Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

Gawyn came, Kivrin thought weakly. Gawyn, who could have told me exactly where the drop is, and I wasn't there.

"Aye, he came to tell you that he had found no trace of your attackers, and that — "

Lady Imeyne came up. "Whither were you bound?" she said, and it sounded like an accusation.

"I could not find my way back," Kivrin said, trying to think what to say to explain her wandering about the village.

"Went you to meet someone?" Lady Imeyne demanded, and it was definitely an accusation.

"How could she go to meet someone?" Rosemund asked. "She knows no one here and remembers naught of before."

"I went to look for the place where I was found," Kivrin said, trying not to lean on Rosemund. "I thought maybe the sight of my belongings might…"

"Help you to remember," Rosemund said. "But — "

"You need not have risked your health to do so," Lady Imeyne said. "Gawyn has fetched them here this day."

"Everything?" Kivrin asked.

"Aye," Rosemund said, "the wagon and all your boxes."

The second bell stopped, and the first bell kept on alone, steadily, slowly, and surely it was a funeral. It sounded like the death of hope itself. Gawyn had brought everything to the manor.

"It is not meet to hold Lady Katherine talking in this cold," Rosemund said, sounding like her mother. "She has been ill. We must needs get her inside ere she catches a chill."

I have already caught a chill, Kivrin thought. Gawyn has brought everything to the manor, all traces of where the drop had been. Even the wagon.

"You are to blame for this, Maisry," Lady Imeyne said, pushing Maisry forward to take Kivrin's arm. "You should not have left her alone."

Kivrin flinched away from the filthy Maisry.

"Can you walk?" Rosemund asked, already buckling under Kivrin's weight. "Should we bring the mare?"

"No," Kivrin said. She somehow couldn't bear the thought of that, brought back like a captured prisoner on the back of a jangling horse. "No," she repeated. "I can walk."

She had to lean heavily on Rosemund's arm and Maisry's filthy one, and it was slow going, but she made it. Past the huts and the steward's house and the interested pigs, and into the courtyard. The stump of a big ash tree lay on the cobbles in front of the barn, its twisted roots catching the flakes of snow.

"She will have caught her death with her behavior," Lady Imeyne said, gesturing to Maisry to open the heavy wooden door. "She will no doubt have a relapse."

It began to snow in earnest. Maisry opened the door. It had a latch like the little door on the rat's cage. I should have let him go, Kivrin thought, scourge or not. I should have let him go.

Lady Imeyne motioned to Maisry, and she came back to take Kivrin's arm again. "No," she said, and shrugged off her hand and Rosemund's and walked alone and without help through the door and into the darkness inside.

18 December 1320 (Old Style.) I think I have pneumonia. I tried to go find the drop, but I didn't make it, and I've had some sort of relapse or something. There's a stabbing pain under my ribs every time I take a breath, and when I cough, which is constantly, it feels like everything inside is breaking to pieces. I tried to sit up awhile ago and was instantly bathed in sweat, and I think my temp is back up. Those are all symptoms Dr. Ahrens told me indicate pneumonia.

Lady Eliwys isn't back yet. Lady Imeyne put a horrible- smelling poultice on my chest and then sent for the steward's wife. I thought she wanted to "chide with" her for usurping the manor, but when the steward's wife came, carrying her six-month old baby, Imeyne told her, "The wound has fevered her lungs," and she looked at my temple and then went out and came back without the baby and with a bowl full of a bitter-tasting tea. It must have had willow bark or something in it because my temp came down, and my ribs don't hurt quite so much.

The steward's wife is thin and small, with a sharp face and ash-blonde hair. I think Lady Imeyne is probably right about her being the one to tempt the steward "into sin." She came in wearing a fur-trimmed kirtle with sleeves so long they nearly dragged on the floor, and her baby wrapped in a finely-woven wool blanket, and she talks in an odd, slurred accent which I think is an attempt to mimic Lady Imeyne's speech.

"The embryonic middle class," as Mr. Latimer would say, nouveau riche and waiting for its chance, which it will get in thirty years when the Black Death hits and a third of the nobility is wiped out.

"Is this the lady was found in the woods?" she asked Lady Imeyne when she came in, and there wasn't any "seeming modesty" in her manner. She smiled at Imeyne as if they were old chums and came over to the bed.

"Aye," Lady Imeyne said, managing to get impatience, disdain, and distaste all in one syllable.

The steward's wife was oblivious. She came over to the bed and then stepped back, the first person to show any indication they thought I might be contagious. "Has she the (something) fever?" The interpreter didn't catch the word, and I couldn't get it either because of her peculiar accent. Flouronen? Florentine?

"She has a wound to the head," Imeyne said sharply. "It has fevered her lungs."

The steward's wife nodded. "Father Roche told us how he and Gawyn found her in the woods."

Imeyne stiffened at the familiar use of Gawyn's name, and the steward's wife did catch that and hurried out to brew up the willow bark. She even ducked a bow to Lady Imeyne when she left the second time.

Rosemund came in to sit with me after Imeyne left — I think they've assigned her to keep me from trying to escape again — and I asked her if it was true that Father Roche had been with Gawyn when he found me.

"Nay," she said. "Gawyn met Father Roche on the road as he brought you here and left you to his care that he might seek your attackers, but he found naught of them, and they brought you here. You need not worry over it. Gawyn has brought your things to the manor."

I don't remember Father Roche being there, except in the sickroom, but if it's true, and Gawyn didn't meet him too far from the drop, maybe he knows where it is.

I have been thinking about what Lady Imeyne said. "The wound to her head has fevered her lungs," she said. I don't think anyone here realizes I'm ill. They let the little girls in the sickroom all the time, and none of them seem the least afraid, except the steward's wife, and as soon as Lady Imeyne told her I had "fevered lungs," she came up to the bed without any hesitation.

But she was obviously worried about the possibility of my illness's being contagious, and when I asked Rosemund why she hadn't gone with her mother to see the cottar, she said, as if it were self-evident, "She forbade me to go. The cottar is ill."

I don't think they know I have a disease. I didn't have any obvious marker symptoms, like pox or a rash, and I think they put my fever and delirium down to my injuries. Wounds often became infected, and there were frequent cases of blood poisoning. There would be no reason to keep the little girls away from an injured person.

And none of them have caught it. It's been five days, and if it is a virus, the incubation period should only be twelve to forty-eight hours. Dr. Ahrens told me the most contagious period is before there are any symptoms, so maybe I wasn't contagious by the time the little girls started coming in. Or maybe this is something they've all had already, and they're immune. The steward's wife asked if I had had "the Florentine? Flahntin? fever," and Mr. Gilchrist's convinced there was an influenza epidemic in 1320. Maybe that's what I caught.

It's afternoon. Rosemund is sitting in the windowseat, sewing a piece of linen with dark red wool, and Blackie's asleep beside me. I've been thinking about how you were right, Mr. Dunworthy. I wasn't prepared at all, and everything's completely different from the way I thought it would be. But you were wrong about it's not being like a fairy tale.