Archive of Our Own

She woke in Heaven, as Roche had thought she must. There was no pain; no stench, whether of manure or the sweetness of blood. The dull ache in her injured side was like overhearing some private conversation, a murmur that half-carried through the wall. It was no more than the pain of inhabiting a body; and he would have expected her to remain a body. He would have believed that the dead, and even saints, rose again with their bodies to enter the kingdom of God.

At first it seemed to her that the room in which she had woken was silent as well as without smell. In time she came to understand that what she had taken for silence was a slurred, repetitive sound, like a racing heartbeat or a chorus of bells. It was the rain. Yet she was not cold, either.

Kivrin opened her eyes. She lay on her back in a hospital bed that had been raised to a reclining position. She was naked except for the open-backed gown and covered to the chest with a thermal blanket she hardly needed: the air was that mild, that warm. The year was 2054. No, it was not. The new year had come and gone. This was January.

She reached for the side rail to pull herself up. Heaven yawed. It was as if what had seemed definite — the rain crushed against the locked window; the saline drip and white bed — had been a reflection on water, and someone had kicked over the bucket and the image was pouring away. She was not at all sure what the year was. The memory of the wood closed around her, crisp and near as if it only lay on the far side of a door; and her vision failed, and the door opened. Was she on her side in the snow? Was she freezing to death: was that why she felt such an embracing warmth? She did not want to go back. In the end she had thought she could never leave, but she did not want to go back. 

She remembered Mr. Dunworthy and the boy. They at least were real, because she could not have imagined them. Mr. Dunworthy had worn a velvet cape like the villain of an opera.

But, she thought, Mr. Dunworthy might have come and gone again, as Roche had bid her do. He might have done everything to help her. He might have reasoned with her, begged. He had even — she remembered — gone so far as to ring the bell. The snow, though. Minute by minute obscuring the path to the drop. It did no good to trade two lives for one. She would not have done it. She had been planning to run away to Scotland, she had been almost glad when Agnes died.

Where was he? He had come; that was more than she would have thought possible. He had given her a dream of Heaven. She had forgiven him when she thought he would not come, he could not come. She had no right to hate him for coming to find her and going again.

Even as she thought it her heart roared up in her ears. No, the rain roared. How had she ever slept in such a rain?

“Miss Engle? Can you hear me?”

She removed her hand from where she had pressed it, protectively, over her eyes. Standing by the bed was a hulking young man in amazingly well-fitting SPGs.

“I can hear you,” she said. His voice was wrong. She had gotten used to hearing the interpreter overlaid on soft inquisitive Norman English. Without it speech seemed flat and brief; she listened stupidly for an echo. “What day is it?”

“January 19th,” he said. She realized that he wasn’t a nurse but a student volunteer; his nametag had a paper insert that said WILLY. He did a competent enough job taking her vitals in spite of that, humming to himself as he worked. At the end he offered her two aspirin and a paper cup.

She inspected the tablets. They looked odd to her, like the bone beads of Imeyne’s rosary; a strange thing to be expected to swallow, let alone to be eased by. There was a word she was looking for, a good contemporary word. “When can I be—” Released? That wasn’t it. “When can I go home?”

“I’ll ask the staff nurse.” He looked a bit wistful behind the fogged transparent face shield, inasmuch as it was still possible to read his expression. “You’ve caused quite a to-do, you know.”

She had seen him somewhere before. “Aren’t you at Balliol? Is Mr. Dunworthy all right?” Her heart had not slowed down.

“I am at Balliol,” he agreed, and went on obscurely, “Six days till start of term, can you believe it! I expect I’ll get out of my first supervision, what with personnel shortage here, but after that…” He gave a theatrical shudder.

It was impossible to tell if in three weeks she had forgotten the conventions of 21st century conversation or if he had never learned them. “Has something happened to Mr. Dunworthy?”

“No-o,” said Willy. “He’s still under observation, but he’s doing very well for a relapse case.”

The tick of the wall clock reached her: it had swum up through the rain. It was not a sound that had existed in the place that she came from. The place you came from? asked a voice in her head; it sounded like Mr. Dunworthy’s at his driest and most unimpressed. It was the voice that drove Mr. Gilchrist around the bend but that Kivrin hardly ever heard — even when he had tried to frighten her with demonstrations of her ignorance, tried to bully her out of traveling to the Middle Ages. It went on implacably: Just where is it that you think you came from, and how do they tell time? Do they light candles with half-hour marks carved in the wax?

No, she wanted to say, marks an inch apart showed intervals of twenty minutes. No, I did not come from there. Where I come from the candles burned out. 

“A relapse case,” she repeated, trying to understand. Her memory that seemed oppressively complete was all a clever patchwork: moments joined together that could not have followed one another in time. Mr. Dunworthy and the boy rode with her through the snow. She and the boy worked together to lift Mr. Dunworthy onto Gawyn’s black stallion. The sky through bare branches. She almost remembered coming through: the plasticine veils of the net parting, the medical team on standby. She had fallen asleep in the ambulance. “It was a virus, he said, not the plague. What virus?”

He told her.

*

She was discharged toward evening, on the condition that she return for radiography the next day; she had a small pneumothorax that was expected to resolve on its own, though it required observation. They would not let her see Mr. Dunworthy. He was still sleeping most of the time, said the staff nurse. She would have asked after the boy, but try as she might she could not summon up his name.

At the start of her final year Kivrin had moved from the dormitories to a flat at Frewin Annexe. She roomed with a second year named John Bartholomew. Bartholomew always stayed with family for the holidays and she duly expected to return to an empty flat. She did not really know how she would acquire the wedge pillow and undemanding foodstuffs that the home recovery instructions recommended, but she decided that the question could wait until after she had changed out of the stiff new clothes the hospital had loaned her. 

But when she disembarked from the shuttle, the light in their kitchen was on. Her stomach pinched. Was it possible she had left it on? On the morning of the drop she had lain awake, unable to sleep for excitement; she had been so nervous, and so determined not to ruin the good effect of her inoculation through short sleep, that she had held herself rigidly still with eyes shut, like a child playacting death; in the end her eyes grew heavy just minutes before the time she had set the alarm for. She slept through the first alarm. Then she was running, running out the door. So perhaps she had not turned off the light nor noticed it when getting on the shuttle that would bear her away to the past.

She told herself this as she fumbled in the window planter for the spare key. Bartholomew opened the door.

“You look awful,” he said, stepping aside to let her in. “What have you done to your hair? You didn’t get the plague?” He was a little nervous of her, she saw. It wasn’t just politeness; he hung back because he thought there was still a risk of infection. 

By plague of course he meant the influenza. Probably he had come back to get his analogue first thing, before the other returning students filled up the waiting rooms and perhaps transmitted a few last instances of the virus. Bartholomew was quite intelligent.

“I had it weeks ago,” she said, closing the door. She could tell he wasn’t sure he could believe her. No doubt he had noticed that something was wrong with her way of walking. She said, “I had my T-cell enhancement and I made a full recovery without professional care. It was during my practicum. When I came back I had to be hospitalized for broken ribs, but in the end I didn’t need surgery. Could you put tea on?”

He pulled out a chair for her: the single cane-backed chair they kept in the kitchen for their usually solitary breakfasts. Bartholomew was a late riser and Kivrin had spent the term attempting to anchor her schedule to daylight hours, so that she would be prepared to rise at dawn as the contemps did. She sat gratefully and almost did not hear when he said, “Your practicum?” He had turned his back to her; he was taking down the tea things from the overhead cabinet. “You don’t mean they let you do it? I thought for sure it would be canceled with the epidemic. What happened, did you fall off a horse?”

There was suppressed excitement in his voice. Bartholomew had set his hopes higher than hers; he was studying the life of Paul and had drawn up a proposal for direct observation of the first century A.D. To Kivrin he seemed like a relic of a former century himself, with his love of Rome and Roman rule and his perfect disdain for the so-called Dark Ages before humanity had picked itself up again and remembered the glory of Rome. But they had been allies in the sacred effort to overthrow Balliol and Twentieth Century’s near-monopoly on the net.

She coughed. He drew back, the mug and dry teabag still in his hand. She was home at last; people knew to keep their distance from the sick. 

“That bad?” he said, in a different tone.

“I have to go in tomorrow for a follow-up, but the bus is a bit of a bear right now. Can you drive me?”

“Well, all right.” The electric kettle had finished boiling and the indicator light turned off by itself. Outside the rain had darkened afternoon to the saturating blue of dusk, but indoors the light was impossibly strong: smearing on the microwave’s mirror finish, touching Bartholomew’s brown hair with auburn threads. Rosemund’s hair was that color, but in all the time Kivrin had stayed with the family, she had only seen it gleam when she and Roche carried the girl’s little body to her grave. That had been the first day the weather cleared. 

The present was a time without shadows. She had not known that before she left. It was like the missing voice of the interpreter: objects appeared curiously without depth, suspended at arbitrary heights rather than resting on any earthly surface. Under her feet lay a dim gray smudge like damage to the linoleum, but that was nothing — nothing at all — to the shadows she had cast in the church with the last candles guttering. Grand castle-headed fanciful monsters, clowns on stilts, witches at the stake. Compared to the one bare bulb overhead, hearth and torch and lantern were not the means of illuminating the world but of darkening it. Roche had looked like a murderer in shadow and in the sun, but his face lit by fire was the face she still remembered, tooled into the surface of her waking mind by fear.

He had been angry, she thought suddenly. It was not an illusion. Why should it be? He lived in a hovel in the shadow of the stone-walled house of God. He spent all his days tending the sick, giving rites to the dying, even before the plague came. He hated it. All the time that she had known him he had wrestled, by his own confession, with unbelief.

“It’s not what you think,” she said aloud.

Bartholomew set down the tea in front of her. “What I think?”

“You think I had some sort of accident. That I wasn’t prepared, that something went wrong.” She started to giggle: almost a snigger, really, with her hand against her mouth.

He stood with half his weight on the counter, head turned stiffly to one side. That was Bartholomew’s kind of sympathy; he would always give you time to tidy up your face. Even huffs of suppressed laughter sent a sharp shock of pain through her side. She stopped herself with an effort. 

“I’ll tell you about it another time. I have to get my notes together.”

That made him look back, level-sounding and half-sensible as it was. His eyes ran lightly over her, with the same suspicion as he had shown when she first came in. “Did they have paper in the fourteenth century?”

*

At the follow-up they praised her X-ray and offered to remove the corder and memory implant. It was a minimally invasive procedure that required only local anesthetic.

“When will the files be sent to me?” she asked after. The twin incisions were almost symmetrical: clean and no more than five millimeters across, sealed with dissolving stitches. If Roche had seen them, he would not have been surprised.

“Um,” said the physician, tapping a comment into Kivrin’s chart. She was a gray-haired Iranian woman with vivid hazel eyes that stayed perpetually fixed on the middle distance. She must have been close to Dr. Ahrens’ age, but she seemed much younger, as though the color of her hair was a fashionable affectation. “The files?” And before Kivrin could answer: “That would be a question for your department head. University property goes to the research laboratories of the relevant college for processing.”

Kivrin thanked her. The synthetic bone spurs had been bagged for cleaning, but the specimen bag still lay on the tray next to the operating chair. She tried not to look at it and then realized this must be more conspicuous than looking. The bag looked empty, at a glance. Only when she narrowed her eyes could she make out a pinkened scrap of bone.

Bartholomew stood to leave as soon as she limped out to the waiting area; he held his bag over one shoulder, and his face mask was pulled tight against the skin. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I want to look in on Mr. Dunworthy. I can meet you at the garage.” He’d had his analogue and there had been only four new cases since January 9th, but she didn’t grudge Bartholomew his evident dread. He was only being careful. She had half-expected him to wait the whole hour in the garage, or to go walk laps around the rugby field next door. Probably he had been tempted, but Bartholomew’s sense of the proper forms was almost as strong as his sense of self-preservation.

“If you’re sure.” He hefted his briefcase higher on his back. 

They walked awkwardly together to the lift. She pressed both call buttons (up for herself, toward the casualties ward; down for him) to spare him the need to touch more potentially contaminated surfaces. For a moment, ludicrously, she felt powerful and knowledgeable, as she had pouring wine on Agnes’ knee. It was so easy, here. When she got off the elevator she would go and wash her hands with the antimicrobial soap that foamed endlessly from the standardized wall dispenser.

Mr. Dunworthy was awake but feverish, the ward nurse said. He had one visitor already in the room. The maximum number of visitors was two, so Kivrin or the other visitor might be asked to step out if another personal connection of his arrived unannounced and asked to be admitted. If Mr. Dunworthy became excessively agitated, Kivrin might likewise be asked to leave. Did Kivrin understand? Well then, go in.

The other visitor turned out to be the boy.

He sat with his knees crammed under his chin and his feet on the edge of the chair. He was reading to Mr. Dunworthy from a hardcover book the size of a butcher’s block.

“...Many were those who begged their families not to abandon them; when evening came, the relatives said to the patient: ‘So that you don't have to wake up the people looking after you at night, asking for things, you yourself can reach for cakes and wine or water, here they are on the shelf above your bed…’”

He read a little stumblingly, but with relish. He didn’t notice Kivrin come in, even when she shut the door behind her. 

Mr. Dunworthy stirred. His lips moved; it might have been Kivrin’s name. His eyes were not quite shut, and without glasses his face seemed at once younger and harsher.

“We saved her,” said the boy. “She’s resting up at her flat. She’ll be better in no time. You don’t worry about Kivrin.”

“I’m here, Mr. Dunworthy,” Kivrin said from the door.

The boy almost overbalanced the chair. He shut the book with one finger inside and scrambled to his feet. “She’s here, Mr. Dunworthy,” he said, still narrating. “She walks quietly. You didn’t mention that.” 

Kivrin ventured toward the bed. Mr. Dunworthy coughed. His eyes opened. “Kivrin,” he said clearly. Then: “Colin, look away from her. Don’t come in here. Go back to the shed and give him some hay.”

Colin. Too late, she remembered the boy introducing himself at the start of a surreally long explanation.

Colin looked a bit panicked. Kivrin wanted to tell him, no, you were right the first time; I wasn’t here; I am still not here. For Mr. Dunworthy could not see her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she said. “Do you want to go back to reading to him?”

“Sorry,” which was clearly Yes. “He wasn’t like this before. I mean, the first time he had the virus. He just slept.” This either defensively or with hostility, she wasn’t sure; perhaps he thought she blamed him, or more likely he was thinking of Dunworthy listing on the donkey’s back.

“There isn’t time,” said Mr. Dunworthy. “It’s getting dark.”

“May I stay a moment?” she asked. “Not long. I have a friend coming to pick me up.” She said it with the half-formed idea that Colin might resent her less if she seemed less alone — if he didn’t have to feel responsible for her, too.

He did relax, maybe just at the promise of her leaving again, and soon. “Can I?” he said, jerking his finger not quite out of the book. She nodded. 

Colin read. The book looked like a textbook, with some image from the public domain blown up prominently on the back cover, but the language had the familiar awkwardness of medieval prose. He must have hit an excerpt of some primary source, although it was not one she recognized. “...When the patient fell asleep, their relatives went away and did not return. If through good fortune the victim had been strengthened by that food, and the next morning found him alive and still strong enough to get to the window, he would have to wait half an hour before anybody came past…”

“They hanged her!” Mr. Dunworthy rapped out sharply. An inept teacher correcting a slow student.

“...if this was not a busy thoroughfare, and even when the odd person passed by, and the patient had enough voice to be heard a little, if he shouted, sometimes he would be answered and sometimes not; and even if he were to be answered, there was no help to be had.”

Mr. Dunworthy cried out. If the nurse looked in, Kivrin thought, it would look as though they were torturing him with accounts of his impending doom.

Colin kept doggedly on. “‘Many died without being seen, remaining on their beds till they stank.’ That’s from the chronicle of Mar-chee-own di Coppo—”

“Marchionne,” guessed Kivrin.

Mr. Dunworthy spoke over her. “Go away from here, Colin. Go back.”

“Why does he keep saying that?” she asked.

“He thinks we’re in the other village. Not the one where we found you.” Colin squinted at the page. “There were bodies everywhere and he didn’t want me to be traumatized or anything, but he pretended to be worried about the horse. He thought they all lost their minds and attacked each other, because some of the dead people had ropes around their necks and everyone was lying in a heap. It could have been, but I think it was just a way to move the bodies that were too heavy to carry. It’s hard to carry much when you’re sick. I told him my idea, but I don’t know if he listened. What do you think?”

“I think you’re right,” said Kivrin. “Does he ever know that he’s here, that he’s in the hospital?”

“Sometimes. So far just for a few minutes before he falls asleep or gets confused. You could try tomorrow. He was a little better in the morning.”

“I will.” She leaned over the bed to press Mr. Dunworthy’s left hand, which lay atop the covers. It felt only a trifle warm, but the skin was canvas-dry and thin, as though the last moisture had been leached from it by fever.

*

That night she dreamed that she lay dead in the village that Colin and Mr. Dunworthy had found. The rope chafed around her neck. Mr. Dunworthy turned her over again so her face could not be seen.

Waking she discovered that she had slid down the wedge pillow procured at baffling expense from Marks & Spencer. She threw out a hand for the touch lamp on her nightstand but couldn’t reach it. Her hand shook when she lifted it into the dark over her face.

In the dream she had known that death was not the worst. She had known that Mr. Dunworthy would not recognize her, would not admit that she was found; he would go with Colin to another village to look for her, and another after that. He would wander forever in a snowy landscape emptied of the living. He would grow lost.

*

Come morning Colin was gone, neither the nurse nor the receptionist knew where; and Mr. Dunworthy blinked at her and said nothing at all.

She took her chances with the hard plastic chair. The tight ache in her side bothered her less, already, whether because she was recovering or because she was learning how to inch along without disturbing the fractures.

One thing she could not do was inhale deeply. She had to speak in a low voice, and fast. She wished she sounded certain, even with no one to listen. What she sounded was distracted and furtive.

“Mr. Dunworthy, I’d like you to be the one to review my record.”

He stared ahead, breathing loudly through his nose.

“I dedicated it to you, and it has entries from when… that is, I don’t remember everything I said in it, exactly. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind.”

His scant gray hair was pasted to his forehead with sweat. That was good. That meant the fever had broken.

“I wouldn’t want Mr. Basingame or the dean to think less of me because I made a hash of my observations. I suppose they’ll make allowances. All the same, it was for you.”

Mr. Dunworthy blew out air in a very long sigh, like an animal, a horse or dog, when it is comfortable. He reached up with one hand and scratched idly at his throat.

“Please wake up.”

She thought he smiled in his dream.

*

The student volunteer — William Gaddson — had given her his phone number before she was discharged. In case she wanted to get together, don’t you know, or needed a hand with any heavy lifting. She waited superstitiously until she was off campus to call him.

He lit up over video with unsurprised delight. Freed from the confines of his SPGs, he was rosy-fair and blond and knew a great little place where he could spot her a drink.

Kivrin arrived before him. Bartholomew had driven her to the hospital again but asked if she would be all right to take the bus home, to which she had assented, not wanting to act as if she was entitled to his help. Despite that, the short walk to the pub seemed to have been in some way a mistake. On both nights now since her return she had slept a black sleep that left her leaden and stupid. She blamed these irksome nights, more than her injury, for her exhaustion.

At the bar she asked for water and got a faintly disapproving stare from the athletic-looking barman; he sent her back to her booth with both water and a bowl of peanuts. She had been slightly afraid that as William’s especial recommendation the pub would already be done up for Valentine’s Day, but it was bare except for the Christmas lights that still clung grimly in a double string to the back shelves.

“Kivrin!” William slid into the booth with remarkable ease for such a well-grown young man. Out of his cumbersome biohazard gear, she had the impression he more or less slid everywhere. “Just the person I wanted to speak to. You don’t know how pleased I was when your number popped up.” 

She tried pointlessly to dissuade him from paying for her pot of tea. He ordered a strawberry daiquiri, with a wink to show he knew his own daring in straying so far from the canon of young male drinks. She was more amazed by his willingness to handle anything iced, even inside the heated pub, but he wore his muffler undone and his coat halfway open; he did not seem to feel the cold at all. Against her better judgment, she was charmed. Gawyn with his tales of renegades would have had to adapt quickly to compete with the likes of young William.

She made conversation as best she could about the epidemic — the quarantine — and his modestly understated but decisive role in assisting Mr. Dunworthy with the preparations for her rescue, as he told it. “Did you know Dr. Ahrens?” he asked at one point without pausing for her answer, and she nodded and let him go on about how poor Dr. Ahrens’ death at the height of the bureaucratic shutdown had meant that no one noticed her authorization code on the order for Dunworthy and her kid nephew to get their streptomycin. It was what she would have wanted, he said piously.

Kivrin closed her eyes for a moment and saw Dr. Ahrens, hand on hip; Dr. Ahrens glaring down at the welt from her inoculation.

“She saved my life.” She felt foolish as soon as she said it. William had assumed a profound expression. There was nothing to do but go on. “She insisted on vaccinating me against the plague even though I was supposed to go to 1320. She was afraid for me — she didn’t think I would listen to her or anyone about the risks — but even so, she wouldn’t hear a word against me going, because I wanted it so much. Isn’t it strange that someone like that could…”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said William, bending forward across the table. “It feels as though this virus has picked off the best of us.” He shook his head. “What you’ve got to remember is that Dr. Ahrens thought you were the best of us. That’s why she made sure you had your T-cell enhancement and plague jab and all. So don’t give up hope. It didn’t get everyone. We’re stocked with analogues, so now life can go on and we’ll always remember.”

It had the merit of making as much sense as any other consolation of philosophy. Kivrin pressed her thumb against the space between her brows until her eyes stopped prickling. “Dr. Ahrens was always kind to me,” she said. “I had a question for you, actually, about hospital protocol.”

She explained about the corder; its contents that might be misinterpreted or misfiled in the absence of Mr. Dunworthy and poor Mr. Gilchrist, who had context for the project; the entries not set down in the best frame of mind. “What I want to know is if they’ll have forwarded it to the lab right away, or if… your friend who helped fast-track the inoculations…”

William gave a contented hum. “Oh. No, they’ll have stripped the sheathing tissue and sent it on immediately.”

Kivrin was almost relieved. “Of course. Thanks. Sorry to bother you with it, I’ll just—”

“But I’d be surprised if the lab touched it before February,” he said. “They’ll be shorthanded. Lots of the techs have refused to come back without hazard pay; plus there’s a backlog of transcription requests that were never handled over the break. I know a student at Shrewsbury… When do you want it by? And do you just want the audio, or do you want to load in a modified file?”

Her hands tightened around the teacup. It was too warm for that; they sprang apart. “Could I?”

“Depends on if anyone looks hard at the metadata. We might be able to make that look like a mistake on their end. Power outage, file loss, the works. Let’s start with pulling the audio and go from there, shall we?”

The wet heat of the steam was making her lightheaded. She felt hideously exposed. The barman was reading a glossy interior decor magazine with a stiff insert of featured color swatches. No one else had come in since William arrived, and the Christmas lights bristling on the cable, blinking pink and green and blue, were the most animate thing in the room. “Thank you,” she managed. “That would mean a lot to me.”

He leaned his cheek on his palm and sipped daiquiri from the brimming glass. “It might need a couple of days, I’ve got to wait until my friend is back from vac. Might be a week, might be a couple of days. So…”

“A week is fine,” Kivrin hastened to say. “You’re very thoughtful.”

It didn’t work. He went on: “...so I wonder if you’d be an angel and help with something else. I hate to ask. It’s just, I’m meant to have been reading Petrarch over the holiday.” He lifted his face carefully from the glass, in which the level of daiquiri had lowered by two thirds, despite his measured and nearly-inaudible sipping. “It was a make-up, actually. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I’ve left it too late. But you were there. I mean, the Middle Ages! The Black Death!” He waved the glass in a neat little arc that didn’t let fly a drop of iced rum. “Was there anything that could go in my paper, do you think?”

For a moment her mind went entirely blank. It was as though she had come unprepared to an oral exam. Her skin crawled at the thought of shaking her head no, of apologizing. 

She must have blushed, because he smiled at her.

Finally she said, “Do you have an outline?”

* 

William called a taxi for her. In the back seat she did two recommended breathing exercises from memory. She put a hand on her chest and a hand on her stomach and breathed until she could feel her stomach expand.

Oxford out the window was severe without festooning leaves or snow. The rain had stopped but a rising wind bent the trees almost at right angles. Their route took them past St. Mary’s, and the tower that had stood not quite eight hundred years was the only thing in a canyon of stone that seemed to lift its head toward the sky.

Bartholomew was on the hall phone when she entered the flat. “Sorry, someone’s coming, I think it’s her,” he said clearly. “Yes, officer. Yes, all sorted now, just a bit of nerves since she’s been ill. Thanks.”

She hung up her coat and hat and sat down on the bench to untie her boots, a bit laboriously. He hung up the receiver with a determined click.

“Did you call campus security?”

“You were late,” said Bartholomew.

She thought of pointing out that he hadn’t offered her a ride back, but it seemed petty, and she didn’t care. “We didn’t set a time to talk about dinner, did we?” During term they cooked together about once a week and made shift on their own otherwise. Term had not yet begun, of course.

“You’re being deliberately obtuse.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

From the corner of her eye she saw him draw himself up to snap at her. Too late, she thought she had been petty after all. He was like Eliwys at the window, awaiting her husband’s return; he was one of the living, who did not know the future, and for whom anything could still go wrong. “I went for drinks with Willy Gaddson. I didn’t expect it to take long, but he wanted to talk about Petrarch.”

A silence followed in which she tapped some mud out of the boot treads. “Isn’t he the one with a girlfriend at every college?”

“Two at Shrewsbury, I think.” Kivrin gave him a wan smile. “You really needn’t worry. He just wants a primary source.”

Bartholomew got up. “I hope he’s paying you in more than beer, then.”

At her computer she found that William’s outline had already winged its way to her student inbox. The filename was PETRARCH_2055_NEEDS_WORK. She opened it with trepidation and then, seeing the title, went to get a pillow from her bed that she could hold to her chest while she read.

FRANCESCO PETRARCA: PANDEMIC POET?

Before Shakespeare, there was Petrarch. Before Juliet married Romeo, Laura rejected Francis. Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) is best remembered as the original bard of love and humanism, and much has rightfully been written about his insight into romantic troubles. By comparison, his writings on the Black Death are comparatively neglected in modern scholarship. It is often thought that his musings on death and mortality are too dependent on classical conventions to provide insight onto period psychology. In this paper, drawing from my lived experiences during the Oxford epidemic of December 2054 - January 2055, I will show that Petrarch’s letters about the plague describe truly universal experiences and argue that he borrows images from antiquity to evoke surprisingly original sentiments. 

• Aeneas carrying his father = Petrarch carrying his soul (modernity causing more introspection, people became self-aware) 
• ??
• Laura died in the plague? [synthesis, connection 2 romance writing]

The white light of the overcast day was waning fast; the light of the screen was much brighter. She thought closing her laptop might help, but it only removed the one brilliant square, without restoring color to the rest of the dim little room.

Her bedroom had built-in shelves and floating shelves and a hutch over the desk and a little standing bookshelf painted green; even so her books stacked up on the floor, under the bed. Rented textbooks and reference manuals bought secondhand; the gloriously smelly dictionaries and grammars and treatises that Mr. Dunworthy had loaned; the popular anthologies and fiction which traveled in a suitcase with her to uni three years prior. There had to be something she could use to write William’s paper for him.

She moved to sit on the edge of the mattress. A few weeks before the drop, she had used self-adhesive hooks to anchor makeshift bed hangings around her narrow bedframe, so she could acclimate to the slightly claustrophobic feeling of air stilled by shut curtains. It looked haphazard and cheap with the hand-placed hooks and the checkered bedsheets she had used, which she had been glad of, since she did not want to be accused of entertaining a sentimental fantasy. She had been so defensive of the seriousness of her ambition that she had pretended for years not to know that it was suspect, and herself forgot by the time of her last preparations why she had chosen flannel over linen. 

Now she lay down on her wedge pillow and stared at the looped-back hangings. The kinked ends of her hair moved with her breath. If Eliwys or Imeyne had seen this bed, plain and white as the metal frame was, stained and flaccid as the bedsheets were, they would hardly have doubted it was fit for royalty.

She wished she had found a way to record their voices and not only her own. It was impossible to argue the justice of the fact that interpreter worked only after she began to speak and be spoken to, once she had risked humiliation and suspicion. That was, if you liked, the first lesson a historian must learn, the sort of thing Mr. Dunworthy would say with a hand to his heart and a gleam of sarcasm in his eyes behind their glasses: you are an observer, and you will be observed. You must be to see anything worth the candle. 

All very well for the post-colonial ethics of practical history. Yet she wanted fiercely to know what had been said in her presence when she was ill; if she had not yet deserved it, lying feverish and stupid in their care, then she deserved it now. Now she had seen them, now she had spoken to them, now she had cared for them in her turn, and now they were dead. She was owed everything that remained of them, everything that she could have learned if not for her own weakness.

If she had pressed her hands together and held them up to Eliwys’s face when she pleaded for water, she might have captured something of the sing-song quality of Eliwys remonstrating with her to rest. If she had pretended to pray as Imeyne bid her, she might have retrieved fragments of Imeyne’s neverending complaints, rich with names and times and comparisons to the better life they had left behind them, the life already blown apart by the plague and which Kivrin had never seen. There, as here, she had woken unknowing to a world set upon by disaster, the end written and bleeding through the page not turned: the world only looked as it should to her because she knew nothing about it. Then, as now.

What will I do if Mr. Dunworthy dies? she asked herself. 

But she knew. It was why she had to write William’s paper. 

If Mr. Dunworthy died, her record would go from being incomplete to being worse than useless. Just the excited ravings of the very ill: an artifact of historical interest, not history. To salvage it, she would need to transcribe it herself, fleshing out the observations where appropriate. And she would need to take out the passages she had meant only for him. Poor Mr. Gilchrist was dead, so he could not use the audio of Kivrin swearing at Mr. Dunworthy and blaming him for the death of a child to damage Mr. Dunworthy’s reputation at the university. Mr. Latimer had been transferred to another facility for long-term care, so he could not appreciate the increasing clarity of her Church Latin as she begged.

She sat up, holding the pillow to her side. I must start with Laura, she said to herself. Start as if the argument were already proven. Start from the end.

*

The next morning the door buzzer started up around dawn.

Kivrin came awake without quite believing that she had been asleep. She had been up late reading Petrarch’s English Laurels, 1475-1700: A Compendium of Printed References and Allusions: the third edition. It was harder to read while injured, just as much as it was harder to use the toilet or ride a donkey or do nothing. She had to keep stopping when the alarm went off for the latest dose of her regimen of staggered painkillers, and moving to new positions to prevent mucus from collecting and making her cough. So she had thought that she would wake more exhausted than ever, and being roused at a time when the street outside was still dark and the digital on her wrist read seven-zero-something seemed a grim fulfillment of her fears. It took her a little while to notice that she was not at all tired.

She heard Bartholomew arguing with someone.

She rose as well as she could. She wore loose button-down pajamas — it was all button-downs for the foreseeable future — and decided they were decent enough for company, since she was an invalid.

The hall was still dark; the only light came through the open door from the motion sensor on the stoop. The person Bartholomew was heatedly addressing himself to was a pointy-chinned young Black woman with natural curls loosened by the drizzle. “—why you would expect anyone to accept an unmarked package from a stranger—”

Kivrin, cringing, stumped faster toward the door. “Hi, good morning. Is someone asking for me?”

Bartholomew seemed in no hurry to move out of the way. “Yes,” he said flatly. “This is Polly Wilson. She’s got a package for you. Are you expecting a package?”

 He had on his joggers; he must have been getting ready to leave when the buzzer went off. Over his shoulder, Polly raised both hands to shoulder-height in the universal posture of the wrongly accused. She wore a leather jacket over a hoodie and cumbersome mittens. In one hand she held on delicately to a brown paper sleeve with no handle, like they gave out at museums, except it had something hard and rectangular at the bottom, about the size of a stick drive.  

Kivrin’s sides had started to hurt from the effort of breathing slowly. “Thanks for coming out all this way — did Willy Gaddson give you my address?”

“That’s right,” said Polly carefully. “Since we don’t want to leave a trail, I figured an external drive was best.”

“Pardon?” said Bartholomew. “Who the hell is ‘we’? Kivrin, what is this?”

“Uh…” She reached her hand out for the drive in hopes of letting Polly go before Bartholomew worked himself into high dudgeon. “Remember I told you I was helping Mr. Gaddson with his Petrarch? Well, I asked him if he could do me a favor in return, and he—”

Her slow, even delivery had no more effect on Bartholomew than it had ever had on Agnes’ pony. He took the paper sleeve himself, ignoring Polly’s ambivalent noise of protest. “Why don’t you come in out of the cold,” he told Polly. “This all sounds awfully interesting. Coffee or tea?”

Thus Kivrin found herself stowed once again in the kitchen chair while Polly sized up Bartholomew above her head. “I’m sorry about this,” she said to no one in particular. “I would have given you more warning, John, but I wasn’t expecting anything to happen until after the weekend. Um.”

“Anything to happen?”

Polly crossed her arms. “Is he your flatmate or your boyfriend?” she asked Kivrin with faint disapproval. Kivrin felt a moment’s rising hysteria at the idea of Bartholomew cast as the controlling boyfriend in a soap made of her life. Lost in Time. Like the Plague.

“Flatmate,” said Bartholomew, at the same time as Kivrin said, “We’re just friends. He’s reading History as well. Look, it’s quite simple. I had an audio file with my observations from the period that I wanted retrieved early from the Brasenose lab, since it’ll be months before they get around to formally processing it. Polly is at Shrewsbury but since she’s training for a tech she works with multiple colleges’ in-house systems. Right?” Polly nodded. “She went in, grabbed the audio…”

“Brasenose’s laboratory is closed,” said Bartholomew. “Gilchrist ordered it shut down after the protests. She can’t have ‘gone in.’”

“I used a worm to bypass the moating on the network,” Polly put in.

Bartholomew’s mouth opened and shut with a click. Kivrin said politely, “That was fast, wasn’t it?”

Polly seemed a trifle mollified. “Well. I got the worm ready for Mr. Dunworthy, actually, when he thought only Brasenose had the fix. He ended up not needing it, but I thought what a pity to not test it at all.”

“There, see? Mr. Dunworthy ordered it.” 

Bartholomew poured coffee in silence. The three of them drank down the pot together. “Thanks again,” said Polly; it was not obvious what she said it in reference to, unless it was the opportunity to use her worm. She emptied the mug into the sink and went out; she had never undone her jacket. In the time since her arrival the sun had risen, tinting the cloudy east half of the sky to a delicate pearl blue.

“Are you going to give it to me or not?” she finally asked.

“I haven’t decided. Kivrin, what are you doing? Tampering with your own observations? Do you want your practicum results thrown out? Which is the best case scenario, actually. You could be sent down!”

The light cut apart the gloom like a perpendicular banner, the ghostly film of its presence more visible than what it fell upon. Bartholomew went to the sink to wash up and became half-silhouette, half the pinkened planes of face and forearm where they interrupted the dawn.

“I’m sorry to make you late to your workout,” she said. His usual route would have taken him across the Thames by now: a good place to watch day break.

“Don’t be stupid. I can’t be late for it. I’m not giving you anything until you talk to me.”

His prudish way of sandwiching every show of concern between insults couldn’t disguise the pleasure he took in his own altruism. No doubt he would say that anyone would be worried and he just had the misfortune to live with her. Which might well have been true, but it did not endear him to Kivrin; nor did the sight of his quivering hands as he ran each mug under the faucet. Her poor friend, afraid to say the word “expelled.” 

“Are you afraid that they’ll cancel your applied coursework?” she asked.

“You’re the best history student I know,” he said after a moment in which neither of them had spoken. “I can’t say what’s gotten into you, but I think it’s a waste.”

His voice trembled like his hands did. It occurred to her that he saw himself as reasoning with a traumatized person; that in addition to feeling noble, he felt responsible for her, since her thinking was clouded. Although she was older than him, he spoke to her as a worldly soul to an innocent, for whom sentiment could take priority over a first with honors. She listened and remembered her own thin voice badgering Roche to wear his mask inside the sickroom.

“It’s not like that. —Look, give me the drive and I’ll show you,” she said coldly. She did not want anyone, anyone not Mr. Dunworthy to hear; but it was only Bartholomew, after all.

*

She skipped and fast-forwarded past the first half of the recording. Apart from snippets of her own delirium, there was nothing particularly controversial there.

“...Probability says there was a seventy-two percent chance of dying…”

“...was wroth with my sister…”

“...nunnery wasn’t even five miles…”

“...whether you can hear me or not…”

“...we can hear the plague…”

“There,” she said, hitting play. That was her entry about the bells; that meant the dying had started.

She was at her desk, and Bartholomew had perched himself awkwardly on the foot of her bed. They both listened as the Kivrin of seven hundred years ago listed off the villages she could hear from Ashencote.

There was a sputtering break as the corder deactivated and reactivated. That almost inaudible hiccough represented a lapse of several hours, Kivrin knew. But she was not prepared for what she heard when the recording resumed.

“Iprayyow, naleteth rawzamun sterve. Prayyow naleteth ahnyous sekenen. Sende gawynayyen…”

She stopped playback.

Bartholomew raised his head, though it evidently took him a moment to realize the silence was anything other than the next skip in the tape. “One of the contemps?”

“No.” After so long listening to the scraped hide of her voice over the corder, she sounded too loud and too close to herself. It was as though she spoke with her head inside the hollow of a bell. “No,” she said again. “It’s me.”

*

Bartholomew was almost ecstatic with relief. “So now it doesn’t matter what names you called Dunworthy in your sleep. They’re all invaluable contributions to lexicography.” He wanted her to promise that she would ask Polly to restore the files as-is to Brasenose’s digital archives. She said that she would consider it. She agreed that privacy and her academic reputation were no longer her overriding concern. 

When he had left for his much-deferred run, she played through the entries that followed. After ten minutes or so she got up to pace, keeping her back to the desk. She itched with impatience for the interpreter to come back online; she thought perhaps that listening without the laptop in view might help.

“...Ichhawe nacomen thatrist. Newist nummore taleof thadayyes… Yowmostbee sek midsorwe…”

Sometimes she used a word or name that had no counterpart. Mr. Dunworthy. Pneumonic. But she pronounced Dunworthy strangely, putting the stress on the second syllable and almost dropping the third, with that uptilted sound the aristocratic dialect kept from Old French. She had to listen hard to catch the anachronisms, so hard had the interpreter worked to integrate them into her speech.

 They had removed the corder, but the interpreter was not a machine. The effects on her language acquisition capacity were projected to dwindle after months, not weeks. And she had already mastered this language: well enough, anyway, to understand and be understood.

The voice on the tape didn’t care. It droned on with its hoarse elongated Gs and its constant hint of a question. She recognized the names, most of the time: Roche, Agnes, Rosamund. But even then it often took as much of a paragraph of discussion before she placed the subject.

She had missed her morning dose of aspirin. Her chest throbbed. On the tape the other Kivrin shouted incomprehensibly at no one.

I can’t talk to her, Kivrin thought. It’s the same as when I first arrived. I was too sick to talk, and the interpreter did nothing. The interpreter was primed to respond to her intentions and acquire only such context as she prioritized. She couldn’t fool it into thinking that her disembodied voice was an interlocutor whom she must speak to, whom it was urgent that she hear.

“But I must,” she said aloud.

From hoarse half-strangled screaming the voice of the corder settled into cool exposition. It was close to the end. She would have been detailing her plan to take Roche with her to Scotland. She had recorded a little over four hours of observations in total, of which no more than two had been made while lucid and given in contemporary English. All the time Kivrin had spent worrying about the wrong person hearing the tape; and no one would hear it. If Mr. Dunworthy ever woke up, he would ask: Is that one of the contemps?

Kivrin shut her laptop.

*

“I don’t know,” said Ms. Montoya. “I don’t think we can use you at the dig. It’s all heavy lifting, if you think about it.”

The video stuttered and froze so much that it could have been a series of tableaux: Ms. Montoya at the edge of a pit; Ms. Montoya’s thumb blocking part of the camera. She looked smaller than Kivrin remembered. Like many survivors of the epidemic, she had yet to put back on any of the weight she had lost. 

“I know I can’t be much use,” Kivrin said. “I want to go because I think it might be of help to me.”

“What kind of help? Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I need to go back to the site,” Kivrin said. “I’ve been working through my observations from the corder, but some of them don’t make as much sense without context, and I’m hoping that exploring the immediate environs will jog my memory. I might not be able to dig, but I can do fine work like washing finds.”

“Okay then,” said Ms. Montoya, after a pause that might have been the connection lagging or might have been natural. “I’ll send someone to meet you at Witney.”

On the bus Kivrin clutched her travel pillow to her side and watched the trampled turf and wind-shorn trees stream past. Another storm seemed to be gathering, although no rain had yet fallen; the cloud layer was low and dark, more like a sod roof of the same material as the earth it dipped toward.

At Witney she waited under the 17th-century buttercross with its queer gabled roof until one of Montoya’s graduate students drove up in an ATV. The student wore a face mask like Bartholomew had to the hospital; presumably they were taking no chances about the viral reservoir at the dig, even post-vaccination.

Ms. Montoya was more cheerful in person than over the phone. “Good to see you on your feet,” she said briskly, and dumped a mackintosh, clear safety glasses, and gloves into Kivrin’s arms. “The night you came through I thought we might have retrieved a body. Much better that you’re around to interpret your own notes.”

The dig was in the middle of a barley field, which at this time of year meant ridged black earth under just a bare stubble of green. The dig itself was in a state. The last time Kivrin had seen it, it had bitten a neat though irregular cube out of the topsoil, exposing the paler clay and gravel underneath; now sections of the walls were washed out and support beams stood half-buried in mud that had already hardened again in smooth new runneled shapes. Tarps were stretched across some of the narrow alcoves that extended off the central quadrangle of the dig, but even as she watched the corner of one flapped and tore loose. They were doing battle not just with the rain but with the wind.

“I’m so sorry,” she said blankly. 

Ms. Montoya looked sidelong at her. “You should have seen it three weeks ago!” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of the mechanical pump.

They filed down the ramp, the student leading. Kivrin removed her laptop bag from over her shoulder as soon as she could and set it down on one of the folding tables.

“So,” said Ms. Montoya. “You said you wanted to see the tomb?”

The lid and knight’s effigy stood propped against one side. A sheet of plastene, fogged with damp and handprints, had been first stretched over the opening and then rolled back. Balanced atop the broad stone wall of the tomb were three shallow trays full of hard-to-identify brownish lumps; Ms. Montoya moved one to the table when she noticed them, but seemed at a loss as to how to make room for the others. The tomb itself was empty, although at first Kivrin took that for a trick of the dark.

“Had to move the remains during quarantine,” said Ms. Montoya laconically. “The rain was getting in. That’s how I got the virus.”

From Imeyne’s husband, Kivrin thought, buried in winter. “I’m very sorry. What are the trays for?”

Ms. Montoya gave Kivrin the same look as she had at the brink of the pit: half doubtful, half wondering. “Well,” she said. “Those are all of the wrist bones I could source from the single graves. I was sure you had died from the influenza.”

Kivrin reflexively looked at the sky, averting her eyes from the anonymous rubble in the trays. She saw Rosemund’s open hand that had let the apple fall, and her wrist so thin that the cords stood out like the ridges of a field. The steward had dug a grave for her and they had needed it. You should have seen the other place, Colin had said, but it seemed to her that the work she and Roche and the steward had done had been unmade in less than an instant: every grave they had filled had been opened, the bones scattered. The village itself lay naked in its grave, and the knight’s tomb stood empty. After all the efforts of her rescuers, she had ended up back at the bottom of a churchyard in Ashencote. 

“Could we put the lid back on?” she said. And flushed. “That is, could you…”

But neither Ms. Montoya nor her student objected. The other trays were set down on the ground while it was dry, and they levered up the lid and eased it across until it covered the plastene.

Kivrin knelt and folded her hands. The inscription on the side was not quite level with her eyes: REQUISCAT CUM SANCT, and the rest was worn away, except for the date at the end.

“Requiscat cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,” she said. “And the dead man was a D’Iverie, married to the lady Imeyne, and father of one Guillaume D’Iverie. Guillaume married Eliwys D’Iverie; their daughters were Rosemund and Agnes. Guillaume sent his family here from Bath to escape the plague, but it arrived at Christmas and wiped out the population of the town. And there’s a bell tower you haven’t found.” 

Ms. Montoya took it all down in her notepad. 

“Your memory seems sharp to me,” she said. “Was there more of the site you wanted to see?”

No, Kivrin thought, her eyes blurring. If the tomb doesn’t do it, nothing else in this place will help. I’ve got to try again while kneeling in front of the tomb.

She asked for her laptop and balanced it on her knees. She put in her headphones and shut her eyes and listened.

She stopped the playback again almost immediately in frustration. Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. The forest was gone and the church with its gem-dark glass and its stone vaulting like the belly of some great beast; the snow was gone, never to return. Roche’s body that had lain mere feet from the tomb was gone. None of the excavated bones were his. She had failed to bury him.

In her mind the words from the corder looped without decoding themselves. Yowmostbee sek midsorwe… Yowmostbee sek mid sorwe… Yow most bee sek mid sorwe…

May he rest with Thy saints forever, she thought bleakly. He had told her to go, to pray for him, that his time in purgatory would be short. It had not been. He had told her that she was proof of God’s mercy because she spoke a strange language, because her name was Katherine and the saint’s crude figure stood in the church, because she spoke to the dying clerk of times to come. But these were mysteries to which she knew the only answer; as she knew where the light in the forest had brought her; and where the dark of the church had taken him. Not to the future, where she knelt waiting. To nothing. To a death that was neither a time nor a place, or that was all times and places, without him; the hospital, her flat, the bus, the ruins open to the sky. World without end. She would never find him. The last of his acts was a pain in her side she did everything proper to heal. 

Yet it was not true that she knew more than he of the end to come. All men must die, he said to her, and none, nor even Christ, can save them.

For as long as she had rested with his body in the church, she had thought she would be able to follow him, wherever he had gone. She had thought of the steward seated upright in his grave; she had plotted how she too could bury at least part of herself, enough to protect the bones of her left hand from scavengers. She did not waste time imagining nonexistence, or even the bitter cold. She had imagined Mr. Dunworthy listening to the contents of her corder, and she said all she could think of to make him smile. 

In that way she had tried, like Roche, to comfort her redeemer, and make certain of the future. To know one thing about the world beyond; to know there was love after death.

She felt as though she had been cut in two. One self still sat by Roche’s corpse, his hand cradled in hers. If she listened; if she did not wait; then the other Kivrin would be released, and her hope of salvation with her. Salvation would have come and gone, and the present would have changed again, beyond recognition. She would know nothing any longer about her life to come.

She did not want to listen. She was the only one who could.

She pressed play.

As she did so, the rain started to fall, dropping hard but singly on the dust. In her hurry to relocate her laptop she only half-heard the first words of the entry: “You must be worried sick, Mr. Dunworthy…”

It was not like the halting translations of the interpreter contending with real Middle English. It was language she herself had produced, still scaffolded partly on the habits of modern syntax. She hardly ever dropped an I or thou.

Her back to the tomb, seated at the table under the tarp, Kivrin listened to herself snarl and beg. She listened to her plans for flight.

The recording stuttered after that, and she heard herself say, “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.” She seemed to be speaking from farther off than usual.

Then another voice: a man’s. Husky and almost without breath. “Et lux—”

“Et lux perpetua,” said the Kivrin of then.

*

When next she visited Mr. Dunworthy, she brought her laptop and a back cushion, the better to settle in for a long stay. Bartholomew had worked out that it wouldn’t take him out of his way to pick her up and drop her off if they timed it to his afternoon class schedule.

The narrow table by the bed was partly taken up with flowers and notes from students. There was also an enormous jar of gobstoppers. She did her best to pack the well-wishes together without crumpling any, and balanced her laptop at the very edge.

She talked to him as she worked. 

“I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a bind, Mr. Dunworthy. Do you think it’s too late to convince Mr. Gaddson to throw out his argument?”

And: “Here he is on Laura’s death in the margins of Virgil. Petrarch, that is, not Mr. Gaddson.” 

She mouthed the lines about the dates and Avignon, which seemed an unlikely contrivance, then read: “‘—To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me.’”

The dry sound of his snoring interrupted her. She looked up from the page and found: he had slipped from his open-eyed stupor into a real doze. That meant nothing in particular, she knew.