She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 14
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Then the winter came down. It came early and hard that year, in the first week of December: the Harrow Burn froze at its edges and then all the way across; the millrace froze, and Samuel Dodd's wheel stood still; the road up to the Hall became a sheet of ice that no loaded cart could climb. And the Hall's water came down three days in five, and then two, and then not at all for a week, while the snow lay drifted to the hedgetops and people were thirsty.Thirst does not reason. On the sixth night of the snow, someone took a cold chisel to the chain on the square pump, and in the morning there were footprints all round the trough.Elspeth would not let it beat her. She went from door to door through the drifts with her bag, dosing, warning, scolding. She set up a rota of the strongest boys to haul sledges of snow from the clean fields to the copper in the smithy, where Thomas kept the forge fire burning day and night and Nan melted it into barrels. She carried buckets herself until her hands bled through her mittens. She slept four hours a night, then three; when Mrs. Bellamy told her to stop, she did not hear her.It was Lady Philippa Wickliffe who changed things, and nobody ever expected that.The old lady had watched all of it from the long windows of Harrowmere with her mouth pursed tight. She had said at dinner that it was very irregular; she had said that the Wickliffes did not carry buckets. And then one morning in the middle of December, with the snow still falling, she put on her late husband's frieze riding cloak over her lavender silk, had herself driven down the back road in the pony sledge with two maids and the under-gardener, and sailed into the smithy at Kestleford like a ship of the line."The Hall's brewhouse has three coppers and a well 40 feet deep that has never frozen in my lifetime," she announced. "The laundry has two more. There are women in this village with nothing to do but fret. I shall have them up the back road in the farm sledges by 10:00, and they will fill every barrel in the county by dinner." She looked at Elspeth, who was swaying slightly on her feet beside the copper. "And you, young woman, will sit down before you fall down. It is perfectly obvious to everyone that you cannot do it all yourself. I do not know why it is not obvious to you."Elspeth sat down, mostly from astonishment.For ten days, the Hall and the village worked together, and the water came down the back road on the sledges, and the chain on the pump was mended and not broken again. By Christmas, Arthur Holloway was sitting up in bed and complaining that he was missing everything.It was on the night of the 5th of January, with a strange, warm wind beginning to blow out of the southwest, that Mrs. Prudence Sayer came to the surgery door with a lantern and a long roll of yellowed paper under her arm.