Doing No Harm by Carla Kelly Page B

rapidly, and then walked with it into the hall and down the stairs, the pup in hot pursuit. “I’ll bring him back when he has had a turn in the garden,” she called, making it sound for all the world like Duke was a valued guest who needed to take the air.
    “Amazing lady,” Douglas said as he set the tray on the bedside table and helped Tommy into a sitting position.
    The boy was so hungry that he forgot his pain. He wolfed down the baked oatmeal and inhaled the blood pudding Miss Grant had added. He looked around, still hungry, at the same time Douglas declared that he couldn’t eat another bite and offered the remainder of his breakfast to the boy.
    “Life is hard for you, lad,” Douglas commented, knowing he did not ask a question.
    “Aye, mister,” the boy replied. “Me mam … Sir, please.”
    “I’ll go find this Mrs. Cameron and see how she fares. Do you have a direction?”
    “Behind me house and over one,” the boy said as he finished the last of Douglas’s blood pudding and leaned back, exhausted.
    Without a word, Douglas gave him a lesser draught, lowered him down again, and sat beside Tommy until he gave a long sigh and surrendered to poppy sleep. Douglas sat there a moment, knowing that he could leave Edgar right now, and Miss Grant would keep Tommy Tavish alive. He closed his eyes and smiled over the heterochromatic beauty that a woman with red hair, almost a burgundy color, and faded freckles, blue and brown eyes, and a nose just shy of being labeled masterful could possess. He had no argument with her figure, which he would characterize as comfortable, an attribute probably most pleasing on a cold Scottish night. He already knew she had more brains than a roomful of females. Oh hang it, likely more gray matter than most men.
    “But I swore an oath and she didn’t,” he told the sleeping boy. He paused another minute, knowing he had more than fulfilled his oath, as far as his unexpected stay in Edgar warranted. “All right then.” For the second time in as many days, he took out that same coin and flicked it, stepping back so it would land flat and not roll. “George, if I see you, I am free to leave.”
    Again, the coin landed with George staring bug-eyed up to the ceiling. And again, he pocketed the coin and went down out the door to find Mrs. Tavish.
    She was precisely where Tommy had said she would be found, also staring at the ceiling, her face a sickly pallor and with eyes so hard he knew what had happened even before Mrs. Cameron ushered him into the hovel.
    Mrs. Tavish lay so still that he went directly to her bed and pressed the back of his hand against her neck. Her pulse was slow and thready, and probably only still beating because she looked like a woman with a grievance.
    “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tavish,” he said softly. He turned to Mrs. Cameron in sudden anger, even as the logical part of his own brain told him he was inappropriate. “Could you not have called me, at least? Perhaps I could have done something!”
    Mrs. Cameron didn’t suffer fools gladly. She seized his arm with a surprisingly strong grip and jerked him to the corner of the room, so he could stare down at a baby so small and thin that no art of the surgeon could have changed the outcome.
    He had the good sense to apologize, even as he pulled back a surprisingly clean towel to take a good look at what happens to a malnourished infant from a malnourished mother.
    “I doubt my friend Rhona Tavish has had a decent meal in two years,” Mrs. Cameron said, her voice low with emotion. She stuck her face in his. “Mister or Captain or Surgeon or whoever you are, does it ever shame you to be a man?”
    “Almost on a daily basis,” he replied, which made the woman lower her eyes and step back.
    “My boy?” he heard from the bed, even though Mrs. Tavish spoke no louder than a whisper.
    “Tommy will live and walk again, Mrs. Tavish,” Douglas said, returning to her bedside. “What would you like me to do with