Dooms Day Book

“She told me she wished to see my wagon,” Agnes said. “She said she did not have a hound.”

“You are making up tales,” Eliwys said. “The lady cannot speak,” and Kivrin thought, I have to stop this. They’ll box her ears, too.

She pushed herself up on her elbows. The effort left her breathless. “I spoke with Agnes,” she said, praying the interpreter would do what it was supposed to. If it chose to blink out again at this moment and ended up getting Agnes a beating, that would be the last straw. “I bade her bring her cart to me.”

Both women turned and looked at her. Eliwys’s eyes widened. The old woman looked astonished and then angry, as if she thought Kivrin had deceived them.

“I told you,” Agnes said, and marched over to the bed with the wagon.

Kivrin lay back against the pillows, exhausted. “What is this place?” she asked.

It took Eliwys a moment to recover herself. “You rest safely in the house of my lord and husband…” The interpreter had trouble with the name. It sounded like Guillaume D’Iverie or possibly Devereaux.

Eliwys was looking at her anxiously. “My husband’s privй found you in the woods and brought you hence. You had been set upon by robbers and grievously injured. Who attacked you?”

“I know not,” Kivrin said.

“I am called Eliwys, and this is the mother of my husband, the Lady Imeyne. What is your name?”

And now was the time to tell them the whole carefully researched story. She had told the priest her name was Katherine, but Lady Imeyne had already made it clear she put no stock in anything he said. She didn’t even believe he could speak Latin. Kivrin could say he had misunderstood, that her name was Isabel de Beauvrier. She could tell them she had called out her mother’s, her sister’s name in her delirium. She could tell them she had been praying to St. Katherine.

“Of what family are you?” Lady Imeyne asked.

It was a very good story. It would establish her identity and position in society and would ensure that they wouldn’t try to send for her family. Yorkshire was too far away, and the road north was impassable.

“Whither were you bound?” Eliwys said.

Mediaeval had thoroughly researched the weather and the road conditions. It had rained every day for two weeks in December, and there hadn’t been a hard frost to freeze the mired roads till late January. But she had seen the road to Oxford. It had been dry and clear. And Mediaeval had thoroughly researched the color of her dress, and the prevalence of glass windows among the upper classes. They had thoroughly researched the language.

“I remember not,” Kivrin said.

“Not?” Eliwys said, and turned to Lady Imeyne. “She remembers not.” They think I’m saying “naught,” Kivrin thought, that I don’t remember anything. The inflection, the pronunciation didn’t differentiate between the two words.

“It is her wound,” Eliwys said. “It has shaken her memory.”

“No… nay…,” Kivrin said. She was not supposed to feign amnesia. She was supposed to be Isabel de Beauvrier, from the East Riding. Just because the roads were dry here didn’t mean they weren’t impassable farther north, and Eliwys would not even let Gawyn ride to Oxford to get news of her or to Bath to fetch her husband. She surely wouldn’t send him to the East Riding.

“Can you not even remember your own name?” Lady Imeyne said impatiently, leaning so close Kivrin could smell her breath. It was very foul, an odor of decay. She must have rotting teeth, too.

“What is your name?”

Mr. Latimer had said Isabel was the most common woman’s name in the 1300’s. How common was Katherine? And Mediaeval didn’t know the daughters’ names. What if Yorkshire wasn’t distant enough, after all, and Lady Imeyne knew the family. She would take it as further proof that she was a spy. She had better stay with the common name and tell them she was Isabel de Beauvrier.

The old woman would be only too happy to believe that the priest had gotten her name wrong. It would be further proof of his ignorance, of his incompetence, further reason to send to Bath for a new chaplain. And he had held Kivrin’s hand, he had told her not to be afraid.

“My name is Katherine,” she said.

Transcript from the Doomsday Book

(001300-002018)

I’m not the only one in trouble, Mr. Dunworthy. I think the contemps who’ve taken me in are, too.

The lord of the manor, Lord Guillaume, isn’t here. He’s in Bath, testifying at the trial of a friend of his, which is apparently a dangerous thing to do. His mother, Lady Imeyne, called him a fool for getting mixed up in it, and Lady Eliwys, his wife, seems worried and nervous.

They’ve come here in a great hurry and without servants. Fourteenth-century noblewomen had at least one lady-in-waiting apiece, but neither Eliwys nor Imeyne has any, and they left the children’s—Guillaume’s two little girls are here—nurse behind. Lady Imeyne wanted to send for a new one, and a chaplain, but Lady Eliwys won’t let her.