She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 10
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
"Do you know what I found when I came home from the army in Holland, Miss Carrow?" he said at last. "My father had been dead six weeks. He left this house mortgaged to the chimneys. He had sold the pictures, the plate, the timber off the east woods. I have spent nine years paying his debts with the only money I have—and the only money I have comes from that hill." He looked up toward the smoke of Hartside. "You are asking me to close the one door that keeps the rest of them open.""I am asking you to look at what is coming through it.""You are asking me to take the word of a—" He stopped."Of a woman, sir? Say it if you mean it.""Of a stranger," he said, "who has been here a month." Then, more quietly: "My mother went into that village every week with a basket on her arm, the way great ladies are taught to. One winter she sat up with a carter's wife who had the fever. She brought it home. I was 14. My father never let another soul from this house go down that hill after, and he never gave the village another penny that he could keep. This house learned to keep its distance, Miss Carrow. I have not had to unlearn it until now."It was the first true thing he had said to her, and it cost him; she saw that."I am sorry for your mother," she said. "But she went down the hill. She was the only one of you who did."He flinched as if she had struck him. Then he mounted the gray and rode on to the Hall without another word.And Elspeth walked back to Kestleford with her face burning, sure that she had lost the cottage for good.But the next day, a cart came down from the Hall with two hogsheads of water from the Hall's own spring, and a message from His Grace that it would come every second day for the surgery's use. There was no note with it; there was only the water.Dr. Strand arrived on the 12th of November in a well-sprung chaise with a manservant, a case of instruments in rosewood, and a reputation that had come ahead of him on its own horse. He was perhaps 35, handsome in a narrow way, with a fine voice and beautifully kept hands—and he had plainly come to Harrowmere hoping to leave it as physician to a duke.He made his round of the village with Harcourt at his elbow. He looked at tongues, felt pulses, sniffed at drains, and pronounced: it was, he said, a bilious colic of the low and damp situation, aggravated by the miasma off the bog to the south. He prescribed bleeding for the men, calomel for the women and children, and the draining of the bog—which would cost a great deal of money that nobody had.Elspeth met him in Beatrice Holloway's kitchen. Mrs. Holloway was a widow of 30, tall and straight and as proud as a duchess, who took in washing for the Hall and the vicarage and would have died sooner than accept a shilling she had not earned. She had two sons: the younger, Kit, was six; the elder, Arthur, was 11—a bright, quick, chattering boy who earned his pennies carrying water from the square pump to the houses of the old and the lame, two buckets at a time on a yoke, and drinking from the pump, as he cheerfully admitted, whenever he liked.