Dooms Day Book

Kivrin had been in the right place, after all. The locationals had been shifted by only a few kilometers, a few meters, and she had managed to find the Oxford-Bath road, she had found Skendgate. And died in it, a victim of the influenza she had caught before she went. Or of starvation after the plague, or of despair. She had been dead seven hundred years.

“You found it then,” he said, and it was not a question.

“Found what?” Colin said.

“Kivrin’s corder.”

“No,” Montoya said.

He felt no relief. “But you will,” he said.

Her hands shook a little, holding the rail. “She asked me to,” she said. “The day of the drop. She was the one who suggested the corder look like a bone spur, so the record would survive even if she didn’t. ‘Mr. Dunworthy’s worried over nothing,’ she said, ‘but if something should go wrong, I’ll try to be buried in the churchyard so you,’” her voice faltered, “‘so you won’t have to dig up half of England.’”

Dunworthy closed his eyes.

“But you don’t know that she’s dead, if you haven’t found the corder,” Colin burst out. “You said you didn’t even know where she was. How can you be sure she’s dead?”

“We’ve been conducting experiments with laboratory rats at the dig. Only a quarter of an hour’s exposure to the virus is required for infection. Kivrin was directly exposed to the tomb for over three hours. There’s a 75 per cent chance she contracted the virus, and with the limited med support available in the fourteenth century, she’s almost certain to have developed complications.”

Limited med support. It was a century that had dosed people with leeches and powdered rubies, that had never heard of sterilization or germs or T-cells. They would have stuck filthy poultices on her and muttered prayers and opened her veins. “And the doctors bled them,” Colin’s book had said, “but many died in despite.”

“Without antibiotics and T-cell enhancement,” Montoya said, the virus’s mortality rate is forty-nine per cent. Probability—”

“Probability,” Dunworthy said bitterly. “Are these Gilchrist’s figures?”

Montoya glanced at Colin and frowned. “There is a 75 per cent chance Kivrin contracted the virus, and a 68 per cent chance she was exposed to the plague. Morbidity for bubonic plague is 91 per cent, and the mortality rate is—”

“She didn’t get the plague,” Dunworthy said. “She’d had her plague inoculation. Didn’t Dr. Ahrens or Gilchrist tell you that?”

Montoya glanced at Colin again.

“They said I wasn’t allowed to tell him,” Colin said, looking defiantly at her.

“Tell me what? Is Gilchrist ill?” He remembered looking at the screens and then collapsing forward into Gilchrist’s arms. He wondered if he had infected him when he fell.

Montoya said, “Mr. Gilchrist died of the flu three days ago.”

Dunworthy looked at Colin. “What else did they instruct you to keep from me?” Dunworthy demanded. “Who else died while I was ill?”

Montoya put up her thin hand as if to stop Colin, but it was too late.

“Great-Aunt Mary,” Colin said.

Transcript from the Doomsday Book

(077076-078924)

Maisry’s run away. Roche and I looked everywhere for her, afraid she’d fallen and crawled into some corner, but the steward said he saw her starting into the woods while he was digging Walthef’s grave. She was riding Agnes’s pony.

She will only spread it, or make it as far as some village that already has it. It’s all around us now. The bells sound like vespers, only out of rhythm, as if the ringers had gone mad. It’s impossible to make out whether it is nine strokes or three. Courcy’s double bells tolled a single stroke this morning. I wonder if it is one of the chattering girls who played with Rosemund.

She is still unconscious, and her pulse is very weak. Agnes screams and struggles in her delirium. She keeps shrieking for me to come, but she won’t let me near her. When I try to talk to her, she kicks and screams as if she were having a tantrum.

Eliwys is wearing herself out trying to tend Agnes and Lady Imeyne, who screams, “Devil!” at me when I tend her and nearly gave me a black eye this morning. The only one who lets me near him is the clerk, who is beyond caring. He cannot possibly last the day. He smells so bad we’ve had to move him to the far end of the room. His bubo has started to suppurate again.

(Break)

Gunni, second son of the steward.

The woman with the scrofula scars on her neck.

Maisry’s brother.

Roche’s altarboy, Cob.

(Break)

Lady Imeyne is very bad. Roche tried to give her the last rites, but she refused to make her confession.

“You must make your peace with God ere you die,” Roche said, but she turned her face to the wall and said, “He is to blame for this.”

(Break)

Thirty-one cases. Over seventy-five per cent. Roche consecrated part of the green this morning because the churchyard is nearly full.

Maisry hasn’t come back. She’s probably sleeping in the high seat of some manor house the inhabitants have fled, and when this is all over she’ll become the ancestor of some noble old family.