Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,175

ermine bands on the sleeves of his shift. He was ill. I was never that ill, Kivrin thought, not even when I was dying.

She went up to the bed. Her foot hit a half-empty earthenware wine bottle and sent it rolling under the bed. The clerk flinched. Another bottle, with the seal still on it, stood at the head of the bed.

“He has eaten too much rich food,” Lady Imeyne said, mashing something in her stone bowl, but it was clearly not food poisoning. Nor too much alcohol, in spite of the wine bottles. He’s ill, Kivrin thought. Terribly ill.

He breathed rapidly in and out through his open mouth, panting like poor Blackie, his tongue sticking out. It was bright red and looked swollen. His face was an even darker red, and his expression was distorted, as if he were terrified.

She wondered if he might have been poisoned. The bishop’s envoy had been so anxious to leave he had nearly run Agnes down, and he had told Eliwys not to disturb him. The church had done things like that in the 1300s, hadn’t they? Mysterious deaths in the monastery and the cathedral. Convenient deaths.

But that made no sense. The bishop’s envoy and the monk would not have hurried off and given orders not to disturb the victim when the whole point of poison was to make it look like botulism or peritonitis or the dozen other unaccountable things people died of in the Middle Ages. And why would the bishop’s envoy poison one of his own underlings when he could demote him, the way Lady Imeyne wanted to demote Father Roche.

“Is it the cholera?” Lady Eliwys said.

No, Kivrin thought, trying to remember its symptoms. Acute diarrhea and vomiting with massive loss of body fluids. Pinched expression, dehydration, cyanosis, raging thirst.

“Are you thirsty?” she asked.

The clerk gave no sign that he had heard. His eyes were half-closed, and they looked swollen, too.

Kivrin laid her hand on his forehead. He flinched a little, his reddened eyes flickering open and then closed.

“He’s burning with fever,” Kivrin said, thinking, Cholera doesn’t produce this high a fever. “Fetch me a cloth dipped in water.”

“Maisry!” Eliwys snapped, but Rosemund was already at her elbow with the same filthy rag they must have used on her.

At least it was cool. Kivrin folded it into a rectangle, watching the clerk’s face. He was still panting, and his face contorted when she laid the rag across his forehead, as if he were in pain. He clutched his hand to his belly. Appendicitis? Kivrin thought. No, that usually was accompanied by a low-grade fever. Typhoid fever could produce temps as high as 40 degrees, though usually not at the onset. It produced enlargement of the spleen, as well, which frequently resulted in abdominal pain.

“Are you in pain?” she asked. “Where does it hurt?”

His eyes flickered half-open again, and his hands moved restlessly on the coverlid. That was a symptom of typhoid fever, that restless plucking, but only in the last stages, eight or nine days into the progress of the disease. She wondered if the priest had already been ill when he came.

He had stumbled getting off his horse when they arrived, and the monk had had to catch him. But he had eaten and drunk more than a little at the feast, and grabbed at Maisry. He couldn’t have been very ill, and typhoid came on gradually, beginning with a headache and an only slightly elevated temperature. It didn’t reach 39 degrees until the third week.

Kivrin leaned closer, pulling his untied shift aside to look for typhoid’s rose-colored rash. There wasn’t any. The side of his neck seemed slightly swollen, but swollen lymph glands went with almost every infection. She pulled his sleeve up. There weren’t any rose spots on his arm either, but his fingernails were a bluish-brown color, which meant not enough oxygen. And cyanosis was a symptom of cholera.

“Has he vomited or had loosening of his bowels?” she asked.

“Nay,” Lady Imeyne said, smearing a greenish paste on a piece of stiff linen. “He has but eaten too much of sugars and spices, and it has fevered his blood.”

It couldn’t be cholera without vomiting, and at any rate the fever was too high. Perhaps it was her virus after all, but she hadn’t felt any stomach pain, and her tongue hadn’t swollen like that.

The clerk raised his hand and pushed the rag off his forehead and onto the pillow, and then let his arm fall back to