Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

It's been raining hard since we got back, and I suppose I should be happy since it may melt the snow, but it makes it impossible for me to go out and look for the drop, and it's freezing in the manor house. Everyone's wearing their cloaks and huddling next to the fire.

What do the villagers do? Their huts can't even keep the wind out, and the one I was in had no sign of a blanket. They must be literally freezing, and Rosemund said the steward said it was going to rain till Christmas Eve.

Rosemund apologized for her ill-tempered behavior in the woods and told me, "I was wroth with my sister."

Agnes had nothing to do with it — what upset her was obviously the news that her fiancé had been invited for Christmas, and when I had a chance with Rosemund alone, I asked her if she was worried over her marriage.

"My father has arranged it," she said, threading her needle. "We were betrothed at Martinmas. We are to be wed at Easter."

"And is it with your consent?" I asked.

"It is a good match," she said. "Sir Bloet is highly placed, and he has holdings that adjoin my father's."

"Do you like him?"

She stabbed the needle into the linen in the wooden frame. "My father would never let me come to harm," she said, and pulled the long thread through.

She didn't volunteer anything else, and all I could get out of Agnes was that Sir Bloet was nice and had brought her a silver penny, no doubt as part of the betrothal gifts.

Agnes was too concerned about her knee to tell me anything else. She stopped complaining about it halfway home, and then limped exaggeratedly when she got down off the sorrel. I thought she was just trying to get attention, but when I looked at it, the scab had come off completely. The area around it is red and swollen.

I washed it off, wrapped it in as clean a cloth as I could find, (I'm afraid it may have been one of Imeyne's coifs — I found it in the chest at the foot of the bed) and made her sit quietly by the fire and play with her knight, but I'm worried. If it gets infected, it could be serious. There weren't any antimicrobials in the 1300's.

Eliwys is worried, too. She clearly expected Gawyn back tonight, and has been going to stand by the screens all day, looking out the door. I have not been able to figure out how she feels about Gawyn. Sometimes, like today, I think she loves him, and is afraid of what that means for both of them. Adultery was a mortal sin in the eyes of the church, and often a dangerous one. But most of the time I am convinced that his amour is completely unrequited, that she is so worried about her husband that she doesn't know he exists.

The pure, unattainable lady was the ideal of courtly romances, but it's clear he doesn't know whether or not she loves him either. His rescuing me in the wood and his story of the renegades was only an attempt to impress her (which would have been much more impressive if there had been twenty renegades, all armed with swords and maces and battle axes). He would obviously do anything to win her, and Lady Imeyne knows it. Which is why, I think, he's been sent off to Courcy.

By the time they got back to Balliol, two more of the detainees were down with the virus. Dunworthy sent Colin to bed and helped Finch get the detainees to bed and phone the infirmary.

"All our ambulances are out," the registrar told him. "We'll send one as soon as possible."

As soon as possible was midnight. He didn't get back and to bed till past one.

Colin was asleep on the cot Finch had set up for him, The Age of Chivalry next to his head. Dunworthy debated pulling the book away but he didn't want to risk waking him. He went in to bed.

Kivrin could not be in the plague. Badri had said there was minimal slippage, and the plague had not hit England until 1348. Kivrin had been sent to 1320.

He turned over and closed his eyes determinedly. She could not be in the plague. Badri was delirious. He had said all sorts of things, talked about lids and breaking china as well as rats. None of it made any sense. It was the fever speaking. He had told Dunworthy to back up. He had given him imaginary notes. None of it meant anything.

"It was the rats," Badri had said. The contemps hadn't known it was spread by fleas on the rats. They had had no idea what caused it. They had accused everyone — Jews and witches and the insane. They had murdered halfwits and hanged old women. They had burned stranges at the stake.

He got out of bed and padded into the sitting room. He tiptoed around Colin's cot and slid The Age of Chivalry out from under Colin's head. Colin stirred but didn't wake.

Dunworthy sat on the windowseat and looked up the Black Death. It had started in China in 1333, and moved west on trading ships to Messina in Sicily and from there to Pisa. It had spread through Italy and France — eighty thousand dead in Siena, a hundred thousand in Florence, three hundred thousand in Rome — before it crossed the Channel. It had reached England in 1348, "a little before the Feast of St. John the Baptist," the twenty-fourth of June.

That meant a slippage of twenty-eight years. Badri had been worried about too much slippage, but he had been talking of weeks, not years.

He reached over the cot to the bookcase and took down Fitzwiller's Pandemics .

"What are you doing?" Colin asked sleepily.

"Reading about the Black Death," he whispered. "Go back to sleep."

"They didn't call it that," Colin mumbled around his gobstopper. He rolled over, wrapping himself in his blankets. "They called it the blue fever."

Dunworthy took both books back to bed with him. Fitzwiller gave the date of the plague's arrival in England as St. Peter's Day, the twenty-ninth of June, 1348. It had reached Oxford in December, London in October of 1349, and then moved north and back across the Channel to the Low Countries and Norway. It had gone everywhere except Bohemia, and Poland, which had a quarantine, and, oddly, parts of Scotland.

Where it had gone, it had swept through the countryside like the Angel of Death, devastating entire villages, leaving no one alive to administer the last rites or bury the putrefying bodies. In one monastery, all but one of the monks had died.

The single survivor, John Clyn, had left a record: "And lest things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us," he had written, "I, seeing so many evils and the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One, being myself as if among the dead, I, waiting for death, have put into writing all the things that I have witnessed."

He had written it all down, a true historian, and then died himself, all alone. His words trailed off, and below them, in another hand, someone had written, "Here, it seems, the author died."

Someone knocked on the door. It was Finch in his bathrobe, looking bleary-eyed and distraught. "Another one of the detainees, sir," he said.

Dunworthy put his fingers to his lips and stepped outside the door with him. "Have you telephoned Infirmary?"

"Yes, sir, and they said it would be several hours before they can dispatch an ambulance. They said to isolate her, and give her dimantadine and orange juice."

"Which I suppose we're nearly out of," Dunworthy said irritably.

"Yes, sir, but that's not the problem. She won't cooperate."

Dunworthy made Finch wait outside the door while he dressed and found his face mask, and they went across to Salvin. A huddle of detainees were standing by the door, dressed in an odd assortment of underthings, coats, and blankets. Only a few of them were wearing their face masks. By day after tomorrow they'll all be down with it, Dunworthy thought.

"Thank goodness you're here," one of the detainees said fervently. "We can't do a thing with her."