The Plague Tales

by Ann Benson

  Ted smiled. Oh, yes, very sure, he thought to himself, relief flooding through him. “It’ll mean a slight delay in our own work, but things have pretty much come to a standstill anyway, what with the funeral and all coming up. Most of the staff will want to attend. I don’t see where a few hours are going to make much of a difference. And there’s another problem. I went to the freezer for the sample of P. coli while I was waiting for you this morning, and unfortunately it’s been destroyed. The tube had developed some sort of crack and Frank disposed of it. He left a disposal marker in the slot. I haven’t found any record of him ordering a replacement before he died.”

  Looking very pleased, Janie said, “Well, that settles it.” She turned to Bruce. “How can I reach you?”

  He took his wallet from the back pocket of his pants and fished around in it for a moment, finally producing a card, which he handed to Janie. “Here’s my number. Why don’t you give me yours too.”

  From her purse she extracted a small notepad and wrote the hotel number on it. “There’s voice mail. If I’m not in, just leave me a message. I’ll get right back to you, I promise.”

  “Okay.” He looked at Ted again. “I’ll get right on this.” He glanced at his watch. “Shall we meet back here later, maybe two-thirty or so?”

  Ted nodded.

  Janie said, “We’re just going to write down the tag numbers on the samples we’ve got, then we’ll have to go back to the hotel to compare them to the list. I didn’t think to bring it with me.”

  “Good enough. I’ll talk to you later, then.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Janie said.

  Before leaving, he said, “It was good to see you again after all this time.”

  Janie smiled. “Yeah, it was.”

  As he headed back to his office, Bruce contemplated the morning’s strange and confusing events. When he finished the mental replay of his chance meeting with Janie, he realized that a far more interesting story was taking shape, and he’d nearly missed it in all the excitement. Why isn’t Ted foaming at the mouth? he wondered. This kind of screwup ordinarily sent Ted on a rampage. He wanted to say to the obvious imposter he’d left back in the lab, Who are you and what have you done with Ted?

  Ted was sitting down near the microscope workstation, the scene of his earlier fiasco, waiting for the two women to leave so he could complete his cleanup. He was still trying to compose himself when Caroline returned from the bank of storage units. “One more thing,” she said, “—I almost forgot. I have to get Gertrude.”

  “Gertrude?” Ted asked.

  Caroline turned toward the microscope and extracted a small plastic bag from her purse. “The microbe. The one Frank found on the fabric. We named it after Janie’s grandmother.”

  Ted leapt up off his chair and reached in her direction, his outstretched hands ready to stop her from touching the fabric. “Here, let me help you with that.…” He hoped his voice would not give away his growing panic. He tried to move deliberately, not desperately, toward her. But he was not quick enough; she already had it firmly in hand. There was nothing he could do to stop her.

  “Thanks, but I can manage,” she told him. “I’ll just seal it up in this bag and store it in the unit with the tubes.” She smiled at him. “Hopefully no one will move it on us.”

  I will never get used to independent women, he swore to himself. He swallowed hard and said nothing, but watched her carefully and noted exactly where she put the fabric in the storage unit. He would return later to retrieve it.

  He was careful to maintain a veneer of perfect politeness, and considering the volume of adrenaline pumping through his veins, he did quite well. He sat down again and closed his eyes, hoping to open them again in a few minutes to find this nightmare over. He didn’t think it likely.

  “It looks so puny in there,” Janie said. Placed flat on the plastic-coated wire rack in front of the stacked tubes of dirt, it seemed almost pitifully lost. “Maybe we ought to take that with us now,” she said. “We don’t need to be losing anything else today.”

  Caroline looked back at the unit. “You’re right,” she said, and tucked the sealed plastic bag into her purse.

  Just before leaving the Institute that night, Ted slipped back into the lab to retrieve the fabric. He would burn it, and be done with it, and its potential to cause disaster would be forever neutralized. If they asked where it had gone, he’d play dumb, and he wouldn’t give them the opportunity to search as they’d done before. But when he opened the storage unit, the prize was not immediately visible in the section where he’d seen Caroline place it. He pawed anxiously through an assortment of nearby containers and boxes, but couldn’t find it. After a few minutes he gave up and arranged the items back in their original positions, not wanting to leave a visible path of disturbance.

  He wondered if Caroline had moved it, or if he had remembered incorrectly. He had been in a panic when he watched Caroline place the small plastic bag in the unit; perhaps his memory of what had transpired was untrustworthy. Well, no matter, he thought. They would be back, and he would make sure he was informed of their arrival. Perhaps he would drop in casually while they worked, to socialize, then turn the conversation toward their work and ask to see that item. Then he wouldn’t let it out of his sight.

  Seven

  This was to be the last day of their long travels, so the Spaniard and the Jew rose from their comfortable beds at the inn in Montpellier and rode out energetically well before dawn. Both were eager to leave the ancient monastic town and complete the journey to Avignon.

  They stopped in a small farming village to water their horses after covering a good amount of distance. The sun was not yet high enough in the sky to burn off the dampness of the night before, and they were enveloped in rolling clouds of fine gray mist. As they stood at the trough, removing what they could of the road’s grit, Alejandro splashed water on his face and said, “I will be glad to live through a day when I am not required to rise up from a soft bed and settle my haunches on a hard saddle.”

  “Do not complain, my friend,” Hernandez said, chuckling. “A less fortunate man might have been forced to walk to Avignon.”

  “Ah, but were I truly fortunate, I would not have made the journey at all.”

  “You tempt fate, my friend, with such a declaration. There are those who think there is some sort of divine plan to the course of a man’s life. I am inclined to agree. You do not know what awaits you at the end of this road; perhaps it will be a pleasant situation. Perhaps you will find a means to understand that you are not unfortunate. For the meantime, be thankful that you can ride.”

  Their attention was drawn to the sound of groaning wheels. Out of the mist, a short distance away, emerged a mule-drawn cart, creaking under the weight of its burden.

  “Madre de Dios,” Hernandez whispered, and made the sign of the cross.

  They exchanged shocked glances. Hernandez pointed toward the cart and said, “Now, a truly unfortunate man might have traveled thus.”

  As the cart emerged slowly from the mist, Alejandro began to see the shape of hands and feet protruding from its sides. A man in a hooded black robe, crop in hand, walked before the mule, turning every few steps to whip the reticent animal, who seemed intent on waking the passengers in the cart with his pathetic braying.

  The physician felt his curiosity rising. At last! he said to himself silently. Now I will see for myself if the tales we have heard are true.

  As the cart came closer, his eyes were glued to it. “See how ragged and filthy they all are,” he said to Hernandez. “They must all have been poor in life. And look!” he said, pointing. “Not a one wears shoes!”

  “One cannot infer poverty from a lack of shoes,” Hernandez said, his tone cynical. “Most likely the thieves are the poor ones, looking for a bit of comfort for their feet.” He crossed himself again, the second such unusual gesture for a man who was customarily so lax about observing his religion. “God grant that I may never kn
ow such depravity.”

  Alejandro noticed the protective ritual and said, “You are far too resourceful for that fate to befall you.”

  Hernandez gazed somberly in the direction of the cart. “ ’Tis true, I think, and may the Virgin be praised,” he said, his voice low. “But I would gladly give up my fortunes for the certainty that I will not end up like those poor souls.”

  No such certainty may be had, Alejandro thought to himself. We will all be equal before this scourge. He started to move closer to the cart, and Hernandez immediately began to protest.

  Ignoring his escort’s outcries, Alejandro edged closer still, until he was as near as his own fear would allow him to go. An obscene stink emanated from the cart and he was forced to retreat a few steps. He turned his head away, nearly retching, and gulped in several deep breaths of fresh air. When he approached the cart again, he breathed through the fabric of his shirtsleeve.

  Inside the death cart he saw the twisted bodies of women and children and old men. They were tall and short and fair and swarthy, every variety of humanity he could conceive of. Hernandez is right, he thought to himself. They were not all poor. Some showed signs of leftover plumpness, and might have been prosperous in life; others were as skinny as broomsticks and weathered, a sure sign that they had labored long and hard for their daily bread before meeting an ignominious end. He peered curiously at the bodies, looking closely at the swollen necks and bloated fingers of the unfortunate victims, and decided that none of the tales he had heard were exaggerations.

  “Where will they be taken?” he said to the driver.

  The man looked up at this questioner, and stared with eyes so full of fatigue that they were nearly as dead looking as those of his gruesome passengers. A chill of foreboding passed unbidden through Alejandro’s spine.

  “They will be taken to a field north of town, where the priest will say a funeral mass over all the dead together. God grant that they did not die unshriven!”

  And though he did not really understand what it meant to be unshriven, Alejandro nodded, implying sympathy for the plight of these unshriven dead, hoping privately that the Christian God did not determine the worth of the soul by judging the appearance of the corpse. He would ask Hernandez to explain that condition to him later. He rejoined his escort at the trough, shivering slightly, disturbed by the cart’s grim cargo, and continued his ablutions.

  The majestic arches of the grand bridge of Saint-Bénézet curved gracefully over the Rhône, the beautiful stonework softly reflected in the shimmer of the water. Alejandro caught his breath when it came into view. They had been passing through a stand of trees skirting a bend in the road, when the bridge suddenly appeared as if out of nowhere, massive and magnificent. Over the river lay the city of Avignon, and high on a hill, keeping watch, stood the magnificent papal palace. And after all he had been through—his capture, the branding, the separation from his family, and the murder—Alejandro was still as excited as a child to be there, for Avignon was the place where his new life would begin.

  The towers of the papal palace reached up majestically, great white arms, supplicant, straining toward heaven itself. The dazzling white walls gleamed in the afternoon sun, blinding the observer to the sights around it. Alejandro thought it was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. Scaffolding ran up one of the walls, but Alejandro saw that it was unoccupied. “Do you find it strange, Hernandez,” he said, “that there are no workmen on the ladders on such a fine day as this?”

  Hernandez looked at the palace. “You are right,” he said. “There are no stonemasons in sight. Perhaps Avignon has not escaped this plague either.”

  As they rode into the city, they saw all around them evidence that Avignon had not, in fact, escaped. People rushed swiftly past them, as if some urgent business compelled them onward. The citizens of Avignon showed none of the open friendliness Alejandro had hoped he would find, but instead skulked by, avoiding contact with the riders, distrust and outright hostility in their expressions. Bodies lay on the ground in front of nearly every third house they passed, awaiting the cart. The carts themselves passed by in rapid succession, like some macabre caravan on its way to the burial grounds. Always they were full, their wooden wheels bowing under the weight.

  “Wherever will all these dead be buried?” Alejandro wondered aloud as another cart passed.

  “More important, who will bury them?” Hernandez responded. “This scourge takes so many! By all the gods, Physician, I fear it will take me too! How are we to avoid it?”

  “I do not know,” he said, sounding discouraged, then sighed. “I do not know.”

  “Are you certain that this sign says ‘Rooms to Let?” Hernandez asked. “Perhaps you have forgotten the correct words.…”

  “I have not forgotten,” Alejandro replied. The sound of the slamming door was still ringing in his ears. The widow householder had refused them entry, saying that she no longer trusted anyone to be plague free. She had told them to seek out another house not far away in their quest for lodging, so the tired pair turned in unison and stepped down the narrow stairs back onto the cobblestone street.

  The second widow, an elderly woman whose husband had succumbed to the affliction just three days earlier, was only too glad to have them, for she was all alone and quite frightened, with no relatives to whom she might turn for aid. But she needed income beyond the mere letting of rooms, for the death of her husband had left her without means. She offered to rent her house to Alejandro, and to act as his housekeeper in return for a small payment and his promise to help her with things an old woman could not accomplish by herself.

  It seemed a good arrangement to both, but before consummating the agreement, Alejandro took Hernandez aside, and asked his opinion of the widow’s proposal.

  The Spaniard approved. “A man is always fortunate to have a woman to look after him,” he said, “even if she does not do so without payment.” He glanced back at the widow, who awaited their word. “At least this one will not waste your time in trying to drag you to the altar.”

  After a brief round of self-congratulation for their fortunate discovery, Hernandez said, “I will take our horses for stabling, then seek out the countinghouse to finalize my contract with your father. I shall return before the dinner hour, and then we shall see if this widow’s services are a worthy investment. We shall raise our glasses to your new home and your continued good fortune.”

  Alejandro brought his few things inside the small house. It was small but well appointed with sturdy, serviceable furniture. The packed dirt floors of the ground floor were well swept and level; there was a long, narrow table with benches on either side, a chair, and a small sleeping pallet. Upstairs, he found two separate sleeping chambers, one of which he thought, judging by the size of the bed, might have been occupied once by a child. The other sleeping chamber was large and commodious and, being in the front of the house, had a window. The straw bed was raised off the floor. On closer inspection he found the straw fresh and relatively insect free, and the linens, while obviously old, were in good condition and very clean. He set his own belongings down in the smaller room, with the intent of allowing the massive Hernandez the bigger bed while he remained in Avignon. He would occupy it himself, as master of this house, when Hernandez left.

  Once settled, Alejandro set out to investigate Avignon, hoping to locate a suitable site for his surgery. Not far from his new abode he came upon an apothecary shop, and inquired of the chemist if there were any doctors practicing in this area.

  “At one time there were two physicians and one barber serving the people of this section,” the man told him. “But all have died of the same savage malady that killed their patients, and I fear you will find no help from them.”

  Alejandro explained that he himself was a physician, and was not in need of a physician’s services. “I have recently come to Avignon, and I await the arrival of my family. I am interested in rooms to let for the purpose of setting up my surgery.”r />
  “Then I suggest you inquire of Dr. Selig’s widow. His rooms were two blocks east of here, down a narrow street next to the shoemaker’s shop. She might be willing to sell his equipment as well.” He took on a sad look. “There are young ones to feed.”

  The apothecary leaned closer, as if to convey a great secret. “The good doctor and I had an arrangement regarding his patients. He would send them to me if his treatments failed to effect a cure, and I would prescribe additional medications and potions in a further attempt to aid the patient.”

  Alejandro’s interest was piqued. “Have you had any luck in treating this pestilence?”

  “Bah!” He laughed. “None of our treatments has made a bit of difference. No one can determine the source of the contagion! I have little success in treating even the symptoms.” Again, the chemist leaned in, confiding, “There is talk of Jews poisoning the wells. I myself am inclined to believe it.”

  Alejandro was stunned, but tried to conceal it. This was not the first time he had heard this ridiculous accusation. Now that his appearance was not that of a traditional Jew, it seemed that people felt free to speak ill of his people in his presence. Clutching the collar of his shirt more tightly to his chest, he played along with the man, whispering, “Dreadful! What can be done about it?”

  “Oh, indeed, plenty is being done already! In Aries three Jewesses were burned at the stake after a priest discovered empty vials in their homes. They had been seen at the well just hours before. Now the townspeople are in a great quandary about their water—some say the well is fine; others refuse to use it, saying that to die of thirst would be preferable to risking death by this plague.”

  Alejandro said, with more boldness than he felt, “I think there may be some wisdom in that preference, but I do not think this pest originates in water. We all drink water, and yet many of us live; and would not all the citizens of Aries by now have succumbed completely, to the very last one, if the poison were in the well? It seems only logical that we need not fear the water.”