Doomsday Book

"Read it," he said.

"'And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"

Kivrin would have no idea what had happened. She would think she had the wrong place or the wrong time, that she had lost count of the days somehow during the plague, that something had gone wrong with the drop. She would think they had forsaken her.

"Well?" Mrs. Gaddson said. "Any other requests?"

"No."

Mrs. Gaddson flipped back to the Old Testament. "'For they shall fall by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence,'" she read. "'He that is far off shall die of the pestilence.'"

In spite of everything, he slept, waking finally to something that was not endless afternoon. It was still raining, but there were shadows in the room and the bells were chiming four o'clock. William's nurse helped him to the lavatory. The book had gone, and he wondered if Colin had come back without his remembering, but when the nurse opened the door of the bedstand for his slippers, he saw it lying there. He asked the nurse to crank his bed to sitting, and when she had gone he put on his spectacles and took the book out again.

The plague had spread so randomly, so viciously, the contemps had been unable to believe it was a natural disease. They had accused lepers and Jews and the mentally impaired of poisoning wells and putting curses on them. Anyone strange, anyone foreign was immediately suspected. In Sussex they had stoned two travellers to death. In Yorkshire they had burnt a young woman at the stake.

"So that's where it got to," Colin said, coming into the room. "I thought I'd lost it."

He was wearing his green jacket and was very wet. "I had to carry the handbell cases over to Holy Re-formed for Ms. Taylor, and it's absolutely pouring."

Relief washed over him at the mention of Ms. Taylor's name, and he realized he had not asked after any of the detainees for fear it would be bad news.

"Is Ms. Taylor all right then?"

Colin touched the bottom of his jacket, and it sprang open, spraying water everywhere. "Yes. They're doing some bell thing at Holy Re-Formed on the fifteenth." He leaned around so he could see what Dunworthy was reading.

Dunworthy shut the book and handed it to him. "And the rest of the bellringers? Ms. Piantini?"

Colin nodded. "She's still in hospital. She's so thin you wouldn't know her." He opened the book. "You were reading about the Black Death, weren't you?"

"Yes," Dunworthy said. "Mr. Finch didn't come down with the virus, did he?"

"No. He's been filling in as tenor for Ms. Piantini. He's very upset. We didn't get any lavatory paper in the shipment from London, and he says we're nearly out. He had a fight with The Gallstone over it." He laid the book back on the bed. "What's going to happen to your girl?"

"I don't know," Dunworthy said.

"Isn't there anything you can do to get her out?"

"No."

"The Black Death was terrible," Colin said. "So many people died they didn't even bury them. They just left them lying in big heaps."

"I can't get to her, Colin. We lost the fix when Gilchrist shut the net down."

"I know, but isn't there something we can do?"

"No."

"But — "

"I intend to speak to your doctor about restricting your visitors," the sister said sternly, removing Colin by the collar of his jacket.

"Then begin by restricting Mrs. Gaddson," Dunworthy said. "and tell Mary I want to see her."

Mary did not come, but Montoya did, obviously fresh from the dig. She was mud to the knees, and her curly hair was gray with it. Colin came with her, and his green jacket was thoroughly bespattered.

"We had to sneak in when she wasn't looking," Colin said.

Montoya had lost a good deal of weight. Her hands on the bed rail were very thin, and the digital on her wrist was loose.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Better," he lied, looking at her hands. There was mud under her fingernails. "How are you feeling?"

"Better," she said.

She must have gone directly to the dig to look for the corder as soon as they released her from hospital. And now she had come directly here.

"She's dead, isn't she?" he said.

Her hands took hold of the rail, let go of it. "Yes."

Kivrin had been in the right place, after all. The locationals had been shifted by only a few kilometers, a few meters, and she had managed to find the Oxford-Bath road, she had found Skendgate. And died in it, a victim of the influenza she had caught before she went. Or of starvation after the plague, or of despair. She had been dead seven hundred years.

"You found it then," he said, and it was not a question.

"Found what?" Colin said.

"Kivrin's corder."

"No," Montoya said.

He felt no relief. "But you will," he said.

Her hands shook a little, holding the rail. "She asked me to," she said. "The day of the drop. She was the one who suggested the corder look like a bone spur, so the record would survive even if she didn't. 'Mr. Dunworthy's worried over nothing,' she said, 'but if something should go wrong, I'll try to be buried in the churchyard so you,'" her voice faltered, "'so you won't have to dig up half of England.'"

Dunworthy closed his eyes.

"But you don't know that she's dead, if you haven't found the corder," Colin burst out. "You said you didn't even know where she was. How can you be sure she's dead?"

"We've been conducting experiments with laboratory rats at the dig. Only a quarter of an hour's exposure to the virus is required for infection. Kivrin was directly exposed to the tomb for over three hours. There's a 75 per cent chance she contracted the virus, and with the limited med support available in the fourteenth century, she's almost certain to have developed complications."

Limited med support. It was a century that had dosed people with leeches and powdered rubies, that had never heard of sterilization or germs or T-cells. They would have stuck filthy poultices on her and muttered prayers and opened her veins. "And the doctors bled them," Colin's book had said, "but many died in despite."

"Without antibiotics and T-cell enhancement," Montoya said, the virus's mortality rate is forty-nine per cent. Probability — "

"Probability," Dunworthy said bitterly. "Are these Gilchrist's figures?"

Montoya glanced at Colin and frowned. "There is a 75 per cent chance Kivrin contracted the virus, and a 68 per cent chance she was exposed to the plague. Morbidity for bubonic plague is 91 per cent, and the mortality rate is — "

"She didn't get the plague," Dunworthy said. "She'd had her plague inoculation. Didn't Dr. Ahrens or Gilchrist tell you that?"

Montoya glanced at Colin again.

"They said I wasn't allowed to tell him," Colin said, looking defiantly at her.

"Tell me what? Is Gilchrist ill?" He remembered looking at the screens and then collapsing forward into Gilchrist's arms. He wondered if he had infected him when he fell.

Montoya said, "Mr. Gilchrist died of the flu three days ago."

Dunworthy looked at Colin. "What else did they instruct you to keep from me?" Dunworthy demanded. "Who else died while I was ill?"

Montoya put up her thin hand as if to stop Colin, but it was too late.

"Great-Aunt Mary," Colin said.

Maisry's run away. Roche and I looked everywhere for her, afraid she'd gallen and crawled into some corner, but the steward said he saw her starting into the woods while he was digging Walthef's grave. She was riding Agnes's pony.

She will only spread it, or make it as far as some village that already has it. It's all around us now. The bells sound like vespers, only out of rhythm, as if the ringers had gone mad. It's impossible to make out whether it is nine strokes or three. Courcy's double bells tolled a single stroke this morning. I wonder if it is one of the chattering girls who played with Rosemund.