“Ya bowfing, dighted dug!” Olive burst out. She scrambled out from behind Douglas before he could stop her and grabbed the front of the startled man’s shirt. She gave him a good shake as Douglas stared, open-mouthed. “Aye, it’s charity! Did no one ever tell you hardheaded Highlanders that charity is the pure love of Christ?” She gave him another shake for good measure, then shook her finger at him. “You’re going to eat what I serve you if I have to push your face in it! I’ll thrash you myself if you give me grief!” She leaped up and ran from the shed.
I should do something, Douglas thought, shocked, until it dawned on his fuddled, sleep-deprived mind, that Olive Grant’s brand of Christianity had trouble suffering fools gladly. I will keep my mouth shut, Douglas decided, not certain if he was more appalled or more entertained by the surprising sight of the kind lady pushed past her limit. He knew he never wanted to cross her.
Joe stared at the open door. He put down the mess and just sat there. Douglas looked closer and swallowed when he realized what the dark mess was. Tommy had probably heard his own father bleeding Mrs. Aintree’s cow, the last resort of a desperate man.
He took a deep breath, which wasn’t so wise, considering that the man reeked. He reminded himself that he had spent a quarter of a century working in dark, stinking ships. Was he that big a milky boy?
He considered what he could say to a man reduced to the lowest common denominator, someone on the brink of starvation, someone who had not had a good day in several years. Shame washed over him and he knew what to say.
“I owe you an apology, Joe, for striking you,” he said. “Forgive me, please.”
Tavish raised dark eyes to his, held his gaze briefly, and lowered his head. “I’m the one what gave you the black eye and maybe a bad rib,” he muttered.
“I started it,” Douglas insisted.
“Oh, listen to the two of you barmy moonflies!” Olive declared, obviously still not over her rage. She held two bowls and had stuck a loaf of bread under her arm. One bowl went to Tavish, and the other to Douglas. “Eat something, both of you, and remind me why I shouldn’t slap the two of you silly!”
Joe stared at the bowl in his hands. When it started to shake and fish stew washed over the edge, Olive took it from him gently now and spooned it into his mouth, which he opened obediently as tears streamed down his face.
“There now,” she said, sounding perfectly reasonable. “Hold it with both hands and drink it. I have bread for dunking too.”
She tore the loaf into hunks and handed one to Douglas. He dipped it in the bowl he held and ate because he was hungry too.
“After Trafalgar, I operated for two days straight. My feet swelled and I stood in blood to my ankles. That smell! He was eating raw oats mixed with cow’s blood.”
Olive nodded. She took the bowl from Douglas and dipped chunks of bread in it. She handed it to Joe Tavish when he stared down at his now-empty bowl. “I would call you resourceful, Mr. Tavish,” she said. “I doubt this surgeon would have thought to eat oats and cow’s blood.”
Douglas knew what she was doing and it warmed his heart. “You have me there, Miss Grant,” he admitted.
Joe Tavish understood too. He looked from one to the other. “Aye, right,” he said, his scorn unmistakable. “Don’t ye dare make me a figure of fun.”
“I’d rather you tell me what has happened to get you and your friends to this state,” Douglas said.
“So you can laugh at us too? Laugh at the ignorant Highlanders?” Tavish challenged.
“So I can figure out what to do,” Douglas told him.
“Do? Do?” the man burst out. “Go away!”
“Not yet!” Douglas shouted back, painfully aware that he had not raised his voice since he had taken a stick to this same wretched man weeks ago. Joe Tavish seemed determined to bring out the worst in him. “I have a two-month lease on a house in this miserable village and look there, your arm is a mess.” He tried Olive’s admonition and shook a finger at the startled man. “I have some salve and by h … he … Hadrian’s Wall, you’re going to let me tend you and try to figure something out.”
“T’pure love of Christ?” Joe shouted back.
“Nothing that kind,” Douglas replied. “One angry, put-upon surgeon, more like. Now shut up and don’t you move until I get back with my satchel.”
Chapter 23
Olive followed him from the shed. “By Hadrian’s Wall?” she asked, just on the edge of mirth. “Are we both certifiable?”
“You’re generous to include yourself,” he said as he went into his surgery and grabbed his satchel.
“I’ve never been so irritated with a man as with Joe Tavish,” she started, and then she turned all Flora MacLeod on him and burst into tears. “What have we come to in Scotland?”
He grabbed her in a fierce embrace and kissed her smack on the forehead. “You’re all crazy here north of Hadrian’s Wall. That is my new curse word. Olive Grant, we have work to do. Get me some blankets and a pillow. He’s crawling with lice and he’s not coming in here.”
He clung to her another minute apologizing all the while, babbling something about being tired of doing so much by himself, wishing he could drop himself into the middle of the Canadian wilderness, and sick of endless misery. Appalled at himself, he finally stopped ranting and stepped away from the comfort of Olive’s arms. And here he thought he was holding her; quite the opposite.
“What came over me?” he asked, embarrassed.
Olive appraised him as professionally as he might observe the sick and the wounded. “You’re just tired of working and working and seeing no end in sight. So am I,” she said simply. “We need a bold stroke here in this miserable town.”
“Oh, about that …”
“Nay. You’re right. Hush and let me finish.” She put her hands on his shoulders and he saw the fight in her eyes, banked but not even remotely extinguished. “We have to think bigger than either of us have ever thought before.”
She leaned forward and rested her forehead on his chest for a brief moment, too brief to suit him.
“Poor man! All you wanted was to pass through Edgar and get somewhere else. We’ll let you go, because it is perhaps illegal to hold someone in our village against his will, but we need you first. That’s the truth of it.”
Silently, he agreed that it was. “All right then. I’m going to clean off that wicked-looking abscess on Joe’s arm and give him blankets to bed down right where he is. Tomorrow I’ll find a way to either douse him in the river or stuff him into a tub. He reeks and I won’t have it.”
They walked toward the shed, Olive carrying blankets and Douglas with his satchel. He stopped. “Suppose that man has scarpered off?”
“Then we’ll hunt him down and fix him,” Olive said.
He felt a measure of his good humor returning. “Even if he doesn’t want to be fixed?”
“Especially if he doesn’t want to be fixed,” Olive teased in return. “He should be on a leash, more like.”
But there Joe Tavish was, leaning against the wall of the stone shed and shivering. He seemed surprised to see them again, as though everyone had failed him for so long that he couldn’t imagine anything going well. He appeared to be looking over Olive’s shoulder for someone else.
“There will be no constable,” Douglas told him, interpreting the gaze. “Let me look at your arm.”
Douglas expected a struggle, but Tavish did as directed. He hadn’t the strength to hold it out, so the surgeon rested the forearm on the man’s upraised knee. The cut looked raw and angry, but with laudable pus, thank goodness.
Olive must have gone across the street to her tearoom because she came back with a brass can of lukewarm water. “The Rumford has been extinguished for hours, so this is the best I can do,” she apologized.
She poured the water into a basin and Douglas dipped in a square of gauze, cleaning the area around the wound, caused, he suspected, by a small cut that became infected.
“It was just a scratch,” Tavish said as he leaned back, as though trying to distance himself from his own stink.
“In a cow bier?”
“Aye.” He sighed.
Douglas wiped the wound clean and then looked over in surprise of his own as Olive washed Joe Tavish’s face. Douglas nearly told her not to waste the water, but he saw Joe relax as the grime came away from his face.
“I always feel better when my face is clean,” she told Joe, who actually smiled at her. With the exception of his forearm, bandaged now, and his face, Tavish was as filthy as a man could be. Funny how a clean face made a world of difference. Olive understood what Douglas had forgotten.
He dressed another inflamed cut and wrapped it, at a loss of even where to begin tomorrow in resurrecting this man. He leaned back himself, exhausted and disheartened with the enormity of cleaning Joe Tavish, never mind trying to help so many. He stared at the wall and what he saw touched his heart—a drawing of a crofter’s cottage, perhaps done with a burned stick, with mountains towering behind it, and another drawing of a woman and small boy.
Tavish watched him with a wary expression, as if daring him to make fun of the little works of art, which they were, no matter the medium. He looked at Joe Tavish with new respect.
“I recognize your wife and son,” Douglas said. “The other one?”
“Glen Holt, near Inchnadamph,” Tavish replied as his voice took on an unexpected softness. “We Tavishes lived there for two hundred years, minding our own business, raising a few cattle, growing a few crops.” He turned away with another sigh and stared at the wall with no drawings.
“What happened?” Douglas asked. “I … I ask not to dredge up a wound, but I truly don’t know.” He put away his salve. “I’ve been so long away.” Maybe in more ways than I even know, he told himself.
Douglas did know, because Olive had told him, but he also understood, perhaps better than most, the emotional value of conversation. He thought of the times he had done nothing more than sit at men’s bedsides and listen to them. At first, he had sat out of sheer exhaustion. What he learned when he listened opened up a new side of medicine to him.
He thought Tavish might not speak, because the man continued to stare at the empty wall. With a groan and an oath, he carefully lifted the drawing of Rhona and Tommy Tavish from the nail and held them in his lap, as though deriving comfort from the mere images. He traced the outline of his wife’s face.
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 the ordinary, 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 said when 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 was smoky. 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.”
