Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,228

You must rest and get your strength back.”

“The king will sometimes honor a previous betrothal,” Rosemund said, her thin hands plucking at the blanket, “if both parties be agreed.”

You don’t have to agree to anything, Kivrin thought. He’s dead. The bishop killed them.

“If they are not agreed, the king will bid me marry who he will,” Rosemund said, “and Sir Bloet at least is known to me.”

No, Kivrin thought, and knew it was probably the best thing. Rosemund had been conjuring worse horrors than Sir Bloet, monsters and cutthroats, and Kivrin knew they existed.

Rosemund would be sold off to some nobleman the king owed a debt to or whose allegiance he was trying to buy, one of the troublesome supporters of the Black Prince, perhaps, and taken God knew where to God knew what situation.

There were worse things than a leering old man and a shrewish sister-in-law. Baron Gamier had kept his wife in chains for twenty years. The Count of Anjou had burned his alive. And Rosemund would have no family, no friends, to protect her, to tend her when she was ill.

I’ll take her away, Kivrin thought suddenly, to somewhere where Bloet can’t find her and we’ll be safe from the plague.

There was no, such place. It was already in Bath and Oxford, and moving south and east to London, and then Kent, north through the Midlands to Yorkshire and back across the Channel to Germany and the Low Countries. It had even gone to Norway, floating in on a ship of dead men. There was nowhere that was safe.

“Is Gawyn here?” Rosemund asked, and she sounded like her mother, her grandmother. “I would have him ride to Courcy and tell Sir Bloet that I would come to him.”

“Gawyn?” Eliwys said from her pallet. “Is he coming?”

No, Kivrin thought. No one’s coming. Not even Mr. Dunworthy.

It didn’t matter that she had missed the rendezvous. There would have been no one there. Because they didn’t know she was in 1348. If they knew, they would never have left her here.

Something must have gone wrong with the net. Mr. Dunworthy had been worried about sending her so far back without parameter checks. “There could be unforeseen complications at that distance,” he’d said. Perhaps an unforeseen complication had garbled the fix or made them lose it, and they were looking for her in 1320. I’ve missed the rendezvous by nearly thirty years, she thought.

“Gawyn?” Eliwys said again and tried to rise from her pallet.

She could not. She was growing steadily worse, though she still had none of the marks of the plague. When it began to snow, she had said, relieved, “He will not come now until the storm is over,” and gotten up and gone to sit with Rosemund, but by the afternoon she had to lie down again, and her fever went steadily higher.

Roche heard her confession, looking worn out. They were all worn out. If they sat down to rest, they were asleep in seconds. The steward, coming in to look at his son Lefric, had stood at the barricade, snoring, and Kivrin had dozed off while tending the fire and burned her hand badly.

We can’t go on like this, she thought, watching Father Roche making the sign of the cross over Eliwys. He’ll die of exhaustion. He’ll come down with the plague.

I have to get them away, she thought again. The plague didn’t reach everywhere. There were villages that were completely untouched. It had skipped over Poland and Bohemia, and there were parts of northern Scotland it had never reached.

“Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis,” Father Roche said, his voice as comforting as it had been when she was dying, and she knew it was hopeless.

He would never leave his parishioners. The history of the Black Death was full of stories of priests who had abandoned their people, who had refused to perform burials, who had locked themselves in their churches and monasteries or run away. She wondered now if those statistics were inaccurate, too.

And even if she found some way to take them all, Eliwys, turning even now as she made her confession to look at the door, would insist on waiting for Gawyn, for her husband, to come, as she was convinced they would now that the snow had stopped.

“Has Father Roche gone to meet him?” she asked Kivrin when Roche left to take the sacraments back to the church. “He will be here soon. He has no doubt gone first to Courcy