The moment Libby arrived back at the practice she was greeted by John, with an extra furrow of worry to add to those that age had carved across his brow.
‘So what’s the news, Libby? What did they say at the hospital?’ he asked.
‘It seems as if it might be belladonna poisoning,’ she told him. ‘When Nathan asked Toby if he’d eaten anything while he was playing in the field, or anywhere else for that matter, he said, yes, he’d eaten some shiny black “grapes”, which we think came from a belladonna plant as it describes its berries exactly and his symptoms fit in with what we know of the poisonous effects of it.
‘Fortunately he didn’t eat many of the berries, just one or two, but he’s finding it rather difficult to swallow and is drowsy. Then there’s the fact that he has sickness and diarrhoea and his temperature is up, so the doctor in A and E is going to have to wash his stomach out to get rid of any poisonous substance. Nathan is insisting on being there while it is being done so Toby will have him close all the time, thank goodness.’
John was observing her, dumbstruck. ‘I was with Toby all the time he was in the field. The only time he was out of my sight was when he was playing at hiding in the bushes and I had to find him, so it would have to be then that he found the berries. I feel dreadful that it should have happened while he was in my care, or that it should have happened at all.’
‘You must not feel like that,’ she told him firmly. ‘These things can happen without any blame attached to anyone. How were you to know there was deadly nightshade nearby and that he would mistake the berries for grapes? It is typical of a child to eat what they shouldn’t.’
About to set off for the hospital he paused and asked, ‘Nathan—how is he coping? These are times when a child needs a mother. I have the feeling that somewhere in the past he took the wrong turning with regard to that. I don’t suppose he’s ever said anything to you to that effect, has he?’
As if, she thought grimly, and told him, ‘No, John, he’s never said anything like that to me.’
‘I thought not,’ he said with a sigh, and drove off to see his adoptive grandson.
There were still a few stragglers in the surgery waiting room and when Libby called the first of them in she was confronted by middle-aged Thomas Miller, leaning heavily on a stick.
He owned the outdoor equipment store in the centre of the village, patronised by many of the walkers and climbers who were attracted to the lakes and fells.
Once a keen climber himself, he was no longer able to enjoy their delights due to a serious leg fracture that he’d sustained while up on the tops. He had been missing for days until the mountain rescue team had found him at the bottom of a gully.
The delay in getting him to hospital for the surgery needed on the injured leg had left him only partly mobile on it, so now he was doing the next best thing to climbing the fells by providing those who still could with everything they might need to keep them safe, dry, and fed.
He was a likeable man with a wife and two teenage sons who had no yearnings to become involved in the sport that had once been their father’s favourite pastime.
As well as the store Thomas was chairman of the community centre in the village and almost always had something interesting to pass on when he saw her about what was being planned by his committee.
Before she had time to ask what had brought him to the surgery he was asking for information, rather than giving it, in the form of wanting to know, ‘What’s wrong with the laddie that Nathan’s bringing up, Libby? I’ve just seen John setting off for the hospital looking very downcast, said he hadn’t time to chat as the young’un was very poorly.’
‘Yes, he is,’ she agreed. ‘We had to take him there this morning as we weren’t sure what was wrong with Toby. Nathan is there with him now and I’ve just got back. When something like this happens and the adoptive parent knows nothing about the child’s previous medical history it’s very worrying.
‘Maybe you’d like to pass the word around for the benefit of other children and their parents that it seems as if he has been poisoned by eating the berries of the belladonna plant and at the moment the situation is serious.
‘And now what about you, Thomas? What brings you here on this chilly winter morning?’
‘I’ve got a swollen foot on my good leg and thought I’d better come and see you.’
When she’d examined his foot Libby said, ‘It looks like an infection of some sort. Have you had a sore or a cut on it recently?’
‘I bought some new shoes a few weeks back and they rubbed the skin off one of my toes. It healed up all right, but still felt tender and then the swelling appeared.’
‘Hmm, the infection could have originated from that and lain dormant for a while,’ she told him as she felt the swollen fleshy part of the top of his foot. ‘I’m going to give you a course of amoxicillin. Are you all right with that? You’re not allergic to it?’
‘No,’ he said easily. ‘I’ve had it before without any side effects.’ He got up to go. ‘Do tell Nathan that I hope the boy will soon be better. We’re having a big barbeque on bonfire night on the usual field behind the park and the young’un won’t want to miss that.’
‘Hopefully we’ll all be there,’ she told him, with the dread of what Toby had told them heavy on her, and wished that Nathan would phone, but as it was barely an hour since she’d left him maybe she was expecting too much.
She’d been anticipating having to dash around in the lunch hour to find something to take back with her for Toby, but the nurses had forestalled her and one of them turned up at that moment with sweets and toys that they’d collected amongst the staff.
‘Is it right that Toby might have been eating the berries of the deadly nightshade?’ she asked. ‘I heard you telling Dr John something like that and it sounded really awful.’
‘Yes,’ she told her. ‘He only ate a couple, but it is very worrying just the same as the berries can kill.’
At that moment Nathan came through on her desk phone and the practice nurse departed. ‘How’s Toby?’ she asked urgently.
‘Sleeping more naturally,’ he replied. ’His tummy should now be washed clear of the poison, and if what they’ve done at the hospital is sufficient to make him better, we might see some improvement soon. It makes me shudder to think what he would have been like if he’d eaten more than just two of the ghastly things.
‘How are things at your end?’ he wanted to know. ‘Had Dad finished morning surgery when you got back?’
‘Yes, more or less. He is on his way to the hospital now. John was devastated when I told him what Toby had been up to and is most upset that it had happened while he was in his care. He said it could only have occurred while they were playing hide and seek in the bushes on the edge of the field. So do please have a kind word for him, Nathan.’
There was silence at the other end of the phone for a moment and then he said dryly, ‘Why, what do you think I’m going to do? Blame him for being kind enough to look after Toby during the half-term break?
‘I can tell that you’re not very pleased with me, Libby, and I apologise for being a tactless fool when I told you to go back to the surgery, but there are others who need you besides Toby. We can’t expect to monopolise you all the time. So am I forgiven? I never get it right with you, do I?’
‘There is nothing to forgive, just as there is nothing to thank me for,’ she told him with a lift to her voice. ‘I’ll see you this evening as soon as I’ve finished here.’
When she’d replaced the receiver another patient was waiting to be seen and after that there were twice as many home visits to do because she was the only doctor available. But that was what it was all about and Nathan had been right as usual in insisting that she make the surgery her priority in spite of her longing to be with the two of them.
&
nbsp; When she arrived at the hospital in the evening he was sitting beside the bed, watching over Toby, who was sleeping once more with his small chest rising and falling steadily, unlike the distressed breathing of earlier in the day.
But he was still very pale and poorly-looking and as she came to stand beside them Nathan looked up and said with a wry smile, ‘He has asked a couple of times when you were coming with the “goodies” so it would seem that Toby’s thought processes have not been affected.’
She was bending over the child in the bed, observing him with a glance that was a mix of the keen eye of the medic and the tender concern of someone who cared a lot for the small motherless child and the man watching over him.
It had been a long and tiring day, but it was as nothing compared to what Nathan had been going through, she thought. Yet when she turned to face him the smile was still there, somewhat frayed at the edges but a smile nevertheless. She wasn’t to know that just the sight of her after one of the worst days of his life was comforting beyond belief.
However, Libby’s thoughts were centred on the urgencies of the moment and she asked, ‘So what is the verdict on the gastric lavage and Toby’s condition in general?’
‘Improving,’ he replied soberly. ‘The lavage should have washed the poison out of his system and we have to hope that he will gradually recover. Dad has been and gone in an awful state. He’s going to investigate all the plant life where Toby was hiding and see it off when he finds the belladonna so that no other child will be tempted to eat what they think are juicy black grapes.
‘And what sort of day have you had?’ he asked. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’
Nightmarish would be a truthful answer to that question, she thought, with the two of them constantly in her thoughts and a huge workload to cope with.
Instead she told him, ‘I’ve had better, but Hugo will be back tomorrow and then the pressures from the surgery will slacken off, and as for now would you like me to sit with Toby while you have a break?’
‘No, Libby. I’ll be fine,’ he said, not wanting to miss a moment of being with her now that she was there.
He was doing it again, she thought, pushing her away, keeping her on the edge of the trauma he was going through. Was he afraid that she would see their togetherness at this awful time as a bond that might tie him to her?
She wanted to run away and hide, but not before Toby saw that she had kept her promise. Producing the bag of toys and goodies, she said levelly, ‘The surgery staff have sent these, everyone is most concerned for Toby and yourself.’ And still persisting, she asked, ‘Have you had anything to eat since we came here this morning?’
‘No. Food would choke me. I’ve had a few cups of coffee, which are all I’ve needed so far.’
She nodded and, pulling another chair up at the opposite side of the bed, sat facing him in silence for what seemed like an eternity until Toby opened his eyes and on seeing her asked, ‘Have you brought them, Libby?’
‘Yes, my darling,’ she told him. ‘I’ve brought lots of things for you to eat and play with as soon as you’re feeling better. They’re in this big bag.’ She held it up where he could see it and he nodded then closed his eyes and dozed off again.
Nathan had been silent during their short conversation. As he’d watched the two of them together all his vows to wait until the right moment to open his heart to her had disappeared.
As she was placing the bag in the locker at the side of Toby’s bed he rose to his feet and, fixing her with his dark hazel gaze, said in a low voice that she alone could hear, ‘Libby, will you marry me? It would be so much the right thing to do.’
‘Nathan, how can you ask me that now? Of course I can’t,’ she breathed, taking a step back on legs that had turned to jelly. ‘I’m not in the market for another marriage of convenience, this time yours!’ She moved even further away from him. ‘I will be here to see Toby this time tomorrow, or before if he needs me, and it would help if you aren’t around.’
‘You still haven’t forgiven me for rejecting you all that time ago, have you?’ he said flatly.
‘This is not about forgiveness,’ she told him in an anguished whisper. ‘It’s about a word that seems to be missing from your vocabulary where I’m concerned, so subject closed!’ And once again she set off down the hospital corridor with pain in her heart.
But this time it was for the two of them. It was crystal clear that Nathan’s lukewarm proposal had been because he was considering her as a mother figure to help him bring Toby up, and this crisis had settled any doubts he might have had. If that was the limit of his affection for her, the miseries of the past would seem as nothing compared to those of the future.
As he’d watched her go he had wanted to chase after her and tell her that his love for her was a clear and constant thing, that since he had got to know her better she was never out of his thoughts. But it was clear from Libby’s reaction to his ill-timed proposal that her thoughts were not running along the same channels as his.
And so what had he done? Let his heart take over his mind and asked her to marry him in the worst possible setting. At a time when she was bound to feel that he wanted her in his life to help with Toby, who was lying beside them recovering from an illness that could easily have killed him, and when all around them was the smell of antiseptic when it should have been lilies or roses.
The only good thing to come out of his crazy impulse was to know that she was still on Toby’s case, loving and gentle towards him, caring for him like a mother. So if he, Nathan, had put himself beyond the pale in Libby’s estimation, at least her feelings towards Toby weren’t going to change.
He loved everything about her, he thought achingly, the golden fairness of her, the soft brown velvet of eyes that were only ever watchful and wary where he was concerned. He admired the way she ran the practice and treated the staff, and sometimes wondered how that father of hers could bear to be so far away from his only child. Yet fool that he was, hadn’t he stayed away from her for three long years and now was desperate to make up for it?
As Libby drove back to Swallowbrook at the end of one of the most stressful days she’d had in a long time, her spirits were at a low ebb. It had started badly and got steadily worse, the final straw being Nathan’s impromptu and emotionless proposal.
Her refusal had been prompt and painful, and she’d had control of the situation until now, but on the last mile of her journey home she was weeping at the futility of her feelings for a man who understood her so little.
Roll on her short vacation in the house on the island in the middle of the lake, she was thinking as she put the car away for the night. Just a couple of weeks and she would be away from everything that hurt.
Hopefully by then Toby would be better, because if he wasn’t she wouldn’t want to be away from him no matter how desperate she was for some time on her own, and if Nathan was back at the practice along with Hugo she would be able to go away with an easy mind. But for the present the sting of being proposed to because of her usefulness rather than her appeal was not easy to cope with.
Normality was coming back into his life in everything except his relationship with Libby, Nathan reflected on the morning that Toby was discharged from hospital. That had died a death on the day that he’d asked her to marry him and been well and truly put in his place.
It had been crazy to throw away the closeness that had been developing between them in a moment of intense longing, and now there was not a lot left between them, he decided as he drove home with an excited Toby beside him.
She had been diligent in her visits to the boy, and he’d done as she’d asked and kept out of the way in the early evening of each day, which was when she came, using the break from his bedside to go home and have a shower and a change of clothes.
By the time he’d got back she had been and gone.
Sometimes they’d passed each other on the way and he’d thought grimly that it wasn’t a crime he’d committed. He could think of one or two local, unattached women who would jump at the chance of marrying him, but he didn’t want them. He wanted Libby beside him in the dark hours of the night and across from him at the breakfast table. What it was going to be like when he returned to the practice he shuddered to think.
It had been a Friday when he’d brought Toby home from the hospital and he would be going back to school on the Monday. Nathan had seen little of Libby over the weekend, but Toby had spent some time with her as it seemed that she’d promised him on the night before his discharge that he could go across to her place to play whenever he wanted if it was all right with his uncle.
Nathan hadn’t had any quarrel with that, just a wish that he might have been included in the invitation, and now it was Monday morning and after seeing Toby safely into school Nathan presented himself at the practice once more with the determination inside him that as far as he was concerned he was there to work, ready to slot himself back into the busy medical centre where at least he would be able to see Libby, even if she didn’t want to see him.
He was in for a surprise. Along with the rest of the staff she greeted him cordially enough, as if nothing between them had changed, and he observed her thoughtfully when she wasn’t looking in his direction. He was getting the message. It was going to be business as usual at the surgery and the cold zone at any other time.
It was the first time she had seen him properly in days she was thinking as the morning got under way and noticed that although Nathan was dealing with his patients with his usual brisk efficiency he looked tired and gaunt, like someone carrying a heavy burden, and she felt that her love would be a poor thing if she didn’t do something about it, because love him she did, she always had, and no matter what he did or said, nothing was ever going to change that.
Swallowbrook's Winter Bride Page 9
