She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 17
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Behind them, a great part of the bank slumped with a long, sucking groan. A wave of gray slime and water went over the place where Elspeth had knelt an hour before—where she had set her father's bag down at the edge of the trench—and carried the bag away into the dark with it. She saw it go. She did not move.But the culvert held. The old flood-cut of the third duke, choked for six years, took the water as it had been built to do and carried it roaring away eastward across the moor into the Black Syke, clear of the head and clear of the town. What came down the Harrow Burn that night was ugly and gray, and it broke two paddles off Samuel Dodd's wheel and filled the bottom of the millrace with sludge. It did not reach a single house.At dawn, the rain stopped. Elspeth stood up from beside Ned Dodd, took two steps toward the men coming out of the trench, and her legs went out from under her.She was not unconscious, quite: she knew the cold of the ground and the gray sky turning above her; she knew that someone had lifted her, and that the arms were strong and shaking, and that the coat against her cheek was soaked through and smelled of peat and rain. She heard the Duke say very low, in a voice she had never heard him use: "No. Not you as well. I will not have it."And she knew, as the dark came down, that he was carrying her down the hill in front of all of Kestleford, and that he did not care in the least who saw.She woke in a bedroom at Harrowmere with a fire burning in the grate and Lady Philippa Wickliffe asleep in a chair beside the bed, her lace cap knocked sideways and her hand resting on the coverlet. She had been in a fever for three days. She learned afterwards that the old lady had not left the room for more than an hour at a time, and that the Duke had come to the door every evening and asked how she did, and had gone away again without coming in because his aunt would not allow it.When she was strong enough to sit up, Lady Philippa told her everything that had happened with great precision and a good deal of disapproval:Ned Dodd had been buried beside Jem Rookwood in the churchyard on the hill; the Duke had walked behind the coffin with the Hartside men, and he had paid for the stone, and he had settled a pension on Ned's mother for her life. Thomas Rookwood had coughed for a week and was now, Lady Philippa said, as disagreeable as ever—which Mrs. Bellamy took as a sign of perfect health. Arthur Holloway was out of bed and had been forbidden to carry water for anybody until Easter.Josiah Harcourt had gone before the magistrates at Hexham: the Duke had declined to charge him with the theft of the conduit money on condition that he swore to every payment the Hartside Company had made him and every bargain they struck over Harrow Head. On the strength of his sworn word, the Duke's lawyers had broken the company's lease. Harcourt had gone south with his wife to their son at Cambridge, a smaller man than he had come, and nobody in Kestleford was quite sure whether to be sorry for him.