Dooms Day Book

Agnes took hold of Rosemund’s arm and led her out. “When the clerk dies, we will bury him in the churchyard,” Kivrin could hear her say going down the stairs. “Like Blackie.”

The clerk looked already dead, his eyes half-open and unseeing. Father Roche knelt next to him and hoisted him easily over his shoulder, the clerk’s head and arms hanging limply down, the way Kivrin had carried Agnes home from the midnight mass. Kivrin hastily pulled the coverlet off the featherbed, and Roche eased him down onto the bed.

“We must draw the fever from the brain,” Lady Imeyne said, returning to her poultice. “It is the spices that have fevered his brain.”

“No,” Kivrin whispered, looking at the priest. He lay on his back with his arms out at his sides, the palms up. The thin shift was ripped halfway down the front and had fallen completely off his left shoulder so his outstretched arm was exposed. Under the arm was a red swelling. “No,” she breathed.

The swelling was bright red and nearly as large as an egg. High fever, swollen tongue, intoxication of the nervous system, buboes under the arms and in the groin.

Kivrin took a step back from the bed. “It can’t be,” she said. “It’s something else.” It had to be something else. A boil. Or an ulcer of some kind. She reached forward to pull the sleeve away from it.

The clerk’s hands twitched. Roche stretched to grasp his wrists, pushing them down into the featherbed. The swelling was hard to the touch, and around it the skin was a mottled purplish– black.

“It can’t be,” she said. “It’s only 1320.”

“This will draw the fever out,” Imeyne said. She stood up stiffly, holding the poultice out in front of her. “Pull his shift away from his body that I may lay on the poultice.” She started toward the bed.

“No!” Kivrin said. She put her hands up to stop her. “Stay away! You mustn’t touch him!”

“You speak wildly,” Imeyne said. She looked at Roche. “It is naught but a stomach fever.”

“It isn’t a fever!” Kivrin said. She turned to Roche. “Let go of his hands and get away from him. It isn’t a fever. It’s the plague.”

All of them, Roche and Imeyne and Eliwys looked at her as stupidly as Maisry.

They don’t even know what it is, she thought desperately, because it doesn’t exist yet, there was no such thing as the Black Death yet. It didn’t even begin in China until 1333. And it didn’t reach England till 1348. “But it is,” Kivrin said. “He’s got all the symptoms. The bubo and the swollen tongue and the hemorrhaging under the skin.”

“It is naught but a stomach fever,” Imeyne said and pushed past Kivrin to the bed.

“No—” Kivrin said, but Imeyne had already stopped, the poultice poised above his naked chest.

“Lord have mercy on us,” she said, and backed away, still holding the poultice.

“Is it the blue sickness?” Eliwys said frightenedly.

And suddenly Kivrin saw it all. They had not come here because of the trial, because Lord Guillaume was in trouble with the king. He had sent them here because the plague was in Bath.

“Our nurse died,” Agnes had said. And Lady Imeyne’s chaplain, Brother Hubard. “Rosemund said he died of the blue sickness,” Agnes had told her. And Sir Bloet had said that the trial had been delayed because the judge was ill. That was why Eliwys hadn’t wanted to send word to Courcy and why she had been so angry when Imeyne sent Gawyn to the bishop. Because the plague was in Bath. But it couldn’t be. The Black Death hadn’t reached Bath until the fall of 1348.

“What year is it?” Kivrin said.

The women looked at her dumbly, Imeyne still holding the forgotten poultice. Kivrin turned to Roche. “What is the year?”

“Are you ill, Lady Katherine?” he said anxiously, reaching for her wrists as if he was afraid she was going to have one of the clerk’s seizures.

She jerked her hands away. “Tell me the year.”

“It is the twenty-first year of Edward III’s reign,” Eliwys said.

Edward III, not the Second. In her panic she could not remember when he had reigned. “Tell me the year,” she said.

“Anno domine,” the clerk said from the bed. He tried to lick his lips with his swollen tongue. “One thousand three hundred and forty-eight.”

Book III

Buried with my own hands five of my children in a single grave… No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.

Agniola di Tura, 1347

Chapter Twenty-Four

Dunworthy spent the next two days ringing Finch’s list of techs and Scottish fishing guides and setting up another ward in Bulkeley-Johnson. Fifteen more of his detainees were down with the flu, among them Ms. Taylor, who had collapsed forty-nine strokes short of a full peal.