She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 19
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Nan Rookwood and Beatrice Holloway unpicked the split leather and lined the bag new with good calfskin that Samuel Dodd paid for out of his own pocket, his lease renewed by Nathaniel Price for 21 years at the old rent.Samuel dried the notebooks in the warm loft over his millstones, page by page, pressed between clean flour sacks. Where the ink had run beyond reading, Nathaniel copied out what could be saved in his neat clerk's hand, and Reverend Hale sat up nights helping him make out the words.Mrs. Bellamy put into one of the pockets, wrapped in a twist of linen, the old silver probe her own teacher had given her 50 years before, and said that it was no use to her now and she would be obliged if nobody made a fuss about it.Polly and Arthur gathered the money for new bottles, a halfpenny at a time, from every house in the village. And beneath the old initials under the handle,R. C., Thomas stamped two more letters into the new leather:E. C.They brought it to her on Lady Day. It was the very day her trial in the cottage was to end, and she had not forgotten it; she had been dreading it in a dull way for weeks.She opened the door in the morning to find the lane full: half of Kestleford was standing in it, in their Sunday clothes, in a thin spring sunshine. Thomas Rookwood was at the front of them, very red in the face, holding her father's bag. He did not make a speech either; Kestleford did not hold with them."Found this," he said, and held it out.She took it. She saw the new clasp and the running water on it, and the two sets of letters under the handle. She opened it and saw the instruments shining in their places, and the notebooks dried and bound with fresh tape, and a strange old silver probe in a twist of linen. For a long moment, she could not speak at all.Then Reverend Hale stepped forward with a sheet of paper. On it, in Nathaniel's hand, the vestry of Kestleford had resolved that every household in the parish should pay a penny a week into a sick club, out of which Miss Elspeth Carrow should be paid 20 pounds a year as surgeon to the parish for as long as she would consent to stay. Below it, every head of household had signed; those who could not write had made their marks. There were 63 names.At the bottom, last of all, was a different hand, upright and restrained:Harrowmere.She looked up. The Duke was standing at the back of the crowd by the gate with his hat in his hand, exactly as he had stood by the Holloways' wall on the night Arthur nearly died.The people of Kestleford, who knew more than they let on, found that they had business elsewhere.He came up the path when they had gone. He held out a folded paper of his own. "The deed of the cottage," he said. "In your name. Not until Lady Day—for your life." He paused. "I meant to give it you the day you came out of the fever. My aunt would not let me in."