Dr. Finlay's Courageous Bride
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Marion Lennox
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PROLOGUE
SHE DIDN’T KNOW who he was, but she didn’t care.
She’d die without him.
Even in her head that sounded crazy, the sort of wild declaration she might have made as a twelve-year-old, swooning over pictures of rock stars in the magazines her mum brought home after cleaning Harvey’s place. Harvey’s girlfriends were always leaving magazines behind when they left, and she and her mum loved them. When Dad and Harvey were both away, her mum had sometimes seemed a kid herself, singing along with Maira’s favourite songs and grinning at Maira’s declarations of undying devotion to the gorgeous guys in the magazines.
That was so long ago now, though. The memory was like a stab of pain to the heart, adding to the pain from...everywhere.
But through the pain came his voice, soft, deep, steady.
‘“Weasels—and stoats—and foxes and so on. They’re all right in a way—I’m very good friends with them—pass the time of day when we meet, and all that—but they break out sometimes, there’s no denying it, and then—well, you can’t really trust them, and that’s the fact.”’
She wasn’t actually sure what a weasel was, or a stoat. She did know foxes—her dad used to shoot them—but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that this man, this voice, was here in the small hours, when the hospital was deeply quiet, when apart from her hourly obs, the nurses let her be. She was supposed to be sleeping.
But how could she sleep? She drifted off when the meds kicked in, when the drugs gave her oblivion, but to sleep when she wanted seemed impossible.
But this deep, steady voice said that she might. His voice drifted around the quiet room, an oasis the nightmares couldn’t touch.
Would the woman in the next bed feel the same? She must, she thought, for who wouldn’t?
She’d figured it out by now—sort of. She was in a two-bed hospital ward. The lady in the next bed was called Hilda. The nurses had introduced them, even though neither of them could speak. ‘Maira, this is Hilda who breeds champion Labradors. She was cooking dinner when she tripped over one of her puppies, knocking boiling water over herself as she fell. Her family tell us the puppy’s fine, but Hilda’s copped all the damage.’
Maira had heard the doctors talking to her—‘The swelling will go down, Hilda. You’ll be able to speak soon.’
Whereas for Maira...‘The oil’s burned your throat, Maira. It’ll take time.’
She heard the subtle difference—there were no promises.
No future? She couldn’t think of a future.
Hilda had visitors—her daughters even smuggled in the offending puppy. But Maira had no visitors, apart from the people from social services and the police.
She had nothing.
Only the sound of his voice.
Mr Toad. Ratty. Mole. Badger. She was starting to know them all.
There’d been other stories. He’d come in first a few nights ago, after a roster change. He’d been with the nurse, checking her chart, talking to her—at her?—about pain levels, describing what was happening. Then he’d come back.
‘Hi, I’m Rab, here again, but not as a doctor. I’m on meal break, but who can eat at two in the morning? If there’s drama outside I’ll need to leave, but meanwhile I thought I’d do a bit of reading. How about it?’
Then, as he received no answer from either of them—how could he?—he’d settled on a chair between the beds.
‘Okay, here we go. Sorry, guys, I know these are way beneath you, but I’ve pinched them from the kids’ ward. Let’s start with this first one—a mouse heading to sea in a stolen boat. It looks like fine literature to me, but stop me if you’ve read it. A twitch of a bandaged arm and I’ll move right on to...ooh, the next is an elephant hatching an egg. Hmm, maybe we should start with this one?’
That had been a week ago. A couple of times he’d been interrupted—the door had opened—‘Rab, you’re needed in Room Five...’
‘Excuse me, ladies, I’ll be back.’
He’d kept his promise. He’d come back. She lay still now and let herself sink into the escape of his words.
‘“The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”’
Did Hilda need this as much as she did? she wondered. Maybe so, for the older lady had been stirring and whimpering before he’d come in, but the stories seemed to work their magic on her as well.
Rab. He was Rab. Did he know how much he meant to her?
It wouldn’t last. There’d be another roster change. He’d be needed elsewhere, of course he would. But the stories themselves... There’d been few books in her childhood home, but if her eyes started working again, maybe she could read.
Could she ever again?
There it was again, a jab of terror so fierce it cut through the pain. She heard him pause.
‘Do you want me to stop?’
She managed to give her head a tiny shake, and there was a momentary pressure on her good arm.
‘That’s okay, Maira, just twitch this arm if you do. You’re in control.’
That was a joke. She’d never been in control.
But the voice disagreed.
‘From now on, Maira, the control’s all yours,’ the voice said, softly but surely. ‘When you get through this, the world’s your oyster. There are people who can help you, people who will. I promise. Now, where were we?’
He went back to the river with Mole, and while he read she let herself believe.
