We squeeze through the gate onto the gravel path, past barns of neglected and wandering livestock, the vegetable garden tangled with vines, the orchard dropping its fruits.
On our left is the doleful song of the nuns in the church, doors closed against corruption, breathing their psalms against the foul air of pestilence, hoping in that big boat of stone to get safely to the other shore with their souls intact.
On the right is the infirmary, emanating with the moans of those under the sentence of death, breathing their pleas to someone, anyone: the Blessed Mother; their earthly mothers; their spiritual Mother, the prioress.
We stand in the open pathway, in the space between.
“Mason,” I say, slowing a little, “if this doesn’t work, if my own healing was only a coincidence, then we’re walking right into the mouth of death.”
“Do you want to turn back?” says Mason. “Or maybe give it to the nuns instead?”
“They don’t need it in there,” I say. “It’s the sick who need a doctor, remember?”
* * *
—
In the infirmary, every torch is lit down the long gallery of cells. The walls are the deep red of burnished clay, glowing against the beams of the timber roof. I hadn’t noticed the row of blue-winged angels painted above the cells, cohorts of commanders, interceding for the sick below. The walls become sootier the closer they rise to the ceiling, but the angels peek glints of light out of deepening darkness.
We duck into the corner by the door and wait. In walks the last person I would have expected: Cook.
“I hear you’re short on help, and I’m short on diners,” says Cook. “Can you put me to work, Physician?”
Joan stops her ministrations. “It means certain death, Cook.”
She sighs. “What choice do I have? I’m going to stand before my Judge one way or the other.”
“If you insist,” Joan sighs, but I can tell she’s glad to have the help. “Now listen, Cook, back when Father Johannes found the first sign of disease on his own skin, he dispensed all of us to hear confession, even give communion to the dying. You do whatever these people need you to do.”
“Right,” says Cook, crossing herself. “Holy Saint Cook, at your service.”
A curtain’s pushed aside, and the prioress herself exits a cell. Weak as she is, of course she’d spend the last of her strength here serving the dying. She sees me and Mason standing frozen by the doorway, and draws a deep breath.
“You found what you were looking for,” she says, smiling.
I return the smile, holding up a vessel. “It’s healing water, Mother. And there’s plenty more.”
She takes two tin cups from a cabinet and hands them to us. “Draw some, and follow me.”
We go with her into the very first cell on the left, the one where Brother Timothy died. A man is there, naked to the waist, covered in black pustules, his skin purple against his whitish-yellow hair. He’s clutching at his chest, gasping for breath and coughing out blood. His fingertips look like they’ve been dipped in liquid coal; his eyes are frenzied.
The prioress takes a clay cup from the table at his bedside and holds it out to me. I pour the water into it. She sits on the edge of the bed and fearlessly slides her arm under the bare, seeping shoulders of the sick man. She holds the cup to his cracked white mouth and says softly,
O omnes sitientes, venite ad aquas.
All you who are thirsty, come to the waters.
The man drinks and licks his lips. The wildness in his eyes softens into something more like frightened confusion; he looks at the prioress as she lays him back down, like a child being put to bed after a nightmare. She washes her hands in a basin of cloudy water and dries them as she walks over to the table in the middle of the room.
“Now you do it,” she says to me, and walks away to tend to other responsibilities.
But I’m frozen to the spot. This is the moment where it all becomes real. Mason urges me on with a nod.
Somehow my feet pull me heavily on toward the next cell. I draw the curtain slowly and slip it into the bracket on the wall. There’s an entire family in here. A husband sits on the bed with his wife’s head in his lap. She’s unconscious and in much the same state as the first man was. There on the floor lie two little ones on a pile of dirty straw, writhing and mewling like kittens. Their parents are powerless to help them. The father is only moderately better than the rest of his family. All he can do is watch them die, and wait for his own death to progress.
I reach over to the little side table and pick up their cup. Tin clatters against clay as I pour out the water with trembling hands. I offer it to the father, who’s the only one capable of receiving it, but he points to his children, that they should drink first. I kneel on the ground, and as I saw the prioress do, I slide my arm underneath the shoulders of the younger child.
She can’t be more than four—the age at which parents start breathing a little easier for a child having survived the perils of childhood. The girl’s mouth gapes open. She has a row of perfect baby teeth. Her eyes are half shut. I put the cup to the girl’s bottom lip and she instinctively closes her mouth around its rim.
O omnes sitientes, venite ad aquas.
And I relax into the compassion I feel for this child. Since the sick can’t go to the waters, I’ll bring the waters to them. All they have to do is drink.
* * *
—
Mason and I give water to the pilgrims until the containers are dry, and I feel buoyed by hope. By dawn, the infirmary has fallen silent. Cook slumps in her chair; Joan has her head down on the table, sleeping for perhaps the first time in days. The prioress is curled up on a pallet outside a cell.
Joan wakes up, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands, and immediately begins writing on her wax tablet as though jotting down a dream. Mason and I look in the cells, and most of the patients are either sleeping peacefully, their chests rising and falling in easy rhythms, or sitting up, stunned by the peace they feel.
Despite our own exhaustion, Mason and I make our way to the door with our now-empty buckets. We pass the first cell, where the man with the frenzied eyes had been so near death. He’s sitting cross-legged on the bed with his back against the wall, staring up at the light beginning to come through the window. His skin still has the memory of purple, but the lumps have receded, and his hands, folded in his lap, are no longer tipped in black. His lips move in silent prayer as tears drip down his pale beard.
He’s made it through the night, and must now face the day alone.