Dr Tobias Quill attends the company as physician and, at need, as coroner — a convenience of appointments that Cairnholm has decided not to examine, since he is in any case the man sent for in both capacities, occasionally consecutively. He is nervous, thorough, and permanently tired, a man who has taken too many pulses to be surprised by any of them.
He compounds the households' remedies himself — draughts for the sleepless, drops for the anxious, the Colonel's port kept on a shelf he considers medicinal — and his bag is fitted out with a neatness that approaches devotion. If the company sleeps at night, it is generally by his hand; he himself, by all report, does not.