Doomsday Book (23 page)

"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 chamberpot, 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.

She wondered what had happened to Agnes. Perhaps someone had belatedly had the good sense to bar her from the sickroom, or perhaps the unreliable Maisry was actually watching her. Or, more likely, she had stopped to see her puppy in the stable and forgotten she was going to show her
chavotte
to Kivrin.