Rosemund nodded, and Eliwys stepped forward, Agnes still clinging to her skirt. They helped her to her feet.
"My foot hurts," she said, leaning on her mother, but in a minute she was able to stand on it. "He…of a sudden…"
Eliwys supported her to the end of the bed and sat her down on the carved chest. Agnes clambered up next to her. "The bishop's clerk jumped on top of you," she said.
The clerk murmured something, and Rosemund looked fearfully at him. "Will he rise up again?" she asked Eliwys.
"Nay," Eliwys said, but she helped Rosemund up and led her to the door. "Take your sister down to the fire and sit with her," she told Agnes.
Agnes took hold of Rosemund's arm and led her out. "When the clerk dies, we will bury him in the churchyard," Kivrin could hear her say going down the stairs. "Like Blackie."
The clerk looked already dead, his eyes half-open and unseeing. Father Roche knelt next to him and hoisted him easily over his shoulder, the clerk's head and arms hanging limply down, the way Kivrin had carried Agnes home from the midnight mass. Kivrin hastily pulled the coverlet off the featherbed, and Roche eased him down onto the bed.
"We must draw the fever from the brain," Lady Imeyne said, returning to her poultice. "It is the spices that have fevered his brain."
"No," Kivrin whispered, looking at the priest. He lay on his back with his arms out at his sides, the palms up. The thin shift was ripped halfway down the front and had fallen completely off his left shoulder so his outstretched arm was exposed. Under the arm was a red swelling. "No," she breathed.
The swelling was bright red and nearly as large as an egg. High fever, swollen tongue, intoxication of the nervous system, buboes under the arms and in the groin.
Kivrin took a step back from the bed. "It can't be," she said. "It's something else." It had to be something else. A boil. Or an ulcer of some kind. She reached forward to pull the sleeve away from it.
The clerk's hands twitched. Roche stretched to grasp his wrists, pushing them down into the featherbed. The swelling was hard to the touch, and around it the skin was a mottled purplish- black.
"It can't be," she said. "It's only 1320."
"This will draw the fever out," Imeyne said. She stood up stiffly, holding the poultice out in front of her. "Pull his shift away from his body that I may lay on the poultice." She started toward the bed.
"No!" Kivrin said. She put her hands up to stop her. "Stay away! You mustn't touch him!"
"You speak wildly," Imeyne said. She looked at Roche. "It is naught but a stomach fever."
"It isn't a fever!" Kivrin said. She turned to Roche. "Let go of his hands and get away from him. It isn't a fever. It's the plague."
All of them, Roche and Imeyne and Eliwys looked at her as stupidly as Maisry.
They don't even know what it is, she thought desperately, because it doesn't exist yet, there was no such thing as the Black Death yet. It didn't even begin in China until 1333. And it didn't reach England till 1348. "But it is," Kivrin said. "He's got all the symptoms. The bubo and the swollen tongue and the hemorrhaging under the skin."
"It is naught but a stomach fever," Imeyne said and pushed past Kivrin to the bed.
"No — " Kivrin said, but Imeyne had already stopped, the poultice poised above his naked chest.
"Lord have mercy on us," she said, and backed away, still holding the poultice.
"Is it the blue sickness?" Eliwys said frightenedly.
And suddenly Kivrin saw it all. They had not come here because of the trial, because Lord Guillaume was in trouble with the king. He had sent them here because the plague was in Bath.
"Our nurse died," Agnes had said. And Lady Imeyne's chaplain, Brother Hubard. "Rosemund said he died of the blue sickness," Agnes had told her. And Sir Bloet had said that the trial had been delayed because the judge was ill. That was why Eliwys hadn't wanted to send word to Courcy and why she had been so angry when Imeyne sent Gawyn to the bishop. Because the plague was in Bath. But it couldn't be. The Black Death hadn't reached Bath until the fall of 1348.
"What year is it?" Kivrin said.
The women looked at her dumbly, Imeyne still holding the forgotten poultice. Kivrin turned to Roche. "What is the year?"
"Are you ill, Lady Katherine?" he said anxiously, reaching for her wrists as if he was afraid she was going to have one of the clerk's seizures.
She jerked her hands away. "Tell me the year."
"It is the twenty-first year of Edward III's reign," Eliwys said.
Edward III, not the Second. In her panic she could not remember when he had reigned. "Tell me the year," she said.
"Anno domine," the clerk said from the bed. He tried to lick his lips with his swollen tongue. "One thousand three hundred and forty-eight."
BOOK III
Buried with my own hands five of my children in a single grave…No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dunworthy spent the next two days ringing Finch's list of techs and Scottish fishing guides and setting up another ward in Bulkeley-Johnson. Fifteen more of his detainees were down with the flu, among them Ms. Taylor, who had collapsed forty-nine strokes short of a full peal.
"Fainted dead away and let go her bell," Finch reported. "It swung right over with a noise like doom and the rope thrashing about like a live thing. Wrapped itself round my neck and nearly strangled me. Ms. Taylor wanted to go on after she came to herself, but of course it was too late. I do wish you'd speak to her, Mr. Dunworthy. She's very despondent. Says she'll never forgive herself for letting the others down. I told her it wasn't her fault, that sometimes things are simply out of one's control, aren't they?"
"Yes," Dunworthy said.
He had not succeeded in reaching a tech, let alone persuading him to come to Oxford, and he had not found Basingame. He and Finch had phoned every hotel in Scotland, and then every inn and rental cottage. William had got hold of his credit records, but there were no purchases of fishing lures or waders in some remote Scottish town, as he had hoped, and no entries at all after the fifteenth of December.
The telephone system was becoming progressively disabled. The visual cut out again, and the recorded voice, announcing that due to the epidemic all circuits were busy, interrupted after only two digits on nearly every call he tried to put through.
He did not so much worry about Kivrin as carry her with him, a heavy weight, as he punched and repunched the numbers, waited for ambulances, listened to Mrs. Gaddson's complaints. Andrews had not phoned back, or if he had, had not succeeded in getting through. Badri murmured endlessly of death, the nurses carefully transcribing his ramblings on slips of paper. While he waited for the techs, for the fishing guides, for someone to answer the telephone, he pored over Badri's words, searching for clues. "Black," Badri had said, and "laboratory," and "Europe."
The phone system grew worse. The recorded voice cut in as he punched the first number, and several times he couldn't raise a dial tone. He gave up for the moment and worked on the contacts charts. William had managed to get hold of the primaries' confidential NHS medical records, and he pored over them, searching for radiation treatments and visits to the dentist. One of the primaries had had his jaw X-rayed, but on second look, he saw it had been on the twenty-fourth, after the epidemic began.
He went over to Infirmary to ask the primaries who weren't delirious whether they had any pets or had been duck-hunting recently. The corridors were filled with stretcher trolleys, each one of them with a patient on it. They were jammed up against the doors of Casualties and crosswise in front of the elevator. There was no way he could get past them to it. He took the stairs.