She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 18
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Dr. Strand had gone back to Hexham without the appointment he had come for. Before he left, he had sat down in the library and written a long letter to the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, describing the colic of Kestleford, its cause in the lead of the conduit, and the proof of it. He had shown the letter to Lady Philippa before he sealed it: the observations, it said, were made entirely by Miss Elspeth Carrow, daughter of the late Dr. Robert Carrow of Durham, to whom the writer was obliged to confess that he had at first been wrong."And Laurence," said Lady Philippa, "has sold the house in Brook Street."Elspeth stared at her."The London house, his father's last horses with it, and the Romney of my sister that hung in the dining room. It will pay for a new conduit from the Hall's own spring, built in stone and earthenware, with not an ounce of lead in it from end to end. He says the old pipe is to be dug up and sold for what it will fetch, which he thinks is a fitting end for it." The old lady sniffed. "I told him it was very irregular. He told me that his mother would have done it nine years ago. I could not say he was wrong."The one thing nobody mentioned was the bag. Elspeth did not ask. She had seen it go into the dark; she had the fourth notebook still, because she had carried it in her coat pocket all that night. But the rest of her father's life had gone down the Harrow Burn in slime, and there was no getting it back.She went home to the surgery cottage at the beginning of February. It was very quiet: nobody came to the door for two days, and she told herself that it was the weather.She did not know—because she was not meant to know—that on the morning after the flood, Polly Dodd and Arthur Holloway had gone down the burn together in the gray light, against every instruction of their mothers, and searched the sludge in the bottom of the millrace. They had found the bag on the second day, half-buried below the broken wheel: the leather split along one side, the clasp torn away, the bottles broken, the instruments clogged with gray mud, and the notebooks inside it soaked to a pulp.They did not take it to Miss Carrow. They took it to the smithy. What happened to it then took the whole of a month and the whole of Kestleford:Thomas Rookwood took every instrument out of it—the lancets, the saw, the screw tourniquet, the brass syringe—and cleaned and polished and reset each one at his own bench in the evenings, with a care nobody had known his big hands possessed. Then he forged a new clasp for the bag, of iron with a face of brass, and worked into the brass a tiny pattern of running water.