There are three places in the book where the text contains an odd contraction for "would":
- “The other cove said as ’ow you’ld give me a tanner.”
- “[…] I thought, ‘There’s some secret about that cask and he’ld be willing to pay to have it kept quiet.’ […] I only meant to keep it for a day or two till he’d be willing to pay a reward.”
- “Doctor,” said the Chief, as the former was about to follow, “as soon as you are through with him I wish you’ld make an examination of the woman’s body. […]”
I found these contractions so out of place that I tend to suspect that they are just printer's typos.
I initially thought it was some OCR error, since it only appears these few times (and the standard form of he'd/you'd is used everywhere else), but the same text appears in the page scans (in both editions that are available on Internet Archive).
I might write off the first usage as written dialect, with the L being spoken, not silent. But the other two examples are spoken by different characters who don't have any significant written dialect. In fact, the second example includes the normal "he'd" in the same paragraph (and with the exact same context) as "he'ld".
I considered the possibility that it might have been an archaic contraction, but Ngram Viewer suggests that it was never used much at all (almost indistinguishable from 0.000%). This doesn't look like an archaic form that lost popularity.
I reluctantly acknowledge that this could be an intentional choice by the author. If so, I don't understand the reasons for it. Like I said, apart from maybe the first example, it doesn't appear to suggest a dialect for the characters, and I don't know why else it would be used.
I would suggest standardizing all three occurrences to the common spelling, under the assumption that they are printer's typos. I realize that I don't have much evidence to support a change, so I will understand if you'd (you'ld) prefer to keep the text as written. Either way, I thought it would be helpful to write up my notes in this GitHub issue in case someone else questions it in the future.
If you do want to make this change, I'm happy to submit the pull request for it.