She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 7
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
His daughter did not go back inside. She was a thin, sharp girl of nine named Polly, with flour in her eyebrows and a gap where a tooth had been, and she had been listening from the top of the sack hoist. She came down it hand-over-hand and stood in front of Elspeth with her chin up."The trough goes cloudy," she said. "Tuesdays and Fridays. Not every week. And the minnows in the millrace die."Elspeth crouched down to her height. "Tell me exactly."Polly told her exactly. There was an overflow from the pump trough that ran in a gutter down to the millrace. Polly kept minnows in a jar, and she caught them in the race just below where the gutter came in. On some days, the gutter water ran a little gray, like water with ashes stirred in it; and on those days, by evening, there would be minnows floating belly-up below the gutter, and none above it."Why Tuesdays and Fridays?"Polly shrugged. "That's when the washing floor runs up at Hartside. My uncle works it. Tuesdays and Fridays they wash the bouse."The bouse was the broken ore dug from the hill, which the mine crushed and washed in great wooden troughs to separate the heavy lead from the stone. The washing left behind a gray sludge the miners called slimes. And the slimes, Elspeth thought with a cold feeling settling under her ribs, had to go somewhere.That night she opened the fourth notebook again. Under Baker's account, her father had copied a proof for lead in wine, taken from a German physician named Hahnemann:Dissolve liver of sulphur in water, add a few drops to the liquid to be tried, and if lead is present, it will darken, brown or black according to the quantity.Robert Carrow had made the liver of sulphur himself, as surgeons did, by fusing sulphur with potash, and there was a stoppered bottle of it in the bag still, labeled in his hand.On Friday morning, before it was light, she filled three clean glass vials: one she drew from the mill well, one she drew from the square pump, and one she took from the gutter below the trough at noon, when Polly—posted on the wall like a sentry—came running to say the water had gone gray.She set them in a row on the surgery table. With the dropper from the bag, she let fall three drops of her father's solution into each.The mill water stayed clear as glass. The pump water from the morning took a faint brownish shadow, like weak tea. The noon water turned dark, almost black, and a cloud settled slowly to the bottom of the vial.Polly, kneeling on a stool beside her, let out her breath. "What does it mean?""It means," said Elspeth slowly, "that there is something in the conduit that ought not to be there. Some of it every day; more of it on washing days." She looked at the black vial. "It means your minnows were trying to tell somebody."