“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,
“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.
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.
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.
