The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  “Katherine,” Roche called.

  She turned, and he half ran up to her, his breath like a cloud around him.

  “What is it?” she demanded.

  He looked at her solemnly. “We must not give up hope,” he said.

  “Why not?” she burst out. “We’re up to eighty-five percent, and we haven’t even got started. The clerk is dying, Rosemund’s dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”

  “God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in His arms.”

  Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark. She put her hands up to her face.

  “She is in heaven, where the plague cannot reach her. And God’s love is ever with us,” he said, “and naught can separate us from it, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor things present—”

  “Nor things to come,” Kivrin said.

  “Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, gently, as if he were anointing her. “It was His love that sent you to help us.”

  She put her hand up to his where it rested on her shoulder and held it tightly. “We must help each other,” she said.

  They stood there like that for a long minute, and then Roche said, “I must go and ring the bell that Agnes’s soul may have safe passage.”

  She nodded and took her hand away. “I’ll go check on Rosemund and the others,” she said and went into the courtyard.

  Eliwys had said she needed to stay with Rosemund, but when Kivrin got back to the manor house, she was nowhere near her. She lay curled up on Agnes’s pallet, wrapped in her cloak, watching the door. “Perhaps his horse was stolen by those that would flee the pestilence,” she said, “and that is why he is so long in coming.”

  “Agnes is buried,” Kivrin said coldly, and went to check on Rosemund.

  She was awake. She looked up solemnly at Kivrin when she knelt by her and reached for Kivrin’s hand.

  “Oh, Rosemund,” Kivrin said, tears stinging her nose and eyes. “Sweetheart, how do you feel?”

  “Hungry,” Rosemund said. “Has my father come?”

  “Not yet,” Kivrin said, and it even seemed possible that he might. “I will fetch you some broth. You must rest until I come back. You have been very ill.”

  Rosemund obediently closed her eyes. They looked less sunken, though they still had dark bruises under them. “Where is Agnes?” she asked.

  Kivrin smoothed her dark, tangled hair back from her face. “She is sleeping.”

  “Good,” Rosemund said. “I would not have her shouting and playing. She is too noisy.”

  “I will fetch you the broth,” Kivrin said. She went over to Eliwys. “Lady Eliwys, I have good news,” she said eagerly. “Rosemund is awake.”

  Eliwys raised herself up on one elbow and looked at Rosemund, but apathetically, as if she were thinking of something else, and presently she lay down again.

  Kivrin, alarmed, put her hand to Eliwys’s forehead. It seemed warm, but Kivrin’s hands were still cold from outside, and she couldn’t tell for certain. “Are you ill?” she asked.

  “No,” Eliwys said, but still as if her mind were on something else. “What shall I tell him?”

  “You can tell him that Rosemund is better,” she said, and this time it seemed to get through to her. Eliwys got up and went over to Rosemund and sat down beside her. But by the time Kivrin came back from the kitchen with the broth, she had gone back to Agnes’s pallet and lay curled up under her fur-trimmed cloak.

  Rosemund was asleep, but it was not the frightening deathlike sleep of before. Her color was better, though her skin was still drawn tightly over her cheekbones.

  Eliwys was asleep, too, or feigning sleep, and it was just as well. While she had been in the kitchen, the clerk had crawled off his pallet and halfway over the barricade, and when Kivrin tried to haul him back, he struck out at her wildly. She had to go fetch Father Roche to help subdue him.

  His right eye had ulcerated, the plague eating its way out from inside, and the clerk clawed at it viciously with his hands. “Domine Jesu Christe, ” he swore, “fidelium defunctorium de poenis infermis. ” Save the souls of the faithful departed from the pains of hell.

  Yes, Kivrin prayed, wrestling with his clawed hands, save him now.

  She rummaged through Imeyne’s medical kit again, searching for something to kill the pain. There was no opium powder, and was the opium poppy even in England yet in 1348? She found a few papery orange scraps that looked a little like poppy petals and steeped them in hot water, but the clerk couldn’t drink it. His mouth was a horror of open sores, his teeth and tongue caked with dried blood.

  He doesn’t deserve this, Kivrin thought. Even if he did bring the plague here. Nobody deserves this. “Please,” she prayed, and wasn’t sure what she asked.

  Whatever it was, it was not granted. The clerk began to vomit a dark bile, streaked with blood, and it snowed for two days, and Eliwys grew steadily worse. It did not seem to be the plague. She had no buboes and she didn’t cough or vomit, and Kivrin wondered if it were illness or simply grief or guilt. “What shall I tell him?” Eliwys said over and over again. “He sent us here to keep us safe.”

  Kivrin felt her forehead. It was warm. They’re all going to get it, she thought. Lord Guillaume sent them here to keep them safe, but they’re all going to get it, one by one. I have to do something. But she couldn’t think of anything. The only protection from the plague was flight, but they had already fled here, and it had not protected them, and they couldn’t flee with Rosemund and Eliwys ill.

  But Rosemund’s getting stronger every day, Kivrin thought, and Eliwys doesn’t have the plague. It’s only a fever. Perhaps they have another estate where we could go. In the north.

  The plague was not in Yorkshire yet. She could see to it that they kept away from the other people on the roads, that they weren’t exposed.

  She asked Rosemund if they had a manor in Yorkshire. “Nay,” Rosemund said, sitting up against one of the benches. “In Dorset,” but that was of no use. The plague was already there. And Rosemund, though she was better, was still too weak to sit up for more than a few minutes. She could never ride a horse. If we had horses, Kivrin thought.

  “My father had a living in Surrey, also,” Rosemund said. “We stayed there when Agnes was born.” She looked at Kivrin. “Did Agnes die?”

  “Yes,” Kivrin said.

  She nodded as if she were not surprised. “I heard her screaming.”

  Kivrin couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  “My father is dead, isn’t he?”

  There was nothing to say to that either. He was almost certainly dead, and Gawyn, too. It had been eight days since he had left for Bath. Eliwys, still feverish, had said this morning, “He will come now that the storm is over,” but even she had not seemed to believe it.

  “He may yet come,” Kivrin said. “The snow may have delayed him.”

  The steward came in, carrying his spade, and stopped at the barricade in front of them. He had been coming in every day to look at his son, staring at him dumbly over the upturned table, but now he only glanced at him and then turned to stare at Kivrin and Rosemund, leaning on his spade.

  His cap and shoulders were covered with snow, and the blade of the spade was wet with it. He has been digging another grave, Kivrin thought. Whose?

  “Has someone died?” she asked.

  “Nay,” he said, and went on looking almost speculatively at Rosemund.

  Kivrin stood up. “Did you want something?”

  He looked at her blankly, as if he could not comprehend the question, and then back at Rosemund. “No,” he said, and picked up the spade and went out.

  “Goes he to dig Agnes’s grave?” Rosemund asked, looking after him.

  “No,” Kivrin said gently. “She is already buried in the churchyard”

  “Goes he then to dig mine?”

  “No,” Kivrin said,
appalled. “No! You’re not going to die. You’re getting better. You were very ill, but the worst is over. Now you must rest and try to sleep so you can get well.”

  Rosemund lay down obediently and closed her eyes, but after a minute she opened them again. “My father being dead, the crown will dispose of my dowry,” she said. “Think you Sir Bloet still lives?”

  I hope not, Kivrin thought, and then, poor child, has she been worrying about her marriage all this time? Poor little thing. His being dead is the only good to come out of the plague. If he is dead. “You mustn’t worry about him now. You must rest and get your strength back.”

  “The king will sometimes honor a previous betrothal,” Rosemund said, her thin hands plucking at the blanket, “if both parties be agreed.”

  You don’t have to agree to anything, Kivrin thought. He’s dead. The bishop killed them.

  “If they are not agreed, the king will bid me marry who he will,” Rosemund said, “and Sir Bloet at least is known to me.”

  No, Kivrin thought, and knew it was probably the best thing. Rosemund had been conjuring worse horrors than Sir Bloet, monsters and cutthroats, and Kivrin knew they existed.

  Rosemund would be sold off to some nobleman the king owed a debt to or whose allegiance he was trying to buy, one of the troublesome supporters of the Black Prince, perhaps, and taken God knew where to God knew what situation.

  There were worse things than a leering old man and a shrewish sister-in-law. Baron Gamier had kept his wife in chains for twenty years. The Count of Anjou had burned his alive. And Rosemund would have no family, no friends, to protect her, to tend her when she was ill.

  I’ll take her away, Kivrin thought suddenly, to somewhere where Bloet can’t find her and we’ll be safe from the plague.

  There was no, such place. It was already in Bath and Oxford, and moving south and east to London, and then Kent, north through the Midlands to Yorkshire and back across the Channel to Germany and the Low Countries. It had even gone to Norway, floating in on a ship of dead men. There was nowhere that was safe.

  “Is Gawyn here?” Rosemund asked, and she sounded like her mother, her grandmother. “I would have him ride to Courcy and tell Sir Bloet that I would come to him.”

  “Gawyn?” Eliwys said from her pallet. “Is he coming?”

  No, Kivrin thought. No one’s coming. Not even Mr. Dunworthy.

  It didn’t matter that she had missed the rendezvous. There would have been no one there. Because they didn’t know she was in 1348. If they knew, they would never have left her here.

  Something must have gone wrong with the net. Mr. Dunworthy had been worried about sending her so far back without parameter checks. “There could be unforeseen complications at that distance,” he’d said. Perhaps an unforeseen complication had garbled the fix or made them lose it, and they were looking for her in 1320. I’ve missed the rendezvous by nearly thirty years, she thought.

  “Gawyn?” Eliwys said again and tried to rise from her pallet.

  She could not. She was growing steadily worse, though she still had none of the marks of the plague. When it began to snow, she had said, relieved, “He will not come now until the storm is over,” and gotten up and gone to sit with Rosemund, but by the afternoon she had to lie down again, and her fever went steadily higher.

  Roche heard her confession, looking worn out. They were all worn out. If they sat down to rest, they were asleep in seconds. The steward, coming in to look at his son Lefric, had stood at the barricade, snoring, and Kivrin had dozed off while tending the fire and burned her hand badly.

  We can’t go on like this, she thought, watching Father Roche making the sign of the cross over Eliwys. He’ll die of exhaustion. He’ll come down with the plague.

  I have to get them away, she thought again. The plague didn’t reach everywhere. There were villages that were completely untouched. It had skipped over Poland and Bohemia, and there were parts of northern Scotland it had never reached.

  “Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis,” Father Roche said, his voice as comforting as it had been when she was dying, and she knew it was hopeless.

  He would never leave his parishioners. The history of the Black Death was full of stories of priests who had abandoned their people, who had refused to perform burials, who had locked themselves in their churches and monasteries or run away. She wondered now if those statistics were inaccurate, too.

  And even if she found some way to take them all, Eliwys, turning even now as she made her confession to look at the door, would insist on waiting for Gawyn, for her husband, to come, as she was convinced they would now that the snow had stopped.

  “Has Father Roche gone to meet him?” she asked Kivrin when Roche left to take the sacraments back to the church. “He will be here soon. He has no doubt gone first to Courcy to warn them of the plague, and it is only half a day’s journey from there.” She insisted that Kivrin move her pallet in front of the door.

  While Kivrin was rearranging the barricade to keep the draft from the door off her, the clerk cried out suddenly and went into convulsions. His whole body spasmed, as if he were being shocked, and his face become a terrible rictus, his ulcerated eye staring upward.

  “Don’t do this to him,” Kivrin shouted, trying to wedge the spoon from Rosemund’s broth between his teeth. “Hasn’t he been through enough?”

  His body jerked. “Stop it!” Kivrin sobbed. “Stop it!”

  His body abruptly slackened. She jammed the spoon between his teeth, and a little trickle of black slime came out of the side of his mouth.

  He’s dead, she thought, and could not believe it. She looked at him, his ulcerated eye half-open, his face swollen and blackened under the stubble of his beard. His fists were clenched at his sides. He did not look human, lying there, and Kivrin covered his face with a rough blanket, afraid that Rosemund might see him.

  “Is he dead?” Rosemund asked, sitting up curiously.

  “Yes,” Kivrin said. “Thank God.” She stood up. “I must go tell Father Roche.”

  “I would not have you leave me here alone,” Rosemund said.

  “Your mother is here,” Kivrin said, “and the steward’s son, and I will only be a few minutes.”

  “I am afraid,” Rosemund said.

  So am I, Kivrin thought, looking down at the coarse blanket. He was dead, but even that had not relieved his suffering. He looked still in anguish, still in terror, though his face no longer looked even human. The pains of hell.

  “Please do not leave me,” Rosemund said.

  “I must tell Father Roche,” Kivrin said, but she sat down between the clerk and Rosemund and waited until she was asleep before she went to find him.

  He wasn’t in the courtyard or the kitchen. The steward’s cow was in the passage, eating the hay from the bottom of the pigsty, and it ambled after her out onto the green.

  The steward was in the churchyard, digging a grave, his chest level with the snowy ground. He already knows, she thought, but that was impossible. Her heart began to pound.

  “Where is Father Roche?” she called, but the steward didn’t answer or look up. The cow came up beside her and lowed at her.

  “Go away,” she said, and ran across to the steward.

  The grave was not in the churchyard. It lay on the green, past the lychgate, and there were two other graves in a line next to it, the iron-hard dirt piled on the snow beside each one.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Whose graves are these?”

  The steward flung a spadeful of dirt onto the mound. The frozen clods made a clattering sound like stones.

  “Why do you dig three graves?” she said. “Who has died?” The cow nudged her shoulder with its horn. She twisted away from it. “Who has died?”

  The steward jabbed the spade into the iron-hard ground. “It is the last days, boy,” he said, stepping down hard on the blade, and Kivrin felt a jerk of fear, and then realized he hadn’t recognized her in her boy’s clot
hes.

  “It’s me, Katherine,” she said.

  He looked up and nodded. “It is the end of time,” he said. “Those who have not died, will.” He leaned forward, putting his whole weight on the spade.

  The cow tried to dig its head in under her arm.

  “Go away!” she said, and hit it on the nose. It backed away gingerly, skirting the graves, and Kivrin noticed they were not all the same size.

  The first was large, but the one next to it was no bigger than Agnes’s had been, and the one he stood in did not look much longer. I told Rosemund he wasn’t digging her grave, she thought, but he was.

  “You have no right to do this!” she said. “Your son and Rosemund are getting better. And Lady Eliwys is only tired and ill with grief. They aren’t going to die.”

  The steward looked up at her, his face as expressionless as when he had stood at the barricade, measuring Rosemund for her grave. “Father Roche says you were sent to help us, but how can you avail against the end of the world?” He stood down on the spade again. “You will have need of these graves. All, all will die.”

  The cow trotted over to the opposite side of the grave, its face on a level with the steward’s, and lowed in his face, but he did not seem to notice it.

  “You must not dig any more graves,” she said. “I forbid it.”

  He went on digging, as if he had not noticed her either.

  “They’re not going to die,” she said. “The Black Death only killed one third to one half of the contemps. We’ve already had our quota.”

  He went on digging.

  Eliwys died in the night. The steward had to lengthen Rosemund’s grave for Eliwys, and when they buried her, Kivrin saw he had started another for Rosemund.

  I must get them away from here, she thought, looking at the steward. He stood with the spade cradled against his shoulder, and as soon as he had filled in Eliwys’s grave, he started in on Rosemund’s grave again. I must get them away before they catch it.

  Because they were going to catch it. It lay in wait for them, in the bacilli on their clothes, on the bedding, in the very air they breathed. And if by some miracle they didn’t catch it from that, the plague would sweep through all of Oxfordshire in the spring, messengers and villagers and bishop’s envoys. They could not stay here.