Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)

by Connie Willis

“How to treat open sores and infected wounds, how to prepare a child’s body for burial, how to dig a grave. The mortality rate will still be worth a ten, even if Gilchrist somehow succeeds in getting the ranking changed. The average life expectancy in 1300 was thirty-eight. You have no business going there.”

A highway, Probability had called it. It didn’t look like a highway. It didn’t even look like a road. It looked more like a footpath. Or a cow path. So these were the wonderful highways of fourteenth-century England, the highways that were opening trade and broadening horizons.

He dreamed he heard a telephone ringing. It was Finch. He told him the Americans were threatening to sue for insufficient supplies of lavatory paper and that the vicar had called with the Scripture. “It’s Matthew 2:11,” Finch said. “Waste leads to want,”

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 1200s), I positively reek, and my hair, short as it is, is crawling. I’m the cleanest person here.

“Mr. Finch said to tell you we’re out of sugar and butter and nearly out of cream.” He pulled a jelly tart out of his jacket pocket. “Why is it they never run out of Brussels sprouts?”

She took the printout back from him. “Does he live around livestock, do you know?” “Livestock?” he said. “He lives in a flat in Headington.”

All of Europe knows it, and the Church knows it, too. It will hang on for a few more centuries, making excuses, but it can’t overcome the essential fact—that He let this happen. That He comes to no one’s rescue.