She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 4
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Elspeth looked at her. "Why?""I couldn't tell you why," said Mrs. Sayer. "Nobody could. Only the Hall's people have never drunk from that pump in my lifetime—and the Hall's people are the only ones in this valley who don't get the gripes."Kestleford lay in a fold of the hills where the Harrow Burn came down out of the moors and turned a mill before it went on to the Tyne. It had one street of gray stone cottages, a church with a squat tower, a smithy, an alehouse called The Plough, and in the middle of the little square, a stone pump house with a lead spout and a trough worn hollow by two generations of buckets. Above the village, on the high ground to the west, a smudge of smoke marked the Hartside lead workings, where the ore was dug, crushed, and washed before it went down to the smelt mill on the Allen.The surgery cottage stood at the end of the street. Harcourt's men had come and gone, and the roof was exactly as wet as before, except that now there was a ladder left lying in the garden.On her third morning, Elspeth was standing under the worst of the drips with a basin when a large man with a scarred leather apron filled her doorway."Thomas Rookwood," he said. "Smith. You're the one set Will Tate's leg.""I am.""Will's my wife's cousin." He looked up at the ceiling. "That's not been touched. They've laid two slates loose and gone to The Plough."He took the basin out of her hands, set it on the floor, and went back out for the ladder. By noon, the roof was dry. When she tried to pay him, he looked at the coins in her palm as if she had offered him an insult."I'll not take money off you," he said, "but I'll not take physic off you neither, so we're square. We've managed without doctoring."It was the second time someone had told her Kestleford had managed. She was beginning to understand that it meant something closer to endured.The village did not come to her. For a week, the brass plate she had polished and hung on the gate brought nobody but small boys who read it aloud and ran. Women who passed her in the street were civil and quick; men touched their hats and looked away. A surgeon was a gentleman who came in a gig and was paid in guineas; a surgeon's daughter with her own hands chapped from washing was a thing nobody had a word for.It was Reverend Hale who broke the ice, and he did it without seeming to. He was a lean, untidy man of 50 with ink on his cuffs and a habit of finishing other people's sentences kindly. He took her to tea at the vicarage, and there, by apparent accident, was Mrs. Dorcas Bellamy, the village midwife.Mrs. Bellamy was short and broad and 70 if she was a day. She had brought most of Kestleford into the world, and she had laid out a good many of them when they left it. She looked Elspeth over the way a farmer looks over a heifer at market.