The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  “And it is with your consent?” I asked.

  “It is a good match,” she said. “Sir Bloet is highly placed, and he has holdings that adjoin my father’s.”

  “Do you like him?”

  She stabbed the needle into the linen in the wooden frame. “My father would never let me come to harm,” she said, and pulled the long thread through.

  She didn’t volunteer anything else, and all I could get out of Agnes was that Sir Bloet was nice and had brought her a silver penny, no doubt as part of the betrothal gifts.

  Agnes was too concerned about her knee to tell me anything else. She stopped complaining about it halfway home, and then limped exaggeratedly when she got down off the sorrel. I thought she was just trying to get attention, but when I looked at it, the scab had come off completely. The area around it is red and swollen.

  I washed it off, wrapped it in as clean a cloth as I could find (I’m afraid it may have been one of Imeyne’s coifs—I found it in the chest at the foot of the bed), and made her sit quietly by the fire and play with her knight, but I’m worried. If it gets infected, it could be serious. There weren’t any antimicrobials in the 1300s.

  Eliwys is worried, too. She clearly expected Gawyn back tonight, and has been going to stand by the screens all day, looking out the door. I have not been able to figure out how she feels about Gawyn. Sometimes, like today, I think she loves him, and is afraid of what that means for both of them. Adultery was a mortal sin in the eyes of the church, and often a dangerous one. But most of the time I am convinced that his amour is completely unrequited, that she is so worried about her husband that she doesn’t know he exists.

  The pure, unattainable lady was the ideal of courtly romances, but it’s clear he doesn’t know whether or not she loves him either. His rescuing me in the wood and his story of the renegades was only an attempt to impress her (which would have been much more impressive if there had been twenty renegades, all armed with swords and maces and battle axes). He would obviously do anything to win her, and Lady Imeyne knows it. Which is why, I think, he’s been sent off to Courcy.

  18

  By the time they got back to Balliol, two more of the detainees were down with the virus. Dunworthy sent Colin to bed and helped Finch get the detainees to bed and phone the Infirmary.

  “All our ambulances are out,” the registrar told him. “We’ll send one as soon as possible.”

  As soon as possible was midnight. He didn’t get back and to bed till past one.

  Colin was asleep on the cot Finch had set up for him, The Age of Chivalry next to his head. Dunworthy debated pulling the book away but he didn’t want to risk waking him. He went in to bed.

  Kivrin could not be in the plague. Badri had said there was four hours slippage, and the plague had not hit England until 1348. Kivrin had been sent to 1320.

  He turned over and closed his eyes determindedly. She could not be in the plague. Badri was delirious. He had said all sorts of things, talked about lids and breaking china as well as rats. None of it made any sense. It was the fever speaking. He had told Dunworthy to back up. He had given him imaginary notes. None of it meant anything.

  “It was the rats,” Badri had said. The contemps hadn’t known it was spread by fleas on the rats. They had had no idea what caused it. They had accused everyone—Jews and witches and the insane. They had murdered halfwits and hanged old women. They had burned strangers at the stake.

  He got out of bed and padded into the sitting room. He tiptoed around Colin’s cot and slid The Age of Chivalry out from under Colin’s head. Colin stirred but didn’t wake.

  Dunworthy sat on the window seat and looked up the Black Death. It had started in China in 1333, and moved west on trading ships to Messina in Sicily and from there to Pisa. It had spread through Italy and France—eighty thousand dead in Siena, a hundred thousand in Florence, three hundred thousand in Rome—before it crossed the Channel. It had reached England in 1348, “a little before the Feast of St. John the Baptist,” the twenty-fourth of June.

  That meant a slippage of twenty-eight years. Badri had been worried about too much slippage, but he had been talking of weeks, not years.

  He reached over the cot to the bookcase and took down Fitzwiller’s Pandemics.

  “What are you doing?” Colin asked sleepily.

  “Reading about the Black Death,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

  “They didn’t call it that,” Colin mumbled around his gobstopper. He rolled over, wrapping himself in his blankets. “They called it the blue sickness.”

  Dunworthy took both books back to bed with him. Fitzwiller gave the date of the plague’s arrival in England as St. Peter’s Day, the twenty-ninth of June, 1348. It had reached Oxford in December, London in October of 1349, and then moved north and back across the Channel to the Low Countries and Norway. It had gone everywhere except Bohemia, and Poland, which had a quarantine, and, oddly, parts of Scotland.

  Where it had gone, it had swept through the countryside like the Angel of Death, devastating entire villages, leaving no one alive to administer the last rites or bury the putrefying bodies. In one monastery, all but one of the monks had died.

  The single survivor, John Clyn, had left a record: “And lest things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us,” he had written, “I, seeing so many evils and the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One, being myself as if among the dead, I, waiting for death, have put into writing all the things that I have witnessed.”

  He had written it all down, a true historian, and then had apparently died himself, all alone. His writing on the manuscript trailed off, and below it, in another hand, someone had written, “Here, it seems, the author died.”

  Someone knocked on the door. It was Finch in his bathrobe, looking bleary-eyed and distraught. “Another one of the detainees, sir,” he said.

  Dunworthy put his finger to his lips and stepped outside the door with him. “Have you telephoned Infirmary?”

  “Yes, sir, and they said it would be several hours before they can dispatch an ambulance. They said to isolate her, and give her dimantadine and orange juice.”

  “Which I suppose we’re nearly out of,” Dunworthy said irritably.

  “Yes, sir, but that’s not the problem. She won’t cooperate.”

  Dunworthy made Finch wait outside the door while he dressed and found his face mask, and they went across to Salvin. A huddle of detainees were standing by the door, dressed in an odd assortment of underthings, coats, and blankets. Only a few of them were wearing their face masks. By day after tomorrow they’ll all be down with it, Dunworthy thought.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” one of the detainees said fervently. “We can’t do a thing with her.”

  Finch led him over to the detainee, who was sitting upright in bed. She was an elderly woman with sparse white hair, and she had the same fever-bright eyes, the same frenetic alertness Badri had had that first night.

  “Go away!” she said when she saw Finch and made a slapping motion at him. She turned her burning eyes on Dunworthy. “Daddy!” she cried, and then stuck her lower lip out in a pout. “I was very naughty,” she said in a childish voice. “I ate all the birthday cake, and now I have a stomachache.”

  “Do you see what I mean, sir?” Finch put in.

  “Are the Indians coming, Daddy?” she asked. “I don’t like Indians. They have bows and arrows.”

  It took them until morning to get her onto a cot in one of the lecture rooms. Dunworthy eventually had to resort to saying, “Your daddy wants his good girl to lie down now,” and just after they had her quieted down, the ambulance came. “Daddy!” she wailed when they shut the doors. “Don’t leave me here all alone!”

  “Oh, dear,” Finch said when the ambulance drove off. “It’s past breakfast time. I do hope they haven’t eaten all the bacon.”

  He went off to ration supplies, and Dunworthy
went back to his rooms to wait for Andrews’s call. Colin was halfway down the staircase, eating a piece of toast and pulling on his jacket. “The vicar wants me to help collect clothes for the detainees,” he said with his mouth full of toast. “Great-aunt Mary telephoned. You’re to ring her back.”

  “But not Andrews?”

  “No.”

  “Has the visual been restored?”

  “No.”

  “Wear your regulation face mask,” Dunworthy called after him, “and your muffler!”

  He rang up Mary and waited impatiently for nearly five minutes until she came to the telephone.

  “James?” Mary’s voice said. “It’s Badri. He’s asking for you.”

  “He’s better, then?”

  “No. His fever’s still very high, and he’s become quite agitated, keeps calling your name, insists he has something to tell you. He’s working himself into a very bad state. If you could come and speak with him, it might calm him down.”

  “Has he said anything about the plague?” he asked.

  “The plague?” she said, looking annoyed. “Don’t tell me you’ve been infected by these ridiculous rumors that are flying about, James—that it’s cholera, that it’s breakbone fever, that it’s a recurrence of the Pandemic—”

  “No,” Dunworthy said. “It’s Badri. Last night he said, ‘It killed half of Europe,’ and ‘It was the rats.’ ”

  “He’s delirious, James. It’s the fever. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She’s right, he told himself. The detainee ranted on about Indians with bows and arrows, and you didn’t begin looking for Sioux warriors. She had conjured up too much birthday cake as an explanation for her being ill, and Badri had conjured up the plague. It didn’t mean anything.

  Nevertheless, he said he would be there immediately and went to find Finch. Andrews hadn’t specified what time he would call, but Dunworthy couldn’t risk leaving the phone unattended. He wished he’d made Colin stay while he spoke to Mary.

  Finch would very likely be in hall, guarding the bacon with his life. He took the receiver off the hook so the phone would sound engaged and went across the quad to the hall.

  Ms. Taylor met him at the door. “I was just coming to look for you,” she said. “I heard some of the detainees came down with the virus last night.”

  “Yes,” he said, scanning the hall for Finch.

  “Oh, dear. So I suppose we’ve all been exposed.”

  He couldn’t see Finch anywhere.

  “How long is the incubation period?” Ms. Taylor asked.

  “Twelve to forty-eight hours,” he said. He craned his neck, trying to see over the heads of the detainees.

  “That’s awful,” Ms. Taylor said. “What if one of us comes down with it in the middle of the peal? We’re Traditional, you know, not Council. The rules are very explicit.”

  He wondered why Traditional, whatever that might be, had deemed it necessary to have rules concerning change ringers infected with influenza.

  “Rule Three,” Ms. Taylor said. “ ‘Every man must stick to his bell without interruption.’ It isn’t as if we can put somebody else in halfway through if one of us suddenly keels over. And it would ruin the rhythm.”

  He had a sudden image of one of the bell ringers in her white gloves collapsing and being kicked out of the way so as not to disrupt the rhythm.

  “Aren’t there any warning symptoms?” Ms. Taylor asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “That paper the NHS sent around said disorientation, fever, and headache, but that isn’t any good. The bells always give us headaches.”

  I can imagine, he thought, looking for William Gaddson or one of the other undergraduates he could get to listen for the phone.

  “If we were Council, of course, it wouldn’t matter. They let people substitute right and left. During a peal of Tittum Bob Maxims at York, they had nineteen ringers. Nineteen! I don’t see how they can even call it a peal.”

  None of his undergraduates appeared to be in hall, Finch had no doubt barricaded himself in the buttery, and Colin was long gone. “Are you still in need of a practice room?” he asked Ms. Taylor.

  “Yes, unless one of us comes down with this thing. Of course, we could do Stedmans, but that would hardly be the same thing, would it?”

  “I’ll let you use my sitting room if you will answer the telephone and take down any messages for me. I am expecting an important trunk—long-distance call—so it’s essential that someone be in the room at all times.”

  He led her back to his rooms.

  “Oh, it’s not very big, is it?” she said. “I’m not sure there’s room to work on our raising. Can we move the furniture around?”

  “You may do anything you like, so long as you answer the telephone and take down any messages. I’m expecting a call from Mr. Andrews. Tell him he doesn’t need clearance to enter the quarantine area. Tell him to go straight to Brasenose and I’ll meet him there.”

  “Well, all right, I guess,” she said as if she were doing him a favor. “At least it’s better than that drafty cafeteria.”

  He left her rearranging furniture, not at all convinced that it was a good idea to entrust her with this, and hurried off to see Badri. He had something to tell him. It killed them all. Half of Europe.

  The rain had subsided to little more than a fine mist, and the anti-EC picketers were gathered in force in front of the Infirmary. They had been joined by a number of boys Colin’s age wearing black face plasters and shouting, “Let my people go!”

  One of them grabbed Dunworthy’s arm. “The government’s got no right to keep you here against your will,” he said, thrusting his striped face up to Dunworthy’s face mask.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Dunworthy said. “Do you want to start another pandemic?”

  The boy let go of his arm, looking confused, and Dunworthy escaped inside.

  Casualties was full of patients on stretcher trolleys, and there was one standing next to the elevator. An imposing-looking nurse in voluminous SPG’s was standing next to it, reading something to the patient from a polythene-wrapped book.

  “ ‘Whoever perished, being innocent?’ ” she said, and he realized with dismay that it wasn’t a nurse. It was Mrs. Gaddson.

  “ ‘Or where were the righteous cut off?’ ” she recited.

  She stopped and thumbed through the thin pages of the Bible, looking for another cheering passage, and he ducked down the side corridor and into a stairwell, eternally grateful to the NHS for issuing face masks.

  “ ‘The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption,’ ” she intoned, her voice resounding through the corridor as he fled, “ ‘and with a fever, and with an inflammation.’ ”

  And He shall smite thee with Mrs. Gaddson, he thought, and she shall read you Scriptures to keep your morale up.

  He went up the stairs to Isolation, which had now apparently taken over most of the first floor.

  “Here you are,” the nurse said. It was the pretty blond student nurse again. He wondered if he should warn her about Mrs. Gaddson.

  “I’d nearly given you up,” she said. “He’s been calling for you all morning.” She handed him a set of SPG’s, and he put them on and followed her in.

  “He was frantic for you half an hour ago,” she whispered, “kept insisting he had something to tell you. He’s a bit better now.”

  He looked, in fact, considerably better. He had lost the dark, frightening flush, and though he was still a bit pale under his brown skin, he looked almost like his old self. He was half sitting against several pillows, his knees up, and his hands lying lightly on them, the fingers curved. His eyes were closed.

  “Badri,” the nurse said, putting her imperm-gloved hand on his shoulder and bending close to him. “Mr. Dunworthy’s here.”

  He opened his eyes. “Mr. Dunworthy?”

  “Yes.” She nodded across the bed, indicating him. “I told you he’d come.”

  Badri sat up straighter against the
pillows, but he didn’t look at Dunworthy. He looked intently ahead.

  “I’m here, Badri,” Dunworthy said, moving forward so he was in his line of vision. “What was it you wanted to tell me?”

  Badri continued to look straight ahead and his hands began moving restlessly on his knees. Dunworthy glanced at the nurse.

  “He’s been doing that,” she said. “I think he’s typing.” She looked at the screens and went out.

  He was typing. His wrists rested on his knees, and his fingers tapped the blanket in a complex sequence. His eyes stared at something in front of him—a screen?—and after a moment he frowned. “That can’t be right,” he said and began typing rapidly.

  “What is it, Badri?” Dunworthy said. “What’s wrong?”

  “There must be an error,” Badri said. He leaned slightly sideways and said, “Give me a line-by-line on the TAA.”

  He was speaking into the console’s ear, Dunworthy realized. He’s reading the fix, he thought. “What can’t be right, Badri?”

  “The slippage,” Badri said, his eyes fixed on the imaginary screen. “Readout check,” he said into the ear. “That can’t be right.”

  “What’s wrong with the slippage?” Dunworthy asked. “Was there more slippage than you expected?”

  Badri didn’t answer. He typed for a moment, paused, watching the screen, and began typing frantically.

  “How much slippage was there? Badri?” Dunworthy said.

  He typed for a full minute and then stopped and looked up at Dunworthy. “So worried,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Worried over what, Badri?” Dunworthy said.

  Badri suddenly flung the blanket back and grabbed for the bed rails. “I have to find Mr. Dunworthy,” he said. He yanked at his cannula, pulling at the tape.

  The screens behind him went wild, spiking crazily and beeping. Somewhere outside an alarm went off.

  “You mustn’t do that,” Dunworthy said, reaching across the bed to stop him.

  “He’s at the pub,” Badri said, ripping at the tape.

  The screens went abruptly flatline. “Disconnect,” a computer voice said. “Disconnect.”