(071145-071862)
Rosemund is unconscious. I tried to lance her bubo last night to drain out the infection, and I’m afraid I only made things worse. She lost a great deal of blood. She’s very pale and her pulse is so faint I can’t find it in her wrist at all.
The clerk is worse, too. His skin continues to hemorrhage, and it’s clear he’s near the end. I remember Dr. Ahrens saying untreated bubonic plague kills people in four or five days, but he can’t possibly last that long.
Lady Eliwys, Lady Imeyne, and Agnes are still well, though Lady Imeyne seems to have gone almost crazy in her search for someone to blame. She boxed Maisry’s ears this morning and told her God was punishing us all for her laziness and stupidity.
Maisry is lazy and stupid. She cannot be trusted to watch Agnes for five minutes at a time, and when I sent her for water to wash Rosemund’s wound this morning, she was gone over half an hour and came back without it.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Lady Imeyne hitting her again, and it is only a matter of time before Lady Imeyne gets around to blaming me. I saw her watching me over her Book of Hours when I went out for the water Maisry forgot, and I can well imagine what she’s thinking—that I know too much about the plague not to have been fleeing it, that I am supposed to have lost my memory, that I was not injured but ill.
If she makes those accusations, I’m afraid she’ll convince Lady Eliwys that I’m the cause of the plague and that she shouldn’t listen to me, that they should take the barricade down and pray together for God to deliver them.
And how will I defend myself? By saying, I’m from the future, where we know everything about the Black Death except how to cure it without streptomycin and how to get back there?
Gawyn still isn’t back. Eliwys is frantic with worry. When Roche went to say vespers she was standing at the gate, no cloak, no coif, watching the road. I wonder if it has occurred to her that he might already have been infected when he left for Bath. He rode to Courcy with the bishop’s envoy, and when he came back he already knew about the plague.
(Break)
Ulf the Reeve is near death, and his wife and one of his sons have it. No buboes, but the woman has several small lumps like seeds inside her thigh. Roche constantly has to be reminded to wear his mask and to not touch the patients more than he has to.
The history vids say the contemps were panic stricken and cowardly during the Black Death, that they ran away and wouldn’t tend the sick, and that the priests were the worst of all, but it isn’t like that at all.
Everyone’s frightened, but they’re all doing the best they can, and Roche is wonderful. He sat and held the reeve’s wife’s hand the whole time I examined her, and he doesn’t flinch at the most disgusting jobs—bathing Rosemund’s wound, emptying chamberpots, cleaning up after the clerk. He never seems afraid. I don’t know where he gets his courage.
He continues to say matins and vespers and to pray, telling God about Rosemund and who has it now, reporting their symptoms and telling what we’re doing for them, as if He could actually hear him. The way I talk to you.
Is God there, too, I wonder, but shut off from us by something worse than time, unable to get through, unable to find us?
(Break)
We can hear the plague. The villages toll the death knell after a burial, nine strokes for a man, three for a woman, one for a baby, and then an hour of steady tolling. Esthcote had two this morning, and Osney has tolled continuously since yesterday. The bell in the southwest that I told you I could hear when I first came through has stopped. I don’t know whether that means the plague is over there or whether there’s no one left alive to ring the bell.
(Break)
Please don’t let Rosemund die. Please don’t let Agnes get it. Send Gawyn back.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The boy who had run from Kivrin the day she tried to find the drop came down with the plague in the night. His mother was standing waiting for Father Roche when he went to matins. The boy had a bubo on his back, and Kivrin lanced it while Roche and the mother held him.
She didn’t want to do it. The scurvy had left him already weak, and Kivrin had no idea whether there were any arteries below the shoulder blades. Rosemund did not seem at all improved, though Roche claimed her pulse was stronger. She was so white, as if she had been utterly drained of blood, and so still. And the boy didn’t look as if he could stand to lose any blood.
But he bled hardly at all, and the color was already coming back in his cheeks before Kivrin finished washing the knife.
“Give him tea made from rose hips,” Kivrin said, thinking that at least that would help the scurvy. “And willow bark.” She held the blade of the knife over the fire. It was no bigger than the day she had sat by it, too weak to find the drop. It would never keep the boy warm, and if she told the woman to go gather firewood, she might expose someone else. “We will bring you some wood,” she said, and then wondered how.
There was still food left over from the Christmas feast, but they were fast running out of everything else. They had used most of the wood that was already cut trying to keep Rosemund and the clerk warm, and there was no one to ask to chop the logs that lay piled against the kitchen. The reeve was ill, the steward was tending his wife and son.
Kivrin gathered up an armful of the already-split wood and some pieces of loose bark for kindling and took it back to the hut, wishing she could move the boy into the manor house, but Eliwys had the clerk and Rosemund to tend, and she looked ready to collapse herself.
Eliwys had sat with Rosemund all night, giving her sips of willow tea and rebandaging the wound. They had run out of cloths, and she had taken off her coif and torn it into strips. She sat where she could see the screens, and every few minutes she had stood up and gone over to the door, as if she heard someone coming. With her dark hair down over her shoulders, she looked no older than Rosemund.
Kivrin took the firewood to the woman, dumping it on the dirt floor next to the rat cage. The rat was gone, killed, no doubt, and not even guilty. “The Lord blesses us,” she woman said to her. She knelt by the fire and began carefully adding the wood to it.
Kivrin checked the boy again. His bubo was still draining a clear watery fluid, which was good. Rosemund’s had bled half the night and then begun to swell and grow hard again. And I can’t lance it again, Kivrin thought. She can’t lose any more blood.
She started back to the hall, wondering if she should relieve Eliwys or try to chop some wood. Roche, coming out of the steward’s house, met her with the news that two more of the steward’s children were ill.
It was the two youngest boys, and it was clearly the pneumonic. Both were coughing, and the mother intermittently retched a watery sputum. The Lord blesses us.
Kivrin went back to the hall. It was still hazy from the sulfur, and the clerk’s arms looked almost black in the yellowish light. The fire was no better than the one in the woman’s hut. Kivrin brought in the last of the cut wood and then told Eliwys to lie down, that she would tend Rosemund.
“Nay,” Eliwys said, glancing toward the door. She added, almost to herself, “He has been three days on the road.”
It was seventy kilometers to Bath, a day and a half at least on horseback and the same amount of time back, if he had been able to get a fresh horse in Bath. He might be back today, if he had found Lord Guillaume immediately. If he comes back, Kivrin thought.
Eliwys glanced at the door again, as if she heard something, but the only sound was Agnes, crooning softly to her cart. She had put a blanket over it and was spooning make-believe food into it. “He has the blue sickness,” she told Kivrin.
Kivrin spent the rest of the day doing household chores—bringing in water, making broth from the roast joint, emptying the chamberpots. The steward’s cow, its udders swollen in spite of Kivrin’s orders, came lowing into the courtyard and followed her, nudging her with its horns till Kivrin gave up and milked it. Roche chopped wood in between visits to the s
teward and the boy, and Kivrin, wishing she had learned how to split wood, hacked clumsily at the big logs.
The steward came to fetch them again just before dark to his younger daughter. That’s eight cases so far, Kivrin thought. There were only forty people in the village. The Black Death was supposed to have had a mortality rate of one-third to one-half, and Mr. Gilchrist thought that was exaggerated. One third would be thirteen cases, only five more. Even at fifty per cent, only twelve more would get it, and the steward’s children had all already been exposed.
She looked at them, the older daughter stocky and dark like her father, the youngest boy sharp-faced like his mother, the scrawny baby. You’ll all get it, she thought, and that will leave eight.
She couldn’t seem to feel anything, even when the baby began to cry and the girl took it on her knee and stuck her filthy finger in its mouth. Thirteen, she prayed. Twenty at the most.
She couldn’t feel anything for the clerk either, even though it was clear he could not last the night. His lips and tongue were covered with a brown slime, and he was coughing up a watery spittle that was streaked with blood. She tended him automatically, without feeling.
It’s the lack of sleep, she thought, it’s making us all numb. She lay down by the fire and tried to sleep, but she seemed beyond sleep, beyond tiredness. Eight more people, she thought, adding them up in her mind. The mother will catch it, and the reeve’s wife and children. That leaves four. Don’t let one of them be Agnes or Eliwys. Or Roche.
In the morning Roche found the cook lying in the snow in front of her hut, half-frozen and coughing blood. Nine, Kivrin thought.
The cook was a widow, with no one to take care of her, so they brought her into the hall and laid her next to the clerk, who was, amazingly, horribly, still alive. The hemorrhaging had spread all over his body now, his chest criss-crossed with bluish-purple marks, his arms and legs nearly solid black. His cheeks were covered with a black stubble that seemed somehow a symptom, too, and under it his face was darkening.
Rosemund still lay white and silent, balanced between life and death, and Eliwys tended her quietly, carefully, as if the slightest movement, the slightest sound, might tip her into death. Kivrin tiptoed among the pallets, and Agnes, sensing the need for silence, fell completely apart.
She whined, she hung on the barricade, she asked Kivrin half a dozen times to take her to see her hound, her pony, to get her something to eat, to finish telling her the story of the naughty girl in the woods.
“How does it end?” she whined in a tone that set Kivrin’s teeth on edge. “Do the wolves eat the girl?”
“I don’t know,” Kivrin snapped after the fourth time. “Go and sit by your grandmother.”
Agnes looked contemptuously at Lady Imeyne, who still knelt in the corner, her back to all of them. She had been there all night. “Grandmother will not play with me.”
“Well, then, play with Maisry.”
She did, for five minutes, pestering her so mercilessly she retaliated and Agnes came screaming back, shrieking that Maisry had pinched her.
“I don’t blame her,” Kivrin said, and sent both of them to the loft.
She went to check on the boy, who was so improved he was sitting up, and when she came back, Maisry was hunched in the high seat, sound asleep.
“Where’s Agnes?” Kivrin said.
Eliwys looked around blankly. “I know not. They were in the loft.”
“Maisry,” Kivrin said, crossing to the dais. “Wake up. Where is Agnes?”
Maisry blinked stupidly at her.
“You should not have left her alone,” Kivrin said. She climbed up into the loft, but Agnes wasn’t there, so she checked the solar. She wasn’t there either.
Maisry had got out of the high seat and was huddled against the wall, looking terrified. “Where is she?” Kivrin demanded.
Maisry put a hand up defensively to her ear and gaped at her.
“That’s right,” Kivrin said. “I will box your ears unless you tell me where she is.
Maisry buried her face in her skirts.
“Where is she?” Kivrin said, and jerked her up by her arm. “You were supposed to watch her. She was your responsibility!”
Maisry began to howl, a high-pitched sound like an animal.
“Stop that!” Kivrin said. “Show me where she went!” she pushed her toward the screens.
“What is it?” Roche said, coming in.
“It’s Agnes,” Kivrin said. “We must find her. She may have gone out into the village.”
Roche shook his head. “I did not see her. She is likely in one of the outbuildings.”
“The stables,” Kivrin said, relieved. “She said she wanted to go see her pony.”
She was not in the stables. “Agnes!” she called into the manure-smelling darkness, “Agnes!” Agnes’s pony whinnied and tried to push its way out of its stall, and Kivrin wondered when it had last been fed, and where the hounds were. “Agnes.” She looked in each of the boxes and behind the manger, anywhere a little girl might hide. Or fall asleep.
She might be in the barn, Kivrin thought, and came out of the stable, shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. Roche was just emerging from the kitchen. “Did you find her?” Kivrin asked, but he didn’t hear her. He was looking toward the gate, his head cocked as if he were listening.
Kivrin listened, but she couldn’t hear anything. “What is it?” she asked. “Can you hear her crying?”
“It is the Lord,” he said and ran towards the gate.
Oh, no, not Roche, Kivrin thought, and ran after him. He had stopped and was opening the gate. “Father Roche,” Kivrin said, and heard the horse.
It was galloping toward them, the sound of the hoofs loud on the frozen ground. Kivrin thought, he meant the lord of the manor. He thinks Eliwys’s husband has finally come, and then, with a shock of hope, it’s Mr. Dunworthy.
Roche lifted the heavy bar and slid it to the side.
We need streptomycin and disinfectant, and he’s got to take Rosemund back to hospital with him. She’ll have to have a transfusion.
Roche had the bar off. He pushed on the gate.
And vaccine, she thought wildly. He’d better bring back the oral. Where’s Agnes? He must get Agnes safely away from here.
The horse was nearly at the gate before she came to her senses. “No!” she said, but it was too late. Roche already had the gate open.
“He can’t come here,” Kivrin shouted, looking about wildly for something to warn him off with. “He’ll catch the plague.”
She’d left the spade by the empty pigsty after she buried Blackie. She ran to get it. “Don’t let him through the gate,” she called, and Roche flung his arms up in warning, but he had already ridden into the courtyard.
Roche dropped his arms. “Gawyn!” he said, and the black stallion looked like Gawyn’s, but a boy was riding it. He could not have been older than Rosemund, and his face and clothes were streaked with mud. The stallion was muddy, too, breathing hard, and spattering foam, and the boy looked as winded. His nose and ears were brightened with the cold. He started to dismount, staring at them.
“You must not come here,” Kivrin said, speaking carefully so she wouldn’t lapse into English. “There is plague in this village.” She raised her spade, pointing it like a gun at him.
The boy stopped, halfway off the horse, and sat down in the saddle again.
“The blue sickness,” she added, in case he didn’t understand, but he was already nodding.
“It is everywhere,” he said, turning to take something from the pouch behind his saddle. “I bear a message.” He held out a leather wallet toward Roche, and Roche stepped forward for it.
“No!” Kivrin said and took a step forward, jabbing the spade at the air in front of him. “Drop it on the ground!” she said. “You must not touch us.”
The boy took a tied roll of vellum from the wallet and threw it at Roche’s feet.
Roche picked it up off the f
lagstones and unrolled it. “What says the message?” he asked the boy, and Kivrin thought, of course, he can’t read.
“I know not,” the boy said. “It is from the Bishop of Bath. I am to take it to all the parishes.”
“Would you have me read it?” Kivrin asked.
“Mayhap it is from the lord,” Roche said. “Mayhap he sends word that he has been delayed.”
“Yes,” Kivrin said, taking it from him, but she knew it wasn’t.
It was in Latin, printed in letters so elaborate they were hard to read, but it didn’t matter. She had read it before. In the Bodleian.
She leaned the spade against her shoulder and read the message, translating the Latin:
“The contagious pestilence of the present day, which is spreading far and wide, has left many parish churches and other livings in our diocese without parson or priest to care for their parishioners.”
She looked at Roche. No, she thought. Not here. I won’t let that happen here.
“Since no priests can be found who are willing—” The priests were dead or had run away, and no one could be persuaded to take their place, and the people were dying “without the Sacrament of Penance.”
She read on, seeing not the black letters but the faded brown ones she had deciphered in the Bodleian. She had thought the letter was pompous and ridiculous. “People were dying right and left,” she had told Mr. Dunworthy indignantly, “and all the bishop was concerned about was church protocol!” But now, reading it to the exhausted boy and Father Roche, it sounded exhausted, too. And desperate.
“If they are on the point of death and can not secure the services of a priest,” she read, “then they should make confession to each other. We urge you, by these present letters, in the bowels of Jesus Christ, to do this.”
Neither the boy nor Roche said anything when she had finished reading. She wondered if the boy had known what he was carrying. She rolled it up and handed it back to him.
“I have been riding three days,” the boy said, slumping forward tiredly in the saddle. “Can I not rest here awhile?”
Dooms Day Book Page 51