She Brought a Doctor’s Bag to the Duke’s Estate — By Winter, the Village Was Grateful
Chapter 8
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On Sunday she walked up to Harrow Head with Polly as her guide. It was a long climb through dead bracken, with the wind coming hard off the moor and curlews crying somewhere out of sight. The spring rose in a stone basin at the foot of a slope, and beside it stood the old conduit house—a squat building of dressed stone with the third duke's arms carved over a door that had rotted off its hinges.Inside, the settling cistern was choked: where there should have been a pool of clear water, there was a gray crust a hand thick, and under it a gray ooze. A sluice gate of iron stood beside it, meant to be lowered to shut off the inflow; it had rusted fast in the open position. There were no tool marks on it, no grease, nothing to show that anybody had touched it in years.And above the spring, cut into the slope, she found the reason: someone had dug a channel across the hillside, and down that channel, from a great pond of gray sludge behind an earth bank higher up, came a slow seep of grayish water. It did not run into the spring itself—it did not need to: it soaked into the ground above it, into the same peat and rock through which the spring water rose, and the spring carried it down the hill in the Duke's lead pipe to the trough in Kestleford Square.The earth bank was raw and new. Six years old, Polly said; her uncle had helped build it when the mine opened at the new washing floor.Elspeth stood on the hillside with the wind pulling at her bonnet and looked down at the village, where the smoke was going up from 40 chimneys. She thought of Jem Rookwood's hands.Three days later, Jem Rookwood died. The pains took him in the night, and then a fit, and then another. Elspeth was there for the second. There was nothing in the bag that could help him, and she knew it, and she stayed anyway and held Nan's hand while Thomas held his father. By dawn, it was over. The big smith sat on the floor by the bed with the old man's useless hands in his own and did not speak to anyone.They buried Jem on All Souls' Day in the churchyard on the hill in a thin, cold rain. Reverend Hale read the service. The whole village came. Elspeth stood at the back by the lychgate because she did not think she had a right to stand anywhere else.When it was done, Thomas came down the path toward her. His face was gray under the soot that never quite washed out of it."Nan says you've been up at the head," he said. "Nan says you know what's in that water.""I know that something is. I know it comes worse on washing days. I believe it is lead.""And you knew it before my father died.""I suspected it a week. I hadn't proof."He stood looking at her for a long time, and the rain dripped off the brim of his hat. "Then you'd best go and get it," he said at last. "And when you've got it, you take it up to that Hall and you make him look at it." His voice cracked on the last word. "Because nobody up there has looked at us in 20 years."