An Irish Country Christmas by Patrick Taylor Read Free Book Online

eldritch screech, a doctor’s basso roar. O’Reilly rose to his feet, hand clutching his nose. Arthur trotted over, head thrown back, yodeling, tail going ninety to the dozen. Mrs. Kincaid clapped one hand over her opened mouth, and Barry Laverty, bent double with laughter, had to turn his back on the entire assembly.
    Oh dear, oh dear. He tried to collect himself. In such a household as this, where the unexpected was the norm, how could he possibly worry about O’Reilly’s cough, the new doctor in competition, or thefact that he was all alone right now to run the practice. And even if he wasn’t called out tonight, he’d be on his own in the surgery tomorrow. He would continue to be alone until O’Reilly, who he could see standing and using the towel to dry his nose, was figuratively as well as literally back on his feet again.

The Daily Round, the Common Task
    O’Reilly was definitely not on his feet yet. Forty minutes earlier when Barry had walked softly past the big man’s bedroom door, he’d heard distinct rumbling snores, noises akin to the purring of a pride of lions he seen in a TV documentary by Armand and Michaela Denis. Now he was finishing his breakfast alone.
    “You’ve time for another cup of tea. It’s Twinings, so.” Mrs. Kincaid fussed with the teapot, pouring the tea through a silver strainer into Barry’s cup. “Here’s the milk.”
    Barry knew better than to refuse. “Thanks, Kinky.”
    “Now get that into you like a good lad, and I’ll trot upstairs in a minute and see how himself is doing.”
    Barry saw the twinkle in her agate eyes and the deepening of smile lines at their corners. Someone in Kinky’s ancestry, he thought, must have been a close relative of Florence Nightingale. Nothing seemed to make her happier than ministering unto her charges.
    He added milk to his tea as Kinky cleared his breakfast dishes and left. Barry yawned and sipped. Thank the Lord there’d been no emergencies after they’d gone to bed last night. Barry hadn’t minded taking call for O’Reilly, but he’d needed his night’s sleep. The weather probably explained why no one had summoned him last night. If they thought the roads were blocked, they’d not want to drag him out unless it was an absolute emergency. And perhaps, the thought nagged, if they lived closer to the Kinnegar they might be giving the new doctor a try.
    Between laughing at the mayhem caused by Lady Macbeth and plummeting into a deep and dreamless sleep there had been little time for worry, but the appearance of the competition O’Reilly had mentioned did have to be taken seriously. Barry was no health economist, but the question remained. Were there enough patients in the territory of Ballybucklebo and the Kinnegar to sustain three busy doctors who were paid an annual fee by the Ministry of Health for every patient who belonged to their practices? Old Doctor Bowman had been no threat, and his practice list had been small. He’d been semiretired. But a new man? Och, well, Barry thought, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” And Saint Luke should have known. He was a physician.
    Barry swallowed more tea. He looked through the window at six-inch-deep ridges of snow on the wall of the churchyard opposite. In Ulster snow was rare, and a fall like last night’s, which would be brushed aside as irrelevant by a North American prairie dweller, could paralyse rural Ireland.
    It had stopped falling sometime through the night, and this morning the sky was bright, eggshell blue. The sun was already making water drip from icicles hanging from the eaves of the Presbyterian church opposite O’Reilly’s house. One of the icy stalactites caught and refracted the sun’s rays, and Barry smiled to see the frozen water sparkle on one side and release a tiny perfect rainbow of colour on the other.
    Shiny black slates peeped wetly through the snow that clung to the roof. As he watched, a snow floe slithered off the north side of the