Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  Rosemund went up to the loft to lie down, and Agnes sat down next to Kivrin by the hearth and put her head on her lap, playing absently with her bell.

  Only Lady Imeyne refused to give in to the letdown and languor of the afternoon. “I would have my new chaplain say vespers,” she said, and went up to knock on the bower door.

  Eliwys protested lazily, her eyes still closed, that the bishop’s envoy had said the clerk should not be disturbed, but Imeyne knocked several times, loudly and without result. She waited a few minutes, knocked again, and then came down the steps and knelt at the foot of them to read her Book of Hours and keep an eye on the door so she could waylay the clerk as soon as he emerged.

  Agnes batted at her bell with one finger, yawning broadly.

  “Why don’t you go up into the loft and lie down with your sister?” Kivrin suggested.

  “I’m not tired,” Agnes said, sitting up. “Tell me what happened to the naughty girl.”

  “Only if you lie down,” Kivrin said, and began the story. Agnes didn’t last two sentences.

  In the late afternoon, Kivrin remembered Agnes’s puppy. Everyone was asleep by then, even Lady Imeyne, who had given up on the clerk and gone up to the loft to lie down. Maisry had come in at some point and crawled under one of the tables. She was snoring loudly.

  Kivrin eased her knees carefully out from under Agnes’s head and went out to bury the puppy. There was no one in the courtyard. The remains of a bonfire still smouldered in the center of the green, but there was no one around it. The villagers must be taking a Christmas afternoon nap, too.

  Kivrin brought down Blackie’s body and went into the stable for a wooden spade. Only Agnes’s pony was there, and Kivrin frowned at it, wondering how the clerk was supposed to follow the envoy to Courcy. Perhaps he hadn’t been lying, after all, and the clerk was to be the new chaplain whether he liked it or not.

  Kivrin carried the spade and Blackie’s already stiffening body across to the church and around to the north side. She laid the puppy down and began chipping through the crusted snow.

  The ground was literally as hard as stone. The wooden spade didn’t even make a dent, even when she stood on it with both feet. She climbed the hill to the beginnings of the wood, dug through the snow at the base of an ash tree, and buried the puppy in the loose leaf-mould.

  “Requiscat in pace,” she said so she could tell Agnes the puppy had had a Christian burial and went back down the hill.

  She wished Gawyn would ride up now. She could ask him to take her to the drop while everyone was still asleep. She walked slowly across the green, listening for the horse. He would probably come by the main road. She propped the spade against the wattle fence of the pigsty and went around the outside of the manor wall to the gate, but she couldn’t hear anything.

  The afternoon light began to fade. If Gawyn didn’t come soon, it would be too dark to ride out to the drop. Father Roche would be ringing vespers in another half hour, and that would wake everyone up. Gawyn would have to tend his horse, though, no matter what time he got back, and she could sneak out to the stable and ask him to take her to the drop in the morning.

  Or perhaps he could simply tell her where it was, draw her a map so she could find it herself. That way she wouldn’t have to go into the woods alone with him, and if Lady Imeyne had him out on another errand the day of the rendezvous, she could take one of the horses and find it herself.

  She stood in by the gate till she got cold and then went back along the wall to the pigsty and into the courtyard. There was still no one in the courtyard, but Rosemund was in the anteroom, with her cloak on.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. The clerk—”

  Kivrin’s heart jerked. “What is it? Is he leaving?” He’d woken from his hangover and was ready to leave. And Lady Imeyne had persuaded him to take her to Godstow.

  “Nay,” Rosemund said, going into the hall. It was empty. Eliwys and Imeyne must both be in the bower with him. She unfastened Sir Bloet’s brooch and took her cloak off. “He is ailing. Father Roche sent me to find you.” She started up the stairs.

  “Ailing?” Kivrin said.

  “Aye. Grandmother sent Maisry to the bower to take him somewhat to eat.”

  And to put him to work, Kivrin thought, following her up the steps. “And Maisry found him ill?”

  “Aye. He has a fever.”

  He has a hangover, Kivrin thought, frowning. But Roche would surely recognize the effects of drink, even if Lady Imeyne couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

  A terrible thought occurred to her. He’s been sleeping in my bed, Kivrin thought, and he’s caught my virus.

  “What symptoms does he have?” she asked.

  Rosemund opened the door.

  There was scarcely room for them all in the little room. Father Roche was by the bed, and Eliwys stood a little behind him, her hand on Agnes’s head. Maisry cowered by the window. Lady Imeyne knelt at the foot of the bed next to her medicine casket, busy with one of her foul-smelling poultices, and there was another smell in the room, sickish and so strong it overpowered the mustard and leek smell of the poultice.

  They all, except Agnes, looked frightened. Agnes looked interested, the way she had with Blackie, and Kivrin thought, he’s dead, he’s caught what I had, and he’s died. But that was ridiculous. She had been here since the middle of December. That would mean an incubation period of nearly two weeks, and no one else had caught it, not even Father Roche, or Eliwys, and they had been with her constantly while she was ill.

  She looked at the clerk. He lay uncovered in the bed, wearing a shift and no breeches. The rest of his clothes were draped over the foot of the bed, his purple cloak dragging on the floor. His shift was yellow silk, and the ties had come unfastened so that it was open halfway down his chest, but she wasn’t noticing either his hairless skin or the ermine bands on the sleeves of his shift. He was ill. I was never that ill, Kivrin thought, not even when I was dying.

  She went up to the bed. Her foot hit a half-empty earthenware wine bottle and sent it rolling under the bed. The clerk flinched. Another bottle, with the seal still on it, stood at the head of the bed.

  “He has eaten too much rich food,” Lady Imeyne said, mashing something in her stone bowl, but it was clearly not food poisoning. Nor too much alcohol, in spite of the wine bottles. He’s ill, Kivrin thought. Terribly ill.

  He breathed rapidly in and out through his open mouth, panting like poor Blackie, his tongue sticking out. It was bright red and looked swollen. His face was an even darker red, and his expression was distorted, as if he were terrified.

  She wondered if he might have been poisoned. The bishop’s envoy had been so anxious to leave he had nearly run Agnes down, and he had told Eliwys not to disturb him. The church had done things like that in the thirteen hundreds, hadn’t they? Mysterious deaths in the monastery and the cathedral. Convenient deaths.

  But that made no sense. The bishop’s envoy and the monk would not have hurried off and given orders not to disturb the victim when the whole point of poison was to make it look like botulism or peritonitis or the dozen other unaccountable things people died of in the Middle Ages. And why would the bishop’s envoy poison one of his own underlings when he could demote him, the way Lady Imeyne wanted to demote Father Roche.

  “Is it the cholera?” Lady Eliwys said.

  No, Kivrin thought, trying to remember its symptoms. Acute diarrhea and vomiting with massive loss of body fluids. Pinched expression, dehydration, cyanosis, raging thirst.

  “Are you thirsty?” she asked.

  The clerk gave no sign that he had heard. His eyes were half-closed, and they looked swollen, too.

  Kivrin laid her hand on his forehead. He flinched a little, his reddened eyes flickering open and then closed.

  “He’s burning with fever,” Kivrin said, thinking, cholera doesn’t produce this high a fever. “Fetch me a cloth dipped in water.”

  “Maisr
y!” Eliwys snapped, but Rosemund was already at her elbow with the same filthy rag they must have used on her.

  At least it was cool. Kivrin folded it into a rectangle, watching the priest’s face. He was still panting, and his face contorted when she laid the rag across his forehead, as if he was in pain. He clutched his hand to his belly. Appendicitis? Kivrin thought. No, that usually was accompanied by a low-grade fever. Typhoid fever could produce temps as high as forty degrees, though usually not at the onset. It produced enlargement of the spleen, as well, which frequently resulted in abdominal pain.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked. “Where does it hurt?”

  His eyes flickered half-open again, and his hands moved restlessly on the coverlet. That was a symptom of typhoid fever, that restless plucking, but only in the last stages, eight or nine days into the progress of the disease. She wondered if the priest had already been ill when he came.

  He had stumbled getting off his horse when they arrived, and the monk had had to catch him. But he had eaten and drunk more than a little at the feast, and grabbed at Maisry. He couldn’t have been very ill, and typhoid came on gradually, beginning with a headache and an only slightly elevated temperature. It didn’t reach thirty-nine degrees until the third week.

  Kivrin leaned closer, pulling his untied shift aside to look for typhoid’s rose-colored rash. There wasn’t any. The side of his neck seemed slightly swollen, but swollen lymph glands went with almost every infection. She pulled his sleeve up. There weren’t any rose spots on his arm either, but his fingernails were a bluish-brown color, which meant not enough oxygen. And cyanosis was a symptom of cholera.

  “Has he vomited or had loosening of his bowels?” she asked.

  “Nay,” Lady Imeyne said, smearing a greenish paste on a piece of stiff linen. “He has but eaten too much of sugars and spices, and it has fevered his blood.”

  It couldn’t be cholera without vomiting, and at any rate the fever was too high. Perhaps it was her virus after all, but she hadn’t felt any stomach pain, and her tongue hadn’t swollen like that.

  The clerk raised his hand and pushed the rag off his forehead and onto the pillow, and then let his arm fall back to his side. Kivrin picked the rag up. It was completely dry. And what besides a virus could cause that high a fever? She couldn’t think of anything but typhoid.

  “Has he bled from the nose?” she asked Roche.

  “Nay,” Rosemund said, stepping forward and taking the rag from Kivrin. “I have seen no sign of bleeding.”

  “Wet it with cold water but don’t wring it out,” Kivrin said. “Father Roche, help me to lift him.”

  Roche put his hands to the priest’s shoulders and raised him up. There was no blood on the linen under his head.

  Roche laid him gently back down. “Think you it is the typhoid fever?” he said, and there was something curious, almost hopeful in his tone.

  “I know not,” Kivrin said.

  Rosemund handed Kivrin the rag. She had took Kivrin at her word. It was dripping with icy water.

  Kivrin leaned forward and laid it across the clerk’s forehead.

  His arms came up suddenly, wildly, knocking the cloth backwards out of Kivrin’s hand, and then he was sitting up, flailing at her with both his hands, kicking out with his feet. His fist caught her on the side of her leg, buckling her knees so that she almost toppled onto the bed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Kivrin said, trying to get her balance, trying to clutch at his hands. “I’m sorry.”

  His bloodshot eyes were wide open now, staring straight ahead. “Gloriam tuam,” he bellowed, in a strange high voice that was almost a scream.

  “I’m sorry,” Kivrin said. She grabbed at his wrist, and his other arm shot out, striking her full in the chest.

  “Requiem aeternum dona eis,” he roared, rising up on his knees and then his feet to stand in the middle of the bed. “Et lux perpetua luceat eis.”

  Kivrin realized suddenly that he was trying to sing the mass for the dead.

  Father Roche clutched at his shift, and he lashed out, kicking himself free, and then went on kicking, spinning around as if he were dancing.

  “Miserere nobis.”

  He was too near the wall for them to reach him, hitting the timbers with his feet and flailing arms at every turn without even seeming to notice. “When he comes within reach, we must grab his ankles and knock him down,” Kivrin said.

  Father Roche nodded, out of breath. The others stood transfixed, not even trying to stop him, Imeyne still on her knees. Maisry pushed herself completely into the window, her hands over her ears and her eyes squeezed shut. Rosemund had retrieved the sopping rag and held it in her outstretched hand as if she thought Kivrin might try to lay it on his head again. Agnes was staring open-mouthed at the clerk’s half-exposed body.

  The clerk spun back toward them, his hands pawing at the ties on the front of his shift, trying to rip them free.

  “Now,” Kivrin said.

  Father Roche and she reached for his ankles. The clerk went down on one knee, and then, flinging his arms out wide, burst free and launched himself off the high bed straight at Rosemund. She put her hands up, still holding the rag, and he hit her full in the chest.

  “Miserere nobis,” he said, and they went down together.

  “Grab his arms before he hurts her,” Kivrin said, but the clerk had stopped flailing. He lay atop Rosemund, motionless, his mouth almost touching hers, his arms limply out at his sides.

  Father Roche took hold of the clerk’s unresisting arm and rolled him off Rosemund. He flopped onto his side, breathing shallowly but no longer panting.

  “Is he dead?” Agnes asked, and as if her voice had released the rest of them from a spell, they all moved forward, Lady Imeyne struggling to her feet, gripping the bedpost.

  “Blackie died,” Agnes said, clutching at her mother’s skirts.

  “He is not dead,” Imeyne said, kneeling beside him, “but the fever in his blood has gone to the brain. It is often thus.”

  It’s never thus, Kivrin thought. This isn’t a symptom of any disease I’ve ever heard of. What could it be? Spinal meningitis? Epilepsy?

  She bent down next to Rosemund. The girl lay rigidly on the floor, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands clenched into whitening fists. “Did he hurt you?” Kivrin asked.

  Rosemund opened her eyes. “He pushed me down,” she said, her voice quavering a little.

  “Can you stand?” Kivrin asked.

  Rosemund nodded, and Eliwys stepped forward, Agnes still clinging to her skirt. They helped her to her feet.

  “My foot hurts,” she said, leaning on her mother, but in a minute she was able to stand on it. “He… of a sudden…”

  Eliwys supported her to the end of the bed and sat her down on the carved chest. Agnes clambered up next to her. “The bishop’s clerk jumped on top of you,” she said.

  The clerk murmured something, and Rosemund looked fearfully at him. “Will he rise up again?” she asked Eliwys.

  “Nay,” Eliwys said, but she helped Rosemund up and led her to the door. “Take your sister down to the fire and sit with her,” she told Agnes.

  Agnes took hold of Rosemund’s arm and led her out. “When the clerk dies, we will bury him in the churchyard,” Kivrin could hear her say going down the stairs. “Like Blackie.”

  The clerk looked already dead, his eyes half-open and unseeing. Father Roche knelt next to him and hoisted him easily over his shoulder, the clerk’s head and arms hanging limply down, the way Kivrin had carried Agnes home from the midnight mass. Kivrin hastily pulled the coverlet off the featherbed, and Roche eased him down onto the bed.

  “We must draw the fever from the brain,” Lady Imeyne said, returning to her poultice. “It is the spices that have fevered his brain.”

  “No,” Kivrin whispered, looking at the priest. He lay on his back with his arms out at his sides, the palms up. The thin shift was ripped halfway down the front and had fallen completely off
his left shoulder so his outstretched arm was exposed. Under the arm was a red swelling. “No,” she breathed.

  The swelling was bright red and nearly as large as an egg. High fever, swollen tongue, intoxication of the nervous system, buboes under the arms and in the groin.

  Kivrin took a step back from the bed. “It can’t be,” she said. “It’s something else.” It had to be something else. A boil. Or an ulcer of some kind. She reached forward to pull the sleeve away from it.

  The clerk’s hands twitched. Roche stretched to grasp his wrists, pushing them down into the featherbed. The swelling was hard to the touch, and around it the skin was a mottled purplish– black.

  “It can’t be,” she said. “It’s only 1320.”

  “This will draw the fever out,” Imeyne said. She stood up stiffly, holding the poultice out in front of her. “Pull his shift away from his body that I may lay on the poultice.” She started toward the bed.

  “No!” Kivrin said. She put her hands up to stop her. “Stay away! You mustn’t touch him!”

  “You speak wildly,” Imeyne said. She looked at Roche. “It is naught but a stomach fever.”

  “It isn’t a fever!” Kivrin said. She turned to Roche. “Let go of his hands and get away from him. It isn’t a fever. It’s the plague.”

  All of them, Roche and Imeyne and Eliwys looked at her as stupidly as Maisry.

  They don’t even know what it is, she thought desperately, because it doesn’t exist yet, there was no such thing as the Black Death yet. It didn’t even begin in China until 1333. And it didn’t reach England till 1348. “But it is,” Kivrin said. “He’s got all the symptoms. The bubo and the swollen tongue and the hemorrhaging under the skin.”

  “It is naught but a stomach fever,” Imeyne said and pushed past Kivrin to the bed.

  “No—” Kivrin said, but Imeyne had already stopped, the poultice poised above his naked chest.

  “Lord have mercy on us,” she said, and backed away, still holding the poultice.

  “Is it the blue sickness?” Eliwys said frightenedly.

  And suddenly Kivrin saw it all. They had not come here because of the trial, because Lord Guillaume was in trouble with the king. He had sent them here because the plague was in Bath.