"We must tie her," Kivrin said, and realized she was holding the knife aloft, like a murderer. She wrapped it in one of the cloths Eliwys had torn, and ripped another into strips.
Roche bound Rosemund's wrists above her head while Kivrin tied her ankles to the leg of one of the upturned benches. Rosemund didn't struggle, but when Roche pulled her shift up over her exposed chest, she said, "I know you. You are the cutthroat who waylaid the Lady Katherine."
Roche leaned forward, pressing his full weight down on her forearm, and Kivrin cut across the swelling.
Blood oozed and then gushed, and Kivrin thought, I've hit an artery. She and Roche both lunged for the pile of cloths, and she grabbed a thick wad of them and pressed them against the wound. They soaked through immediately, and when she released her hand to take the one Roche handed her, blood spurted out of the tiny cut. She jammed the tail of her surcote against it, and Rosemund whimpered, a small, helpless sound like Agnes's puppy, and seemed to collapse, though there was nowhere for her to fall.
I've killed her, Kivrin thought.
"I can't stop the bleeding," she said, but it had already stopped. She held the skirt of her surcote against it, counting to a hundred and then two hundred, and carefully lifted a corner of it away from the wound.
Blood still welled from the cut, but it was mixed with a thick yellow-gray pus. Roche leaned forward to dab at it, but Kivrin stopped him. "No, it's full of plague germs," she said, taking the cloth away from him. "Don't touch it."
She wiped the sickening-looking pus away. It oozed up again, followed by a watery serum. "That's all of it, I think," she said to Roche. "Hand me the wine." She looked round for a clean cloth to pour it on.
There weren't any. They had used them all, trying to stop the bleeding. She tipped the wine bottle carefully and let the dark liquid dribble into the cut. Rosemund didn't move. Her face was gray, as if all the blood had been drained out of her. As it had been. And I don't have a transfusion to give her. I don't even have a clean rag.
Roche was untying Rosemund' hands. He took her limp hand in his huge one. "Her heart beats strongly now," he said.
"We must have more linen," Kivrin said, and burst into tears.
"My father will see you hanged for this," Rosemund said.
Rosemund is unconscious. I tried to lance her bubo last night to drain out the infection, and I'm afraid I only made things worse. She lost a great deal of blood. She's very pale and her pulse is so faint I can't find it in her wrist at all.
The clerk is worse, too. His skin continues to hemorrhage, and it's clear he's near the end. I remember Dr. Ahrens saying untreated bubonic plague kills people in four or five days, but he can't possibly last that long.
Lady Eliwys, Lady Imeyne, and Agnes are still well, though Lady Imeyne seems to have gone almost crazy in her search for someone to blame. She boxed Maisry's ears this morning and told her God was punishing us all for her laziness and stupidity.
Maisry is lazy and stupid. She cannot be trusted to watch Agnes for five minutes at a time, and when I sent her for water to wash Rosemund's wound this morning, she was gone over half an hour and came back without it.
I didn't say anything. I didn't want Lady Imeyne hitting her again, and it is only a matter of time before Lady Imeyne gets around to blaming me. I saw her watching me over her Book of Hours when I went out for the water Maisry forgot, and I can well imagine what she's thinking — that I know too much about the plague not to have been fleeing it, that I am supposed to have lost my memory, that I was not injured but ill.
If she makes those accusations, I'm afraid she'll convince Lady Eliwys that I'm the cause of the plague and that she shouldn't listen to me, that they should take the barricade down and pray together for God to deliver them.
And how will I defend myself? By saying, I'm from the future, where we know everything about the Black Death except how to cure it without streptomycin and how to get back there?
Gawyn still isn't back. Eliwys is frantic with worry. When Roche went to say vespers she was standing at the gate, no cloak, no coif, watching the road. I wonder if it has occurred to her that he might already have been infected when he left for Bath. He rode to Courcy with the bishop's envoy, and when he came back he already knew about the plague.
Ulf the Reeve is near death, and his wife and one of his sons have it. No buboes, but the woman has several small lumps like seeds inside her thigh. Roche constantly has to be reminded to wear his mask and to not touch the patients more than he has to.
The history vids say the contemps were panic stricken and cowardly during the Black Death, that they ran away and wouldn't tend the sick, and that the priests were the worst of all, but it isn't like that at all.
Everyone's frightened, but they're all doing the best they can, and Roche is wonderful. He sat and held the reeve's wife's hand the whole time I examined her, and he doesn't flinch at the most disgusting jobs — bathing Rosemund's wound, emptying chamberpots, cleaning up after the clerk. He never seems afraid. 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?
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 over there or whether there's no one left alive to ring the bell.
Please don't let Rosemund die. Please don't let Agnes get it. Send Gawyn back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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. It 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.