She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 12
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Elspeth looked at the page and then at the frightened young man, and began to say something—she was interrupted by a hammering at the door so violent that the candle jumped.It was Beatrice Holloway, bareheaded, with her shawl half off and her proud face broken wide open."It's Arthur," she said. "He's in a fit, and he won't come out of it."Arthur Holloway fought for his life through the whole of that night, and Elspeth fought beside him. There was very little in the bag that could help; she knew that, and she worked anyway. She kept him from striking his head on the bedframe; she sponged him with warm water when the fits came, and kept the room quiet when they passed. She sent Nathaniel running for Mrs. Bellamy, and the old midwife came in her nightcap with a bag of her own and took Kit away to her cottage so that the little boy would not see. Between the fits, Elspeth dripped watered milk between Arthur's lips, a spoonful at a time, because her father had believed milk could ease the lead colic, and she had nothing better to believe in.At 3:00 in the morning, the fits grew farther apart. At 5:00, they stopped. Arthur slept, gray and still, with his mother's hand on his chest to feel it rise.When Elspeth came out into the lane, the sky was paling over the moor, and there was a horse standing at the Holloways' gate. The Duke of Harrowmere was sitting on the low wall beside it in his greatcoat, with his hat in his hands. He looked as if he had been there for some time."Sebastian was at The Plough," he said. "He heard the boy was dying. He rode up and woke me." He stood. "Is he?""Not tonight."He looked past her at the cottage. He had not been inside a cottage in Kestleford—she would learn later—since his mother's funeral. "May I see him?"She took him in. He stood at the foot of the narrow bed for a long time, looking at the boy who carried water from his conduit, and at the proud widow who did his family's linen. And he did not say anything, because there was nothing a duke could say in that room that would have been worth hearing.When they came out again, Elspeth gave him Nathaniel's little marbled book. He read it standing in the lane by the first of the light. She watched his face close page by page, like a house shutting its windows one after another."Forty pounds a year for a sluice that has not been touched," he said. "And 150 from the company that I never saw." He shut the book. "Six years. I signed every page of that ledger he put in front of me. I never once rode up to Harrow Head to see what I was paying for."He rode back up the hill.