Free Doing No Harm by Carla Kelly Page A

time! Once the kava wore off, I was in agony for a few days.”
    “I hope you learned a lesson,” she said, sounding so Scottish that he couldn’t help smiling.
    “I did. Madam, that is my only tattoo. You may search far and wide, but you will find no more,” he said firmly.
    “I didn’t intend to,” she said. “Where do I start? Your ribs, I mean.”
    She was still smiling as she wound the sheet bandage around him, pulling it tighter at his orders, until he was satisfied. She helped him into his shirt, buttoned it for him, and told him to lie down.
    He surrendered happily to someone else’s doctoring. He watched her roll up the rest of the sheet bandage, impressed with her kindness. She turned to leave the room. “Miss Grant?”
    She looked back at him, waiting.
    “You have seen both my tattoo and my ribs,” he said, wondering if she might slap his chops even harder than Tavish had, but determined to forge ahead anyway. “I realize that our acquaintance is brief, and I won’t be here long, but perhaps you could call me Douglas, all things considered.”
    She had pretty, even teeth that showed to great advantage when she laughed.
    “And I am Olive,” she said. “Close your eyes for a while now. I have work to do. Douglas.”

Chapter 9

    O n the third day of Douglas’s enforced sojourn in Edgar, tiny Deoiridh Tavish was buried in Miss Olive Grant’s own christening gown. “I am thirty years old and unlikely to need it for a bairn of my own,” she said quite frankly to Douglas, who wondered about shortsighted Scottish men. Not my business , he thought. Moving on soon .
    The delicate lining of the little box had been anchored in place with the tiny stitches of a true seamstress. Douglas almost had to smile to see the pride on the face of the old woman who had done the stitching.
    “Lovely work,” he said to the old antique, who blushed, to his delight.
    “Now how would you know about good stitching?” she teased.
    He held up his hands. “I’d almost wager that I have thrown in as many stitches as you have. I’ll call mine sutures. Yours are neater though, and mine were generally sewn on a bobbing deck.”
    He thought she might chuckle at that, but she patted his arm instead. “Good lad,” she murmured. “Took a mighty toll though, eh?”
    “Not really,” he told her. “I’m alive and quite a few of those men I stitched are too.”
    She looked at him as she might look at an equal, and he was flattered all out of proportion to the occasion. And then she told him something that made him understand the wisdom of women.
    “It’s in your eyes, lad. They tell a different story.”
    She said it quietly and patted his arm again, before turning to Miss Grant, who held the baby. Douglas had a sudden urge to find a looking glass, which he laughed off. He tried to remember the last time he had really looked into anything beyond a shaving mirror and came up empty.

    When all was ready, Douglas carried the pitifully small coffin upstairs, so that Tommy, awake now and more alert, could bid hail and farewell to his sister.
    The boy had cried to go downstairs and into the garden with the others, but Douglas had firmly vetoed his request. Olive solved the problem by commandeering two of her pensioners, who held Tommy upright by his window so he could watch the simple burial.
    Mrs. Tavish must have been in the tearoom’s backyard before, maybe stealing blankets with Tommy, because she had chosen her daughter’s plot well. The hawthorn bushes had begun their blooming, along with some brave daffodils. Summer here would be a choice place to rest on the bench and think about Deoiridh’s brief pilgrimage through a hard world, rendered easier because her time had been so short.
    Olive had first thought to ask the minister to do the burial, but he had refused. “It’s not consecrated ground,” Olive had fumed when she came back from St. Barnabas. “ ‘Use the pauper’s field,’ he told me. “Wretched man!