Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,137
longer it’s stood, the higher the alcoholic content, and alcohol is an antiseptic.
“I have remembered me that old wine poured into a wound may sometimes stop infections,” I said.
He didn’t ask me what “infection” was or how I was able to remember that when I supposedly can’t remember anything else. He went immediately across to the church and got an earthenware bottle full of strong-smelling wine, and I poured it onto the bandage and washed the wound with it.
I brought the bottle home with me. I’ve hidden it under the bed in Rosemund’s bower (in case it’s part of the sacramental wine—that would be all Imeyne would need, she’d have Roche burned for a heretic) so I can keep cleaning it. Before she went to bed, I poured some straight on.
19
It rained till Christmas Eve, a hard, wintry rain that came through the smoke vent in the roof and made the fire hiss and smoke.
Kivrin poured wine on Agnes’s knee at every chance she got, and by the afternoon of the twenty-third it looked a little better. It was still swollen but the red streak was-gone. Kivrin ran across to the church, holding her cloak over her head, to tell Father Roche, but he wasn’t there.
Neither Imeyne nor Eliwys had noticed Agnes’s knee was hurt. They were trying frantically to get ready for Sir Bloet’s family, if they were coming, cleaning the loft room so the women could sleep there, strewing rose petals over the rushes in the hall, baking an amazing assortment of manchets, puddings, and pies, including a grotesque one in the shape of the Christ child in the manger, with braided pastry for swaddling clothes.
In the afternoon Father Roche came to the manor, drenched and shivering. He had gone out in the freezing rain to fetch ivy for the hall. Imeyne wasn’t there—she was in the kitchen cooking the Christ child—and Kivrin made Roche come in and dry his clothes by the fire.
She called for Maisry, and when she didn’t come went out across the courtyard to the kitchen and fetched him a cup of hot ale. When she returned with it, Maisry was on the bench beside Roche, holding her tangled, filthy hair back with her hand, and Roche was putting goose grease on her ear. As soon as she saw Kivrin she clapped her hand to her ear, probably undoing all the good of Roche’s treatment, and scuttled out.
“Agnes’s knee is better,” Kivrin told him. “The swelling has gone down, and a new scab is forming.”
He didn’t seem surprised, and she wondered if she’d been mistaken, if it hadn’t been blood poisoning at all.
During the night the rain turned to snow. “They will not come,” Lady Eliwys said the next morning, sounding relieved.
Kivrin had to agree with her. It had snowed nearly thirty centimeters in the night, and it was still coming down steadily. Even Imeyne seemed resigned to their not coming, though she kept on with the preparations, bringing down pewter trenchers from the loft and shouting for Maisry.
Around noon the snow stopped abruptly, and by two it had begun to clear, and Eliwys ordered everyone into their good clothes. Kivrin dressed the girls, surprised at the fanciness of their silk shifts. Agnes had a dark red velvet kirtle to wear over hers and her silver buckle, and Rosemund’s leaf-green kirtle had long split sleeves and a low bodice that showed the embroidery on her yellow shift. Nothing had been said to Kivrin about what she should wear, but after she had taken the girls’ hair out of braids and brushed it over their shoulders, Agnes said, “You must put on your blue,” and got her dress out of the chest at the foot of the bed. It looked less out of place among the girls’ finery, but the weave was still too fine, the color too blue.
She didn’t know what she should do about her hair. Unmarried girls wore their hair unbound on festive occasions, held back by a fillet or a ribbon, but her hair was too short for that, and only married women covered their hair. She couldn’t just leave it uncovered—the chopped-off hair looked terrible.
Apparently Eliwys agreed. When Kivrin brought the girls back downstairs, she bit her lip and sent Maisry up to the loft room to fetch a thin, nearly transparent veil that she fastened with Kivrin’s fillet halfway back on her head so that her front hair showed, but the ragged cut ends were hidden.