A woman with two toddlers had helped him, punching in the destination and amount for him and showing him how to insert his ticket in the slot. He had made it to Paddington with time to spare.

"Aren't there any nice people in the Middle Ages?" Kivrin had asked him, and of course there were. Young men with switchblades and tube maps had existed in all ages. So had mothers and toddlers and Mrs. Gaddsons and Latimers. And Gilchrists.

He rolled over onto his other side. "She will be perfectly all right," he said aloud, but softly, so as not to wake Colin. "The Middle Ages are no match for my best pupil." He pulled the blanket up over his shoulder and closed his eyes, thinking of the young man with the green cockscomb poring over the map. But the image that floated before him was of the iron gate, stretched between him and the turnstiles, and the darkened station beyond.

19 December 1320 (Old Style.) I'm feeling better. I can go three or four careful breaths at a time without coughing, and I was actually hungry this morning, though not for the greasy porridge Maisry brought me. I would kill for a glass of orange juice.

And a bath. I am absolutely filthy. Nothing's been washed since I got here except my forehead, and the last two days Lady Imeyne has glued poultices made of strips of linen covered with a disgusting-smelling paste to my chest. Between that, the intermittent sweats that I'm still having, and the bed (which hasn't been changed since the 1200's), I positively reek, and my hair, short as it is, is crawling. I'm the cleanest person here.

Dr. Ahrens was right in wanting to cauterize my nose. Everyone, even the little girls, smells terrible, and it's the dead of winter and freezing cold in here. I can't imagine what it must be like in August. They all have fleas. Lady Imeyne stops even in mid-prayer to scratch, and when Agnes pulled down her hose to show me her knee, there were red bites all up and down her leg.

Eliwys, Imeyne, and Rosemund have comparatively clean faces, but they don't wash their hands, even after emptying the chamberpot, and the idea of washing the dishes or changing the flock in the mattresses has yet to be invented. By rights, they should all have long since died of infection, but, except for scurvy and a lot of bad teeth, everyone seems to be in good health. Even Agnes's knee is healing nicely. She comes to show me the scab every day. And her silver buckle, and her wooden knight, and poor, over-loved Blackie.

She is a treasure trove of information, most of it volunteered without my even asking. Rosemund is "in her thirteenth year," which means she's twelve, and the room they've been tending me in is her bower. It's hard to imagine she's of marriagable age, and thus has a private "maiden's bower," but girls were frequently married at thirteen and fourteen in the 1300's. Eliwys can scarcely have been older than that when she married. Agnes also told me she has three older brothers, all of whom stayed in Bath with their father.

The bell in the southwest is Swindone. Agnes can name all the bells by the sound of their ringing. The distant one that always rings first is the Osney bell, the forerunner of Great Tom. The double bells are at Courcy, where Sir Bloet lives, and the two closest are Witenie and Esthcote. That means I'm close to Skendgate. It has the ash trees, it's about the right size, and the church is in the right place. The dig's church didn't have a bell tower, but Ms. Montoya may simply not have found it yet. Unfortunately, the name of the village is the one thing Agnes hasn't known.

She did know where Gawyn was. She told me he was out hunting my attackers, "And when he finds them, he will slay them with his sword. Like that," she said, demonstrating with Blackie. I'm not certain the things she tells me can always be depended upon. She told me King Edward is in France, and that Father Roche saw the devil, dressed all in black and riding on a black stallion.

This last is possible. (That Father Roche told her that, not that he saw the devil.) The line between the spiritual world and the physical wasn't clearly drawn until the Renaissance, and the contemps routinely saw visions of angels, the Last Judgment, the Virgin Mary.

Lady Imeyne complains constantly about how ignorant and illiterate and incompetent Father Roche is. She is still trying to convince Eliwys to send Gawyn to Osney to fetch a monk. When I asked her if she would send for him so he could pray with me (I decided that request couldn't possibly be considered "over- bold"), she gave me a half-hour recital of how he had forgotten part of the Venite, had blown the candles out instead of pinching them so that "much wax is wasted," and filled the servants' heads with superstitious prate (no doubt of the devil and his horse).

Village-level priests in the 1300's were merely peasants who'd been taught the mass by rote and a smattering of Latin. Everyone smells about the same to me, but the nobility viewed their serfs as a different species altogether, and I'm sure it offends Imeyne's aristocratic soul to have to tell her confession to this "villein!"

He's no doubt as superstitious and illiterate as she claims. But he's not incompetent. He held my hand when I was dying. He told me not to be afraid. And I wasn't.

I'm feeling better by leaps and bounds. This afternoon I sat up for half an hour, and tonight I went downstairs for supper. Lady Eliwys brought me a brown wadmal kirtle and mustard-colored surcote to wear, and a sort of kerchief to cover my chopped-off hair (not a wimple and coif, so Eliwys must still think I'm a maiden, in spite of all Imeyne's talk about "daltrisses") I don't know if my clothes were inappropriate or simply too nice to be worn for everyday, Eliwys didn't say anything. She and Imeyne helped me dress. I wanted to ask if I could wash before I put my new clothes on, but I'm afraid of doing anything that will make Imeyne more suspicious.

She watched me fasten my points and tie my shoes as it was, and kept a sharp eye on me all through dinner. I sat between the girls and shared a trencher with them. The steward was relegated to the very end of the table, and Maisry was nowhere to be seen. According to Mr. Latimer, the parish priest ate at the lord's table, but Lady Imeyne probably doesn't like Father Roche's table manners either.

We had meat, I think venison, and bread. The venison tasted of cinnamon, salt and lack of refrigeration and the bread was stone-hard, but it was better than porridge, and I don't think I made any mistakes in table manners.

Though I'm certain I must be making mistakes all the time, and that's why Lady Imeyne is so suspicious of me. My clothes, my hands, probably my sentence structure, is slightly (or not so slightly) off, and it all combines to make me seem foreign, peculiar — suspicious.

Lady Eliwys is too worried over her husband's trial to notice my mistakes, and the girls are too young. But Lady Imeyne notices everything and is probably making a list like the one she has for Father Roche. Thank goodness I didn't tell her I was Isabel de Beauvrier. She'd have ridden to Yorkshire, winter or no, to catch me out.

Gawyn came in after dinner. Maisry, who'd finally slunk in with a scarlet ear and a wooden bowl of ale, dragged the benches over to the hearth and put several logs of fat pine on the fire, and the women were sewing by its yellow light.

Gawyn stopped in front of the screens, obviously just in from a hard ride, and for a minute no one noticed him. Rosemund was brooding over her embroidery. Agnes was pushing her cart back and forth with the wooden knight in it, and Eliwys was talking earnestly to Imeyne about the cottar, who apparently isn't doing very well. The smoke from the fire was making my chest hurt, and I turned my head away from it, trying to keep from coughing, and saw him standing there, looking at Eliwys.