Doing No Harm (27 page)

“Are you ready to take a stick to me because I am the author of all your pain?” he asked her. “Give yourself a few days to feel better.”

The widow shook her head. “You left me in good hands. Oh, dear, that is amusing.” She laughed and then closed her eyes and slept again, while Rhona Tavish tidied up the already spotless room.

He debated for a long moment whether to say anything to the Tavishes about Joe, then he decided he couldn’t leave them ignorant. After helping Tommy with the milk pans, he gathered them into Mrs. Aintree’s kitchen.

Mrs. Tavish surprised him. Her arm around Tommy, she listened to the whole story, sniffing back tears when Douglas described her husband’s mean supper of oats and cow’s blood, mixed in a bowl of dirt. When he finished, she looked at her son.

“Well, lad?”

Tommy nodded. “We’ll clean’um up, Mr. Bowden. He’s still Da, and he needs us.”

“I’m not so certain that Mrs. Aintree will allow him here,” Rhona Tavish said.

“No worries. He can stay in my shed for now.”

“I’m not even certain that I want him here, either.”

“You’re quite entitled,” Douglas said.

She shrugged. “For richer or poorer, although we’ve only been poorer. I’ll see if Mrs. Aintree has some clothes that might fit.” She left the room.

“Tommy, did you know he was back?” Douglas asked. Something in the way the boy wouldn’t look at either of them had made him suspicious.

“Aye,” the boy said in a small voice. “One morning Lucinda had already been milked and the milk put in pans.”

“Anyone could have done that.”

Tommy dug into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. He held it out to Douglas, who wondered if he would ever fathom the human heart. Joe Tavish had sketched Olive’s backyard and his daughter’s grave. “Only one man did this.”

Satisfied, Douglas had his usual bowl of porridge in Miss Grant’s Tearoom, disappointed because Olive did not make an appearance, but grateful that she had better sense than he did and still slept. He thought about the times—he really had no idea how many—that she had come into his room and given his shoulder a shake firm enough to dislodge his bad dreams, but not wake him up entirely.

Flora MacLeod nearly tackled him as he crossed the street to return to his house. She tugged his arm and announced that she and her business partners had sold four Seven Seas Fancies yesterday. She tugged his heart next. “We have enough money to eat all week, and it is only Tuesday,” she told him. “My partners and I have decided to give some of it to the Hannays and the Elliotts.”

I am surrounded by the kindest people
, Douglas thought, and then he sobered.
Let us see if I can include Lady Telford in that number
.

A visit to Lady Telford should have included a bath beforehand and clean linens at least. The Tavishes had already borrowed his tin tub, so Lady Telford would have to be satisfied with just a clean neckcloth.

Whether she would even see him, when her maid announced his rumpled presence at the front door, gave him cause to worry. He knew precisely who she was, making him likely the last person she would invite into her sitting room.

“Brace yourself,” he said to his mirror as he tied his neckcloth. “The enterprise will die right here if you cannot convince one old woman that you are not an idiot.”

It was not a sanguine observation. And why in the world should he suddenly feel ten years old again and unsure of himself, facing Elsie Glump across the high counter in the butcher shop? Come to think of it, why was he doing any of this?

He thought about that as he took another look at Mrs. Aintree, who was being watched over by Mrs. Campbell now, and who gleefully informed him that the girls made two more sales of fancies just this day.

“We’re getting low on shells, mind,” Mrs. Campbell said.

He assured her that his shell source in Plymouth would rise to the occasion, which earned a grunt from Mrs. Campbell and a pithy remark best rendered in Gaelic and never translated.

He knew he would find Joe Tavish in the shed, sitting with no good grace in the tin tub on loan from his house. Tommy managed to balance himself and sweep out the shed, or at least lay the dust on the dirt floor. Rhona kept up a wicked-sounding scold in Gaelic as she scrubbed her husband’s back.
Ah, blissful marriage
, Douglas thought as he smiled at them all and closed the door on Rhona Tavish’s pointed remarks.

Still, there they were, three people tossed into a murky stream like wood chips, to bob or sink on their way to the ocean. They were not as alone as he was Douglas had to admit. True, Joe Tavish was probably getting a well-deserved trimming. One couldn’t really tell with Gaelic because it always sounded harsh and peremptory to Douglas’s ears. If Rhona Tavish had felt nothing for her louse-ridden, defeated husband, he’d be sitting in dirty water in an empty shed.

He stood a long moment on the bridge, looking uphill to Lady Telford’s manor, thinking what an excellent hospital it would make, once the current occupant quitted the place. He shook his head over that piece of folly, wondering if every doctor had similar thoughts.

And here he stood at the front door, scarcely aware how he had got there. He looked back at Edgar, smiling (and a little flattered) to see Olive Grant on her front stoop looking at him. He waved to her and she waved back. He directed his gaze toward the abandoned shipyard, thinking that if he squinted hard enough, he could see a yacht under construction and workers swarming about.

“I’m not asking much,” he said out loud, wondering if this constituted a prayer. In case it did, he said “Amen,” and knocked on Lady Telford’s front door.

Chapter 25

M
aidie, is your mistress home
?” he asked Maeve’s older sister, who dropped him a curtsey.

“Aye, Mr. Bowden, she is always home,” Maidie began. She put her hand to her mouth. “Blast and dash! I am supposed to say, ‘I will inquire within.’ ”

He kept his smile to himself. “I am here to tell you, Maidie, that if she insists that you inform me that she is not at home, I’m going to stay here anyway.”

“Is it a matter of grave importance?” the maid asked, her eyes wide and worried.

Was it? Douglas decided the answer was yes, if Edgar was ever going to regain even a speck of its prominence. “I believe it is. Yes, I am certain. And you had probably better tell your mistress right away,” he added gently, when she appeared transfixed by the idea of anything of grave importance ever happening in Edgar.

“Oh, aye,” she said and bounded off, without showing him to the sitting room. Douglas doubted that Lady Telford had overmuch company, considering how little Maidie knew what to do.

Douglas stood in the entryway a long moment. He was staring up at the elaborate plaster whorls in the ceiling when he heard a massive throat clearing behind him. Odd how that sound could transport him back some three decades.

He turned around and there she was, Elsie Glump, wearing an even more colorful turban today, and a dress in which someone much younger would appear to great advantage.
Do I pretend I don’t know who she really is?
he asked himself, suddenly at a loss.

She solved the dilemma for him. She executed a perfunctory little bow for someone who still considered herself far superior to the little son of a cooper.

“Dougie Bowden,” she exclaimed in that booming voice he remembered.

I can play this too
, he thought as he gave her a better bow. “Mistress Elsie Glump. I never thought to see you on England’s far side. I remember you last in a butcher shop not too far from my father’s cooper yard.”

She gave him a thoughtful stare, and heaven help him if he didn’t start feeling younger and less confident by the moment. He remembered that stare, especially during a hard time in the barrel business when the Bowdens were eating little meat and only the cheapest cuts. He stared back gamely and watched the hard light leave her eyes.

She indicated a seat, plumping herself down. He followed suit.

“I thought you must know who I am,” she said finally.

He didn’t think he imagined the glimmer of fear in those eyes now, just a small glint, but enough to suggest that the road between Glump and Telford might have been unexpectedly rocky.

“I do.”

“Then I thank you for not giving me away to Miss Grant,” she replied.

“Not I,” he said, unwilling to ruin the woman’s life by even hinting that everyone in Edgar already knew who she was. “I came here for two reasons. The first is that I am concerned about the way your eye droops. It looks more pronounced than on my first visit here.”

“I have a physician,” she informed him, obviously inclined to toss out a better title than mere surgeon. “Sir Rodney Follette of Edinburgh, who sees quality clientele.”

“I am relieved,” he said, wondering what game she played. “I would suggest that you pay the man a visit soon.”

He could tell she had no intention of doing that. He also thought she had no real desire to talk to him, which made him wonder why she had agreed to seat him in her parlor.

“And your second reason?” she asked, her tone frosty.

“It can wait,” he said, even though he knew it couldn’t. “I really would like to know the happy set of circumstances that took you from a butcher’s shop to Lady Telford.” He gestured around the overdone room. “You and Sir Dudley have evidently done well.”

Her eyes filled with tears. Whether that came from his mention of her late husband or some other source, he couldn’t be certain. From what he remembered of Dudley Glump, a coarse and overbearing bully, he thought it must be the latter.

But she was a woman suffering from something, and his bedside manner overpowered his hesitation. He joined her on the sofa and took her hand. “Lady Telford, kindly tell me what is bothering you.”

“Nothing,” she said immediately, but she did not withdraw her hand from his. Never mind. He could wait her out. “Perhaps there is something,” she said, after only a short pause, “but you must swear yourself to secrecy on that … that hypocritical oath.”

“Confidentiality is for medical matters,” he explained, as he swallowed down a laugh of epic proportions, “but I will never tell anyone anything, if that is your wish.”

“Aye, it is.” She looked around elaborately, perhaps making certain that no enemy agents or members of the peerage lurked. “Dudley—Mr. Glump—sold a boggy piece of property to a gent buying up land for a canal scheme.”

“Plenty of boggy land in Norfolk,” Douglas agreed. “Did Mr. Glump buy more land then and increase his fortune that way?”

Lady Telford shook her head so vigorously that her turban shifted a bit on its axis. “He wanted to, but I told him about a joint stock company in the slave trade, name of the Royal African Company, and made him put it there.” She looked at him, triumph in her eyes now. “We made a pile of money.”

On black men and women’s bones
, Douglas thought, more than a little disgusted. He recalled one memorable afternoon when their frigate had come upon a slave ship becalmed in the doldrums. The stench across the water had been unbelievable. The ship had run up signals requesting a surgeon, and his captain sent him aboard. He did what he could among the dead and dying, felled by dysentery and starvation, but mostly loss of hope. Months passed before he could close his eyes and not see mothers chained to the deck and holding out their dying babies to him.

“I suppose you did,” he said, merely because she seemed to expect some commentary. “Made you wealthy, did it?”

“More than,” she crowed, and the satisfaction on her face turned to something less joyful. “This brought Dudley to the attention of Prinny, himself.”

And he needed money in the worst way
, Douglas thought, recalling wardroom stories about the Prince of Wales’s constant penury. “Let me guess: Mr. Glump loaned him a healthy sum, in exchange for a title.”

“A baronetcy,” Lady Telford said. She looked at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to congratulate those shrewd Glumps.

“Why Telford?” he asked, unwilling to congratulate her on a title handed out by the Prince Regent like sweets at Christmas, all to cover his own debts and with no regard for the country’s well being.