"Gates are a mile on," he said without looking at her. "Hall's a mile past that. I've a load for Hexham before dark, miss."So Elspeth Carrow climbed down into the October mud of Northumberland in the year 1809, and the carrier set her trunk on the wet verge and drove away.Her other piece of luggage she had not allowed him to touch. It was an old surgeon's bag of black cowhide, gone brown at the corners, its brass clasp worn smooth by 30 years of one man's thumb. Inside lay his lancets in their tortoiseshell case, his bone saw wrapped in oiled linen, a brass screw tourniquet, a dozen stoppered bottles, and a bundle of notebooks tied with tape and filled in a small, slanting hand. The initials R. C. were pressed into the leather beneath the handle. Her own initials were not on it anywhere.Dr. Robert Carrow had been dead for seven weeks. In her pocket was the letter that had come for him three weeks after the burial from a clergyman named Matthew Hale, vicar of a village called Kestleford. The village surgeon had died in the spring; the surgery cottage stood empty, and it belonged—like nearly everything in that valley—to the Duke of Harrowmere. Would Dr. Carrow, of whom Mr. Hale had heard such good report, consider coming north?Elspeth had answered it herself. She had written plainly that her father was gone, that she had kept his books, mixed his medicines, and stood at his elbow through ten years of fevers and fractures, and that she would come in his place if the village would have her.The vicar's reply had been short and kind and careful: Come, he had written, and we shall see. The cottage is His Grace's to give, not mine.That was her errand. She meant to walk up to a duke's front door and ask him for a house.She had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile when she heard the horses. They came round the bend above the stone bridge at a pace no sensible man would drive on a wet road: two bays in tandem, a high yellow curricle swinging behind them, and a young gentleman on the box laughing at something the wind had said. A groom clung to the rumble seat behind him.The leader shied at the parapet; the wheeler followed it. For one long, silent moment, the curricle seemed to hang on a single wheel, and then it went over with a crack like a tree falling.Elspeth dropped her trunk and ran.The young gentleman had been flung clear into the bracken. He was sitting up, white, blood running from his hairline, saying, "Good God, good God," in a voice of great surprise.The groom had not been flung clear. He lay half under the wheel, and his right leg below the knee was bent where no leg should bend. The white end of the bone had come through his stocking; blood was pulsing out around it, bright and quick.