The Physician's Tale

by Ann Benson

  Chandos rode up to de Coucy and said discreetly, “No one will think less of you for getting rid of that thing. Certainly I will not.”

  “I will keep it,” de Coucy said defiantly. “Better yet, my cousin shall have its pelt for his fiancée, and it shall become part of her trousseau.” He looked to the same man who had brought it to him. “You,” he said, “skin this thing and leave the carcass behind.”

  Chandos wanted to strike him. But the king would not approve of such a gesture, especially under the circumstances. He ordered the party to continue on.

  They made camp that night about half a day shy of the Peaks. The hounds had picked up a fresh trail, and they had followed it, as there was nothing else to show them the way. In the morning when they awoke, the pelt was gone. Stolen by a wolf, the houndsman speculated. Everyone thought it a mercy. De Coucy said nothing, nor did Benoit. The unpleasantness was over, for the moment.

  Kate awoke before dawn. The first thing her eyes settled upon was the thatched ceiling of the Blackwell cottage, and a surge of happiness rushed through her. She turned in the straw and saw three little girls lying there, all sound asleep, dreaming perhaps of sweets and treats and rag dolls to make their days happy.

  “You live a fine life,” she said in a whisper. They were not wealthy, nor were they privileged in any other way, but there was a bond of love and trust between the parents and children of this clan that seemed almost unnatural to her. One little girl mewed slightly in her sleep and turned a bit in the straw. Her blond curls were a tangle, and Kate wondered if the little child would cry out when one of her older sisters tried to comb the knots out of it.

  I only hope your sister is more gentle to you than mine is to me.

  She threw off the light wool coverlet and tiptoed across the wide planks of the loft. She moved quietly down the ladder and found Thomas Blackwell’s wife already at work before the hearth.

  “Good morning to you, madam,” Kate said brightly.

  Mrs. Blackwell nodded and smiled, then put a finger to her lips. She leaned forward and whispered, “My husband is a bit under the weather this morning.”

  Kate leaned close as well and asked, with alarm in her voice, “Has he taken ill?”

  “Oh, no, dearie, nothing like that. He just has a bit too much of the drink left in him this morning. He’ll be fine in a few hours, I suspect. But right now he wants to toss back up everything he ate yesterday and more. I shouldn’t be surprised to see a fair piece of his stomach somewhere on this floor.”

  Kate smiled with relief as she left the house and headed for the water trough. The ground was damp with dew, which wet the bottom of her feet. It was wonderfully quiet outside, not even a bird was chirping—the hour was still too early. When she had cleaned the sleep from her eyes and face, she went back into the house. “Is there some way I can help you?”

  “No, miss, you just take your ease. I’ll finish the porridge.”

  It seemed such a sweet and simple task, the making of food, one that Kate had been denied for all of her time in Windsor.

  “It would be my pleasure to stir,” she said.

  After a long look, Mrs. Blackwell pointed the handle in Kate’s direction. When Kate took it, Mrs. Blackwell wiped her hands on her skirt and sat down on a chair to watch.

  “Well, isn’t this a treat,” she said. “A fine lady I am, if only for a moment.”

  “Indeed,” Kate said as she turned the slurry over and over in the pot. The last time she had performed this task was in the longhouse outside Paris, for her husband and father. She did not look in Mrs. Blackwell’s direction, lest the woman—a stranger—see her tears. One or two fell into the pot. She hoped they would not turn the porridge bitter.

  After a few more moments of stirring, she turned back to Mrs. Blackwell and asked, “I was wondering, madam, if you might spare a few goose feathers.”

  Chandos rode at the head of the party as they followed the hounds. When he saw the black flag in the distance, he held up one hand to halt those who followed him. When the entire party was stopped, he turned to one of his men and said, “We shall proceed no further in this direction.”

  Amid the cacophony of baying and snorting, de Coucy moved forward, just close enough so that Chandos could hear him. “But the hounds…” he said.

  “I can see that they are agitated,” Chandos said. “Nevertheless, we shall ride no further.” He nodded toward the flag. “I am not man enough to tempt such a fate as that, with the future son-in-law of my king in the party.”

  De Coucy glared at Chandos; the seasoned warrior stared back with even greater vitriol. It so unnerved the young French knight that he looked away for a moment. Finally he gathered his courage and said, “But she will escape!”

  “Perhaps she will,” Chandos said. “It would not be the first time she has slipped away. Nor, I am sure, will it be the last. She is as cunning as a vixen.” He placed his gloved hand on de Coucy’s arm to soothe him. “And more determined than a vixen not to be caught.”

  De Coucy brushed his hand away angrily. “Cunning she may be, but I will have her back again.”

  “Perhaps,” Chandos said quietly. “And perhaps not.” He rode off to confer with his lieutenant on their camping arrangements, after which he turned his huge black horse around and faced the company.

  “We will make a detour around this village,” he said. He pointed to the flag. “In view of this posting, I suspect our quarry will not have ventured therein. Perhaps,” he said, staring at de Coucy, “the hounds are confused by the scent of yesterday’s fox.”

  All eyes went to Isabella’s unhappy baron.

  “If, on the other side,” Chandos continued, “we are unable to reacquire their trail, we shall return to Windsor and make our apologies to the king. He will not fault us for preserving ourselves and the new member of his family against the Death.” He gave a quick nod to one of his lieutenants, who whistled loudly and gestured with his hand in the reverse direction.

  The soldiers in the party turned about face as if they were one body. De Coucy and Benoit stayed beneath the flag, whispering feverishly between themselves for a good while before they fell in with the others. As he waited for them, Chandos stared up at the tattered warning flag.

  I have no fear of plague, Kate had told him over one of their chess games. A tingling rose up in Chandos’s spine, for he knew in his heart that they were in there.

  Twenty-six

  “We need to take a tissue sample to be sure if this is plague,” Janie said as she stood over the mottled corpse. “It would be best to get one from the neck or the groin.”

  “This would have to be from a natural source,” Lany said nervously. “Wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. There’s no natural reservoir around here.”

  “But there must be carriers in this area. He might have handled something that was infected, like a rabbit or a rat or something. People must be eating a lot of strange things these days.”

  “If we were out west in a dry climate,” Janie said, “I might agree with you. But natural cases of plague are so rare here. In the past twenty years there have only been two cases.”

  Lany gave her a suspicious look. “And you know this because…”

  Janie looked at her. “Because I once did some fieldwork on—” She was about to say specifically plague but changed her mind. “Infectious diseases. One of the, uh, projects I worked on concerned plague in the environment.”

  Lany stared back for a moment, sensing from Janie’s clipped explanation that there was more to the story than she was telling, but she didn’t press. “And you’re relatively sure this is plague.”

  “No, but it has a lot of the characteristics. At least on the surface. And I’ve seen it firsthand.”

  “In a human being?”

  She couldn’t meet Lany’s eyes. “In more than one.”

  “Someday you’ll have to tell me about that.”

  Janie did not respond to the prompting,
but instead explained the reasons for her suspicion. “Look at the groin,” she said, pointing with the stick. “Massively swollen lymph glands and testes. And his neck,” she said, moving the stick. “Visible buboes. If we’d taken a scalpel to those swellings just before this man died, they would have exploded all over us.”

  “Ugh.”

  “You don’t want to know. If we could get his mouth open, his teeth would be coated with a white film of bacteria. In his lungs you’d see pockets of dried blood that collected in the air sacs. His liver would be swollen, if he’d had bubonic plague, which from first glance this resembles.”

  She stood up and walked around the corpse, examining it with her eyes only from all angles. “Still, I don’t know…. This is just so out of place. It looks like plague, but it really shouldn’t be. Not here, not at this time of year.”

  She was quiet for a moment, as if mulling over something in her mind. “The bacteria we found on our SAM-pulls, and on the repeat samples Michael took…that looked like plague too. But it wasn’t. And it looked a little like DR SAM too. But it wasn’t.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “I am. Unequivocally.”

  “My God,” Lany said. “What if this is a combination of the two?”

  “There’s no way to tell what it is unless we take a sample.” She glanced up unhappily. “Unfortunately, I did what Steve suggested: I brought survival stuff, not field-research equipment.” She looked the corpse up and down again, her frustration building. “My kingdom for latex gloves and a plastic bag,” she said. “A nice sharp scalpel wouldn’t hurt either.”

  Alejandro, she knew, would have found a way to make do with what was around him. She looked down on the ground nearby for something that might be folded or cupped. A large brown leaf, waterlogged and supple, presented itself.

  Janie took out her knife and knelt low over the corpse. Using the leaf like Lany had, she grabbed a cluster of lymph nodes with her left hand and, with one swift move of the knife in her right hand, cut them free. She set the leaf faceup on the ground with the small slice of flesh in its center, staring up at her.

  “I need something to tie it up,” she said.

  Lany brought forth a long green tendril of newly sprouted bittersweet. “I used to yank this stuff up from my flower beds. It’s tough as nails.”

  “Great.” Janie took it from her hand and wrapped it around the leaf until it was all secure. “Looks like a stuffed grape leaf,” she said.

  “I hope that holds,” Lany said. “Otherwise, we’re both in trouble.”

  “Hey,” Janie said, almost bitterly, “not to worry. If it’s plague, we’re immune, right?”

  With the sample stowed at the base of one of her saddlebags, Janie went to the water’s edge and rubbed her hands clean until they were so cold from the icy water that she could barely feel them. She got back on the horse again with her teeth chattering. “We need to make up some time if we’re going to do twenty miles today.”

  “Then we should probably go out onto the road,” Lany said. “It’ll be a lot faster. This river should bring us out to Route 32. I don’t think it’s even a mile from here to that point.”

  They continued along the riverbank. Since they’d discovered the corpse, sounds were louder, colors brighter, smells more overwhelming. Janie was supremely aware of every crack of a stick and every scream of a bird. When they finally reached the bridge for Route 32—within a mile, just as Lany had speculated—they urged their horses up the embankment until they came to the edge of the cracked pavement. Lany looked up at the sky, then looked in each direction on the road. “East is that way,” she said, pointing left.

  The sounds their own horses’ hooves made on the pavement seemed deafening. “This makes me nervous,” Janie said. “I keep expecting a car to come whizzing around the corner at any moment. I feel like I want to get off the road.”

  “It is strange,” Lany admitted. She glanced around, her eyes touching on abandoned buildings where roadside businesses once thrived.

  Not far down the road, they came upon a cluster of dilapidated industrial-looking buildings, typical New England mills. The walls of a large brick building—an abandoned factory of some sort—came right up to the edge of the road. They passed in nervous silence, too close to the building for either one’s liking. At the halfway point, despite her desire to get beyond the looming facade, Janie brought Jellybean to a sudden halt.

  Lany turned back and gave her a questioning look.

  “Shh,” Janie whispered. Then, “Do you hear that?”

  Lany concentrated on listening. “Water,” she said.

  “More than that. I hear something else—I think it’s—creaking.”

  They tied up the horses and inched their way around the edge of the massive building. When they came to the back corner, they stopped and looked around carefully. The source of the creaking sound became clear instantly.

  It came from a brand-new, fast-spinning waterwheel that rotated freely, pushed by the rushing current of a small river. There was a narrow bridge over the wheel, attached to the top of the building from which the wheel’s axle protruded.

  Two little girls played on the bridge. After a few moments, an adult woman came out onto the bridge and shooed them back inside, perhaps for a snack or a nap.

  As if nothing had ever changed.

  “My God,” Janie whispered as the trio disappeared into the building. She let her gaze drift up the side of the building; it was five stories high, and along the side there were perhaps a dozen windows—twice as many, at least, in the other direction.

  “A whole town could live in here,” she said.

  “Maybe a whole town does,” Lany replied. “Maybe we should…go inside.”

  “No,” Janie said urgently. “We have a mission. We need to stay focused. And we have a sample of what might be bubonic plague tissue in one of our saddlebags. We can’t be exposing a whole group of people to that.”

  A whole group of people. It was the most delicious phrase.

  But their excitement was quickly tempered.

  “Look,” Lany said, pointing up a hill.

  Janie turned her eyes in that direction. She saw three graves with cross markers. The earth that covered them appeared to be fresh.

  “I guess we know where our mystery man came from,” she said.

  “He’d have to canoe upstream to get to where we found him. He didn’t look like he was in any kind of shape for that.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t all that sick when he left.”

  “Then why would he leave?”

  Janie looked at her and said, “Maybe it wasn’t voluntary.”

  They went back to the horses and rode off at a quick but stealthy pace. From a safe vantage point, they stopped to look back. Janie half-expected to see eyes staring back at her. Monastery came to mind.

  The horses, at their riders’ urgings, stepped lively. The sun was past its zenith, leaving them perhaps five more hours of traveling light.

  “When we get far enough out of town, I’d like to check in with the folks in Orange. Steve will be worried about us by now.”

  “Okay,” Janie said. “They can send a message to Alex for me after that.”

  About a mile farther down the road, all evidence of civilization vanished, except for a small roadside picnic area with a table and benches, by some inexplicable grace still unrotted and sittable. They tied up the horses and stretched their own legs for a few moments, then sat down on opposite sides of the weathered table.

  “Oh, God,” Lany said as she began to press the buttons on the PDA, “I hope I can remember how to work this thing.”

  She held it in both hands carefully so as not to drop it and pushed buttons with both thumbs. “It’s on,” she said. “Now, I press Select.…”

  She fiddled for a few more seconds, then looked up at Janie with a grin. “There’s a signal bar,” she said. “My God. How long has it been since I’ve seen one of these?”

&
nbsp; Janie came around to that side of the table. “Just one bar,” she said. “But maybe that’ll be enough.”

  “It’ll have to be.” Lany touched the keypad a number of times in rapid succession. Then she typed out a message letter by letter, a slow and laborious process for fingers out of practice.

  OK so far, twelve miles out. Came upon potential friendlies. Send e-mail to TA from J.

  She wrote nothing about the graves; it would require too much explanation and would have to wait for their return. “Okay, now I send it. Here goes,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

  She pressed the green arrow. A progress bar appeared, advancing slowly from left to right as the message was beamed through the air to the next cell tower:

  Message sent successfully.

  “Oh, my God, it worked!” Then, in a more tempered voice, she added, “At least it says it did.”

  Janie said, “Steve said they would send something right back if they got ours.”

  “Ten minutes, they said, so the battery doesn’t run out.”

  They waited, counting the seconds of precious battery power.

  The PDA emitted a small beep.

  Janie almost jumped. Lany held the PDA so they could both read the screen.

  Hello, Lewis and Clark, things fine here, message to TA tonight.

  Invite friendlies to dinner. Smile. Keep up the good work, report in before sleep if possible.

  What sleep? Janie thought. There would be little sleep for her tonight.

  Fredo found Bruce in his laboratory in the biological sciences building.

  “The teams are ready, boss,” he said.

  “Good. Has everyone gotten their positioning?”

  “We handed it out about a half hour ago.”

  He drew in a long breath, then let it out again. “Well, I guess we’re all set, then. I’ll be there in a minute.”