Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,218
He leaned around so he could see what Dunworthy was reading.
Dunworthy shut the book and handed it to him. “And the rest of the bell ringers? Ms. Piantini?”
Colin nodded. “She’s still in hospital. She’s so thin you wouldn’t know her.” He opened the book. “You were reading about the Black Death, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Dunworthy said. “Mr. Finch didn’t come down with the virus, did he?”
“No. He’s been filling in as tenor for Ms. Piantini. He’s very upset. We didn’t get any lavatory paper in the shipment from London, and he says we’re nearly out. He had a fight with the Gallstone over it.” He laid the book back on the bed. “What’s going to happen to your girl?”
“I don’t know,” Dunworthy said.
“Isn’t there anything you can do to get her out?”
“No.”
“The Black Death was terrible,” Colin said. “So many people died they didn’t even bury them. They just left them lying in big heaps.”
“I can’t get to her, Colin. We lost the fix when Gilchrist shut the net down.”
“I know, but isn’t there something we can do?”
“No.”
“But—”
“I intend to speak to your doctor about restricting your visitors,” the sister said sternly, removing Colin by the collar of his jacket.
“Then begin by restricting Mrs. Gaddson,” Dunworthy said, “and tell Mary I want to see her.”
Mary did not come, but Montoya did, obviously fresh from the dig. She was mud to the knees, and her dark curly hair was gray with it. Colin came with her, and his green jacket was thoroughly bespattered.
“We had to sneak in when she wasn’t looking,” Colin said.
Montoya had lost a good deal of weight. Her hands on the bed rail were very thin, and the digital on her wrist was loose.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Better,” he lied, looking at her hands. There was mud under her fingernails. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” she said.
She must have gone directly to the dig to look for the corder as soon as they released her from hospital. And now she had come directly here.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he said.
Her hands took hold of the rail, let go of it. “Yes.”
Kivrin had been in the right place, after all. The locationals had been shifted by only a few kilometers, a few meters, and she had managed to find the Oxford-Bath road, she had found Skendgate. And died in it, a victim of the influenza she had caught before she went. Or of starvation after the plague, or of despair. She had been dead seven hundred years.
“You found it then,” he said, and it was not a question.
“Found what?” Colin said.
“Kivrin’s corder.”
“No,” Montoya said.
He felt no relief. “But you will,” he said.
Her hands shook a little, holding the rail. “Kivrin asked me to,” she said. “The day of the drop. She was the one who suggested the corder look like a bone spur, so the record would survive even if she didn’t. ‘Mr. Dunworthy’s worried over nothing,’ she said, ‘but if something should go wrong, I’ll try to be buried in the churchyard so you,’ ” her voice faltered, “ ‘so you won’t have to dig up half of England.’ ”
Dunworthy closed his eyes.
“But you don’t know that she’s dead, if you haven’t found the corder,” Colin burst out. “You said you didn’t even know where she was. How can you be sure she’s dead?”
“We’ve been conducting experiments with laboratory rats at the dig. Only a quarter of an hour’s exposure to the virus is required for infection. Kivrin was directly exposed to the tomb for over three hours. There’s a 75 percent chance she contracted the virus, and with the limited med support available in the fourteenth century, she’s almost certain to have developed complications.”
Limited med support It was a century that had dosed people with leeches and strychnine, that had never heard of sterilization or germs or T-cells. They would have stuck filthy poultices on her and muttered prayers and opened her veins. “And the doctors bled them,” Gilchrist’s book had said, “but many died in despite.”
“Without antimicrobials and T-cell enhancement,” Montoya said, the virus’s mortality rate is forty-nine percent. Probability—”
“Probability,” Dunworthy said bitterly. “Are these Gilchrist’s figures?”
Montoya glanced at Colin and frowned. “There is a 75 percent chance Kivrin contracted the virus, and a 68 percent chance she was exposed to the plague. Morbidity for bubonic plague is 91 percent, and the mortality rate is—”
“She didn’t get the plague,” Dunworthy said. “She’d had her plague immunization. Didn’t Dr. Ahrens or Gilchrist tell you that?”