Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,225

fetch things for you. You won’t have to do a thing.”

“It might not work,” Dunworthy said. “The slippage …”

“But you’re going to try, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

A band tightened round his chest with every step, and Badri had already had one relapse, and even if they managed it, the net might not send him through.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to try.”

“Apocalyptic!” Colin said.

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE DOMESDAY BOOK

(078926–079064)

Lady Imeyne, mother of Guillaume D’Ivene.

(Break)

Rosemund is sinking. I can’t feel the pulse in her wrist at all, and her skin looks yellow and waxen, which I know is a bad sign. Agnes is fighting hard. She still doesn’t have any buboes or vomiting, which is a good sign, I think. Eliwys had to cut off her hair. She kept pulling at it, screaming for me to come and braid it.

(Break)

Roche has anointed Rosemund. She couldn’t make a confession, of course. Agnes seems better, though she had a nosebleed a little while ago. She asked for her bell.

(Break)

You bastard! I will not let you take her. She’s only a child. But that’s your specialty, isn’t it? Slaughtering the innocents? You’ve already killed the steward’s baby and Agnes’s puppy and the boy who went for help when I was in the hut, and that’s enough. I won’t let you kill her, too, you son of a bitch! I won’t let you!

31

Agnes died the day after New Year’s, still screaming for Kivrin to come.

“She is here,” Eliwys said, squeezing her hand. “Lady Katherine is here.”

“She is not” Agnes wailed, her voice hoarse but still strong. “Tell her to come!”

“I will,” Eliwys promised, and then looked up at Kivrin, her expression faintly puzzled. “Go and fetch Father Roche,” she said.

“What is it?” Kivrin asked. He had administered the last rites that first night, Agnes flailing and kicking at him as if she were having a tantrum, and since then she had refused to let him near her. “Are you ill, lady?”

Eliwys shook her head, still looking at Kivrin. “What will I tell my husband when he comes?” she said, and laid Agnes’s hand along her side, and it was only then that Kivrin realized she was dead.

Kivrin washed her little body, which was nearly covered with purplish-blue bruises. Where Eliwys had held her hand, the skin was completely black. She looked like she had been beaten. As she has been, Kivrin thought, beaten and tortured. And murdered. The slaughter of the innocents.

Agnes’s surcote and shift were ruined, a stiffened mass of blood and vomit, and her everyday linen shift had long since been torn into strips. Kivrin wrapped her body in her own white cloak, and Roche and the steward buried her.

Eliwys did not come. “I must stay with Rosemund,” she said when Kivrin told her it was time. There was nothing Eliwys could do for Rosemund—the girl still lay as still as if she were under a spell, and Kivrin thought the fever must have caused some brain damage. “And Gawyn may come,” Eliwys said.

It was very cold. Roche and the steward puffed out great clouds of condensation as they lowered Agnes into the grave, and the sight of their white breath infuriated Kivrin. She doesn’t weigh anything, she thought bitterly, you could carry her in one hand.

The sight of all the graves angered her, too. The churchyard was filled, and nearly all the rest of the green that Roche had consecrated. Lady Imeyne’s grave was almost in the path to the lychgate, and the steward’s baby did not have one—Father Roche had let it be buried at its mother’s feet though it had not been baptized—and the churchyard was still full.

What about the steward’s youngest son, Kivrin thought angrily, and the clerk? Where do you plan to put them? The Black Death was only supposed to have killed one third to one half of Europe. Not all of it.

“Requiescat in pace. Amen,” Roche said, and the steward began shoveling the frozen dirt onto the little bundle.

You were right, Mr. Dunworthy, she thought bitterly. White only gets dirty. You’re right about everything, aren’t you? You told me not to come, that terrible things would happen. Well, they have. And you can’t wait to tell me I told you so. But you won’t have that satisfaction because I don’t know where the drop is, and the only person who does is probably dead.

She didn’t wait for the steward to finish shoveling dirt down on Agnes or for Father Roche to complete his chummy little chat with God.