Kivrin gathered up an armful of the already-split wood and some pieces of loose bark for kindling and took it back to the hut, wishing she could move the boy into the manor house, but Eliwys had the clerk and Rosemund to tend, and she looked ready to collapse herself.
Eliwys had sat with Rosemund all night, giving her sips of willow tea and rebandaging the wound. They had run out of cloths, and she had taken off her coif and torn it into strips. She sat where she could see the screens, and every few minutes she had stood up and gone over to the door, as if she heard someone coming. With her dark hair down over her shoulders, she looked no older than Rosemund.
Kivrin took the firewood to the woman, dumping it on the dirt floor next to the rat cage. The rat was gone, killed, no doubt, and not even guilty. "The Lord blesses us," she woman said to her. She knelt by the fire and began carefully adding the wood to it.
Kivrin checked the boy again. His bubo was still draining a clear watery fluid, which was good. Rosemund's had bled half the night and then begun to swell and grow hard again. And I can't lance it again, Kivrin thought. She can't lose any more blood.
She started back to the hall, wondering if she should relieve Eliwys or try to chop some wood. Roche, coming out of the steward's house, met her with the news that two more of the steward's children were ill.
It was the two youngest boys, and it was clearly the pneumonic. Both were coughing, and the mother intermittently retched a watery sputum. The Lord blesses us.
Kivrin went back to the hall. It was still hazy from the sulfur, and the clerk's arms looked almost black in the yellowish light. The fire was no better than the one in the woman's hut. Kivrin brought in the last of the cut wood and then told Eliwys to lie down, that she would tend Rosemund.
"Nay," Eliwys said, glancing toward the door. She added, almost to herself, "He has been three days on the road."
It was seventy kilometers to Bath, a day and a half at least on horseback and the same amount of time back, if he had been able to get a fresh horse in Bath. He might be back today, if he had found Lord Guillaume immediately. If he comes back, Kivrin thought.
Eliwys glanced at the door again, as if she heard something, but the only sound was Agnes, crooning softly to her cart. She had put a blanket over it and was spooning make-believe food into it. "He has the blue sickness," she told Kivrin.
Kivrin spent the rest of the day doing household chores — bringing in water, making broth from the roast joint, emptying the chamberpots. The steward's cow, its udders swollen in spite of Kivrin's orders, came lowing into the courtyard and followed her, nudging her with its horns till Kivrin gave up and milked it. Roche chopped wood in between visits to the steward and the boy, and Kivrin, wishing she had learned how to split wood, hacked clumsily at the big logs.
The steward came to fetch them again just before dark to his younger daughter. That's eight cases so far, Kivrin thought. There were only forty people in the village. The Black Death was supposed to have had a mortality rate of one-third to one-half, and Mr. Gilchrist thought that was exaggerated. One third would be thirteen cases, only five more. Even at fifty per cent, only twelve more would get it, and the steward's children had all already been exposed.
She looked at them, the older daughter stocky and dark like her father, the youngest boy sharp-faced like his mother, the scrawny baby. You'll all get it, she thought, and that will leave eight.
She couldn't seem to feel anything, even when the baby began to cry and the girl took it on her knee and stuck her filthy finger in its mouth. Thirteen, she prayed. Twenty at the most.
She couldn't feel anything for the clerk either, even though it was clear he could not last the night. His lips and tongue were covered with a brown slime, and he was coughing up a watery spittle that was streaked with blood. She tended him automatically, without feeling.
It's the lack of sleep, she thought, it's making us all numb. She lay down by the fire and tried to sleep, but she seemed beyond sleep, beyond tiredness. Eight more people, she thought, adding them up in her mind. The mother will catch it, and the reeve's wife and children. That leaves four. Don't let one of them be Agnes or Eliwys. Or Roche.
In the morning Roche found the cook lying in the snow in front of her hut, half-frozen and coughing blood. Nine, Kivrin thought.
The cook was a widow, with no one to take care of her, so they brought her into the hall and laid her next to the clerk, who was, amazingly, horribly, still alive. The hemorrhaging had spread all over his body now, his chest criss-crossed with bluish-purple marks, his arms and legs nearly solid black. His cheeks were covered with a black stubble that seemed somehow a symptom, too, and under it his face was darkening.
Rosemund still lay white and silent, balanced between life and death, and Eliwys tended her quietly, carefully, as if the slightest movement, the slightest sound, might tip her into death. Kivrin tiptoed among the pallets, and Agnes, sensing the need for silence, fell completely apart.
She whined, she hung on the barricade, she asked Kivrin half a dozen times to take her to see her hound, her pony, to get her something to eat, to finish telling her the story of the naughty girl in the woods.
"How does it end?" she whined in a tone that set Kivrin's teeth on edge. "Do the wolves eat the girl?"
"I don't know," Kivrin snapped after the fourth time. "Go and sit by your grandmother."
Agnes looked contemptuously at Lady Imeyne, who still knelt in the corner, her back to all of them. She had been there all night. "Grandmother will not play with me."
"Well, then, play with Maisry."
She did, for five minutes, pestering her so mercilessly she retaliated and Agnes came screaming back, shrieking that Maisry had pinched her.
"I don't blame her," Kivrin said, and sent both of them to the loft.
She went to check on the boy, who was so improved he was sitting up, and when she came back, Maisry was hunched in the high seat, sound asleep.
"Where's Agnes?" Kivrin said.
Eliwys looked around blankly. "I know not. They were in the loft."
"Maisry," Kivrin said, crossing to the dais. "Wake up. Where is Agnes?"
Maisry blinked stupidly at her.
"You should not have left her alone," Kivrin said. She climbed up into the loft, but Agnes wasn't there, so she checked the solar. She wasn't there either.
Maisry had got out of the high seat and was huddled against the wall, looking terrified. "Where is she?" Kivrin demanded.
Maisry put a hand up defensively to her ear and gaped at her.
"That's right," Kivrin said. "I will box your ears unless you tell me where she is.
Maisry buried her face in her skirts.
"Where is she?" Kivrin said, and jerked her up by her arm. "You were supposed to watch her. She was your responsibility!"
Maisry began to howl, a high-pitched sound like an animal.
"Stop that!" Kivrin said. "Show me where she went!" she pushed her toward the screens.
"What is it?" Roche said, coming in.
"It's Agnes," Kivrin said. "We must find her. She may have gone out into the village."
Roche shook his head. "I did not see her. She is likely in one of the outbuildings."
"The stables," Kivrin said, relieved. "She said she wanted to go see her pony."
She was not in the stables. "Agnes!" she called into the manure-smelling darkness, "Agnes!" Agnes's pony whinnied and tried to push its way out of its stall, and Kivrin wondered when it had last been fed, and where the hounds were. "Agnes." She looked in each of the boxes and behind the manger, anywhere a little girl might hide. Or fall asleep.