“Hold her arm,” she said, and Roche pinned her wrist and halfway up the forearm, pressing her arm flat to the floor. Rosemund still didn’t move.
Two quick, clean slices, Kivrin thought. She took a deep breath and touched the knife to the swelling.
Rosemund’s arm spasmed, her shoulder twisting protectively away from the knife, her thin hand clenching into a claw. “What do you do?” she said hoarsely. “I will tell my father!”
Kivrin jerked the knife back. Roche caught at Rosemund’s arm and pushed it back against the floor, and she hit weakly at him with her other hand.
“I am the daughter of Lord Guillaume D’Iverie,” she said. “You cannot treat me thus.”
Kivrin scooted out of her reach and scrambled to her feet, trying to keep the knife from touching anything. Roche reached forward and caught both her wrists easily in one hand. Rosemund kicked out weakly at Kivrin. The chalice fell over and wine spilled out in a dark puddle.
“We must tie her,” Kivrin said, and realized she was holding the knife aloft, like a murderer. She wrapped it in one of the cloths Eliwys had torn, and ripped another into strips.
Roche bound Rosemund’s wrists above her head while Kivrin tied her ankles to the leg of one of the upturned benches. Rosemund didn’t struggle, but when Roche pulled her shift up over her exposed chest, she said, “I know you. You are the cutthroat who waylaid the Lady Katherine.”
Roche leaned forward, pressing his full weight down on her forearm, and Kivrin cut across the swelling.
Blood oozed and then gushed, and Kivrin thought, I’ve hit an artery. She and Roche both lunged for the pile of cloths, and she grabbed a thick wad of them and pressed them against the wound. They soaked through immediately, and when she released her hand to take the one Roche handed her, blood spurted out of the tiny cut. She jammed the tail of her surcote against it, and Rosemund whimpered, a small, helpless sound like Agnes’s puppy, and seemed to collapse, though there was nowhere for her to fall.
I’ve killed her, Kivrin thought.
“I can’t stop the bleeding,” she said, but it had already stopped. She held the skirt of her surcote against it, counting to a hundred and then two hundred, and carefully lifted a corner of it away from the wound.
Blood still welled from the cut, but it was mixed with a thick yellow-gray pus. Roche leaned forward to dab at it, but Kivrin stopped him. “No, it’s full of plague germs,” she said, taking the cloth away from him. “Don’t touch it.”
She wiped the sickening-looking pus away. It oozed up again, followed by a watery serum. “That’s all of it, I think,” she said to Roche. “Hand me the wine.” She looked round for a clean cloth to pour it on.
There weren’t any. They had used them all, trying to stop the bleeding. She tipped the wine bottle carefully and let the dark liquid dribble into the cut. Rosemund didn’t move. Her face was gray, as if all the blood had been drained out of her. As it had been. And I don’t have a transfusion to give her. I don’t even have a clean rag.
Roche was untying Rosemund’s hands. He took her limp hand in his huge one. “Her heart beats strongly now,” he said.
“We must have more linen,” Kivrin said, and burst into tears.
“My father will see you hanged for this,” Rosemund said.
TRANSCRIPT FROM THE DOMESDAY BOOK
(071145–071862)
Rosemund is unconscious. I tried to lance her bubo last night to drain out the infection, and I’m afraid I only made things worse. She lost a great deal of blood. She’s very pale and her pulse is so faint I can’t find it in her wrist at all.
The clerk is worse, too. His skin continues to hemorrhage, and it’s clear he’s near the end. I remember Dr. Ahrens saying untreated bubonic plague kills people in four or five days, but he can’t possibly last that long.
Lady Eliwys, Lady Imeyne, and Agnes are still well, though Lady Imeyne seems to have gone almost insane in her search for someone to blame. She boxed Maisry’s ears this morning and told her God was punishing us all for her laziness and stupidity.
Maisry is lazy and stupid. She cannot be trusted to watch Agnes for five minutes at a time, and when I sent her for water to wash Rosemund’s wound this morning, she was gone over half an hour and came back without it.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Lady Imeyne hitting her again, and it is only a matter of time before Lady Imeyne gets around to blaming me. I saw her watching me over her Book of Hours when I went out for the water Maisry forgot, and I can well imagine what she’s thinking—that I know too much about the plague not to have been fleeing it, that I am supposed to have lost my memory, that I was not injured but ill.
If she makes those accusations, I’m afraid she’ll convince Lady Eliwys that I’m the cause of the plague and that she shouldn’t listen to me, that they should take the barricade down and pray together for God to deliver them.
And how will I defend myself? By saying, I’m from the future, where we know everything about the Black Death except how to cure it without streptomycin and how to get back there?
Gawyn still isn’t back. Eliwys is frantic with worry. When Roche went to say vespers she was standing at the gate, no cloak, no coif, watching the road. I wonder if it has occurred to her that he might already have been infected when he left for Bath. He rode to Courcy with the bishop’s envoy, and when he came back he already knew about the plague.
(Break)
Ulf the Reeve is near death, and his wife and one of his sons have it. No buboes, but the woman has several small lumps like seeds inside her thigh. Roche constantly has to be reminded to wear his mask and to not touch the patients more than he has to.
The history vids say the contemps were panic-stricken and cowardly during the Black Death, that they ran away and wouldn’t tend the sick, and that the priests were the worst of all, but it isn’t like that at all.
Everyone’s frightened, but they’re all doing the best they can, and Roche is wonderful. He sat and held the reeve’s wife’s hand the whole time I examined her, and he doesn’t flinch at the most disgusting jobs—bathing Rosemund’s wound, emptying chamber pots, cleaning up after the clerk. He never seems afraid. I don’t know where he gets his courage.
He continues to say matins and vespers and to pray, telling God about Rosemund and who has it now, reporting their symptoms and telling what we’re doing for them, as if He could actually hear him. The way I talk to you.
Is God there, too, I wonder, but shut off from us by something worse than time, unable to get through, unable to find us?
(Break)
We can hear the plague. The villages toll the death knell after a burial, nine strokes for a man, three for a woman, one for a baby, and then an hour of steady tolling. Esthcote had two this morning, and Osney has tolled continuously since yesterday. The bell in the southwest that I told you I could hear when I first came through has stopped. I don’t know whether that means the plague is finished there or whether there’s no one left alive to ring the bell.
(Break)
Please don’t let Rosemund die. Please don’t let Agnes get it. Send Gawyn back.
28
The boy who had run from Kivrin the day she tried to find the drop came down with the plague in the night. His mother was standing waiting for Father Roche when he went to matins. The boy had a bubo on his back, and Kivrin lanced it while Roche and the mother held him.
She didn’t want to do it. The scurvy had left him already weak, and Kivrin had no idea whether there were any arteries below the shoulder blades. Rosemund did not seem at all improved, though Roche claimed her pulse was stronger. She was so white, as if she had been utterly drained of blood, and so still. And the boy didn’t look as if he could stand to lose any blood.
But he bled hardly at all, and the color was already coming back in his cheeks before Kivrin finished washing the knife.
“Give him tea made from rose hips,” Kivrin said, thinking that at least that would help the scurvy. “And
willow bark.” She held the blade of the knife over the fire. The fire was no bigger than the day she had sat by it, too weak to find the drop. It would never keep the boy warm, and if she told the woman to go gather firewood, she might expose someone else. “We will bring you some wood,” she said, and then wondered how.
There was still food left over from the Christmas feast, but they were fast running out of everything else. They had used most of the wood that was already cut trying to keep Rosemund and the clerk warm, and there was no one to ask to chop the logs that lay piled against the kitchen. The reeve was ill, the steward was tending his wife and son.
Kivrin gathered up an armful of the already-split wood and some pieces of loose bark for kindling and took it back to the hut, wishing she could move the boy into the manor house, but Eliwys had the clerk and Rosemund to tend, and she looked ready to collapse herself.
Eliwys had sat with Rosemund all night, giving her sips of willow tea and rebandaging the wound. They had run out of cloths, and she had taken off her coif and torn it into strips. She sat where she could see the screens, and every few minutes she had stood up and gone over to the door, as if she heard someone coming. With her dark hair down over her shoulders, she looked no older than Rosemund.
Kivrin took the firewood to the woman, dumping it on the dirt floor next to the rat cage. The rat was gone, killed, no doubt, and not even guilty. “The Lord blesses us,” the woman said to her. She knelt by the fire and began carefully adding the wood to it.
Kivrin checked the boy again. His bubo was still draining a clear watery fluid, which was good. Rosemund’s had bled half the night and then begun to swell and grow hard again. And I can’t lance it again, Kivrin thought. She can’t lose any more blood.
She started back to the hall, wondering if she should relieve Eliwys or try to chop some wood. Roche, coming out of the steward’s house, met her with the news that two more of the steward’s children were ill.
It was the two youngest boys, and it was clearly the pneumonic. Both were coughing, and the mother intermittently retched a watery sputum. The Lord blesses us.
Kivrin went back to the hall. It was still hazy from the sulfur, and the clerk’s arms looked almost black in the yellowish light. The fire was no better than the one in the woman’s hut. Kivrin brought in the last of the cut wood and then told Eliwys to lie down, that she would tend Rosemund.
“Nay,” Eliwys said, glancing toward the door. She added, almost to herself, “He has been three days on the road.”
It was seventy kilometers to Bath, a day and a half at least on horseback and the same amount of time back, if he had been able to get a fresh horse in Bath. He might be back today, if he had found Lord Guillaume immediately. If he comes back, Kivrin thought.
Eliwys glanced at the door again, as if she heard something, but the only sound was Agnes, crooning softly to her cart. She had put a kerchief over it like a blanket and was spooning make-believe food into it. “He has the blue sickness,” she told Kivrin.
Kivrin spent the rest of the day doing household chores—bringing in water, making broth from the roast joint, emptying the chamber pots. The steward’s cow, its udders swollen in spite of Kivrin’s orders, came lowing into the courtyard and followed her, nudging her with its horns till Kivrin gave up and milked it. Roche chopped wood in between visits to the steward and the boy, and Kivrin, wishing she had learned how to split wood, hacked clumsily at the big logs.
The steward came to fetch them again just before dark to his younger daughter. That’s eight cases so far, Kivrin thought. There were only forty people in the village. One third to one half of Europe was supposed to have caught the plague and died and Mr. Gilchrist thought that was exaggerated. One third would be thirteen cases, only five more. Even at fifty percent, only twelve more would get it, and the steward’s children had all already been exposed.
She looked at them, the older daughter stocky and dark like her father, the youngest boy sharp-faced like his mother, the scrawny baby. You’ll all get it, she thought, and that will leave eight.
She couldn’t seem to feel anything, even when the baby began to cry and the girl took it on her knee and stuck her filthy finger in its mouth. Thirteen, she prayed. Twenty at the most.
She couldn’t feel anything for the clerk either, even though it was clear he could not last the night. His lips and tongue were covered with a brown slime, and he was coughing up a watery spittle that was streaked with blood. She tended him automatically, without feeling.
It’s the lack of sleep, she thought, it’s making us all numb. She lay down by the fire and tried to sleep, but she seemed beyond sleep, beyond tiredness. Eight more people, she thought, adding them up in her mind. The mother will catch it, and the reeve’s wife and children. That leaves four. Don’t let one of them be Agnes or Eliwys. Or Roche.
In the morning Roche found the cook lying in the snow in front of her hut, half-frozen and coughing blood. Nine, Kivrin thought.
The cook was a widow, with no one to take care of her, so they brought her into the hall and laid her next to the clerk, who was, amazingly, horribly, still alive. The hemorrhaging had spread all over his body now, his chest crisscrossed with bluish-purple marks, his arms and legs nearly solid black. His cheeks were covered with a black stubble that seemed somehow a symptom, too, and under it his face was darkening.
Rosemund still lay white and silent, balanced between life and death, and Eliwys tended her quietly, carefully, as if the slightest movement, the slightest sound, might tip her into death. Kivrin tiptoed among the pallets, and Agnes, sensing the need for silence, fell completely apart.
She whined, she hung on the barricade, she asked Kivrin half a dozen times to take her to see her hound, her pony, to get her something to eat, to finish telling her the story of the naughty girl in the woods.
“How does it end?” she whined in a tone that set Kivrin’s teeth on edge. “Do the wolves eat the girl?”
“I don’t know,” Kivrin snapped after the fourth time. “Go and sit by your grandmother.”
Agnes looked contemptuously at Lady Imeyne, who still knelt in the corner, her back to all of them. She had been there all night. “Grandmother will not play with me.”
“Well, then, play with Maisry.”
She did, for five minutes, pestering her so mercilessly she retaliated and Agnes came screaming back, shrieking that Maisry had pinched her.
“I don’t blame her,” Kivrin said, and sent both of them to the loft.
She went to check on the boy, who was so improved he was sitting up, and when she came back, Maisry was hunched in the high seat, sound asleep.
“Where’s Agnes?” Kivrin said.
Eliwys looked around blankly. “I know not. They were in the loft.”
“Maisry,” Kivrin said, crossing to the dais. “Wake up. Where is Agnes?”
Maisry blinked stupidly at her.
“You should not have left her alone,” Kivrin said. She climbed up into the loft, but Agnes wasn’t there, so she checked the bower. She wasn’t there either.
Maisry had got out of the high seat and was huddled against the wall, looking terrified. “Where is she?” Kivrin demanded.
Maisry put a hand up defensively to her ear and gaped at her.
“That’s right,” Kivrin said. “I will box your ears unless you tell me where she is.”
Maisry buried her face in her skirts.
“Where is she?” Kivrin said, and jerked her up by her arm. “You were supposed to watch her. She was your responsibility!”
Maisry began to howl, a high-pitched sound like an animal.
“Stop that!” Kivrin said. “Show me where she went!” She pushed her toward the screens.
“What is it?” Roche said, coming in.
“It’s Agnes,” Kivrin said. “We must find her. She may have gone out into the village.”
Roche shook his head. “I did not see her. She is likely in one of the outbuildings.”
“The
stables,” Kivrin said, relieved. “She said she wanted to go see her pony.”
She was not in the stables. “Agnes!” she called into the manure-smelling darkness, “Agnes!” Agnes’s pony whinnied and tried to push its way out of its stall, and Kivrin wondered when it had last been fed, and where the hounds were. “Agnes.” She looked in each of the boxes and behind the manger, anywhere a little girl might hide. Or fall asleep.
She might be in the barn, Kivrin thought, and came out of the stable, shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. Roche was just emerging from the kitchen. “Did you find her?” Kivrin asked, but he didn’t hear her. He was looking toward the gate, his head cocked as if he were listening.
Kivrin listened, but she couldn’t hear anything. “What is it?” she asked. “Can you hear her crying?”
“It is the Lord,” he said and ran toward the gate.
Oh, no, not Roche, Kivrin thought, and ran after him. He had stopped and was opening the gate. “Father Roche,” Kivrin said, and heard the horse.
It was galloping toward them, the sound of the hoofs loud on the frozen ground. Kivrin thought, Roche meant the lord of the manor. He thinks Eliwys’s husband has finally come, and then, with a shock of hope, it’s Mr. Dunworthy.
Roche lifted the heavy bar and slid it to the side.
We need streptomycin and disinfectant, and he’s got to take Rosemund back to hospital with him. She’ll have to have a transfusion.
Roche had the bar off. He pushed on the gate.
And vaccine, she thought wildly. He’d better bring back the oral. Where’s Agnes? He must get Agnes safely away from here.
The horse was nearly at the gate before she came to her senses. “No!” she said, but it was too late. Roche already had the gate open.
“He can’t come here,” Kivrin shouted, looking about wildly for something to warn him off with. “He’ll catch the plague.”
She’d left the spade by the empty pigsty after she buried Blackie. She ran to get it. “Don’t let him through the gate,” she called, and Roche flung his arms up in warning, but he had already ridden into the courtyard.