Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,207

I don’t know where he gets his courage.

He continues to say matins and vespers and to pray, telling God about Rosemund and who has it now, reporting their symptoms and telling what we’re doing for them, as if He could actually hear him. The way I talk to you.

Is God there, too, I wonder, but shut off from us by something worse than time, unable to get through, unable to find us?

(Break)

We can hear the plague. The villages toll the death knell after a burial, nine strokes for a man, three for a woman, one for a baby, and then an hour of steady tolling. Esthcote had two this morning, and Osney has tolled continuously since yesterday. The bell in the southwest that I told you I could hear when I first came through has stopped. I don’t know whether that means the plague is finished there or whether there’s no one left alive to ring the bell.

(Break)

Please don’t let Rosemund die. Please don’t let Agnes get it. Send Gawyn back.

28

The boy who had run from Kivrin the day she tried to find the drop came down with the plague in the night. His mother was standing waiting for Father Roche when he went to matins. The boy had a bubo on his back, and Kivrin lanced it while Roche and the mother held him.

She didn’t want to do it. The scurvy had left him already weak, and Kivrin had no idea whether there were any arteries below the shoulder blades. Rosemund did not seem at all improved, though Roche claimed her pulse was stronger. She was so white, as if she had been utterly drained of blood, and so still. And the boy didn’t look as if he could stand to lose any blood.

But he bled hardly at all, and the color was already coming back in his cheeks before Kivrin finished washing the knife.

“Give him tea made from rose hips,” Kivrin said, thinking that at least that would help the scurvy. “And willow bark.” She held the blade of the knife over the fire. The fire was no bigger than the day she had sat by it, too weak to find the drop. It would never keep the boy warm, and if she told the woman to go gather firewood, she might expose someone else. “We will bring you some wood,” she said, and then wondered how.

There was still food left over from the Christmas feast, but they were fast running out of everything else. They had used most of the wood that was already cut trying to keep Rosemund and the clerk warm, and there was no one to ask to chop the logs that lay piled against the kitchen. The reeve was ill, the steward was tending his wife and son.

Kivrin gathered up an armful of the already-split wood and some pieces of loose bark for kindling and took it back to the hut, wishing she could move the boy into the manor house, but Eliwys had the clerk and Rosemund to tend, and she looked ready to collapse herself.

Eliwys had sat with Rosemund all night, giving her sips of willow tea and rebandaging the wound. They had run out of cloths, and she had taken off her coif and torn it into strips. She sat where she could see the screens, and every few minutes she had stood up and gone over to the door, as if she heard someone coming. With her dark hair down over her shoulders, she looked no older than Rosemund.

Kivrin took the firewood to the woman, dumping it on the dirt floor next to the rat cage. The rat was gone, killed, no doubt, and not even guilty. “The Lord blesses us,” the woman said to her. She knelt by the fire and began carefully adding the wood to it.

Kivrin checked the boy again. His bubo was still draining a clear watery fluid, which was good. Rosemund’s had bled half the night and then begun to swell and grow hard again. And I can’t lance it again, Kivrin thought. She can’t lose any more blood.

She started back to the hall, wondering if she should relieve Eliwys or try to chop some wood. Roche, coming out of the steward’s house, met her with the news that two more of the steward’s children were ill.

It was the two youngest boys, and it was clearly the pneumonic. Both were coughing, and the mother intermittently retched a watery sputum. The Lord blesses us.

Kivrin went