The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  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 coverlid off the featherbed, and Roche eased him down onto the bed.

  “We must draw the fever from his head,” 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 autumn 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 were 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 the Third’s reign,” Eliwys said.

  Edward the Third, 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

  THREE

  Buried with my own hands five of my children in a single grave … No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.

  AGNIOLA DI TURA

  SIENA, 1347

  24

  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 thrashed 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 Basingame’s 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.

  William’s blond student nurse met him at the door of Isolation. She was wearing a white cloth gown and mask. “I’m afraid you can’t go in,” she said, holding up a gloved hand.

  Badri’s dead, he thought. “Is Mr. Chaudhuri worse?” he asked.

  “No. He seems actually to be resting a bit more quietly. But we’ve run out of SPG’s. London’s promised to send us a shipment tomorrow, and the staffs making do wi
th cloth, but we haven’t enough for visitors.” She fished in her pocket for a scrap of paper. “I wrote down his words,” she said, handing it to him. “I’m afraid most of it’s unintelligible. He says your name and—Kivrin’s?—is that right?”

  He nodded, looking at the paper.

  “And sometimes isolated words, but most of it’s nonsense.”

  She had tried to write it down phonetically, and when she understood a word, she underscored it. “Can’t,” he had said, and “rats,” and “so worried.”

  Over half the detainees were down by Sunday morning, and everyone not ill was nursing them. Dunworthy and Finch had given up all notion of putting them in wards, and at any rate they had run out of cots. They left them in their own beds, or moved them, bed and all, into rooms in Salvin to keep their makeshift nurses from running themselves ragged.

  The bell ringers fell one by one, and Dunworthy helped put them to bed in the old library. Ms. Taylor, who could still walk, insisted on going to visit them.

  “It’s the least I can do,” she said, panting after the exertion of walking across the corridor, “after I let them down like that.”

  Dunworthy helped her onto the air mattress William had carried over and covered her with a sheet. “ ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,’ ” he said.

  He felt weak himself, bone-tired from the lack of sleep and the constant defeats. He had finally managed, between boiling water for tea and washing bedpans, to get through to one of Magdalen’s techs.

  “She’s in hospital,” her mother had said. She’d looked harried and tired.

  “When did she fall ill?” Dunworthy’d asked her.

  “Christmas Day.”

  Hope had surged in him. Perhaps Magdalen’s tech was the source. “What symptoms does your daughter have?” he’d asked eagerly. “Headache? Fever? Disorientation?”

  “Ruptured appendix,” she’d said.

  By Monday morning three quarters of the detainees were ill. They ran out, as Finch had predicted, of clean linens and NHS masks and, more urgently, of temps, antimicrobials, and aspirin. “I tried to ring Infirmary to ask for more,” Finch said, handing Dunworthy a list, “but the phones have all gone dead.”

  Dunworthy walked to the Infirmary to fetch the supplies. The street in front of Casualties was jammed, a jumble of ambulance vans and taxis and protesters carrying a large sign that proclaimed “The Prime Minister Has Left Us Here to Die.” As he squeezed past them and in the door, Colin came running out. He was wet, as usual, and red-faced and red-nosed from the cold. His jacket was unstripped.

  “The telephones are out,” he said. “There was an overload. I’m running messages.” He pulled an untidy clutch of folded papers from his jacket pocket. “Is there anyone you’d like me to take a message to?”

  Yes, he thought. To Andrews. To Basingame. To Kivrin.

  “No,” he said.

  Colin stuffed the already-wet messages back in his pocket. “I’m off then. If you’re looking for Great-aunt Mary, she’s in Casualties. Five more cases just came in. A family. The baby was dead.” He darted off through the traffic jam.

  Dunworthy pushed his way into Casualties and showed his list to the house officer, who directed him to Supplies. The corridors were still full of stretcher trolleys, though now they were lined lengthwise on both sides so there was a narrow passage between. Bending over one of the stretcher trolleys was a nurse in a pink mask and gown reading something to one of the patients.

  “ ‘The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee,’ ” she said, and he realized too late that it was Mrs. Gaddson, but she was so intent on her reading she did not look up. “ ‘Until he have consumed thee from the land.’ ”

  The pestilence shall cleave unto thee, he said silently, and thought of Badri. “It was the rats,” Badri had said. “It killed them all. Half of Europe.”

  She can’t be in the Black Death, he thought, turning down the corridor to Supplies. Andrews had said the maximal slippage was five years. In 1325 the plague hadn’t even begun in China. Andrews had said the only two things that would not have automatically aborted the drop were the slippage and the coordinates, and Badri, when he could answer Dunworthy’s questions, insisted he had checked Puhalski’s coordinates.

  He went into Supplies. There was no one at the desk. He rang the bell.

  Each time Dunworthy had asked him, Badri had said the apprentice’s coordinates were correct, but his fingers moved nervously over the sheet, typing, typing in the fix. That can’t be right. There’s something wrong.

  He rang the bell again, and a nurse emerged from among the shelves. She had obviously come out of retirement expressly for the epidemic. She was ninety at the least, and her white uniform was yellowed with age, but still stiff with starch. It crackled when she took his list.

  “Have you a supply authorization?”

  “No,” he said.

  She handed him back his list and a three-page form. “All orders must be authorized by the ward matron.”

  “We haven’t any ward matron,” he said, his temper flaring. “We haven’t any ward. We have fifty detainees in two dormitories and no supplies.”

  “In that case, authorization must be obtained from the doctor in charge.”

  “The doctor in charge has an infirmary full of patients to take care of. She doesn’t have time to sign authorizations. There’s an epidemic on!”

  “I am well aware of that,” the nurse said frigidly. “All orders must be signed by the doctor in charge,” and walked creakily back among the shelves.

  He went back to Casualties. Mary was no longer there. The house officer sent him up to Isolation, but she wasn’t there either. He toyed with the idea of forging Mary’s signature, but he wanted to see her, wanted to tell her about his failure to reach the techs, his failure to find a way to bypass Gilchrist and open the net. He could not even get a simple aspirin, and it was already the third of January.

  He finally ran Mary to ground in the laboratory. She was speaking into the telephone, which was apparently working again, though the visual was nothing but snow. She wasn’t watching it. She was watching the console, which had the branching contacts chart on it. “What exactly is the difficulty?” she was saying. “You said it would be here two days ago.”

  There was a pause while the person lost in the snow apparently made some sort of excuse.

  “What do you mean it was turned back?” she said incredulously. “I’ve got a thousand people with influenza here.”

  There was another pause. Mary typed something into the console, and a different chart appeared.

  “Well, send it again,” she shouted. “I need it now! I’ve got people dying here! I want it here by—hullo? Are you there?” The screen went dead. She turned to click the receiver and caught sight of Dunworthy.

  She beckoned him into the office. “Are you there?” she said into the telephone. “Hullo?” She slammed the receiver down. “The phones don’t work, half my staff is down with the virus, and the analogues aren’t here because some idiot wouldn’t let them into the quarantine area!” she said angrily.

  She sank down in front of the console and rubbed her fingers against her cheekbones. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been rather a bad day. I’ve had three DOA’s this afternoon. One of them was six months old.”

  She was still wearing the sprig of holly on her lab coat. Both it and the lab coat were much the worse for wear, and Mary looked impossibly tired, the lines around her mouth and eyes cutting deeply into her face. He wondered how long it had been since she had slept and whether, if he were to ask her, she would even know.

  She rubbed two fingers along the lines above her eyes. “One never gets used to the idea that there is nothing one can do,” she said.

  “No.”

  She looked up at him, almost as if she hadn’t realized he was there. “Was there something you needed, James?”

  She had had no sleep, and no help, and three DOA’s, one of them a baby
. She had enough on her mind without worrying over Kivrin.

  “No,” he said, standing up. He handed her the form. “Nothing but your signature.”

  She signed it without looking at it. “I went to see Gilchrist this morning,” she said, handing it back to him.

  He looked at her, too surprised and touched to speak.

  “I went to see if I could convince him to open the net earlier. I explained that there’s no need to wait until there’s been full immunization. Immunization of a critical percentage of the virus pool effectively eliminates the contagion vectors.”

  “And none of your arguments had the slightest effect on him.”

  “No. He’s utterly convinced the virus came through from the past.” Mary sighed. “He’s drawn up charts of the cyclical mutation patterns of Type A myxoviruses. According to them, one of the Type A myxoviruses extant in 1318–19 was an H9N2.” She rubbed at her forehead again. “He won’t open the laboratory until full immunization’s been completed and the quarantine’s lifted.”

  “And when will that be?” he asked, though he had a good idea.

  “The quarantine has to remain in effect until seven days after full immunization or fourteen days after final incidence,” she said as if she were giving him bad news.

  Final incidence. Two weeks with no new cases. “How long will nationwide immunization take?”

  “Once we get sufficient supplies of the vaccine, not long. The Pandemic only took eighteen days.”

  Eighteen days. After sufficient supplies of the vaccine were manufactured. The end of January. “That’s not soon enough,” he said.

  “I know. We must positively identify the source, that’s all.” She turned to look at the console. “The answer’s in here, you know. We’re simply looking in the wrong place.” She punched in a new chart. “I’ve been running correlations, looking for veterinary students, primaries who live near zoos, rural addresses. This one’s of secondaries listed in DeBrett’s, grouse hunting and all that. But the closest any of them’s come to a waterfowl is eating goose for Christmas.”