She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 20
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"She was quite right," said Elspeth unsteadily. "I should have said something foolish.""I hoped you might."She looked at him then, properly, and saw how tired he was, and how much of the stiffness had gone out of him since the autumn, and how much it frightened him to stand on her doorstep with nothing in his hands."Miss Carrow," he said. "Elspeth. I know what I was when you came. I said this village had managed. I had not set foot in it for 20 years. You told me that my mother was the only one of us who went down the hill, and you were right—and I have not forgiven you for it, because it was true." He took a breath. "I am not asking you to come up the hill to the Hall and sit in a drawing room and stop being what you are. God knows the Hall needs you less than Kestleford does. I am asking whether you will let me come down it every day, if you will have me for the rest of my life."She set her father's bag down on the step between them—carefully, so that she would have both her hands free."You will have to learn to carry water, Your Grace," she said."I have been practicing," said the Duke of Harrowmere. And for the first time since she had known him, he laughed.They were married in the church on the hill at midsummer by Reverend Hale, with Lady Philippa in lavender in the front pew, and Lord Sebastian, sober and nervous, holding the ring. The whole village came. Afterwards, nobody could agree who had cried the hardest, though most of Kestleford put its money on Thomas Rookwood.The new conduit was finished that September. On the morning the water was first let into it, they gathered round the new stone fountain in the square where the old lead pump had stood. The Duke turned the cock himself. The water ran out clear and cold into the trough. Polly Dodd, ten years old now and very conscious of her importance, filled a clean glass vial from it. She held it up to the light.Then, with the whole of Kestleford watching, the Duchess of Harrowmere opened her father's bag, took out the stoppered bottle of liver of sulphur, and let three drops fall into the glass.It stayed as clear as the morning.That night, in the surgery cottage at the end of the street—which she had kept, and where she still saw patients three days a week—Elspeth Wickliffe opened the fourth notebook to the page where her father had underlined one sentence twice:Look always to what they drink.Under it, in her own hand, she wrote a line of her own:And to who will carry it.Then she closed the book, laid it in the bag beside the old silver probe and the shining instruments, fastened the clasp with its little pattern of running water, and set the bag by the door, where it would be ready in the morning, as it had always been, for whoever came knocking.