She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 6
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
"Came on last winter," said Nan. "His right first, then his left. He can't hold a hammer, can't hardly hold his spoon. And the pains in his belly, nights, so he walks the floor."Elspeth knelt and took the old man's hands in hers and turned them over. The strength in his upper arm was good; it was only the wrists that had failed—both of them alike.She had seen this before. She was sure of it. Not in Durham—in a book.That night, by a tallow candle, with the rain loud on the mended roof, she untied the bundle of her father's notebooks and went through them one by one. She found it in the fourth, written in his slanting hand 20 years before, under a heading that read:Colic of Devon, after Dr. Baker.He had copied out the account of the physician George Baker, who 40 years earlier had shown that the colic and palsy that afflicted the cider counties came from the lead used in the presses and the cider vats: belly pains, costiveness, the sweet taste, children wasting—and the hands, the strength gone from the wrists so that they hung down. Her father had underlined one sentence twice:Look always to what they drink.Elspeth set down the notebook and looked at her own list. Then she took a fresh sheet, drew the street of Kestleford as best she remembered it, and marked on it every house from which a case of the gripes had come to her door.When she had finished, the candle was nearly out. She sat for a long while staring at the paper. The marks were not scattered: they lay thick along the square and Conduit Row, thinning as the street ran east. And the cooper's cottage on the Hexham road, where she had sat four hours and seen nothing wrong with anybody, had no mark at all.The pump in the square drew from the old conduit. Everybody knew that, the way they knew the church tower leaned. The third duke had built it in the year 1742, out of piety or pride, to bring sweet water down from a spring called Harrow Head, high on the moor, through a mile of buried pipe into the village. The pipe was lead. So was the spout. So, Elspeth learned, was the lining of the old stone cistern at the springhead, where the water was meant to rest and settle before it began its journey down.The houses at the east end of the street did not use the pump; they were nearer the mill, and the miller let them draw from the deep well in his yard.The miller was a broad, quiet man named Samuel Dodd, and when Elspeth asked him about the water, he became quieter still."It is His Grace's conduit, miss," he said, and wiped the flour from his hands as if the conversation were flour, too. "Not my place to say aught about it.""I'm not asking you to say anything about His Grace. I'm asking whether you have noticed anything about the water."He looked at the ground. "My lease comes up at Candlemas," he said. "Mr. Harcourt does the leases." And he went back inside.