The Surgeon's Lady by Carla Kelly Page A

confirming her belief that the last thing he wanted on his hands right now was a woman who could not stop laughing. He turned to the orderly. “Lad, I agree with you. She’s a pretty sight, even now.”
    “I will never understand men,” she declared, standing still and letting the surgeon wipe off her face with the damp cloth in his hand.
    “Nature never intended you to,” he replied. “We are an entirely different species.”
    When he did not come, too, she asked, “What about you?”
    “I’ve just started my night,” he replied. He followed her, wiping his hands on his apron. “Thank you, Lady Taunton,” he said, “thank you a thousand times. I’ll probably not be around when you leave for Torquay in the morning, but…”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” she interrupted. “Nana might be disappointed, but I’ll write her a letter and explain everything.”
    “Home to Taunton, then?” he asked gently. “I’m sorry we were so hard on you.”
    She shook her head. “Taunton is not home. You are so dense. I’m staying here, Lieutenant. I promised Matthew I would read Robinson Crusoe, and someone has to hold Davey Dabney’s hand.” She fingered her stiff dress. “Besides, I amnot even fit to ride the mail coach. Twenty-five pounds a year will hardly keep me in dresses, at this rate.”
    “Are you…”
    “Serious? Staying? Of unsound mind? I am, indeed, sir,” she told him. “All three. And know this—I intend to fight Boney in my own way, too.”

Chapter Eight
    M aybe it needed to happen. The jetty had pushed her beyond tears.
    “I don’t even know what this is in your hair, and I’m not going to look too closely,” Aunt Walters said as she scrubbed Laura’s hair over the large sink in the scullery. “If I thought he would listen, I would give my nephew a generous helping of my mind.”
    “I volunteered,” Laura said, in Lt. Brittle’s defense. She tipped her head forward while Aunt Walters poured warm water over it. “I wanted to,” she added, when she came up for air.
    “You’re braver than I am,” Aunt Walters said frankly, handing her a towel. “I’ve never screwed up enough courage to go to the landing jetty.”
    “It’s a terrible place.”
    She protested, but the housekeeper insisted on delivering supper in bed. Propped up with lavender-scented pillows, she ate stew, then wrote a letter to her sister. She knewshe was disappointing Nana, but Laura didn’t think she could fight Napoleon in a sitting room in Torquay.
    She was glad Aunt Walters sat with her as darkness came, telling her about Stonehouse, then stories about her nephew: his earlier years as surgeon’s assistant on a frigate in the Mediterranean, Trafalgar, school in Edinburgh and London Hospital, and his most recent years in a fever hospital in Jamaica.
    “He survived yellow fever,” the woman said as she tidied the room. “Tough as an old boot, is Phil.”
    “I’m not so sure about that,” Laura countered, and told Aunt Walters about his kiss on Davey Dabney’s forehead.
    Aunt Walters nodded. “He suffers agonies when they die. I wish he had a wife to talk to, for comfort.”
    Laura tried to compose herself. Her back still ached from bending over so many wounded men for so many hours; she wasn’t sure she could lie flat.
    Aunt Walters was about to close the door when Laura stopped her. “Tell me something. I looked up once at the jetty and saw Sir David Carew standing at a window. Why didn’t he help?”
    “And get his uniform mussed?” Aunt Walters muttered something low in her throat. “He’s a physician, Lady Taunton, with a medical degree written up on parchment in Latin no one can read, a head full of theories that probably never saved a tar on the jetty, and no skill at all with capital knives. I doubt he could dismember a chicken bone at the dinner table.”
    That was an image Laura found vastly unappealing. “I’m not certain I care to see anyone carve poultry right now! Do you