them until morning to get her onto a cot in one of the lecture rooms. Dunworthy eventually had to resort to saying, “Your daddy wants his good girl to lie down now,” and just after they had her quieted down, the ambulance came. “Daddy!” she wailed when they shut the doors. “Don’t leave me here all alone!”
“Oh, dear,” Finch said when the ambulance drove off. “It’s past breakfast time. I do hope they haven’t eaten all the bacon.”
He went off to ration supplies, and Dunworthy went back to his rooms to wait for Andrews’s call. Colin was halfway down the staircase, eating a piece of toast and pulling on his jacket. “The vicar wants me to help collect clothes for the detainees,” he said with his mouth full of toast. “Great-aunt Mary telephoned. You’re to ring her back.”
“But not Andrews?”
“No.”
“Has the visual been restored?”
“No.”
“Wear your regulation face mask,” Dunworthy called after him, “and your muffler!”
He rang up Mary and waited impatiently for nearly five minutes until she came to the telephone.
“James?” Mary’s voice said. “It’s Badri. He’s asking for you.”
“He’s better, then?”
“No. His fever’s still very high, and he’s become quite agitated, keeps calling your name, insists he has something to tell you. He’s working himself into a very bad state. If you could come and speak with him, it might calm him down.”
“Has he said anything about the plague?” he asked.
“The plague?” she said, looking annoyed. “Don’t tell me you’ve been infected by these ridiculous rumors that are flying about, James—that it’s cholera, that it’s breakbone fever, that it’s a recurrence of the Pandemic—”
“No,” Dunworthy said. “It’s Badri. Last night he said, ‘It killed half of Europe,’ and ‘It was the rats.’ ”
“He’s delirious, James. It’s the fever. It doesn’t mean anything.”
She’s right, he told himself. The detainee ranted on about Indians with bows and arrows, and you didn’t begin looking for Sioux warriors. She had conjured up too much birthday cake as an explanation for her being ill, and Badri had conjured up the plague. It didn’t mean anything.
Nevertheless, he said he would be there immediately and went to find Finch. Andrews hadn’t specified what time he would call, but Dunworthy couldn’t risk leaving the phone unattended. He wished he’d made Colin stay while he spoke to Mary.
Finch would very likely be in hall, guarding the bacon with his life. He took the receiver off the hook so the phone would sound engaged and went across the quad to the hall.
Ms. Taylor met him at the door. “I was just coming to look for you,” she said. “I heard some of the detainees came down with the virus last night.”
“Yes,” he said, scanning the hall for Finch.
“Oh, dear. So I suppose we’ve all been exposed.”
He couldn’t see Finch anywhere.
“How long is the incubation period?” Ms. Taylor asked.
“Twelve to forty-eight hours,” he said. He craned his neck, trying to see over the heads of the detainees.
“That’s awful,” Ms. Taylor said. “What if one of us comes down with it in the middle of the peal? We’re Traditional, you know, not Council. The rules are very explicit.”
He wondered why Traditional, whatever that might be, had deemed it necessary to have rules concerning change ringers infected with influenza.
“Rule Three,” Ms. Taylor said. “ ‘Every man must stick to his bell without interruption.’ It isn’t as if we can put somebody else in halfway through if one of us suddenly keels over. And it would ruin the rhythm.”
He had a sudden image of one of the bell ringers in her white gloves collapsing and being kicked out of the way so as not to disrupt the rhythm.
“Aren’t there any warning symptoms?” Ms. Taylor asked.
“No,” he said.
“That paper the NHS sent around said disorientation, fever, and headache, but that isn’t any good. The bells always give us headaches.”
I can imagine, he thought, looking for William Gaddson or one of the other undergraduates he could get to listen for the phone.
“If we were Council, of course, it wouldn’t matter. They let people substitute right and left. During a peal of Tittum Bob Maxims at York, they had nineteen ringers. Nineteen! I don’t see how they can even call it a peal.”
None of his undergraduates appeared to be in hall, Finch had no doubt barricaded himself in the buttery, and Colin was long gone. “Are you still in need of a practice room?” he asked Ms. Taylor.
“Yes, unless one of us comes down with this thing. Of course, we could do Stedmans, but that would