Read Online An Irish Doctor in Love and at Sea by Patrick Taylor - Free Book Online

believe that illness could strike him and denied its existence. But those symptoms were serious. O’Reilly glanced again at Charlie, who made a rapid shaking of his head.
    O’Reilly’d understood. Let matters pass—for now. But he and Charlie would discuss what to do as soon as they could. “Right,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t want to rush anybody. It’s been a lovely lunch. Thanks for joining us, Ronald, and for the lesson in net…?” He deliberately stumbled over the word.
    â€œ Netsuke, ” Ronald said, and smiled.
    â€œ Netsuke, ” O’Reilly said. “Now if you’ll all excuse us…” He rose. “Kitty has an overwhelming desire to visit Clerys department store on O’Connell Street…” And I have a similar desire to get her alone back in our hotel room, he thought. “And then we’ll all need to change into our formal gear again. We’ll see you in the foyer about six thirty.”
    â€œSee you then,” Charlie said.
    â€œThank you,” Fitzpatrick said.
    Both men rose when Kitty stood.
    â€œCome on, then,” O’Reilly said to Kitty, and offered her his hand. “Next stop Clerys, so you can buy whatever you need to look beautiful tonight.” He mock growled and said, “And, I’ll have to look like a flaming naval officer—again.”

 
    4
    England’s Green and Pleasant Land
    Fingal lengthened his still-rolling stride and turned onto a privet-hedge-lined lane at the end of which was a cottage right out of the pages of Country Life . Behind the cottage, a sward swept down to the pollard willows along the edges of the Wallington River as it ran toward Fareham Lake. With metronomic regularity a man was casting a fly into the river’s limpid waters. Farther downstream, a pair of swans looked haughtily at their own reflections.
    Fingal stopped and took a deep breath. The warm September air was filled with the sweet smell of hay. A flock of sheep grazed nearby, woolly puffballs on a green carpet. In a distant field, a girl in what looked like the uniform of the Land Army was driving a horse-drawn reaper, making hay. The reaper’s blades clattered in the distance and he could hear the song of a thrush rising above it.
    A local call to Mrs. Wilcoxson last night had been greeted with pleasure and she’d said she’d be delighted to see him today—for lunch perhaps?
    Fingal fiddled with the knot of his tie and smoothed his uniform. From behind a church with a squat Norman spire came the lowing of cattle, the sound drifting in the still air. It was a picture captured in a line from William Blake’s “Jerusalem . ” “England’s green and pleasant land.” The contrast struck Fingal with a force he hadn’t been prepared for: the pastoral beauty of the countryside and the dismal shades of London’s grey and black, the stinking filth of the wanton destruction he’d seen yesterday.
    For a brief moment Fingal wondered where his old Warspite colleagues were, could feel the sway of the great ship beneath him, but the lowing of the cattle brought his thoughts back to the present. He was in Hampshire, a few short miles from the English Channel. He straightened his cap.
    So, he thought, surveying the picture-perfect cottage. This was the home of Surgeon Commander Richard Wilcoxson and his wife, Marjorie. Three first-floor latticed windows jutted from beneath a thatched roof. A varnished wooden door with a massive black metal ring for a handle was offset to the right side of the whitewashed front wall and was flanked by three windows, one to its right, the others to its left. The window frames were all painted bright red. A yellow climbing rose ran up a trellis on one side of the door. Its scent mingled with that of the newly mown hay. On the other side a wooden plaque read TWIDDY’S COTTAGE 1741 .
    England was a place of great antiquity, of