The doctor came in the afternoon. In places the mud on the road was a foot deep. The horse’s black haunches were starred with it, and there were splashes right up to the waist of the doctor’s horse-coat. At least the rain had held off; he would not have to shift about for half a day in damp clothes. This last winter he had noted the stiffening of his joints, pain at times in both knees, in the deep places of his hips. His wife rubbed him with embrocation, the same stuff they used on the horses, until the pair of them stank like stable hands. But a doctor who would not ride had better have a fancy practice in Bath or the Hotwells. Out here he would starve.

He came to the ridge above the village and looked down into the vale where the fields were bright with standing water. From here you could see for miles: farmland, woods, a glimpse of the river, brown between vivid green banks. And now that he could spy the roof of the church (grey and mossy green, like a stepping stone you might use to cross this waterlogged land) he turned his thoughts to his patient, to young Lacroix, back from the war.

He had treated his father for years—for rheumatics, lockjaw, gout. Mostly for melancholy. The boy and his sisters he had seen or heard without taking much notice of them, though he remembered looking in at the younger girl when she had scarlatina. As for the mother, he had not met her, did not think she had got much beyond her twenty-fifth year. His business had been with Lacroix (old Lacroix he should perhaps call him now), and once medical matters were out the way they had liked to sit together talking farming or philosophy but mostly speaking of their collections, for they were both among that portion of mankind who gather and hoard the things that delight them. Moths and beetles for the doctor; village music and village songs for Lacroix. Sometimes he would bring his patient a beetle to look at, something jewelled, the size of a fingernail, carried in an old snuff box. In return, Lacroix would open one of his books, tall like ledgers, where he wrote down what the old men and women of the parish sang for him. His own singing voice was only middling but the doctor encouraged him, if only because a man cannot die of much while he is singing, and even if he sheds tears it is better to have them out and riding on music than he should sit staring dryly at the floor.