She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 5
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"Durham," she said. "Town hands.""Durham hands have delivered a fair number of babies, ma'am.""With the doctor stood behind you, I've no doubt. Here, there's no doctor stood behind anybody. There's me, and there's the Lord, and some nights He's busy." She drank her tea. "Well. We'll see what you're made of."They saw on the following Tuesday at 2:00 in the morning, when Mrs. Bellamy came hammering at the cottage door with a lantern. The cooper's wife on the Hexham road had been in labor since the previous dawn, and the child was lying wrong. Elspeth took the bag and went. Between them, in a hot little room with the husband praying outside, they turned the child. It took four hours. Both mother and daughter lived.Walking back in the gray light, Mrs. Bellamy said nothing at all for half a mile, and then she said, "You've your father's patience. I'll give you that."And that was the end of the matter. By the next week, there were women at the surgery door. They brought her the ordinary miseries of any village: whitlows and chilblains, a scalded child, a plowman's rupture, a girl with a rotten tooth. Elspeth dealt with them and wrote each one in a fresh notebook, as her father had always done, with the name, the house, the complaint, and the treatment.And slowly, without at first noticing it, she began to write the same complaint again and again.The gripes, they called it in Kestleford: a griping pain in the belly that came and went, worse at night; a costiveness that no senna would shift; headaches; a gray, tired pallor in the faces of people who should have been ruddy with work; a sweetish, metallic taste in the mouth that some of them complained of and most had stopped noticing. Among the children, it was worse: fretfulness, wasting, and, in a few, fits.At first, she thought nothing of it: poor food might do it; so might hard work, and damp houses, and the long dark of a northern winter. She dosed with castor oil and warm fomentations, and told mothers to feed their children milk if they could get it. And some got better, and some did not.Then the smith's wife came for her. Nan Rookwood was a brisk, warm, freckled woman who seemed to know which family in Kestleford was behind with its rent, which was expecting, and which was quarreling, and who carried that knowledge without unkindness, like a woman carrying a full pail carefully so as not to spill it. She came to the surgery one wet afternoon with her shawl over her head."Thomas'd skin me for this," she said. "But it's his father. Will you come?"Old Jem Rookwood had been smith before his son, and his arms were still thick with muscle. But he sat by the fire in the cottage behind the forge with his hands resting on his knees, and the hands did not move. When he tried to lift them, the wrists stayed limp and the fingers hung down like the wings of a shot bird.