She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 13
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By noon, the whole of Kestleford knew that Mr. Harcourt had been called to the library, and that the door had been shut for two hours, and that Lord Sebastian had been sent for in the middle of it. What was said behind that door came out in pieces over the following weeks; some of it came from Mrs. Sayer, who heard more than any housekeeper admits to. Harcourt had not denied the money: he had asked very quietly whether His Grace knew that the old duke had not paid his steward's salary for the last three years of his life, and that a steward with a sick wife and a son at Cambridge had been obliged to find his wages where he could. He had asked whether His Grace knew where his brother's gaming debts at York had been settled from two winters ago, when the moneylenders would lend no more—and Lord Sebastian, white to the lips, had stood in the middle of the library carpet and admitted that he had borrowed £600 from the steward, and never asked where it came from because he had not wanted to know.It was the first time anyone at Harrowmere had seen the younger brother ashamed of himself. It would not be the last time he surprised them.The Duke did not have Harcourt taken up—not then. He told him to leave the estate by the end of the month and to hand every key and every book to Nathaniel Price. He told Sebastian nothing at all, which Sebastian said afterwards was worse than any thrashing.And then he did a thing nobody in the valley had seen a Wickliffe do in 30 years.Reverend Hale called a vestry meeting in the church on the last Thursday of November. He opened the parish registers on the communion table, and in his careful, untidy voice, he read out the burials: in the six years before 1803, 11 children of the parish had been buried; in the six years since, 26. Then he sat down.And the Duke of Harrowmere stood up in the front pew—where his family had sat for 200 years without ever once speaking in it—and turned round to face the village. He did not make a speech. He told them that the water in the conduit was bad, that it had been bad for six years, that the fault lay with the estate, and that the estate was his. He told them that from that day, the pump in the square would be chained, and that the Hall's carts would bring water from the Hall's own spring to every door on Conduit Row and the Square every day, at his cost. He told them that he would go to law with the Hartside Company to stop the washing above Harrow Head.Then he sat down again.Nobody cheered; Kestleford did not know how. But when the meeting broke up, Thomas Rookwood waited in the porch until the Duke came out, and took off his hat to him, which he had never done in his life. And Elspeth, standing beside Mrs. Bellamy at the back, saw the Duke stop on the church step for a moment and put his hand against the cold stone of the doorframe, as if he needed something solid to hold.