Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,204

tear his chest apart, though nothing came up. The sound woke Rosemund and she began to whimper, and if it isn’t a punishment, Kivrin thought, it certainly looks like one.

Rosemund’s sleep had not helped her at all. Her temp was back up again, and her eyes had begun to look sunken. She jerked as if flogged at the slightest movement.

It’s killing her, Kivrin thought. I have to do something.

When Roche came in again, she went up to the bower and brought down Imeyne’s casket of medicines. Imeyne watched, her lips moving soundlessly, but when Kivrin set it in front of her and asked her what was in the linen bags, she put her folded hands up to her face and closed her eyes.

Kivrin recognized some of them. Dr. Ahrens had made her study medicinal herbs, and she recognized comfrey and lungwort and the crushed leaves of tansy. There was a little pouch of powdered mercury sulfide, which no one in their right mind would give anyone, and a packet of foxglove, which was almost as bad.

She boiled water and poured in every herb she recognized and steeped it. The fragrance was wonderful, like a breath of summer, and it tasted no worse than the willow-bark tea, but it didn’t help either. By nightfall, the clerk was coughing continuously, and red blotches had begun to appear on Rosemund’s stomach and arms. Her bubo was the size of an egg and as hard. When Kivrin touched it, she screamed with pain.

During the Black Death the doctors had put poultices on the buboes or lanced them. They had also bled people and dosed them with arsenic, she thought, though the clerk had seemed better after his buboes broke, and he was still alive. But lancing it might spread the infection or, worse, take it into the bloodstream.

She heated water and wet rags to lay on the bubo, but even though the water was lukewarm, Rosemund screamed at the first touch. Kivrin had to go back to cold water, which did no good. None of it’s doing any good, she thought, holding the wet cold cloth against Rosemund’s armpit. None of it.

I must find the drop, she thought. But the woods stretched on for miles, with hundreds of oak trees, dozens of clearings. She would never find it. And she couldn’t leave Rosemund.

Perhaps Gawyn would turn back. They had closed the gates of some cities—perhaps he would not be able to get in, or perhaps he would talk to people on the roads and realize Lord Guillaume must be dead. Come back, she willed him, hurry. Come back.

Kivrin went through Imeyne’s bag again, tasting the contents of the pouches. The yellow powder was sulfur. Doctors had used that during epidemics, too, burning it to fumigate the air, and she remembered learning in History of Meds that sulfur killed certain bacteria, though whether that was only in the sulfa compounds she couldn’t remember. It was safer than cutting the bubo open, though.

She sprinkled a little on the fire to test it, and it billowed into a yellow cloud that burned Kivrin’s throat even through her mask. The clerk gasped for breath, and Imeyne, over in her corner, set up a continuous hacking.

Kivrin had expected the smell of bad eggs to disperse in a few minutes, but the yellow smoke hung in the air like a pall, burning their eyes. Maisry ran outside, coughing into her apron, and Eliwys took Imeyne and Agnes up to the loft to escape it.

Kivrin propped the manor door open and fanned the air with one of the kitchen cloths, and after a while the air cleared a little, though her throat still felt parched. The clerk continued to cough, but Rosemund stopped, and her pulse slowed till Kivrin could scarcely feel it.

“I don’t know what to do,” Kivrin said, holding her hot, dry wrist. “I’ve tried everything.”

Roche came in, coughing.

“It is the sulfur,” she said. “Rosemund is worse.”

He looked at her and felt her pulse and then went out again, and Kivrin took that as a good sign. He would not have left if Rosemund were truly bad.

He came back in a few minutes, wearing his vestments and carrying the oil and viaticum of the last rites.

“What is it?” Kivrin said. “Has the steward’s wife died then?”

“Nay,” he said, and looked past her at Rosemund.

“No,” Kivrin said. She scrambled to her feet to stand between him and Rosemund. “I won’t let you.”

“She must not die unshriven,” he said, still looking