The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  “Your son will be ill-pleased to find we have disobeyed him. He bade us, and Gawyn, keep to the manor till he come.”

  She still sounded furious, and as she lowered her hand, she clenched it into a fist, as if she would have liked to box Imeyne’s ears the way she does Maisry’s. But the color had come back in her cheeks as soon as Imeyne said, “Cirencestre,” and I think she was at least a little relieved.

  “Certes, things go not so ill in Bath that Gawyn could not go thence without harm,” Imeyne said, but it’s obvious Eliwys doesn’t think he can. Is she afraid he’d ride into a trap or that he might lead Lord Guillaume’s enemies here? And are things going so “ill” that Guillaume can’t quit Bath?

  Perhaps all three. Eliwys has been to the door to look out into the rain at least a dozen times this morning, and she’s in as bad a temper as Rosemund was in the woods. Just now she asked Imeyne if she was certain the archdeacon was at Cirencestre. She’s obviously worried that if he wasn’t, Gawyn will have taken the message into Bath himself.

  Her fear has infected everyone. Lady Imeyne has slunk off into a corner with her reliquary to pray, Agnes whines, and Rosemund sits with her embroidery in her lap, staring blindly at it.

  (Break)

  I took Agnes to Father Roche this afternoon. Her knee was much worse. She couldn’t walk at all, and there was what looked like the beginning of a red streak above it. I couldn’t tell for certain—the entire knee is red and swollen—but I was afraid to wait.

  There was no cure for blood poisoning in 1320, and it’s my fault her knee is infected. If I hadn’t insisted on going to look for the drop, she wouldn’t have fallen. I know the paradoxes aren’t supposed to let my presence here have any effect on what happens to the contemps, but I couldn’t take that chance. I wasn’t supposed to be able to catch anything either.

  So when Imeyne went up to the loft, I carried Agnes over to the church to ask him to treat her. It was pouring by the time we got there, but Agnes wasn’t whining over getting wet, and that frightened me more than the red streak.

  The church was dark and smelled musty. I could hear Father Roche’s voice from the front of the church, and it sounded like he was talking to someone. “Lord Guillaume has still not arrived from Bath. I fear for his safety,” he said.

  I thought perhaps Gawyn had come back, and I wanted to hear what they said about the trial, so I didn’t go forward. I stood there with Agnes in my arms and listened.

  “It has rained these two days,” Roche said, “and there is a bitter wind from the west. We have had to bring the sheep in from the fields.”

  After a minute of peering into the dark nave, straining to see, I finally made him out. He was on his knees in front of the rood screen, his big hands folded together in prayer.

  “The steward’s babe has a colic on the stomach and cannot keep his milk down. Tabord the cottar fares ill.”

  He wasn’t praying in Latin, and there was none of the priest at Holy Re-Formed’s singsong chanting or the vicar’s oratory in his voice. He sounded businesslike and matter-of-fact, the way I sound now, talking to you.

  God was supposed to be very real to the contemps in the 1300s, more vivid than the physical world they inhabited. “You do but go home again,” Father Roche told me when I was dying, and that’s what the contemps are supposed to have believed—that the life of the body is illusory and unimportant, and the real life is that of the eternal soul, as if they were only visiting life the way I am visiting this century, but I haven’t seen much evidence of it. Eliwys dutifully murmurs her aves at vespers and matins and then rises and brushes off her kirtle as if her prayers had nothing to do with her worries over her husband or the girls or Gawyn. And Imeyne, for all her reliquary and her Book of Hours, is concerned only about her social standing. I’d seen no evidence that God was real at all to them till I stood there in the damp church, listening to Father Roche.

  I wonder if he sees God and heaven as clearly as I can see you and Oxford, the rain falling in the quad and your spectacles steaming up so you have to take them off and polish them on your muffler. I wonder if they seem as close as you do, and as difficult to get to.

  “Preserve our souls from evil and bring us safely into heaven,” Roche said, and as if that were a cue, Agnes sat up in my arms and said, “I want Father Roche.”

  Father Roche stood up and started toward us. “What is it? Who is there?”

  “It is Lady Katherine,” I said. “I have brought Agnes. Her knee is—” What? Infected? “I would have you look at her knee.”

  He tried to look at it, but it was too dark in the church, so he carried her over to his house. It was scarcely lighter there. His house is not much larger than the hut I took shelter in, and no higher. He had to stoop the whole time we were there to keep from bumping his head against the rafters.

  He opened the shutter on the only window, which let the rain blow in, and then lit a rushlight and set Agnes on a crude wooden table. He untied the bandage, and she flinched away from him.

  “Sit you still, Agnus, ” he told her, “and I will tell you how Christ came to earth from far heaven.”

  “On Christmas Day,” Agnes said.

  Roche felt around the wound, poking at the swollen parts, talking steadily. “ ‘And the shepherds stood afraid, for they knew not what this glittering light was. And sounds they heard, as of bells rung in heaven. But they beheld it was God’s angel come down to them.’ ”

  Agnes had screamed and pushed my hands away when I tried to touch her knee, but she let Roche prod the red area with his huge fingers. There was definitely the beginning of a red streak. Roche touched it gently and brought the rushlight closer.

  “ ‘And there came from a far land,’ ” he said, squinting at it, “ ‘three kings bearing gifts.’ ” He touched the red streak again, gingerly, and then folded his hands together, as if he were going to pray, and I thought, Don’t pray. Do something.

  He lowered his hands and looked across at me. “I fear the wound is poisoned,” he said. “I will make an infusion of hyssop to draw the venom out.” He went over to the hearth, stirred up a few lukewarm-looking coals, and poured water into an iron pot from a bucket.

  The bucket was dirty, the pot was dirty, the hands he’d felt Agnes’s wound with were dirty, and, standing there, watching him set the pot on the fire and dig into a dirty bag, I was sorry I’d come. He wasn’t any better than Imeyne. An infusion of leaves and seeds wouldn’t cure blood poisoning any more than one of Imeyne’s poultices, and his prayers wouldn’t help either, even if he did talk to God as if He were really there.

  I almost said, “Is that all you can do?” and then realized I was expecting the impossible. The cure for infection was penicillin, T-cell enchancement, antiseptics, none of which he had in his burlap bag.

  I remember Mr. Gilchrist talking about mediaeval doctors in one of his lectures. He talked about what fools they were for bleeding people and treating them with arsenic and goat’s urine during the Black Death. But what did he expect them to do? They didn’t have analogues or antimicrobials. They didn’t even know what caused it. Standing there, crumbling dried petals and leaves between his dirty fingers, Father Roche was doing the best he could.

  “Do you have wine?” I asked him. “Old wine?”

  There’s scarcely any alcohol in the small ale and not much more in their wine, but the longer it’s stood, the higher the alcoholic content, and alcohol is an antiseptic.

  “I have remembered me that old wine poured into a wound may sometimes stop infections,” I said.

  He didn’t ask me what “infection” was or how I was able to remember that when I supposedly can’t remember anything else. He went immediately across to the church and got an earthenware bottle full of strong-smelling wine, and I poured it onto the bandage and washed the wound with it.

  I brought the bottle home with me. I’ve hidden it under the bed in Rosemund’s bower (in case it’s part of the sacramental wine—that would be all Ime
yne would need, she’d have Roche burned for a heretic) so I can keep cleaning it. Before she went to bed, I poured some straight on.

  19

  It rained till Christmas Eve, a hard, wintry rain that came through the smoke vent in the roof and made the fire hiss and smoke.

  Kivrin poured wine on Agnes’s knee at every chance she got, and by the afternoon of the twenty-third it looked a little better. It was still swollen but the red streak was-gone. Kivrin ran across to the church, holding her cloak over her head, to tell Father Roche, but he wasn’t there.

  Neither Imeyne nor Eliwys had noticed Agnes’s knee was hurt. They were trying frantically to get ready for Sir Bloet’s family, if they were coming, cleaning the loft room so the women could sleep there, strewing rose petals over the rushes in the hall, baking an amazing assortment of manchets, puddings, and pies, including a grotesque one in the shape of the Christ child in the manger, with braided pastry for swaddling clothes.

  In the afternoon Father Roche came to the manor, drenched and shivering. He had gone out in the freezing rain to fetch ivy for the hall. Imeyne wasn’t there—she was in the kitchen cooking the Christ child—and Kivrin made Roche come in and dry his clothes by the fire.

  She called for Maisry, and when she didn’t come went out across the courtyard to the kitchen and fetched him a cup of hot ale. When she returned with it, Maisry was on the bench beside Roche, holding her tangled, filthy hair back with her hand, and Roche was putting goose grease on her ear. As soon as she saw Kivrin she clapped her hand to her ear, probably undoing all the good of Roche’s treatment, and scuttled out.

  “Agnes’s knee is better,” Kivrin told him. “The swelling has gone down, and a new scab is forming.”

  He didn’t seem surprised, and she wondered if she’d been mistaken, if it hadn’t been blood poisoning at all.

  During the night the rain turned to snow. “They will not come,” Lady Eliwys said the next morning, sounding relieved.

  Kivrin had to agree with her. It had snowed nearly thirty centimeters in the night, and it was still coming down steadily. Even Imeyne seemed resigned to their not coming, though she kept on with the preparations, bringing down pewter trenchers from the loft and shouting for Maisry.

  Around noon the snow stopped abruptly, and by two it had begun to clear, and Eliwys ordered everyone into their good clothes. Kivrin dressed the girls, surprised at the fanciness of their silk shifts. Agnes had a dark red velvet kirtle to wear over hers and her silver buckle, and Rosemund’s leaf-green kirtle had long split sleeves and a low bodice that showed the embroidery on her yellow shift. Nothing had been said to Kivrin about what she should wear, but after she had taken the girls’ hair out of braids and brushed it over their shoulders, Agnes said, “You must put on your blue,” and got her dress out of the chest at the foot of the bed. It looked less out of place among the girls’ finery, but the weave was still too fine, the color too blue.

  She didn’t know what she should do about her hair. Unmarried girls wore their hair unbound on festive occasions, held back by a fillet or a ribbon, but her hair was too short for that, and only married women covered their hair. She couldn’t just leave it uncovered—the chopped-off hair looked terrible.

  Apparently Eliwys agreed. When Kivrin brought the girls back downstairs, she bit her lip and sent Maisry up to the loft room to fetch a thin, nearly transparent veil that she fastened with Kivrin’s fillet halfway back on her head so that her front hair showed, but the ragged cut ends were hidden.

  Eliwys’s nervousness seemed to have returned with the improving weather. She started when Maisry came in from outside and then cuffed her for getting mud on the floor. She suddenly thought of a dozen things that weren’t ready and found fault with everyone. When Lady Imeyne said for the dozenth time, “If we had gone to Courcy …” Eliwys nearly snapped her head off.

  Kivrin had thought it was a bad idea to dress Agnes before the last possible minute, and by midafternoon the little girl’s, embroidered sleeves were grubby and she had spilled flour all down one side of the velvet skirt.

  By late afternoon Gawyn had still not returned, everyone’s nerves were at the snapping point, and Maisry’s ears were bright red. When Lady Imeyne told Kivrin to take six beeswax candles to Father Roche, she was delighted with the chance to get the girls out of the house.

  “Tell him they must last through both the masses,” Imeyne said irritably, “and poor masses will they be for our Lord’s birth. We should have gone to Courcy.”

  Kivrin got Agnes into her cloak and called Rosemund, and they walked across to the church. Roche wasn’t there. A large yellowish candle with bands marked on it sat in the middle of the altar, unlit. He would light it at sunset and use it to keep track of the hours till midnight. On his knees in the icy church.

  He wasn’t in his house either. Kivrin left the candles on the table. On the way back across the green, they saw Roche’s donkey by the lychgate licking the snow.

  “We forgot to feed the animals,” Agnes said.

  “Feed the animals?” Kivrin asked warily, thinking of their clothes.

  “It is Christmas Eve,” Agnes said. “Fed you not the animals at home?”

  “She remembers not,” Rosemund said. “On Christmas Eve we feed the animals in honor of our Lord that he was born in a stable.”

  “Do you remember naught of Christmas then?” Agnes asked.

  “A little,” Kivrin said, thinking of Oxford on Christmas Eve, of the shops in Carfax decorated with plastene evergreens and laser lights and jammed with last-minute shoppers, the High full of bicycles, and Magdalen Tower showing dimly through the snow.

  “First they ring the bells and then you get to eat and then mass and then the Yule log,” Agnes said.

  “You have turned it all about,” Rosemund said. “First we light the Yule log and then we go to mass.”

  “First the bells,” Agnes said, glaring at Rosemund, “and then mass.”

  They went to the barn for a sack of oats and some hay and took them across to the stable to feed the horses. Gringolet wasn’t among them, which meant Gawyn still wasn’t back. She must speak with him as soon as he returned. The rendezvous was less than a week away, and she still had no idea where the drop was. And with Lord Guillaume coming, everything might change.

  Eliwys had only put off doing anything with her till her husband came, and she had told the girls again this morning she expected him today. He might decide to take Kivrin to Oxford, or London, to look for her family, or Sir Bloet might offer to take her back with them to Courcy. She had to talk to him soon. But with guests here, it would be much easier to catch him alone, and in all the bustle and busyness of Christmas, she might even get him to show her the place.

  Kivrin dawdled as long as she could with the horses, hoping Gawyn might come back, but Agnes got bored and wanted to go feed corn to the chickens. Kivrin suggested they go feed the steward’s cow.

  “It is not our cow,” Rosemund snapped.

  “She helped me on that day when I was ill,” Kivrin said, thinking of how she had leaned against the cow’s bony back the day she tried to find the drop. “I would thank her for her kindness.”

  They went past the pen where the pigs had lately been, and Agnes said, “Poor piglings. I would have fed them an apple.”

  “The sky to the north darkens again,” Rosemund said. “I think they will not come.”

  “Ay, but they will,” Agnes said. “Sir Bloet has promised me a trinket.”

  The steward’s cow was in almost the same place Kivrin had found it, behind the second to the last hut, eating what was left of the same blackening pea vines.

  “Good Christmas, Lady Cow,” Agnes said, holding a handful of hay a good meter from the cow’s mouth.

  “They speak only at midnight,” Rosemund said.

  “I would come see them at midnight, Lady Kivrin,” Agnes said. The cow strained forward. Agnes edged back.

  “You cannot, simplehead,” Rosemund said. “You w
ill be at mass.”

  The cow extended her neck and took a large-hoofed step forward. Agnes retreated. Kivrin gave the cow a handful of hay.

  Agnes watched enviously. “If all are at mass, how do they know the animals speak?” she asked.

  Good point, Kivrin thought.

  “Father Roche says it is so,” Rosemund said.

  Agnes came out from behind Kivrin’s skirts and picked up another handful of hay. “What do they say?” She pointed it in the cow’s general direction.

  “They say you know not how to feed them,” Rosemund said.

  “They do not,” Agnes said, thrusting her hand forward. The cow lunged for the hay, mouth open, teeth bared. Agnes threw the handful of hay at it and ran behind Kivrin’s back. “They praise our blessed Lord. Father Roche said it.”

  There was a sound of horses. Agnes ran between the huts. “They are come!” she shouted, running back. “Sir Bloet is here. I saw them. They ride now through the gate.”

  Kivrin hastily scattered the rest of the hay in front of the cow. Rosemund took a handful of oats out of the bag and fed them to the cow, letting it nuzzle the grain out of her open hand.

  “Come, Rosemund!” Agnes said. “Sir Bloet is here!”

  Rosemund rubbed what was left of the oats off her hand. “I would feed Father Roche’s donkey,” she said, and started toward the church, not even glancing in the direction of the manor.

  “But they’ve come, Rosemund,” Agnes shouted, running after her. “Do you not want to see what they have brought?”

  Obviously not. Rosemund had reached the donkey, which had found a tuft of foxtail grass sticking out of the snow next to the lychgate. She bent and stuck a handful of oats under its muzzle, to its complete disinterest, and then stood there with her hand on its back, her long dark hair hiding her face.