The Physician's Tale

by Ann Benson

“For all this time I have believed them,” she said finally. “For seven years, I have lived with the notion that if I attempted to escape, they would kill my son.”

  After a pause, Chaucer said, “And now you are freed from that belief. It is only your own fate you need to consider.”

  Tears streaked down Kate’s cheeks. Chaucer reached up and brushed them away with his fingertips.

  “I shall investigate this passageway for you,” he offered.

  “Oh, Chaucer…would you? I shall kneel before you in gratitude!”

  He blushed slightly. “Save that for God, lady, who will determine if it all works out as we hope and pray it will. Now, where, approximately, is it to be found?”

  “Near one of the kitchens below,” she said, “against the north wall. I wish I could describe its location better, but it has been many years since I went there. I cannot even think of a reason why I should request to go, unless it is to cook. And then my guards will follow. It seems impossible!”

  “Do not fret about that now; it may well be usable still. Of more serious concern is what you will do if you manage to depart through that passage. You will be alone and on foot. And,” he added, “there are not many women who look as you do, so you will easily be found.”

  “A disguise can be arranged,” she said, “perhaps some peasants’ clothing left in the brush near the point of departure. But a horse is essential. I cannot outrun a man on horseback, but with a good mount and a preconceived destination, I can perhaps outride him.”

  Chaucer echoed her words. “A preconceived destination.”

  “I cannot simply ride out. I must have someplace to go, to gather my wits and make a reasonable plan! I know so little of what passes in England now that I should surely stand out as odd among the people by my behaviors alone. There is a place that might serve me well, but again, I am unsure of its condition, so many years later.”

  “Where?”

  She glanced quickly at her guards before speaking, this time in a near whisper. “There is a stone cottage near Charing Cross; it lies at the end of a narrow road, which itself passes between two massive oaks. They have grown together as one tree, despite their awesome size. They sit on the edge of a meadow. We crossed that meadow in our escape many years ago. Père buried his clothing there before we fled; he was afraid that someone might steal it from the cottage and contract plague from wearing it.”

  “But—how should anyone contract plague from his clothing?”

  She sat back slightly and said, “He was himself afflicted.”

  Chaucer gasped in surprise.

  Her mind drifted to the terrifying days of Alejandro’s illness. A darkness descended upon her as the physician’s words came back.

  You must not let me spit out the medicine. Do you understand this, child?

  “I was only a small child,” she said. “I do not recall all the details, but I remember the place itself well, for there seemed to be a magic quality about it….”

  Seeing that her distress was further deepening, Chaucer moved a bit closer and put his arm around her shoulder. “To further the notion of our romance,” he said as an explanation. “This place near the oaks, will your père remember it?”

  “Without doubt,” she answered.

  “Then let us arrange for you both to go there.”

  “But how can we get a message to him?”

  “Through de Chauliac! His position is such that he has the means to see it delivered, no matter where your père may be. The king sends envoys to Paris often, weekly these days, with so much to attend to; the pouches are always full of messages and letters for the various French royals and ministers.”

  “But our message must be clandestine. If we send it with the king’s courier, someone will surely break the seal and read it.”

  “If they can.”

  “Well, of course they can! The seals are only wax, and—”

  “You misunderstand me, lady. Of course the seal can be broken. But if the message cannot be read, then there is no need for concern.”

  Kate stood, quite abruptly. “Your riddles are not amusing, sir.” She glanced at her guards, who took notice of her sudden movement and followed her with their eyes.

  “Please,” Chaucer said, offering a hand. “I did not mean to confuse or upset you. Please sit again.”

  She sat, though her expression showed uncertainty.

  “If we send this message in a sort of code, then no one will be able to read it.”

  “Including Père, unless you can magically implant the key to this code within his head from afar.”

  Chaucer smiled. “That will not be necessary, for it is already implanted there.”

  Twelve

  The pig was slaughtered with one precious bullet to the brain; the bloody business that followed was contained entirely within the barn. Janie stood over the slit-open gut and identified the animal’s pancreas, using an old farm text. She carried the steaming organ in a covered metal pan, going from the barn through the house and then into the lab, each step placed with exactitude. Thereafter Kristina literally installed herself in the small room, allowing only the occasional forced interruption for sustenance.

  Or the occasional visits—purportedly to check her progress—of Evan Dunbar.

  The harvest of the animal’s parts and pieces kept everyone busy, visitors included, for the remainder of that day. Lany Dunbar decided to stay on with the child’s father. Her son, whose fascination with Kristina was sweetly obvious, needed little convincing to remain as well. The others, realizing they would be fretted over by those they left behind as Michael had been in his protracted absence, paraded out the front gate early the next morning in a flurry of waves, with vows of animal husbandry to their new best friends and pleas to hurry back to those they left behind. No one was fooled by the pageantry; they faced a rough ride, dangerous in ways no one could fully anticipate, and long explanations when they got home. Sleep would be late but deep for the travelers that night.

  The father remained at the child’s bedside, leaving Lany Dunbar in the company of her hosts. She fell in by default with Janie. With Kristina constantly in the lab, Caroline took over her usual role with the children. Lany drifted into the kitchen after the others went back and found Janie setting a roast into a large metal pan.

  “Too bad they couldn’t stay for dinner,” Janie said. “We have a special on pork today.”

  “And tomorrow and the day after that, and so on,” Lany said with a little smile. “Been there, done that. Just once, I’d love to sink my teeth into a nice big piece of salmon.”

  “With lemon,” Janie added dreamily. “Hey, maybe someone will start a salmon farm around here one of these days, and they’ll be friendly to boot.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice.” Then Lany’s tone softened. “Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you—all this other stuff was in the way—I think what you’re doing is amazing. I can’t tell you how much we all appreciate it.”

  “It was Kristina, really, but hey, we all have to stick together in the brave new world, right?” Janie said. She pulled open the oven door and set the roasting pan in the center, then fooled around with the damper and checked the fuel box.

  “Is this thing going all the time?” Lany asked. She pointed to the vent pipe. “I don’t remember seeing any smoke outside.”

  “We run the hot air into the basement in the winter, to reclaim the heat,” she said. “Tom put in a scrubber that takes out most of the particles.”

  “What a great idea.”

  “Yeah, my husband is a real waste-not-want-not kind of guy. But it’s a misery to clean the scrubbers. We have to make the filters last.”

  “You have so much more technology than we do. The lab—I haven’t seen anything like that since—”

  She stopped short, then re-formed her sentence. “It’s incredible that you can make insulin here.”

  “Maybe we can make insulin. There’s no guarantee it’ll work. But if anyone can do it,
Kristina can. That girl is a brilliant technician.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. “I hope I made it clear that there was no guarantee when we started. She may actually succeed in creating the insulin, but it might already be too late. We’ll get enough for a few weeks, but then we have to contend with making it all the time—for the rest of her life. This will keep happening to her if she doesn’t get it regularly. I checked on her a little while ago; she’s very, very sick. And she won’t get any better until we give her an injection.”

  “You’ve got the syringes and everything?”

  “We do.”

  Lany said pensively, “How much insulin can you get out of one pig? I’d hate to think we’re going to have to keep slaughtering them.”

  “I don’t know. But Kristina’s already talking about turning some of the cells she harvests from this one into little factories, with the help of a couple of viruses.”

  Lany stiffened. “You have those viruses?”

  “You’d be amazed what you can find by looking down at the ground.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Hey, listen,” Janie said, “this roast will be a while, and I have to go out to our powerhouse and check on a couple of things. Tom usually does it, but he’s, uh, a little busy today.” She smiled. “Feel like taking a walk?”

  “Love to.”

  “Good. Get your coat; it’s windy along the path. I’m just going to take a quick peek at my patient, then we’ll go.”

  She came back shortly. “Still no change.”

  “That’s good, I suppose,” Lany said. She pointed to the bow slung over Janie’s right shoulder. “Should I be worried about this walk?”

  As Janie pulled the quiver of arrows out of a cabinet near the door, she shrugged and said, “You never know what you might meet out there.” She smiled and winked. “Just ask Michael.”

  “Hey, it worked out okay,” Lany said. She pointed to the bow and arrows. “Got any more of those?”

  Janie obliged her with a set from the cabinet. They left the warmth and safety of the house and set out into the cold woods.

  The path was strangled on either side with stands of brush and the boulder formations that New England farmers had cursed for centuries. They made their way over the roots and rocks, always wary and respectful of what might be waiting to pounce from a branch. Soon they came to the same open view that had captivated Tom and Janie just a few nights before, and stopped to look out. In the bright daylight from their elevated vantage point, they could see about forty miles east. Sunlight danced on the lake; the tops of the trees were tinted with bits of green, especially in the valley below, where spring came sooner than on the mountainside. Small plumes of smoke rose from three separate locations within the vista.

  “They’re out there,” Janie said pensively as she scanned the valley. “We’ve talked about connecting with other groups a hundred times, but we haven’t gone yet.”

  “That’s probably smart. We’ve gone out a number of times. Early on, we found some friendlies, but none of those groups seemed to want to team up. In retrospect, I think it was still too early at the time; it was the second spring. So we waited a year and went out again. Went to an encampment that we thought had possibilities, from the amount of smoke they were putting out. We figured they had to be pretty advanced.” Lany shaded her eyes and pointed to the northeast. “There,” she said, “do you see that cell tower, the one that looks like a tree, just past that hill?”

  Janie strained in the bright sun. “I think so. One branch is hanging down?”

  With a nod, Lany said, “That’s where they are, or at least where they used to be. God alone knows what became of them. It was a disaster. Their camp was like some kind of wild Appalachian nightmare. Tents and boxes, blankets hanging in the doorways, filth everywhere. There was one house, but it was a real mess, just falling down around them. Everyone we saw looked sick.”

  Janie watched as Lany spoke, knowing by the tension on her face that the memories she recounted were not pleasant.

  “They saw us coming—must have had some lookouts—and ambushed us as soon as we got there.”

  “God,” Janie said. Images of her own last trip from the world before into the compound flashed through her brain. She could still feel her finger pulling the trigger back; her attacker’s wide eyes stared back from dreams on more nights than she cared to count. “What did you do?”

  “Fought back,” Lany said. “What else could we do?”

  “Did they have weapons?”

  “A couple of guns. They got off several rounds, but they were pretty bad shots.” She lowered her eyes. “We took out two of them, and the rest just ran.”

  Took out. It sounded so military, and the expression Lany wore hinted that she herself might have been the one who did the taking out. Janie let a few moments of silence pass. “I spent my whole adult life trying to save lives,” she said. “I never dreamed I would ever take a life. But when it was him or me, I did.”

  Lany stayed very quiet herself for a brief time, then said, “I wish I could say I’ve only taken one. It’s been a lot more than that.”

  “Were you a soldier?”

  Lany’s laugh was tinged with bitterness.

  “No,” she said. “I was a cop.” A big sigh followed; her shoulders seemed to slump a bit.

  There was a fallen log on the edge of the path. “You look a little tired.” She gestured toward the log. “Let’s sit down for a moment,” Janie said.

  As her eyes rested on Lany’s face, Janie let her mind drift, hoping that with this new information the memory floating just beneath the surface of her consciousness would come forward into the light. Finally, it flooded out—she saw Jameson Memorial Hospital, and after that Betsy’s school, surrounded by a chain-link fence and people in green suits. The image of a helmet being removed came to her. And then, miraculously, she saw Lany Dunbar’s face as she had seen it the first time, a bit younger, the expression intense and worried. Helmet in hand, the woman shook out her hair. It was longer and blond-streaked, but the face was the same.

  Janie had tried, unsuccessfully, to sneak past her.

  She remembered the feel of Lany’s vinyl glove on her arm, the pressure of her grip as she stopped her, and then the voice. I’m sorry, ma’am, you can’t go in there….

  “Were you a biocop…in Northampton?”

  Lany nodded.

  Janie wiped away a small tear. “There was a lockdown at a school…” she said.

  Lany lowered her gaze and stared at the dirt, as if she knew what would follow.

  “My first husband, and my daughter…”

  Janie could not finish the sentence. After a few moments of painful silence, Lany Dunbar put a hand gently on her arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this probably isn’t much consolation to you, but we had no choice, the building had to be isolated. So many more people would have died if we hadn’t.”

  So many died anyway, Janie thought. “I know that. And you’re right,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “It’s no consolation.”

  The ensuing silence was beyond awkward until Lany said, “I probably don’t have to tell you how many times we did the same thing in other places.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  As Janie wrestled with her memories, her new acquaintance maintained the light, soothing touch on her arm. Finally Janie wiped one hand over her face. “Well. Enough of that.” After a deep breath, she said, “How did you end up in Orange?”

  “Long story.”

  Janie gestured toward the beautiful vista. “We’ve got time.”

  “We do, don’t we? One of the good things about the new world—plenty of time to think.” She managed a smile. “Well, it was a pretty circuitous route. I was actually a detective in Los Angeles. I had a big case that…had an effect on me and my family, and they put me on administrative duty for a while. I don’t know if you remember the case of Wilbur Durand, the pedophile who murdered
—”

  Janie’s jaw dropped. “You were that detective?”

  Lany Dunbar, former Los Angeles detective specializing in crimes against children, gave a small nod of her head.

  “Oh, my God. That case was all over the newspapers and TV.” Janie’s brow wrinkled as she worked to recall. “Wait a minute, it was your son’s friend who he…”

  “Maimed,” Lany said, finishing the sentence for her. “Yeah, Jeff was Evan’s best friend.”

  “I’m afraid to ask how things turned out for him.”

  Lany shook her head. “He didn’t make it. I think he might have otherwise, but his body was so weak after what Durand did to him that when DR SAM came along, he didn’t have a chance. Evan was devastated. But we all had to get over that stuff pretty quickly. He lost his two sisters right about the same time.”

  Now it was Janie who offered the reassuring touch.

  But Lany Dunbar whizzed right by her own tragedy as if it were something she’d trained for. “They took me off administrative duty when DR SAM first started surfacing and sent me out to biocop school. I worked on the crew that went out first to set things up for the follow-up units. They told us we were the A team. In retrospect, I know it was really an honor and that they were throwing me a bone for the job I did on Durand. They put all of what I would consider to be the best people in that group.”

  The words flowed out of her as if she’d rehearsed them in her mind a thousand times.

  “It came across the border from Tijuana, but very few people know that. Drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus mexicalis—DR SAM.” She gave a cynical chuckle. “The folks in Washington didn’t want to make a stink, because they had some intense diplomatic stuff going on with Mexico, mostly over trade and immigration issues, and there was pressure from some pretty big corporations to keep the origin quiet so it could be business as usual, at least that’s what the speculation in our unit was. God forbid anyone should be offended by the truth: That border was basically an open sewer trough. Every disease under the sun came in through there. Even after 9/11.

  “But what they really didn’t want anyone to know—maybe to avoid a 9/11 type of hysteria—is that DR SAM’s arrival wasn’t exactly a natural event. All that stuff about not being able to pinpoint the origin—it was bull.”