The church was dark, and smelled musty. I could hear Father Roche's voice from the front of the church, and it sounded like he was talking to someone. "Lord Guillaume has still not arrived from Bath. I fear for his safety," he said.

I thought perhaps Gawyn had come back, and I wanted to hear what they said about the trial, so I didn't go forward. I stood there with Agnes in my arms and listened.

"It has rained these two days," Roche said, "and there is a bitter wind from the west. We have had to bring the sheep in from the fields."

After a minute of peering into the dark nave, straining to see, I finally made him out. He was on his knees in front of the rood screen, his big hands folded together in prayer.

"The steward's babe has a colic on the stomach and cannot keep his milk down. Tabord the Cottar fares ill."

He wasn't praying in Latin, and there was none of the priest at Holy Reformed's sing-song chanting or the vicar's oratory in his voice. He sounded businesslike and matter-of-fact, the way I sound now, talking to you.

God was supposed to be very real to the contemps in the 1300's, more vivid than the physical world they inhabited. "You do but go home again," Father Roche told me when I was dying, and that's what the contemps are supposed to have believed — that the life of the body is illusory and unimportant, and the real life is that of the eternal soul, as if they were only visiting life the way I am visiting this century, but I haven't seen much evidence of it. Eliwys dutifully murmurs her aves at vespers and matings and then rises and brushes off her kirtle as if her prayers had nothing to do with her worries over her husband or the girls or Gawyn. And Imeyne, for all her reliquary and her Book of Hours, is concerned only about her social standing. I'd seen no evidence that God was real at all to them till I stood there in the damp church, listening to Father Roche.

I wonder if he sees God and heaven as clearly as I can see you and Oxford, the rain falling in the quad and your spectacles steaming up so you have to take them off and polish them on your muffler. I wonder if they seem as close as you do, and as difficult to get to.

"Preserve our souls from evil and bring us safely into heaven," Roche said, and as if that were a cue, Agnes sat up in my arms and said, "I want Father Roche."

Father Roche stood up and started toward us. "What is it? Who is there?"

"It is Lady Katherine," I said. "I have brought Agnes. Her knee is — " What? Infected? "I would have you look at her knee."

He tried to look at it, but it was too dark in the church, so he carried her over to his house. It was scarcely lighter there. His house is not much larger than the hut I took shelter in, and no higher. He had to stoop the whole time we were there to keep from bumping his head against the rafters.

He opened the shutter on the only window, which let the rain blow in, and then lit a rushlight and set Agnes on a crude wooden table. He untied the bandage, and she flinched away from him.

"Sit you still, Agnus," he told her, "and I will tell you how Christ came to earth from far heaven."

"On Christmas Day," Agnes said.

Roche felt around the wound, poking at the swollen parts, talking steadily. "And the shepherds stood afraid, for they knew not what this light was. And sounds they heard, as of bells rung in heaven. But they beheld it was God's angel come down to them."

Agnes had screamed and pushed my hands away when I tried to touch her knee, but she let Roche prod the red area with his huge fingers. There was definitely the beginning of a red streak. Roche touched it gently and brought the rushlight closer.

"And there came from a far land," he said, squinting at it, "three kings bearing gifts." He touched the red streak again, gingerly, and then folded his hands together, as if he were going to pray, and I thought, don't pray. Do something.

He lowered his hands and looked across at me. "I fear the wound is poisoned," he said. "I will make an infusion of hyssop to draw the venom out." He went over to the hearth, stirred up a few lukewarm-looking coals, and poured water into an iron pot from a bucket.

The bucket was dirty, the pot was dirty, the hands he'd felt Agnes's wound with were dirty, and, standing there, watching him set the pot on the fire and dig into a dirty bag, I was sorry I'd come. He wasn't any better than Imeyne. An infusion of leaves and seeds wouldn't cure blood poisoning any more than one of Imeyne's poultices, and his prayers wouldn't help either, even if he did talk to God as if He was really there.

I almost said, "Is that all you can do?" and then realized I was expecting the impossible. The cure for infection was penicillin, T-cell enhancement, antiseptics, none of which he had in his burlap bag.

I remember Mr. Gilchrist talking about mediaeval doctors in one of his lectures. He talked about what fools they were for bleeding people and treating them with arsenic and goat's urine during the Black Death. But what did he expect them to do? They didn't have analogues or antimicrobials. They didn't even know what caused it. Standing there, crumbling dried petals and leaves between his dirty fingers, Father Roche was doing the best he could.

"Do you have wine?" I asked him. "Old wine?"

There's scarcely any alcohol in the hopless small ale and not much more in their wine, but the longer it's stood the higher the alcoholic content, and alcohol is an antiseptic.

"I have remembered me that old wine poured into a wound may sometimes stop infections."

He didn't ask me what "infection" was or how I was able to remember that when I supposedly can't remember anything else. He went immediately across to the church and got an earthenware bottle full of strong-smelling wine, and I poured it onto the bandage and washed the wound with it.

I brought the bottle home with me. I've hidden it under the bed in Rosemund's bower (in case it's part of the sacramental wine — that would be all Imeyne would need. She'd have Roche burned for a heretic.) so I can keep cleaning it. Before she went to bed, I poured some straight on.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It rained till Christmas Eve, a hard, wintry rain that came through the smoke-vent in the roof and made the fire hiss and smoke.

Kivrin poured wine on Agnes's knee at every chance she got, and by the afternoon of the twenty-third it looked a little better. It was still swollen but the red streak was gone. Kivrin ran across to the church, holding her cloak over her head, to tell Father Roche, but he wasn't there.

Neither Imeyne nor Eliwys had noticed Agnes's knee was hurt. They were trying frantically to get ready for Sir Bloet's family, if they were coming, cleaning the loft room so the women could sleep there, strewing rose petals over the rushes in the hall, baking an amazing assortment of manchets, puddings and pies, including a grotesque one in the shape of the Christ child in the manger, with braided pastry for swaddling clothes.

In the afternoon Father Roche came to the manor, drenched and shivering. He had gone out in the freezing rain to fetch ivy for the hall. Imeyne wasn't there — she was in the kitchen cooking the Christ child — and Kivrin made Roche come in and dry his clothes by the fire.

She called for Maisry, and when she didn't come went out across the courtyard to the kitchen and fetched him a cup of hot ale. When she came in with it, Maisry was on the bench beside Roche, holding her tangled, filthy hair back with her hand, and Roche was putting goose grease on her ear. As soon as she saw Kivrin she clapped her hand to her ear, probably undoing all the good of Roche's treatment, and scuttled out.

"Agnes's knee is better," Kivrin told him. "The swelling has gone down, and a new scab is forming."