Dooms Day Book Read online

  Because of being out of my head, I’m not sure of my temporal location either. I’ve been trying to remember, and I think I’ve only been sick two days, but it might be more. And I can’t ask them what day it is because they don’t understand me, and I can’t get out of bed without falling over, and they’ve cut my hair off, and I don’t know what to do. What happened? Why won’t the interpreter work? Why didn’t the T-cell enhancement?

  (Break)

  There’s a rat under my bed. I can hear it scrabbling in the dark.

  Chapter Eleven

  They couldn’t understand her. Kivrin had tried to communicate with Eliwys, to make her understand, but she had merely smiled kindly, uncomprehendingly, and told Kivrin to rest.

  “Please,” Kivrin had said as Eliwys started for the door. “Don’t leave. This is important. Gawyn is the only one who knows where the drop is.”

  “Sleep,” Eliwys said. “I will be back in a little.”

  “You have to let me see him,” Kivrin said desperately, but Eliwys was already nearly to the door. “I don’t know where the drop is.”

  There was a clattering on the stairs. Eliwys opened the door and said, “Agnes, I bade you go tell—”

  She stopped in midsentence and took a step back. She did not look frightened or even upset, but her hand on the lintel jerked a little, as if she would have slammed the door, and Kivrin’s heart began to pound. This is it, she thought wildly. They’ve come to take me to the stake.

  “Good morning, my lady,” a man’s voice said. “Your daughter Rosemund told me I would find you in hall, but I did not.”

  He came into the room. Kivrin couldn’t see his face. He was standing at the foot of the bed, hidden from her by the hangings. She tried to shift her head so she could see him, but the movement made her head spin violently. She lay back down.

  “I thought I would find you with the wounded lady,” the man said. He was wearing a padded jerkin and leather hose. And a sword. She could hear it clank as he took a step forward. “How does she?”

  “She fares better today,” Eliwys said. “My husband’s mother has gone to brew her a decoction of woundwort for her injuries.”

  She had taken her hand from the door, and his comment about “your daughter Rosemund” surely meant that this was Gawyn, the man she had sent to look for Kivrin’s attackers, but Eliwys had taken two more steps backward as he spoke, and her face looked guarded, wary. The thought of danger flickered through Kivrin’s mind again, and she wondered suddenly if she might not have dreamed Mr. Dunworthy’s cutthroat after all, if that man, with his cruel face, might be Gawyn.

  “Found you aught that might tell us of the lady’s identity?” Eliwys said carefully.

  “Nay,” he said. “Her goods had all been stolen and the horses taken. I hoped the lady might tell me somewhat of her attackers, how many there were and from what direction they came upon her.”

  “I fear she cannot tell you anything,” Eliwys said.

  “Is she mute then?” he said and moved so she could see him.

  He was not so tall as Kivrin remembered him, standing over her, and his hair looked less red and more blonde in the daylight, but his face still looked as kind as when he had set her on his horse. His black horse Gringolet.

  After he had found her in the clearing. He was not the cutthroat—she had dreamed the cutthroat, conjured him out of her delirium and Mr. Dunworthy’s fears, along with the white horse and the Christmas carols—and she must be misunderstanding Eliwys’s reactions the way she had misunderstood their getting her up to use the chamberpot.

  “She is not mute, but speaks in some strange tongue I do not know,” Eliwys said. “I fear her injuries have addled her wits.” She came around to the side of the bed and Gawyn followed her. “Good lady. I have brought my husband’s privй Gawyn.”

  “Good day, my lady,” Gawyn said, speaking slowly and over– distinctly, as if he thought Kivrin were deaf.

  “It was he who found you in the woods,” Eliwys said.

  Where in the woods? Kivrin thought desperately.

  “I am pleased that your wounds are healing,” Gawyn said, emphasizing every word. “Can you tell me of the men who attacked you?”

  I don’t know if I can tell you anything, she thought, afraid to speak for fear he wouldn’t understand her either. He had to understand her. He knew where the drop was.

  “How many men were there?” Gawyn said. “Were they on horseback?”

  Where did you find me? she thought, emphasizing the words the way Gawyn had. She waited for the interpreter to work out the whole sentence, listening carefully to the intonations, checking them against the language lessons Mr. Dunworthy had given her.

  Gawyn and Eliwys were waiting, watching her intently. She took a deep breath. “Where did you find me?”

  They exchanged quick glances, his surprised, hers saying plainly, “You see?”

  “She spoke thus that night,” he said. “I thought it was her injury that made her speak so.”

  “And so I do,” Eliwys said. “My husband’s mother thinks she is of France.”

  He shook his head. “It is not French she speaks.” He turned back to Kivrin. “Good lady,” he said, nearly shouting, “came you from another land?”

  Yes, Kivrin thought, another land, and the only way back is the drop, and only you know where it is.

  “Where did you find me?” she said again.

  “Her goods were all taken,” Gawyn said, “but her wagon was of rich make, and she had many boxes.”

  Eliwys nodded. “I fear she is of high birth and her people seeking her.”

  “In what part of the woods did you find me?” Kivrin said, her voice rising.

  “We are upsetting her,” Eliwys said. She leaned over Kivrin and patted her hand. “Shh. Take your rest.” She moved away from the bed, and Gawyn followed.

  “Would you have me ride to Bath to Lord Guillaume?” Gawyn said, out of sight behind the hangings.

  Eliwys stepped back the way she had when he first came in, as if she were afraid of him. But they had stood side by side at the bed, their hands nearly touching. They had spoken together like old friends. This wariness must be coming from something else.

  “Would you have me bring your husband?” Gawyn said.

  “Nay,” Eliwys said, looking down at her hands. “My lord has enough to worry him, and he cannot leave until the trial is finished. And he bade you stay with us and guard us.”

  “By your leave, then, I will return to the place where the lady was set upon and search further.”

  “Aye,” Eliwys said, still not looking at him. “In their haste, some token may have fallen to the ground nearby that will tell us of her.”

  The place where the lady was set upon, Kivrin recited under her breath, trying to hear his words under the interpreter’s translation and memorize them. The place where I was set upon.

  “I will take my leave and ride out again,” Gawyn said.

  Eliwys looked up at him. “Now?” she said. “It grows dark.”

  “Show me the place where I was set upon,” Kivrin said.

  “I do not fear the dark, Lady Eliwys,” he said, and strode out, the sword clanking.

  “Take me with you,” Kivrin said, but it was no use. They were already gone, and the interpreter was broken. She had deceived herself into thinking it was working. She had understood what they were saying because of the language lessons Mr. Dunworthy had given her, not because of the interpreter, and perhaps she was only deceiving herself that she understood them.

  Perhaps the conversation had not been about who she was at all, but about something else altogether—finding a missing sheep or putting her on trial.

  The lady Eliwys had shut the door when they went out, and Kivrin couldn’t hear anything. Even the tolling bell had stopped, and the light from the waxed linen was faintly blue. It grows dark.

  Gawyn had said he was going to ride back to the drop. If the window overlooked the courtyard, she
might at least be able to see which way he rode out. It is not far, he had said. If she could just see the direction he rode, she could find the drop herself.

  She pushed herself up in the bed, but even that much exertion made the pain in her chest stab again. She put her feet over the side, but the action made her dizzy. She lay back against the pillow and closed her eyes.

  Dizziness and fever and a pain in the chest. What were those symptoms of? Smallpox started out with fever and chills, and the pox didn’t appear until the second or third day. She lifted her arm up to see if there were the beginnings of the pox. She had no idea how long she had been ill, but it couldn’t be smallpox because the incubation period was ten to twenty-one days. Ten days ago she had been in hospital in Oxford, where the smallpox virus had been extinct for nearly a hundred years.

  She had been in hospital, getting inoculated against all of them: smallpox, typhoid fever, cholera, plague. So how could it be any of them? And if it wasn’t any of them, what was it? St. Vitus’s dance? She had told herself that before, that this was something she had not been vaccinated against, but she had had her immune system augmented, too, to fight off any infection.

  There was a sound of running on stairs. “Modder!” a voice that she already recognized as Agnes’s shouted. “Rosemund waited not!”

  She didn’t burst into the room with quite as much violence because the heavy door was shut and she had to push it open, but as soon as she had squeezed through, she raced for the windowseat, wailing.

  “Modder! I would have told Gawyn!” she sobbed, and then stopped when she saw her mother wasn’t in the room. The tears stopped too, Kivrin noticed.

  Agnes stood by the window for a minute, as if she were debating whether to try this scene at a later time, and then ran back to the door. Halfway there, she spied Kivrin and stopped again.

  “I know who you are,” she said, coming around to the side of the bed. She was scarcely tall enough to see over the bed. Her cap strings had come undone again. “You are the lady Gawyn found in the wood.”

  Kivrin was afraid that her answer, garbled as the interpreter obviously made it, would frighten the little girl. She pushed herself up a little against the pillows and nodded.

  “What befell your hair?” Agnes asked. “Did the robbers steal it?”

  Kivrin shook her head, smiling at the odd idea.

  “Maisry says the robbers stole your tongue,” Agnes said. She pointed at Kivrin’s forehead. “Hurt you your head?”

  Kivrin nodded.

  “I hurt my knee,” she said, and tried to pick it up with both hands so Kivrin could see the dirty bandage. The old woman was right. It was already slipping. She could see the wound under it. Kivrin had supposed it was just a skinned knee, but the wound looked fairly deep.

  Agnes tottered, let go of the knee, and leaned against the bed again. “Will you die?”

  I don’t know, Kivrin thought, thinking of the pain in her chest. The mortality rate for smallpox had been seventy-five per cent in 1320, and her augmented immune system wasn’t working.

  “Brother Hubard died,” Agnes said wisely. “And Gilbert. He fell from his horse. I saw him. His head was all red. Rosemund said Brother Hubard died of the blue sickness.”

  Kivrin wondered what the blue sickness was—choking perhaps, or apoplexy—and if he was the chaplain that Eliwys’ mother-in– law was so eager to replace. It was usual for noble households to travel with their own priests. Father Roche was apparently the local priest, probably uneducated and possibly even illiterate, though she had understood his Latin perfectly well. And he had been kind. He had held her hand and told her not to be afraid. There are nice people in the Middle Ages, Mr. Dunworthy, she thought. Father Roche and Eliwys and Agnes.

  “My father said he would bring me a magpie when he comes from Bath,” Agnes said. “Adeliza has a tercel. She lets me hold him sometimes.” She held her bent arm up and out, the dimpled fist closed as if a falcon were perched on her imaginary gauntlet. “I have a hound.”

  “What is your hound’s name?” Kivrin asked.

  “I call him Blackie,” Agnes said, though Kivrin was certain that was only the interpreter’s version. More likely she had said Blackamon or Blakkin. “He is black. Have you a hound?”

  Kivrin was too surprised to answer. She had spoken and made herself understood. Agnes hadn’t even acted like her pronunciation was unusual. She had spoken without thinking about the interpreter or waiting for it to translate, and perhaps that was the secret.

  “Nay, I have no hound,” she said finally, trying to duplicate what she’d done before.

  “I will teach my magpie to talk. I will teach him to say, ‘Good morrow, Agnes.’”

  “Where is your hound?” Kivrin said, trying again. The words sounded different to her, lighter, with that murmuring French inflection she had heard in the women’s speech.

  “Do you wish to see Blackie? He is in the stable,” she said. It sounded like a direct response, but the way Agnes talked it was difficult to tell. She might simply have been volunteering information. To be sure, Kivrin would have to ask her something completely off the subject and something with only one answer.

  Agnes was stroking the soft fur of the bedcovering and humming a toneless little tune.

  “What is your name?” she asked, trying to let the interpreter control her words. It translated her modern sentence into something like, “How are youe cleped?” which she was not sure was correct, but Agnes didn’t hesitate.

  “Agnes,” the little girl said promptly. “My father says I may have a tercel when I am old enough to ride a mare. I have a pony.” She stopped stroking the fur, propped her elbows on the edge of the bed and rested her chin in her little hands. “I know your name,” she said, sounding smugly pleased. “It is Katherine.”

  “What?” Kivrin said blankly. Katherine. How had they come up with Katherine? Her name was supposed to be Isabel. Was it possible that they thought they knew who she was?

  “Rosemund said none knew your name,” she went on, looking smug, “but I heard Father Roche tell Gawyn you were called Katherine. Rosemund said you could not speak, but yet you can.”

  Kivrin had a sudden image of the priest bending over her, his face obscured by the flames that seemed constantly in front of her, saying in Latin, “What is your name that you might be shriven?”

  And she, trying to form the word though her mouth was so dry she could hardly speak, afraid she would die and they would never know what had happened to her.

  “Are you called Katherine?” Agnes was demanding, and she could hear the little girl’s voice clearly under the interpreter’s translation. It sounded just like Kivrin.

  “Aye,” Kivrin said, and felt like crying.

  “Blackie has a…,” Agnes said. The interpreter didn’t catch the word. Karette? Chavette? “It is red. Would you like to see it?” and before Kivrin could stop her, went running out through the still partly-opened door.

  Kivrin waited, hoping she would come back and that a karette wasn’t alive, wishing she had asked where she was and how long she’d been here, though Agnes was probably too young to know. She looked no more than three, though of course she would be much smaller than a modern three-year-old. Five, then, or possibly six. I should have asked her how old she was, Kivrin thought, and then remembered that she might not know that either. Joan of Arc hadn’t known how old she was when the Inquisitors asked her at her trial.

  At least she could ask questions, Kivrin thought. The interpreter was not broken after all. It must have been temporarily stymied by the strange pronunciations, or affected somehow by her fever, but it was all right now, and Gawyn knew where the drop was and could show it to her.

  She sat up straighter among the pillows so she could see the door. The effort hurt her chest and made her dizzy, and her head ached. She anxiously felt her forehead and then her cheeks. They felt warm, but that could be because her hands were cold. It was icy in the room, and on her excursion to the chamber
pot, she hadn’t seen any sign of a brazier or even a warming pan.

  Had warming pans been invented yet? They must have. Otherwise how would people have survived the Little Ice Age? It was so cold.

  She was beginning to shiver. Her fever must be going back up. Were they supposed to come back? In her Med History lecture she had read about fevers breaking, and after that the patient was weak, but the fever didn’t come back, did it? Of course it did. What about malaria? Shivering, headache, sweats, recurring fever. Of course they came back.

  Well, it obviously wasn’t malaria. Malaria had never been endemic to England, mosquitoes didn’t live in Oxford in midwinter and never had, and the symptoms were wrong. She hadn’t experienced any sweating, and the shivering she was having was due to fever.

  Typhus produced headache and a high fever, and it was transmitted by body lice and rat fleas, both of which were endemic to England in the Middle Ages and probably endemic to the bed she was lying on, but the incubation period was too long, nearly two weeks.

  Typhoid fever’s incubation period was only a few days, and it caused headache, aching in the limbs, and high fever too. She didn’t think it was a recurring fever, but she remembered it was normally highest at night, so that must mean it went down during the day and then up again in the evening.

  Kivrin wondered what time it was. Eliwys had said, “It grows dark,” and the light from the linen-covered window was faintly blue, but the days were short in December. It might only be mid-afternoon. She felt sleepy, but that was no sign either. She had slept off and on all day.

  Drowsiness was a symptom of typhoid fever. She tried to remember the others from Dr. Ahrens’ “short course” in mediaeval medicine. Nosebleeds, coated tongue, rose-colored rash. The rash wasn’t supposed to appear until the seventh or eighth day, but Kivrin pulled her shift up and looked at her stomach and chest. No rash, so it couldn’t be smallpox. The pox started appearing by the second or third day.