THE SECOND OPINION

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which the doctor and the midwife are shut in one room with one patient, and the patient recovers out of sheer self-defence.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

Doctor Tolbert Ebbrell believes every ailment in the realm comes from the air. Gammer Sowden, the midwife of Mucklecombe and eleven miles about, believes this is nonsense, and has told him so at two suppers, and their disagreement is the longest-running feud in the district that has never once come to blows, because neither of them will give the other the satisfaction.

He is a physician, trained, expensive, and wrong about why nearly everything he does works. She is untrained, unpaid past a fashion, and right about nearly everything with no theory to hang it on. In forty years they have agreed on precisely nothing and been, between them, the best medicine the parish has, a fact that would appall them both equally if either could be got to admit it.

So when the Marle child took a fever that neither of them could shift alone, and the family, in despair, sent for both, the parish gathered outside the cottage to watch, because there is no entertainment in Sogmarsh finer than free, and this was going to be free and considerable.

It went as everyone hoped.

Ebbrell arrived first and opened the window, because it is the air. Sowden arrived second and moved the child off the floor and put a boiled cloth to its head, because it is the water and the wet. Ebbrell said the window must stay open. Sowden said the draught would finish the child. Ebbrell said the draught was the cure. Sowden said she had buried a good many of his cures. Ebbrell said he had a degree. Sowden said she had a thousand and some arrivals and not one of them had asked to see it.

They did not shout. That is the thing the watchers at the window remember. Two people who despise each other's entire understanding of the world, working over a sick child, in a small hot room, in furious, clipped, immaculate politeness, each doing their own half of the job perfectly and narrating loudly why the other half was witchcraft.

He got the child up and sat and the air moving — which was right. She got the water into it boiled and the fever cooled with cloth after cloth — which was right. He kept the fire in and the window cracked on the leeward side, which was the one thing they never quite argued about because it was, though neither would say so, exactly what the other would have done. And between the two of them, over one long night, doing everything twice and agreeing on none of it, they hauled the Marle child back from the edge it had been sliding over.

Toward dawn the fever broke, and the child sat up and asked, in the way of children who have frightened everyone half to death, whether there was anything to eat.

And there was a silence in the little room, the two of them exhausted, the argument suddenly with nowhere to go, and the plain fact sitting in the middle of the floor that the child was alive and neither of them could honestly say it was their doing alone.

Ebbrell looked at the open window. Sowden looked at the boiled cloths. And Ebbrell said, stiffly, that he supposed the warmth Mistress Sowden had insisted on had done no harm. And Sowden said, just as stiffly, that she supposed a little of the doctor's fresh air had not, on this one occasion, actually killed anybody.

Which is, from those two, a declaration of love, and the whole parish at the window knew it, and had the enormous good sense to say nothing.

They left separately, at dawn, by different doors, so as not to be seen leaving together. Ebbrell wrote in his account "attendance, and the air improved." Sowden wrote in hers, "the doctor came, and was some use, which I did not put to him." Neither has ever conceded a word to the other since.

But it is noticed, in the district, that when a case is truly bad now — when it is a child, and it is the edge — somebody sends for both of them, and both of them come, and come quickly, and neither has ever once asked why they were called together, or refused to be.

Two people can be completely, immovably wrong about each other and still be, between them, the best thing a parish has — because a truth you understand and a truth you cannot explain will save a child far better working side by side than either will alone, and the only thing that need never be admitted, by either of the proud fools doing the saving, is that they have needed each other all along.