A Naval Surgeon to Fight For
Author
Carla Kelly
Reads
17.4K
Chapters
40
As her snobbish aunt's companion, penniless vicar's daughter Jerusha Langley is sent to take a donation to the local naval hospital. There she meets dashing surgeon Jamie Wilson and embarks on a secret mission — sneaking out to help him care for injured sailors! With his life in peril fighting Napoleon, Jamie has never considered taking a wife, yet he's impressed by Jerusha's nursing ability — and beauty inside and out. Jamie knows she's risking a scandal by helping him. Can he risk his heart and save her reputation with a marriage offer?
Prologue
At the age of nine, Jerusha Langley was no shrinking violet, no meek female, in an age when meek females were highly prized. Children were to be seen and not heard, and females—no matter what age—were never to call attention to themselves.
Jerusha had long been curious about the duck-pond on her father’s modest property, or rather, the parish’s modest vicarage near Bolling, where the Langley family resided, thanks to a living furnished by Jerusha’s aunt, Lady Oakshott, who had the good fortune to marry a baronet. The vicarage in Bolling was small, but ideal for an equally modest clergyman.
For a few weeks, Jerusha had observed tadpoles turning into frogs on the pond’s fringe. Mama threw up her hands in exasperation when Jerusha trooped into the house bearing three little frogs. Papa gently reminded her that frogs belonged in ponds, and would she please return them?
She did so with no good grace, because she would have preferred to keep the frogs. Muttering to herself, she carried the frogs back to the pond, leaned over, and released them. In the process, she dumped herself in.
It was early spring, so her coat dragged her down. She sputtered and thrashed into the middle of the pond, which took on the proportions of the ocean so vividly described by her father’s discourse upon Noah and his ark. She thought she might make sufficient headway if she flailed about enough, but that coat was heavy and now waterlogged. She began to sink.
When matters reached their worst, a boy appeared at the pond’s edge, older and taller than she was. He hesitated not a moment but plunged in, swimming to her. He grabbed the back of her coat and hauled her to shore.
‘You’re all right, now then?’ he asked finally, in that Scottish lilt of his.
She recognised him. His father was secretary to the solicitor who lived next door. Jerusha didn’t know his name—he was a twin and either Douglas or Jamie—but she thanked him for saving her life.
‘You should learn to swim,’ was his reply.
He walked her home, all sodden and squelching. Mama shrieked and accused him of pushing her in the water. Jerusha protested. The boy calmly assured her mother that he was merely walking by and rescued her. Mrs Langley whisked her inside and slammed the door in his startled face.
And that was that, even though Jerusha protested as Mama dried her off, and stated that the boy had saved her life.
‘I’ve heard complaints aplenty about the secretary’s twins,’ her mother said, when Jerusha was dry and sent to bed—over further protest—mainly because Mrs Langley had personal tendencies towards hypochondria. ‘I know for a fact that one of them stole a pig. That’s the rumour, but it came from a good source.’
Jerusha’s ‘But Mama...’ fell on deaf ears.
Mrs Langley carried the news of Jerusha’s near death to Vicar Langley, who carried the tale to the solicitor, who grilled his secretary, Daniel Wilson, and then sacked the man over his protests that Douglas, his more obstreperous son, would never push someone in the water just to turn around and appear a hero, and Jamie, his twin, wouldn’t, either.
The solicitor told the vicar later that he was happy enough to see the backs of the whole Wilson clan, because his secretary had a disturbing tendency to correct his grammar and spelling on legal documents, damn the man.
‘Douglas or Jamie, those twins will never trouble the district again,’ Jerusha’s mother announced to her in triumph a few days after the Wilsons were sent packing.
‘Mama, one of them saved my life,’ Jerusha said.
‘Oh, pish posh,’ Mama said. ‘It is a shallow pond. You could have just put your feet down and waded ashore, I am certain. They’re gone and the district is the better for it, I am certain.’
At the age of nine, Jerusha learned three valuable lessons: Life isn’t fair, Augusta Langley had a curious grudge against Scots, and she wasn’t much of a Christian. When Jerusha attempted a mild protest—‘Mama, you should have thanked him.’—Mama gave her a good shake.
A conscientious child, Jerusha nursed her own anguish, mortified to have been the reason a secretary was unjustly sacked. Her only consolation was the Langley’s cook, a kindly woman. Jerusha moped in the kitchen until Mrs Pingree allowed her to pour out her misery at the whole wretched business.
‘Lovey, the Wilsons will be fine,’ Mrs Pingree soothed, wiping away Jerusha’s tears and handing her two lumps of sugar. ‘I hear that Scots are a tough lot.’
Jerusha did one thing of consequence that she never told her parents: She learned to swim. The whole thing was clandestine, but she had discovered a tendency to go her own way when she was certain she was right. The matter involved watching behind trees in high summer as boys gathered at a deeper pond for merriment.
Her education increased because they swam naked, but never mind that. From her secret spot she watched them push up from the bottom and lie on their backs. It looked simple and she tried it during late-night visits to the pond when the house was dark. Push up, lie flat, arms out. Easy.
She watched again at actual swimming, and at night repeated that flailing about with a purpose this time, arms moving in rhythm across the pond. She sank a few times, but figured it out.
Swimming was her little secret.
Through twelve years and more, Mrs Pingree kept up occasional correspondence with Mrs Wilson. Jerusha learned that Mr Wilson acquired better employment in the Highlands. As for the twins later on, Douglas took Orders in the Church of Scotland—so much for stealing pigs—and Jamie attached himself to the Royal Navy at age thirteen, not so long after the drowning incident.
‘Last I heard,’ Mrs Pingree told Jerusha when Jerusha was twenty-one, ‘is that Douglas has a fine church in Spring Hill and a wife, and Jamie is a surgeon’s mate in the navy.’ Mrs Pingree handed Jerusha two more lumps of sugar and they both laughed. ‘You needn’t trouble yourself about Jamie Wilson.’
Then why couldn’t she forget him?
