Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,179

had given up all notion of putting them in wards, and at any rate they had run out of cots. They left them in their own beds, or moved them, bed and all, into rooms in Salvin to keep their makeshift nurses from running themselves ragged.

The bell ringers fell one by one, and Dunworthy helped put them to bed in the old library. Ms. Taylor, who could still walk, insisted on going to visit them.

“It’s the least I can do,” she said, panting after the exertion of walking across the corridor, “after I let them down like that.”

Dunworthy helped her onto the air mattress William had carried over and covered her with a sheet. “ ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,’ ” he said.

He felt weak himself, bone-tired from the lack of sleep and the constant defeats. He had finally managed, between boiling water for tea and washing bedpans, to get through to one of Magdalen’s techs.

“She’s in hospital,” her mother had said. She’d looked harried and tired.

“When did she fall ill?” Dunworthy’d asked her.

“Christmas Day.”

Hope had surged in him. Perhaps Magdalen’s tech was the source. “What symptoms does your daughter have?” he’d asked eagerly. “Headache? Fever? Disorientation?”

“Ruptured appendix,” she’d said.

By Monday morning three quarters of the detainees were ill. They ran out, as Finch had predicted, of clean linens and NHS masks and, more urgently, of temps, antimicrobials, and aspirin. “I tried to ring Infirmary to ask for more,” Finch said, handing Dunworthy a list, “but the phones have all gone dead.”

Dunworthy walked to the Infirmary to fetch the supplies. The street in front of Casualties was jammed, a jumble of ambulance vans and taxis and protesters carrying a large sign that proclaimed “The Prime Minister Has Left Us Here to Die.” As he squeezed past them and in the door, Colin came running out. He was wet, as usual, and red-faced and red-nosed from the cold. His jacket was unstripped.

“The telephones are out,” he said. “There was an overload. I’m running messages.” He pulled an untidy clutch of folded papers from his jacket pocket. “Is there anyone you’d like me to take a message to?”

Yes, he thought. To Andrews. To Basingame. To Kivrin.

“No,” he said.

Colin stuffed the already-wet messages back in his pocket. “I’m off then. If you’re looking for Great-aunt Mary, she’s in Casualties. Five more cases just came in. A family. The baby was dead.” He darted off through the traffic jam.

Dunworthy pushed his way into Casualties and showed his list to the house officer, who directed him to Supplies. The corridors were still full of stretcher trolleys, though now they were lined lengthwise on both sides so there was a narrow passage between. Bending over one of the stretcher trolleys was a nurse in a pink mask and gown reading something to one of the patients.

“ ‘The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee,’ ” she said, and he realized too late that it was Mrs. Gaddson, but she was so intent on her reading she did not look up. “ ‘Until he have consumed thee from the land.’ ”

The pestilence shall cleave unto thee, he said silently, and thought of Badri. “It was the rats,” Badri had said. “It killed them all. Half of Europe.”

She can’t be in the Black Death, he thought, turning down the corridor to Supplies. Andrews had said the maximal slippage was five years. In 1325 the plague hadn’t even begun in China. Andrews had said the only two things that would not have automatically aborted the drop were the slippage and the coordinates, and Badri, when he could answer Dunworthy’s questions, insisted he had checked Puhalski’s coordinates.

He went into Supplies. There was no one at the desk. He rang the bell.

Each time Dunworthy had asked him, Badri had said the apprentice’s coordinates were correct, but his fingers moved nervously over the sheet, typing, typing in the fix. That can’t be right. There’s something wrong.

He rang the bell again, and a nurse emerged from among the shelves. She had obviously come out of retirement expressly for the epidemic. She was ninety at the least, and her white uniform was yellowed with age, but still stiff with starch. It crackled when she took his list.

“Have you a supply authorization?”

“No,” he said.

She handed him back his list and a three-page form. “All orders must be authorized by the ward matron.”

“We haven’t any ward matron,” he said, his temper flaring. “We haven’t any ward. We have fifty detainees in