by C. R. Berry
Catherine’s pain worsened as the bright sunlight pouring through the window began to grow dim. It wasn’t night, just gloom. Maybe it was just the sickness stepping up its attack on her body, or maybe the sunlight really did take the edge off the pain. She remembered the agony endured by her husband seemed worse when dismal weather set in.
She must’ve dozed off. She was a fifteen-year-old newlywed again, making love to Peter in their favourite spot by the River of Wells when no one was around – but then a loud knock at the door wrenched her from the dream. A moment ago her body was youthful and nimble; now it was weak and withered again, heaving with buboes the size of eggs, lodged in her thighs, beneath her arms and on her neck, and filling up with black infected blood, making walking, talking and breathing a painful and exhausting experience.
O Lord, am I really so deserving of such cruelty?
Beatrice was still sitting on the bed praying. The rings around her eyes suggested she was fighting her own fatigue to keep watch over Catherine. At the sound of the knock, she rose from the bed and bolted downstairs to answer the door.
A few minutes later, Catherine heard two sets of footsteps coming up the stairs. She recognised her daughter’s – dainty and quick – but the other set were loud and stomping.
Beatrice entered, followed by the looming shape of a plague doctor. Could’ve been the one who visited earlier. She couldn’t tell. They all wore similar costumes.
“Doctor’s here to see you, Mother,” said Beatrice.
“Are you the same doctor who came by earlier?” Catherine murmured weakly, straining to sit up.
“No, Mother,” Beatrice answered for him. “He’s come to offer a second opinion. He says there is hope!” There was jubilation in Beatrice’s high voice, but Catherine was dubious.
“I see,” Catherine said. Something warm trickled over her shoulder and down her arm – the bubo on her neck was bleeding again, from where the previous doctor had cut it open. She used a damp cloth to dab the wound.
“I’ll leave you to examine her, Doctor,” said Beatrice, turning and leaving, shutting the door behind her.
For a moment the plague doctor just looked at Catherine with his vacant, inert, stork-like face, every inch of his real expression hidden. A chill knifed her in the small of the back.
“So what is this hope you are teasing my daughter with?” she asked.
“I’m not teasing her with it.” His voice – partly muffled by his mask – was thick and rough, lacking in warmth, but she felt a twinge of relief nonetheless. So you are alive under there.
“Then tell me,” she insisted.
“Are you Catherine Godfrey?”
“I – er – Godfrey was my maiden name. My husband is – was – Peter Hawthorn. Please, sir. What is this hope you bring?”
“A cure.”
“I’m sure. I have heard of plague doctors who offer erroneous alternative cures for fees over and above what the city is already paying them. If you presume to con me, sir, know now that it will not succeed. My mind remains sharp despite the failure of my body.”
“This cure is not erroneous,” said the doctor.
“Oh, is it not? Then you are a worker of miracles?”
Catherine coughed, then silently scolded herself for being so bold. He might just have been trying to help. She sighed, “I apologise, doctor. I fear this plague is eating away at my manners.”
The doctor was silent for a moment and Catherine wished she could see his expression through that ghastly mask. Then he continued, “This cure is real. I can free your body of the Pestilence and I’m not demanding extra fees.”
Catherine raised an eyebrow. “I sense a ‘but’ approaching.”
“There’s one condition.”
“What?”
“Tell me where the book is.”
She felt a tightening in her chest. “I’m sorry, what book?”
The doctor produced a sheet of parchment from inside his overcoat. “This,” he said, holding it up.
When she saw it, it was like a spear had been driven through her belly.
On the parchment was a picture, more detailed than any painting she’d ever seen. It showed the cover of the impossible book that told the future. The book with the unmistakable title: The History of Computer-Aided Timetabling for Railway Systems by Jeremy Jennings.
“I know of no such book,” Catherine lied.
“Did you hear what I said? Give me want I want and I can free you and your daughter of this disease.”
“My daughter?”
“Your daughter has it. Her symptoms aren’t showing yet, but they will. If you help me, I can save her.”
He was probably telling the truth. These were powerful people. The power to detect and to cure the plague was no doubt one of many unfathomable capabilities.
But what would Catherine be if she helped them? A traitor. That’s what she’d be. A traitor to her king and her country. Beatrice wouldn’t have wanted that.
“Please, sir, look around you.” Catherine gestured weakly with her left hand, indicating the small, simple room they were in. There was the bed Catherine lay on and shared with Beatrice (and previously Peter and Nicholas as well), which was a large, lumpy bag of hay over a lattice of rope straps housed in a basic wooden frame. The only other items were a small round table with a jug of water, a cup and a candle on it; a large chest of clothes by the wall beneath the window; and a chamber pot in the corner. “I am the widow of a cordwainer. A simple tradesman who could make ends meet but little more. Do you really think we would possess as rare and expensive a commodity as books?”
The doctor lunged, gripped both of her arms in his gloved hands and pinned her to the bed. She flinched, banging her head against the wall behind her linen pillow. He stooped close to her face, and she could smell the perfumes coming from inside his beak. He rasped in her ear, “Catherine, I’m losing patience.”
“Please, sir,” Catherine choked. “I’m telling you the truth. You’ve got the wrong Godfrey.”
The doctor stared at her, motionless. Did he believe her?
Moments later, he released her arms and straightened. She felt a warm, steady flow on her shoulder and down her arm again. The bubo on her neck.
The doctor reached beneath his overcoat, this time pulling out a tubular device that was transparent, possibly glass, with a dark liquid roiling inside and a tall, glinting needle jutting out of the top.
“What is that?” Catherine asked. “Is that the cure?”
“No. It’s an enhanced form of your disease. You have about a day to live but if I inject you with this, you’ll have minutes. And they’ll be horrible. The worst pain you can imagine.”
Please God, don’t let this happen.
She refused to give in. “Please. I promise you. I know nothing about this book you speak of.”
The doctor lifted the device, his thumb against the rounded top of a rod that extended from the other end of the tube. She reasoned that it was a kind of hand-operated pump, the rod a piston for pushing the liquid up the tube.
“Last chance. Tell me where it is.”
“I’ll scream. I’ll scream so loud that all of London will hear.”
“Do that and I’ll go downstairs and stick this needle in your daughter. Actually, maybe I’ll just go and do that now.”
The doctor turned to leave. Catherine felt a stab of panic. “No! No, I’ll tell you.”
The doctor stopped at the door, turning slowly to face her.
“Please don’t hurt her.” Her breathing became heavy, the bubo on her neck throbbing and bleeding, reducing her voice to a whimper. “I’ll tell you where it is.”
“So you had it all along. You lied.”
“Y-yes.” She coughed.
“Well? Where is it?”
She took a breath. “I-I g-gave it t…” Her voice trailed into a feeble mumble.
“What?”
“I… I g-gave it t-to…”
The doctor sprang t
owards the bed, yelling, “You gave it to who?”
Channelled by desperation, which took the form of a sharp and almost otherworldly bolt of strength, Catherine shot up, thrust her arm towards the doctor and snatched the tubular device from his grip. She went to stab him with it, but he jerked out of the way and she missed. So she plunged the needle into her own arm. As he lunged to retrieve it, her thumb was on the piston, thrusting it up the tube, pumping the dark liquid into her blood. By the time he grabbed it back, she’d emptied it.
“Stupid bitch!”
“Beatrice, get out of the house!”
“M-mother?” she heard Beatrice call from the bottom of the stairs. “W-what’s hap –”
“He’ll kill you! Run! Get out of th –”
The words stuck in her throat as the doctor’s gloved hands closed around her neck in a painful grip. The bubo on her neck burst, warm blood and pus wetting the bed beneath her. As her arms shot up to try to grapple with him, she saw that both were turning purple, her fingers blackening. She felt a warm flow trickling across her face from her nose, and then another from the corner of her mouth.
“You’re dying,” the doctor whispered, tightening his grip on her throat. “I can stop it. If I inject you with the cure you’ll recover.”
Not even tiny wisps of breath could get past the doctor’s grip. She tried to dig her blackening fingers beneath his, but as she bent them, acute pains ripped through them, rippling up her arms as if someone was peeling off her skin. The rising agony took over, whittling away at her strength. She couldn’t fight him. Vision blurring, heart pounding in her ears, she let her throbbing limbs fall to the bed.
“Just tell me where it is.”
She opened her mouth to speak, the doctor’s grip loosened, and she channelled everything she had left to her voice, spitting, “Burn in Hell.”
The doctor’s bird-like face fell inside a blanching haze, growing ever more indistinct. She saw him jerk, and then a quick, hard blow to her left cheek flung her head to the side.
She couldn’t help but smile as her eyes met the rapidly disappearing window. Her limbs were paralysed and all the pain had turned to numbness. She welcomed the release. She hoped to God that Beatrice had heeded her words, but as she’d not called for her again, or come up the stairs, Catherine satisfied herself that she had.
Then, as the window rolled into the thickening mantle of white, shimmering flecks of golden light were all around her.
Heaven?
Please God, let me have that.
When Robert Skinner went back downstairs to the room that served as a living space, a kitchen and a shoemaker’s workshop, Catherine Godfrey’s daughter was gone. He made a quick exit, sloshing through the mud puddle at the front of the house and hastening up the plague-ridden street, passing a couple of body collectors who were replenishing their cart with the occupants of the house next door. The fumes from the open sewer ditches running along both sides of Cordwainer Lane gave way to a stench of dead, diseased flesh so strong that it penetrated Skinner’s clove and cinnamon-filled beak.
He sneaked into a narrow alleyway leading to some cart sheds, then stopped for a moment to catch his breath.
How would he find that fucking book now?
He walked past the cart sheds, through another alley, coming out onto a different street, home to a rather sedate marketplace that had obviously been sapped by plague and was not as bustling as it should’ve been. Squawks of “Sheep’s feet, hot sheep’s feet,” and “Three pies for a halfpenny,” came from a young lad behind him, carrying a tray laden with bowls of misshapen pies and unappetising-looking hooves. Skinner saw a fishmonger with hay-filled crates of glistening mackerel and cod and a couple of barrels of live crabs, farmers selling chickens and sacks of wheat, and a couple of men selling furs, cloth, horseshoes, candlesticks, faggots and tableware made from pewter.
Skinner weaved through, catching a few stares from the peasants, valets and tradesmen who were shopping here. He passed another plague doctor buying a pound of fresh ginger from a spice-seller, perhaps to top up the perfumes in his beak.
He rounded a corner onto the next street, walking in no particular direction. He just needed to think. He needed a game plan.
He’d have to go back for the daughter. After weeks of interrogating Godfrey families across London he’d finally found the right one. Now that Catherine was dead, the daughter was his best – his only – lead. Would Catherine have shared knowledge of the book with her daughter? Who the fuck knew. But he was going to find out.
Struck by dizziness, he stumbled against the wall of a closed-down baker’s, a pain shooting from his abdomen to his throat and triggering a cough. Steadying himself, he straightened and inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with cloves and cinnamon. The dizziness abated.
Was it the jumps? He knew that time travel could have side effects, but they were rare and only affected a small percentage of travellers. Skinner never thought he’d be one of them, but figured that even if he was, he was a big guy and could handle it. Now he wasn’t so sure. Something was wrong. Something felt wrong – inside. How the hell was he going to be able to pull this off if he was getting sick?
There was an easy answer to that. Because I have to. Skinner’s own life had been rewritten, and that was on him. Karen, his darling wife. Carly and Shannon, his two beautiful little daughters. It was his fault they were never born. He had to put it right. And he wasn’t about to let a few stomach cramps get in the way.
His ringtone pealed from his pocket. Shit! He thought he’d put his phone on silent. He did a fast turn into another alleyway. He pulled his phone from his pocket and removed his mask.
He felt a bite of nervousness in his throat. He decided he wouldn’t tell her. He’d just say he was still looking. Then he’d have to think of something. He composed himself, cleared his throat with a forced cough, and answered confidently, “Yes, ma’am?”
“Report, Mr Skinner.”
“Nothing yet, ma’am, but I will find it. I just need a bit more –”
“Please don’t say time.”
Skinner swallowed the word. A foolish thing to say, given the circumstances. He reiterated, “I promise, I will find it.”
“No, you won’t. Not there, anyway. You’re done with 1348.”
Oh no. She wanted him to jump again. Great. “What do you mean?”
“I have a new lead.”
5
September 12th 2019
Ferro had heard of a museum in the market town of Portphilly in Snowdonia, North Wales, that was home to a collection of archaeological finds and historical texts thought to be apocryphal. Wall-to-wall with fake artefacts, unreliable manuscripts, and books about UFOs and conspiracy theories, it was said to be the place where bad research and discredited ideas went to die. Historians whose assertions had been proved inaccurate, fraudulent or based on dubious sources often found their work on the shelves of Portphilly Museum. Not surprisingly its nickname was the ‘Museum of Bad History’.
A lot of people thought the Bible belonged there. Ferro could see why, but he just didn’t – couldn’t – agree. Even though he was a history teacher accustomed to testing the historicity of everything he read and encouraging his students to do the same, he believed the Bible – despite being of anonymous and non-contemporaneous authorship – an exception to the rule. He always had, and it had brought him comfort on a lot of very dark days. Still, he recognised the contradiction.
Opening in 1922, Portphilly Museum was held in much higher regard in its early days, but as time wore on, its contents became increasingly controversial. Although the museum continued to present itself outwardly as credible and legitimate, it was said that the curators were aware of the nickname and quietly perpetuated its low-brow reputation. After all, the museum attracted scores of ufologists, conspiracy theorists and fringe researchers, many of whom were willing to donate large sums of money to keep the place going.
Ferro was starting to wonder why h
e was here. He thought himself sensible, level-headed. He wasn’t someone who believed in wacky conspiracy theories like the Royal Family being alien lizards in disguise or the Earth being flat or Paul McCartney having died in the 60s and been replaced by a lookalike. Yet he was surrounded by books that propagated these ideas.
Having said that, that was the point. He’d come here hoping to find more evidence to support Purkis’s deathbed confession, which suggested that William II had been murdered by a time traveller. Most people would think that a pretty wacky theory, one that flies in the face of modern science. Having visited a whole bunch of libraries and museums up and down the country, he wondered if Portphilly Museum – home of cold-shouldered history – could hold some ignored and overlooked clues.
He spent his first day studying the three books the museum had on the Normans but turned up nothing about Walter Tyrrell or the ‘book’. He used his dwindling savings to book a night at the cheapest bed-and-breakfast he could find and, in the morning, used the free WiFi to publish an article on his blog about the Simon of Stonebury text he came upon in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, two weeks ago. He opened by saying that ‘life’ had prevented him from writing about his findings earlier, which was true. The collapse of his marriage and breaking up of his family was making it difficult to concentrate on much of anything. After barely leaving the house for two weeks, he’d decided that the best source of distraction would be to resume his search for the truth about William II’s killer, so he’d forced himself to get in the car and drive to Wales.
After posting his article and refuelling with a generously portioned full English breakfast – was it called a full Welsh over here? – Ferro checked out of the B&B and returned to Portphilly Museum. On arrival he asked the curator if she knew of any books they had relating to the Black Death, to see if he could find anything to corroborate the Simon of Stonebury-cited rumour about the plague physician who interrogated people about a ‘book with a strange title’, and was seen using a phone-like device before disappearing.
