She started across the green, furious with all of them: with the steward for standing there with his spade, eager to dig more graves, with Eliwys for not coming, with Gawyn for not coming. No one’s coming, she thought. No one.
“Katherine,” Roche called.
She turned, and he half ran up to her, his breath like a cloud around him.
“What is it?” she demanded.
He looked at her solemnly. “We must not give up hope,” he said.
“Why not?” she burst out. “We’re up to eighty-five percent, and we haven’t even got started. The clerk is dying, Rosemund’s dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”
“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in His arms.”
Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark. She put her hands up to her face.
“She is in heaven, where the plague cannot reach her. And God’s love is ever with us,” he said, “and naught can separate us from it, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor things present—”
“Nor things to come,” Kivrin said.
“Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, gently, as if he were anointing her. “It was His love that sent you to help us.”
She put her hand up to his where it rested on her shoulder and held it tightly. “We must help each other,” she said.
They stood there like that for a long minute, and then Roche said, “I must go and ring the bell that Agnes’s soul may have safe passage.”
She nodded and took her hand away. “I’ll go check on Rosemund and the others,” she said and went into the courtyard.
Eliwys had said she needed to stay with Rosemund, but when Kivrin got back to the manor house, she was nowhere near her. She lay curled up on Agnes’s pallet, wrapped in her cloak, watching the door. “Perhaps his horse was stolen by those that would flee the pestilence,” she said, “and that is why he is so long in coming.”
“Agnes is buried,” Kivrin said coldly, and went to check on Rosemund.
She was awake. She looked up solemnly at Kivrin when she knelt by her and reached for Kivrin’s hand.
“Oh, Rosemund,” Kivrin said, tears stinging her nose and eyes. “Sweetheart, how do you feel?”
“Hungry,” Rosemund said. “Has my father come?”
“Not yet,” Kivrin said, and it even seemed possible that he might. “I will fetch you some broth. You must rest until I come back. You have been very ill.”
Rosemund obediently closed her eyes. They looked less sunken, though they still had dark bruises under them. “Where is Agnes?” she asked.
Kivrin smoothed her dark, tangled hair back from her face. “She is sleeping.”
“Good,” Rosemund said. “I would not have her shouting and playing. She is too noisy.”
“I will fetch you the broth,” Kivrin said. She went over to Eliwys. “Lady Eliwys, I have good news,” she said eagerly. “Rosemund is awake.”
Eliwys raised herself up on one elbow and looked at Rosemund, but apathetically, as if she were thinking of something else, and presently she lay down again.
Kivrin, alarmed, put her hand to Eliwys’s forehead. It seemed warm, but Kivrin’s hands were still cold from outside, and she couldn’t tell for certain. “Are you ill?” she asked.
“No,” Eliwys said, but still as if her mind were on something else. “What shall I tell him?”
“You can tell him that Rosemund is better,” she said, and this time it seemed to get through to her. Eliwys got up and went over to Rosemund and sat down beside her. But by the time Kivrin came back from the kitchen with the broth, she had gone back to Agnes’s pallet and lay curled up under her fur-trimmed cloak.
Rosemund was asleep, but it was not the frightening deathlike sleep of before. Her color was better, though her skin was still drawn tightly over her cheekbones.
Eliwys was asleep, too, or feigning sleep, and it was just as well. While she had been in the kitchen, the clerk had crawled off his pallet and halfway over the barricade, and when Kivrin tried to haul him back, he struck out at her wildly. She had to go fetch Father Roche to help subdue him.
His right eye had ulcerated, the plague eating its way out from inside, and the clerk clawed at it viciously with his hands. “Domine Jesu Christe, ” he swore, “fidelium defunctorium de poenis infermis. ” Save the souls of the faithful departed from the pains of hell.
Yes, Kivrin