Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,128
He had given him imaginary notes. None of it meant anything.
“It was the rats,” Badri had said. The contemps hadn’t known it was spread by fleas on the rats. They had had no idea what caused it. They had accused everyone—Jews and witches and the insane. They had murdered halfwits and hanged old women. They had burned strangers at the stake.
He got out of bed and padded into the sitting room. He tiptoed around Colin’s cot and slid The Age of Chivalry out from under Colin’s head. Colin stirred but didn’t wake.
Dunworthy sat on the window seat and looked up the Black Death. It had started in China in 1333, and moved west on trading ships to Messina in Sicily and from there to Pisa. It had spread through Italy and France—eighty thousand dead in Siena, a hundred thousand in Florence, three hundred thousand in Rome—before it crossed the Channel. It had reached England in 1348, “a little before the Feast of St. John the Baptist,” the twenty-fourth of June.
That meant a slippage of twenty-eight years. Badri had been worried about too much slippage, but he had been talking of weeks, not years.
He reached over the cot to the bookcase and took down Fitzwiller’s Pandemics.
“What are you doing?” Colin asked sleepily.
“Reading about the Black Death,” he whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“They didn’t call it that,” Colin mumbled around his gobstopper. He rolled over, wrapping himself in his blankets. “They called it the blue sickness.”
Dunworthy took both books back to bed with him. Fitzwiller gave the date of the plague’s arrival in England as St. Peter’s Day, the twenty-ninth of June, 1348. It had reached Oxford in December, London in October of 1349, and then moved north and back across the Channel to the Low Countries and Norway. It had gone everywhere except Bohemia, and Poland, which had a quarantine, and, oddly, parts of Scotland.
Where it had gone, it had swept through the countryside like the Angel of Death, devastating entire villages, leaving no one alive to administer the last rites or bury the putrefying bodies. In one monastery, all but one of the monks had died.
The single survivor, John Clyn, had left a record: “And lest things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us,” he had written, “I, seeing so many evils and the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One, being myself as if among the dead, I, waiting for death, have put into writing all the things that I have witnessed.”
He had written it all down, a true historian, and then had apparently died himself, all alone. His writing on the manuscript trailed off, and below it, in another hand, someone had written, “Here, it seems, the author died.”
Someone knocked on the door. It was Finch in his bathrobe, looking bleary-eyed and distraught. “Another one of the detainees, sir,” he said.
Dunworthy put his finger to his lips and stepped outside the door with him. “Have you telephoned Infirmary?”
“Yes, sir, and they said it would be several hours before they can dispatch an ambulance. They said to isolate her, and give her dimantadine and orange juice.”
“Which I suppose we’re nearly out of,” Dunworthy said irritably.
“Yes, sir, but that’s not the problem. She won’t cooperate.”
Dunworthy made Finch wait outside the door while he dressed and found his face mask, and they went across to Salvin. A huddle of detainees were standing by the door, dressed in an odd assortment of underthings, coats, and blankets. Only a few of them were wearing their face masks. By day after tomorrow they’ll all be down with it, Dunworthy thought.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” one of the detainees said fervently. “We can’t do a thing with her.”
Finch led him over to the detainee, who was sitting upright in bed. She was an elderly woman with sparse white hair, and she had the same fever-bright eyes, the same frenetic alertness Badri had had that first night.
“Go away!” she said when she saw Finch and made a slapping motion at him. She turned her burning eyes on Dunworthy. “Daddy!” she cried, and then stuck her lower lip out in a pout. “I was very naughty,” she said in a childish voice. “I ate all the birthday cake, and now I have a stomachache.”
“Do you see what I mean, sir?” Finch put in.
“Are the Indians coming, Daddy?” she asked. “I don’t like Indians. They have bows and arrows.”