Doing No Harm Read Online Free PDF Page A

squeamish, Miss Grant?” he asked.
    “Aye,” she admitted, but then set the record straight. “However, I do not flinch from duty.” Honestly, Olive, s he thought, exasperated with herself. You sound like a ninny .
    He smiled then. “I could have used a plain speaker like you during the war and saved myself enormous amounts of time. I need you now. Will you please keep the twist tight on my neck cloth?”
    She looked at his neck, then realized he meant the bloody scrap he must have tightened around the boy’s leg.
    She would have been embarrassed, but he wasn’t going to let her. “I don’t think any amount of laundry soap will ever make this clean again,” he told her, entirely at ease. “Put your fingers right by mine. Underneath them now. Keep up the pressure on the knot.”
    Their hands touched and she tightened her grip when he let go.
    “Excellent!” he said and rummaged in his satchel. He was even humming, which made her smile, even as she kept her grip on the ghastly tourniquet and wished she did not have to contemplate the bone ends protruding from torn skin.
    “Are you going to have to … to … oh, my … amputate?” Better to know now, even if he thought her an idiot because her voice squeaked.
    “Not if I can help it,” he said cheerfully.
    With a clink of metal on metal, he pulled another pair of scissors from a cloth pouch he unrolled with one hand. Olive gasped and looked away from the saw and knives even longer than those in her kitchen, and probably sharper.
    “My capital knives,” he said. “I won’t need them, except for this little bistoury. Hand me a small towel.”
    She did as he asked with her free hand. He spread the towel by the boy’s leg and set the little curved knife on it, and the scissors.
    “What … what …” Her mouth just wasn’t working.
    “I’m going to lengthen this laceration a little, then snap that bone back in place. Young ones fare better from this sort of injury. Then I’ll start suturing. Hmm. Reach under my arms and see if you can find a bodkin about four inches long.”
    She did as he asked, closer to a man than she had ever been in her life.
    “There it is. Here now.” He teased her bloody fingers away from the improvised tourniquet and twisted in the steel bodkin, anchoring it with strips of bandage plaster. “It’ll stay in place now. I need your hands.”
    Olive looked at him, struck again by his pleasant attitude, as her stomach did little flops. He even seemed to be enjoying himself.
    “At least you introduced yourself,” she grumbled, which made him laugh.
    “You don’t do surgery here more than once or twice a day?” he teased, which had the effect of slowing down her racing heart and steadying those hands he thought he needed.
    “You, sir, are trying me,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
    He pulled out one thin steel instrument with two hooks on the end. “Tenaculum,” he said as he handed it to her. “Go around on the other side of poor little Tommy Tavish and pull back the skin.”
    She did as he said, tears in her eyes, fearful for Tommy. “I’m hurting him,” she whispered.
    “He’s unconscious,” the surgeon reminded her. “If he comes around before I’m done, and I’ll work fast, just drop the tenaculum and hold him down.”
    He must have seen the fear in her face, because Mr. Bowden or Captain Bowden or whatever he was put his free hand over hers and squeezed. “You’re a bonny lass,” he said, “and that’s all the Scottish I know.”
    She had to laugh, her fear shoved back into a dark corner. The tenaculum tidily held back the skin. She watched in growing admiration as the surgeon worked quickly, every move decisive. She gasped when he snapped the bone in place and dabbed at the blood where he pointed.
    She was aware that Maeve, her eyes huge, had come into the room, carrying more water in a brass can. The surgeon must have seen her from the corner of his eye.
    “Aha! I need you too. You are