Dooms Day Book

I don’t know if I can tell you anything, she thought, afraid to speak for fear he wouldn’t understand her either. He had to understand her. He knew where the drop was.

“How many men were there?” Gawyn said. “Were they on horseback?”

Where did you find me? she thought, emphasizing the words the way Gawyn had. She waited for the interpreter to work out the whole sentence, listening carefully to the intonations, checking them against the language lessons Mr. Dunworthy had given her.

Gawyn and Eliwys were waiting, watching her intently. She took a deep breath. “Where did you find me?”

They exchanged quick glances, his surprised, hers saying plainly, “You see?”

“She spoke thus that night,” he said. “I thought it was her injury that made her speak so.”

“And so I do,” Eliwys said. “My husband’s mother thinks she is of France.”

He shook his head. “It is not French she speaks.” He turned back to Kivrin. “Good lady,” he said, nearly shouting, “came you from another land?”

Yes, Kivrin thought, another land, and the only way back is the drop, and only you know where it is.

“Where did you find me?” she said again.

“Her goods were all taken,” Gawyn said, “but her wagon was of rich make, and she had many boxes.”

Eliwys nodded. “I fear she is of high birth and her people seeking her.”

“In what part of the woods did you find

me?” Kivrin said, her voice rising.

“We are upsetting her,” Eliwys said. She leaned over Kivrin and patted her hand. “Shh. Take your rest.” She moved away from the bed, and Gawyn followed.

“Would you have me ride to Bath to Lord Guillaume?” Gawyn said, out of sight behind the hangings.

Eliwys stepped back the way she had when he first came in, as if she were afraid of him. But they had stood side by side at the bed, their hands nearly touching. They had spoken together like old friends. This wariness must be coming from something else.

“Would you have me bring your husband?” Gawyn said.

“Nay,” Eliwys said, looking down at her hands. “My lord has enough to worry him, and he cannot leave until the trial is finished. And he bade you stay with us and guard us.”

“By your leave, then, I will return to the place where the lady was set upon and search further.”

“Aye,” Eliwys said, still not looking at him. “In their haste, some token may have fallen to the ground nearby that will tell us of her.”

The place where the lady was set upon, Kivrin recited under her breath, trying to hear his words under the interpreter’s translation and memorize them. The place where I was set upon.

“I will take my leave and ride out again,” Gawyn said.

Eliwys looked up at him. “Now?” she said. “It grows dark.”

“Show me the place where I was set upon,” Kivrin said.

“I do not fear the dark, Lady Eliwys,” he said, and strode out, the sword clanking.

“Take me with you,” Kivrin said, but it was no use. They were already gone, and the interpreter was broken. She had deceived herself into thinking it was working. She had understood what they were saying because of the language lessons Mr. Dunworthy had given her, not because of the interpreter, and perhaps she was only deceiving herself that she understood them.

Perhaps the conversation had not been about who she was at all, but about something else altogether—finding a missing sheep or putting her on trial.

The lady Eliwys had shut the door when they went out, and Kivrin couldn’t hear anything. Even the tolling bell had stopped, and the light from the waxed linen was faintly blue. It grows dark.

Gawyn had said he was going to ride back to the drop. If the window overlooked the courtyard, she might at least be able to see which way he rode out. It is not far, he had said. If she could just see the direction he rode, she could find the drop herself.

She pushed herself up in the bed, but even that much exertion made the pain in her chest stab again. She put her feet over the side, but the action made her dizzy. She lay back against the pillow and closed her eyes.

Dizziness and fever and a pain in the chest. What were those symptoms of? Smallpox started out with fever and chills, and the pox didn’t appear until the second or third day. She lifted her arm up to see if there were the beginnings of the pox. She had no idea how long she had been ill, but it couldn’t be smallpox because the incubation period was ten to twenty-one days. Ten days ago she had been in hospital in Oxford, where the smallpox virus had been extinct for nearly a hundred years.

She had been in hospital, getting inoculated against all of them: smallpox, typhoid fever, cholera, plague. So how could it be any of them? And if it wasn’t any of them, what was it? St. Vitus’s dance? She had told herself that before, that this was something she had not been vaccinated against, but she had had her immune system augmented, too, to fight off any infection.

There was a sound of running on stairs. “Modder!” a voice that she already recognized as Agnes’s shouted. “Rosemund waited not!”