Dooms Day Book

“Fainted dead away and let go her bell,” Finch reported. “It swung right over with a noise like doom and the rope thrashing about like a live thing. Wrapped itself round my neck and nearly strangled me. Ms. Taylor wanted to go on after she came to herself, but of course it was too late. I do wish you’d speak to her, Mr. Dunworthy. She’s very despondent. Says she’ll never forgive herself for letting the others down. I told her it wasn’t her fault, that sometimes things are simply out of one’s control, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Dunworthy said.

He had not succeeded in reaching a tech, let alone persuading him to come to Oxford, and he had not found Basingame. He and Finch had phoned every hotel in Scotland, and then every inn and rental cottage. William had got hold of his credit records, but there were no purchases of fishing lures or waders in some remote Scottish town, as he had hoped, and no entries at all after the fifteenth of December.

The telephone system was becoming progressively disabled. The visual cut out again, and the recorded voice, announcing that due to the epidemic all circuits were busy, interrupted after only two digits on nearly every call he tried to put through.

He did not so much worry about Kivrin as carry her with him, a heavy weight, as he punched and repunched the numbers, waited for ambulances, listened to Mrs. Gaddson’s complaints. Andrews had not phoned back, or if he had, had not succeeded in getting through. Badri murmured endlessly of death, the nurses carefully transcribing his ramblings on slips of paper. While he waited for the techs, for the fishing guides, for someone to answer the telephone, he pored over Badri’s words, searching for clues. “Black,” Badri had said, and “laboratory,” and “Europe.”

The phone system grew worse. The recorded voice cut in as he punched the first number, and several times he couldn’t raise a dial tone. He gave up for the moment and worked on the contacts charts. William had managed to get hold of the primaries’ confidential NHS medical records, and he pored over them, searching for radiation treatments and visits to the dentist. One of the primaries had had his jaw X-rayed, but on second look, he saw it had been on the twenty-fourth, after the epidemic began.

He went over to Infirmary to ask the primaries who weren’t delirious whether they had any pets or had been duck-hunting recently. The corridors were filled with stretcher trolleys, each one of them with a patient on it. They were jammed up against the doors of Casualties and crosswise in front of the elevator. There was no way he could get past them to it. He took the stairs.

William’s blonde student nurse met him at the door of Isolation. She was wearing a white cloth gown and mask. “I’m afraid you can’t go in,” she said, holding up a gloved hand.

Badri’s dead, he thought. “Is Mr. Chaudhuri worse?” he asked.

“No. He seems actually to be resting a bit more quietly. But we’ve run out of SPG’s. London’s promised to send us a shipment tomorrow, and the staff’s making do with cloth, but we haven’t enough for visitors.” She fished in her pocket for a scrap of paper. “I wrote down his words,” she said, handing it to him. “I’m afraid most of it’s unintelligible. He says your name and—Kivrin’s?—is that right?”

He nodded, looking at the paper.

“And sometimes isolated words, but most of it’s nonsense.”

She had tried to write it down phonetically, and when she understood a word, she underscored it. “Can’t,” he had said, and “black,” and “so worried.”

Over half the detainees were down by Sunday morning, and everyone not ill was nursing them. Dunworthy and Finch had given up all notion of putting them in wards, and at any rate they had run out of cots. They left them in their own beds, or moved them, bed and all, into rooms in Salvin to keep their makeshift nurses from running themselves ragged.

The bellringers fell one by one, and Dunworthy helped put them to bed in the old library. Ms. Taylor, who could still walk, insisted on going to visit them.

“It’s the least I can do,” she said, panting after the exertion of walking across the corridor, “after I let them down like that.”

Dunworthy helped her onto the air mattress William had carried over and covered her with a sheet. “‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,’” he said.

He felt weak himself, bone-tired from the lack of sleep and the constant defeats. He had finally managed, between boiling water for tea and washing bedpans, to get through to one of Magdalen’s techs.

“She’s in hospital,” her mother had said. She’d looked harried and tired.

“When did she fall ill?” Dunworthy’d asked her.

“Christmas Day.”

Hope had surged in him. Perhaps Magdalen’s tech was the source. “What symptoms does she have?” he’d asked eagerly. “Headache? Fever? Disorientation?”

“Ruptured appendix,” she’d said.