Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

Agnes died the day after New Year's, still screaming for Kivrin to come.

"She is here," Eliwys said, squeezing her hand. "Lady Katherine is here."

"She is not ," Agnes wailed, her voice hoarse but still strong. "Tell her to come!"

"I will," Eliwys promised, and then looked up at Kivrin, her expression faintly puzzled. "Go and fetch Father Roche," she said.

"What is it?" Kivrin asked. He had administered the last rites that first night, Agnes flailing and kicking at him as if she were having a tantrum, and since then she had refused to let him near her. "Are you ill, lady?"

Eliwys shook her head, still looking at Kivrin. "What will I tell my husband when he comes?" she said, and laid Agnes's hand along her side, and it was only then that Kivrin realized she was dead.

Kivrin washed her little body, which was nearly covered with purplish-blue bruises. Where Eliwys had held her hand, the skin was completely black. She looked like she had been beaten. As she has, Kivrin thought, beaten and tortured. And murdered. The slaughter of the innocents.

Agnes's surcote and shift were ruined, a stiffened mass of blood and vomit, and her everyday linen shift had long since been torn into strips. Kivrin wrapped her body in her white cloak, and Roche and the steward buried her.

Eliwys did not come. "I must stay with Rosemund," she said when Kivrin told her it was time. There was nothing she could do for Rosemund — the girl still lay as still as if she were under a spell , and Kivrin thought the fever must have caused some brain damage. "And Gawyn may come," Eliwys said.

It was very cold. Roche and the steward puffed out great clouds of condensation as they lowered Agnes into the grave, and the sight of their white breath infuriated Kivrin. She doesn't weigh anything, she thought bitterly, you could carry her in one hand.

The sight of all the graves angered her, too. The churchyard was filled, and nearly all the rest of the green that Roche had consecrated. Lady Imeyne's grave was almost in the path to the lychgate, and the steward's baby did not have one — Father Roche had let it be buried at its mother's feet though it had been baptized — and the churchyard was still full.

What about the steward's youngest son, Kivrin thought angrily, and the clerk? Where do you plan to put them? The Black Death was only supposed to have killed one-third to one- half of Europe. Not all of it.

" Requiescat in pace, Amen ," Roche said, and the steward began shoveling the frozen dirt onto the little bundle.

You were right, Mr. Dunworthy, she thought bitterly. White only gets dirty. You're right about everything, aren't you? You told me not to come, that terrible things would happen. Well, they have. And you can't wait to tell me I told you so. But you won't have that satisfaction because I don't know where the drop is, and the only person who does is probably dead.

She didn't wait for the steward to finish shovelling dirt down on Agnes or for Father Roche to complete his chummy little chat with God. She started across the green, furious with all of them: with the steward for standing there with his spade, eager to dig more graves, with Eliwys for not coming, with Gawyn for not coming. No one's coming, she thought. No one.

"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 per cent, and we haven't even gotten 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 distractedly, 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 the 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.