Dooms Day Book

“His sending her now has nothing to do with Advent or holy days,” he said, watching Badri. He was back to tapping one key at a time and frowning. “He could send her next week and use Epiphany for a rendezvous date. He could run unmanneds for six months and then send her lapse-time. Gilchrist is sending her now because Basingame’s off on holiday and isn’t here to stop him.”

“Oh, dear,” Mary said. “I rather thought he was rushing it myself. When I told him how long I needed Kivrin in Infirmary, he tried to talk me out of it. I had to explain that her inoculations needed time to take effect.”

“A rendezvous on the twenty-eighth of December,” Dunworthy said bitterly. “Do you realize what holy day that is? The Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Which, in light of how this drop is being run, may be entirely appropriate.”

“Why can’t you stop it?” Mary said. “You can forbid Kivrin to go, can’t you? You’re her tutor.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not. She’s a student at Brasenose. Latimer’s her tutor.” He waved his hand in the direction of Latimer, who had picked up the brass-bound casket again and was peering absentmindedly into it. “She came to Balliol and asked me to tutor her unofficially.”

He turned and stared blindly at the thin-glass. “I told her then that she couldn’t go.”

Kivrin had come to see him when she was a first-year student. “I want to go to the Middle Ages,” she had said. She wasn’t even a meter and a half tall, and her fair hair was in braids. She hadn’t looked old enough to cross the street by herself.

“You can’t,” he had said, his first mistake. He should have sent her back to Mediaeval, told her she would have to take the matter up with her tutor. “The Middle Ages are closed. They have a ranking of ten.”

“A blanket ten,” Kivrin had said, “which Mr. Gilchrist says they don’t deserve. He says that ranking would never hold up under a year-by-year analysis. It’s based on the contemps’ mortality rate, which was largely due to bad nutrition and no med support. The ranking wouldn’t be nearly as high for an historian who’d been inoculated against disease. Mr. Gilchrist plans to ask the History Faculty to reevaluate the ranking and open part of the fourteenth century.”

“I cannot conceive of the History Faculty opening a century that had not only the Black Death and cholera, but the Hundred Years War,” Dunworthy had said.

“But they might, and if they do, I want to go.”

“It’s impossible,” he’d said. “Even if it were opened, Mediaeval wouldn’t send a woman. An unaccompanied woman was unheard of in the fourteenth century. Only women of the lowest class went about alone, and they were fair game for any man or beast who happened along. Women of the nobility and even the emerging middle class were constantly attended by their fathers or their husbands or their servants, usually all three, and even if you weren’t a woman, you’re a student. The fourteenth century is far too dangerous for Mediaeval to consider sending a student. They would send an experienced historian.”

“It’s no more dangerous than Twentieth Century,” Kivrin had said. “Mustard gas and automobile crashes and pinpoints. At least no one’s going to drop a bomb on me. And who’s an experienced Mediaeval historian? Nobody has on-site experience, and your Twentieth Century historians here at Balliol don’t know anything about the Middle Ages. Nobody knows anything. There are scarcely any records, except for parish registers and tax rolls, and nobody knows what their lives were like at all. That’s why I want to go. I want to find out about them, how they lived, what they were like. Won’t you please help me?”

He had finally said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to speak with Mediaeval about that,” but it was too late.

“I’ve already talked to them,” she said. “They don’t know anything about the Middle Ages either. I mean, anything practical. Mr. Latimer’s teaching me Middle English, but it’s all pronomial inflections and vowel shifts. He hasn’t taught me to say anything.

“I need to know the language and the customs,” she said, leaning over Dunworthy’s desk, “and the money and table manners and things. Did you know they didn’t use plates? They used flat loaves of bread called manchets, and when they finished eating their meat, they broke them into pieces and ate them. I need someone to teach me things like that, so I won’t make mistakes.”

“I’m a twentieth-century historian, not a mediaevalist. I haven’t studied the Middle Ages in forty years.”

“But you know the sorts of things I need to know. I can look them up and learn them, if you’ll just tell me what they are.”

“What about Gilchrist?” he had said, even though he considered Gilchrist a self-important fool.

“He’s working on the re-ranking and hasn’t any time.”

And what good will the re-ranking do if he has no historians to send? Dunworthy thought. “What about Montoya? She’s working on a mediaeval dig out near Witney, isn’t she? She should know something about the customs.”