Doing No Harm by Carla Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

Grant and her charming tearoom. The lowering clouds had cleared away to demonstrate that southwestern Scotland did have blue skies. Hand in his pockets, he walked the length of the High he had not traversed yet, which took him past the posting house name of the Hare and Hound, the ubiquitous Presbyterian church, and what looked like a combination tobacconist and lending library. On a whim, he stuck his head inside to inquire about the annual fee for borrowing books and was pleasantly surprised.
    A smaller road angled away from the High in that manner of village roads, which meandered where people did, and eventually turned into actual byways. He remembered such roads from his childhood in Norfolk, spent largely in his father’s workshop and barrel yard, helping make kegs of all sizes, many intended for the holds of Royal Navy ships.
    The only boy with two older sisters, he had left home in shocking fashion. The death of his mother had rendered him melancholy, but with no one to discuss the matter. Papa just worked harder, his face more set, and the vicar in his local parish reminded him that he and others in Norfolk, at least, were born to trouble as the sparks flew upwards.
    It wasn’t enough to assuage a twelve-year-old boy’s heart. The day Papa entrusted him to take a load of kegs to the Great Yarmouth docks was the last day he saw his father. He fulfilled his assignment, sent the money carefully wrapped and addressed to Nahum Bowden’s Cooperage in Walton, Norfolk, and offered himself to the Royal Navy.
    He was given the choice of powder monkey or loblolly boy, and he took the latter, because medicine interested him. Dumping emesis basins and urinals began his hard school, but his absolute, unyielding calmness in the face of terror moved him quickly to pharmacist’s mate. One year in a Spanish prison rendered him nearly fluent in the language, which eased his escape and reunion with the Royal Navy’s White Fleet, off anchor on blockade duty.
    On the surprising endorsement of a fleet physician, after five years, he spent two years in London Hospital, learning the trade he practiced for the duration of Napoleon’s wars. He was skilled, talented, and footloose now.
    Walking felt so good. Why seeing water still meant so much to him, he could not have said. He climbed higher up the road, moving aside for wagons, horsemen, and one carriage. When he came to a spot where the road widened, he turned to look down on Edgar. He watched the docks and the fishing vessels, clouded now by competing gulls, which meant the day’s catch was ashore.
    He studied the High Street until he located the tearoom. A small figure in the back garden, probably Maeve, was pulling laundry off the line. He admired the graceful arch of the stone bridge that crossed the River Dee, and the ruined castle on the opposite height from where he stood. Miss Grant had mentioned a manor of sorts belonging to an Englishwoman, and there it was, easily the most elegant building in town. Just this side of the Dee, he noticed a smaller two-story stone house, painted a soft yellow. No smoke curled from the chimney, even though it was approaching suppertime, and the windows had no curtains.
    Maybe the house was empty. Maybe he could start a practice in Edgar. Two rooms on the bottom would suffice for an anteroom-office and a surgery, and there was likely a kitchen, which would be useful for the pharmacology part of his business. He could live upstairs. He reminded himself that he had entertained this same fiction in Pauling.
    He convinced himself he had better keep looking, once Tommy Tavish was this side of death and not in danger of infection. A larger, more prosperous village probably waited just around the bend in the land. What was the hurry, anyway? He had leisure for the first time in his life. He could take a carriage or even a post chaise all the way to John o’ Groats, at Scotland’s rooftop, and travel down the other side.
    “That’s what I will