She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 2
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She knelt in the mud and opened the bag. "You," she said to the young gentleman. "Come here and lift that wheel when I tell you. Not before.""I beg your pardon, madam, but who the devil—""Lift it."He lifted it. She drew the groom's leg free, and the man screamed, and she did not stop. The screw tourniquet went round his thigh above the knee, and she turned the brass handle until the pulsing slowed and then ceased. She packed the wound with lint from a tin and bound it, talking to the groom all the while in a low, level voice—asking his name, which was Will Tate, and whether he had children, which he had: three. She had learned long ago from her father that a frightened man held still better when he was made to think of something he loved.She was splinting the leg with the curricle's broken footboard when a gray horse came down the hill at a gallop, and a man swung out of the saddle before it had stopped. He was tall and dark, near 40, dressed in a plain black coat with gray at his temples, and he took in the overturned curricle, the bleeding young gentleman, and the groom in the mud with a single look that showed nothing at all."Sebastian," he said. "Alive, Laurence?""Mostly. This lady has been ordering me about."The tall man turned his eyes on Elspeth. She did not get up; her hands were full."Who are you?""Someone whose hands are occupied, sir. Hold his leg there, just at the ankle, and do not let it turn."There was the smallest pause. Then the Duke of Harrowmere, master of 11,000 acres, knelt in the road in his good coat and held his groom's ankle exactly as he had been told.They carried Will Tate up to the Hall on a hurdle taken from a field gate, and in the servants' hall, on a scrubbed deal table, Elspeth set the bone. A gray-haired housekeeper in a black stuff gown held the lamp without being asked and did not flinch once; her name was Mrs. Prudence Sayer, and she had been at Harrowmere for 41 years.When it was done, and the leg was boxed in splints, and the bleeding had stayed stopped, Mrs. Sayer looked at the bag on the table, and then at the young woman who had closed it. "Your father's," she said. It was not a question."Yes.""He taught you well.""He taught me everything he had time for," said Elspeth, and turned away to wash her hands, because it was the first time anyone had spoken of him since she had left Durham, and she did not intend to weep in a duke's kitchen.The Duke received her an hour later in the library. It was a long, cold room; half the shelves were empty, and pale squares on the walls showed where pictures had hung. A fire burned at one end of it, small and carefully fed, like a fire in a house where somebody counts the coals. He stood by it with his hands behind his back. Beside the window, in a chair with arms carved into lions, sat an old lady in lavender silk and a lace cap, who was introduced as his aunt, Lady Philippa Wickliffe, and who looked at Elspeth's muddied hem as if it had been tracked in on purpose.