The Plague Tales Page 4

  “Jew.”

  Alejandro froze, the young woman’s voice having shocked him to stillness. How had he not known someone was there?

  Again she said, “Jew!” louder and more forcefully. Without looking he knew this voice belonged to the girl who had eyed him so immodestly at the well. Surely, he thought, she would not risk being found with me, especially in the dark! Without speaking he looked at her, and their eyes locked.

  “Do men of your kind usually respond so ungraciously when addressed by a lady?”

  Alejandro kept his voice low, his tone deliberately unfriendly. He did not want this girl to mistake his intentions. “Lady,” he said, allowing her a title of respect he felt was surely undeserved, “men of my ‘kind’ do not allow themselves to be in the company of a young woman when it is ill advised by the inequality of their stations in life.” He hoped she would think he was implying that she held a loftier position by virtue of her Christianity; he did not want to explain his true meaning.

  She laughed, tossing her long dark hair in a manner meant to excite him, and said, “I do not consider it a sin to enjoy the company of a good-looking man, even if he is unaccountably attired as a beggar. When I saw you this morning at the well, I thought you meant to please all the ladies. I do confess that your appearance pleased me. But now it is another tale! Tell me, are your patients not paying you, or do you travel this evening to a masquerade?”

  Alejandro invented a quick tale that he thought might appease her curiosity. “I am traveling to a remote place to gather certain medicinal herbs that bloom only at night. The terrain is difficult and I will surely ruin my regular garments.”

  Smiling seductively, she stepped close enough to place her hand on his rough cloak as if to examine the quality of the fabric. “And this garment is surely beyond ruination,” she said. He cringed, stiffening visibly, and she laughed mockingly at his discomfort. She continued to handle his cloak, slowly drawing her fingers down the front edge until her hands were near his waist, all the while keeping her eyes locked on his, searching for a signal to proceed with her exploration. He remained expressionless, still frozen with fear; he swore at himself again for having been careless.

  If the apprentice came back, he knew she would be shamed into running away. Surely, he thought, she will not allow a witness to see her here with me. He fidgeted, and pulled away from her. Where is that God-cursed boy?

  She frowned a little, realizing that he was resisting her advances. She deliberately reached for his waist, and pulled him back again.

  “Señorita,” he said nervously, “surely this can do no good for either of us. Are we not both forbidden by our Gods to be together in this way?”

  She laughed and answered, “I am forbidden by my God even to be with a man of my own faith, unless he is chosen by my father, and I am properly married to him. I would be disgraced before the entire town if I were to approach a Christian man this way. But I know that you will not tell a living soul if I am unchaste with you. My father would demand your death, and the governor would surely accommodate him.”

  “Señorita …”

  Laughing again, she added, “Besides, I am told that Jews are different in their manhood from Christians, and while I will not admit to knowing much about how a Christian man is, I do admit to curiosity.…”

  As she continued her seduction, he felt his manhood rising against his will. What disloyalty is this? he demanded silently of his stirring loins. You would rise for this strumpet?

  He said again, “Señorita, I beg you … do not do this …” but she did not remove her hand. As she laughed and slipped her hand into the space between his breeches and his belly, he grabbed her wrist and pushed it away. In his fear he held it too tightly, unintentionally causing her sharp pain. She cried aloud and gripped her injured wrist in shock.

  The skittish mule paced nervously back and forth to the limit of his restraints. Trapped as he was by the girl, Alejandro had paid the difficult animal little heed, though he could see that the beast was agitated. On hearing her cry the mule reared up, determined to rid himself of the confining leather straps. The cart to which he was harnessed tipped sideways at an odd angle, and Alejandro watched in horror as the hay tumbled out at their feet, followed by the loosely wrapped body of Carlos Alderón, which landed at the girl’s feet, its shroud dislodged from the face. The shriveled blacksmith lay staring up at the young girl as if in disbelief at her brazenness.

  Her screams could be heard throughout the entire village and voices of alarm rose rapidly up in response. The apprentice, having sufficiently doused his pain, ran out of the stable just in time to see the girl running toward the square, her skirts flying out behind her, and to hear her shrieks of terror.

  Alejandro knew instinctively that he could not escape. The girl would run to the constable and the priest would be called out to attend to the desanctified remains.

  The apprentice looked pleadingly at him, not knowing what to do. No one had seen him with Alejandro during the course of their adventure; the physician waved him off urgently, and he ran away in great relief, narrowly escaping the ordeal of a trial and possible execution.

  Alejandro dropped down to his knees, tired beyond all experience. He knew his life was forever altered, and he prayed to God for the strength to see him through the terrible days and nights to come. As he heard the approaching commotion, he covered his face with his hands, and wept bitter tears.

  Two

  Janie and her assistant sat at a small round table in her London hotel room, a small efficiency with a kitchenette and sitting area. Intended to accommodate the service for a minimal tea, the table wasn’t quite up to holding an entire scientific research project. It overflowed with piles of disorganized paperwork, which would ultimately be gathered together in a coherent fashion and rewritten to create a doctoral thesis, one that Janie sincerely hoped would make it past the critical—but she had to admit, fair—eye of her thesis advisor back in Massachusetts.

  “If John Sandhaus could see this mess, he’d have a conniption fit,” Janie said.

  “Sorry,” her assistant said with a hurt look.

  “No, no, I don’t mean to imply it’s your fault,” Janie quickly added. “I knew there would be this much paper. It’s just that right now it doesn’t have that ‘career-saving’ look I’d hoped it would. It looks like one of my early medical-school projects. Completely disorganized.” She worked her way through one of the piles of papers, looking for a specific piece that she expected would have been folded into quarters because of its large size. As she plowed through the various letters of permission, geographical surveys, computer prints, and other odd scrawlings on pressed cellulose, she could see that just about everything she’d expected to find done by the time she arrived had in fact been done.

  She found the piece she was looking for and unfolded it over the rest of what lay there. It was a detailed geographical map of a portion of London, a good chunk of which had been involved in the Great Fire of 1666. As part of the final thesis Janie would compare the chemical content of the soil in the burned sections against that of the unburned sections, and the final dig sites were laid out carefully on the map before her. Most of the sites were marked with red X’s, indicating that permission to dig had been acquired and that the necessary paperwork was already completed. A few were marked with the green X’s that meant permission had been given verbally, but the papers still had to be chased down.

  “Wow, you’ve been busy, I see,” she said. “Really, Caroline, this is nice work.”

  Caroline Porter beamed, pleased to receive Janie’s acknowledgment of what had been a marvel of organization on her part. “I know when you look at this mess”—she gestured at the table—“it doesn’t look like much. I was hoping to get it all into a binder before I picked you up at the airport, but it just didn’t happen.” She laughed a little. “I was counting on your plane being late.”

  Janie smiled. “Not usually a bad bet these days. But the flight w
ent off without a hitch. Thank God, because the woman sitting beside me was a real yakker. I finally just shut off my earphones. I wish the etiquette for that stuff were more developed.”

  “Maybe you should e-mail Miss Manners.”

  Janie laughed. “Dear Miss Manners: How can one, with proper sensitivity and empathy, courteously silence one’s rude and irritating airplane seatmate?”

  “Gentle Reader,” Caroline said, “One may whack such boors politely over the head with the buckle of one’s seat belt.”

  “But then all the other passengers will be pissed off at me because the seat-belt alarm will sound.”

  Caroline smirked. “If we only ran the world, no one would face such dilemmas … but back to the dilemma at hand.” She pointed to two spots on the map. “These two owners are away. One should be back tomorrow and the other is due in over the weekend. I have messages waiting for both of them.” Then she sighed. “But this one”—she pointed to a small undeveloped area south of the Thames—“this one’s going to be tough. His name is Robert Sarin. He’s a very old man and he’s the ‘caretaker,’ whatever that means, of this area.” She drew her finger around it on the map. “This could be the fly in the ointment. I spoke to the man at some length yesterday before I picked you up at Heathrow. He’s just not budging. And he doesn’t seem to have a really good reason why he won’t give permission. Tell you the truth, I don’t think he’s got all his bolts tightened. Seems a little slow to me.”

  “Do you think it will help if I give him a call myself?”

  Caroline pondered for a moment before answering. “It certainly can’t hurt. But I don’t know why he’d give you permission if he won’t give it to me. He doesn’t know either of us. Maybe we should tell him about all the other people who’ve said yes.”

  “Good idea. Maybe he’d feel more comfortable if he knew what good company he’d be in by letting us dig.” She shuffled through the papers until she found the list of property owners. “Lady this, Lord that, the tenth earl of whatchamacallit … a pretty impressive group, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Impressive,” Caroline said. “But I don’t know if it’s gonna help you much. I think this guy Sarin will be a tough nut to crack.”

  Janie’s eyebrows furrowed. “I’m getting a headache,” she said. “Shit.”

  “I have some ibuprofen,” Caroline offered, smiling.

  Janie’s eyebrows rose up in a look of surprise. “How’d you get that in?” she asked.

  “The toe of one shoe. I brought four pairs but he only looked through two of them.”

  “Congratulations, I think. But don’t get caught with it.”

  “I’m not planning to. I’ll get you a couple.” She went next door to her own room and returned in less than a minute. She handed three tablets to Janie and poured her a glass of water.

  Janie swallowed them quickly, then leaned back in her chair as if in anticipation of some wonderful high that would soon take hold of her. “Ah, drugs,” she said with a sigh. “Somehow I think the drugs we used to have were a lot more fun than this.”

  Caroline smirked. “Back in the ‘good old days’?”

  Janie said nothing, but responded instead with a brief and very strained smile. In her mind’s eye she saw her neat home in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, her husband and daughter smiling from a porch swing as they rocked back and forth. She heard the buzz of June bugs and felt the sultry heat of a New England summer. Lawn mowers and children squealing with delight as they ran through sprinklers. Laundry, snow tires, the morning bathroom ritual of three people who were accustomed to living together. Then it faded, and she was alone again.

  “Janie, I’m sorry.… I didn’t mean …”

  Janie tried to dismiss Caroline’s concern with a wave of her hand. “It’s all right, Caroline,” she said. “Life goes on. And you shouldn’t have to tiptoe around me. I don’t expect you to run everything you’re going to say to me through some sort of ‘appropriateness’ filter. We’ve got enough to think about as it is.” She looked up again and smiled. “And thanks for the ibuprofen,” she said. “I appreciate your parting with a little bit of your supply.” Then she looked away again.

  “No problem.”

  There was a small but uncomfortable silence between them for a few moments. Janie finally broke it by saying, “Okay, now that I’ve dealt with one headache, let’s get on to the next one.”

  “Right,” Caroline said. “The unbudgeable Mr. Sarin.”

  Janie sighed deeply. “He could really screw this whole project up. I need that soil sample.” She spaced two fingers half an inch apart from each other and displayed them in front of Caroline’s face. “I’m this close to getting certified. And I’m really getting tired of being unemployed.”

  “Maybe you could call John Sandhaus and see if he’ll let you change the dig sites.”

  As she neatened the piles of papers, Janie said, “Attila the Advisor? Fat chance. He didn’t even want me to come to London in the first place. ‘Why can’t you find something to do here?’ he asked me. He’d love a chance to drag me back again and make me dig up something in the United States.”

  “They don’t make this stuff easy for you, do they?” Caroline said.

  “No, they don’t,” she said with a sigh. “But don’t get me going on that. I haven’t got enough time to wallow in it today.” Then her expression intensified. “Tell you what,” she said. “We’ll get started on the first bunch of digs this afternoon. No time like the present.” She pointed out several X’s in one neighborhood of London. “That way we can get them to the lab for analysis and I’ll feel like I’ve actually accomplished something.”

  She poked through another pile of paper and then said, “I assume you’ve got the authorization papers for the lab somewhere in here.…”

  Caroline moved one or two things and extracted a sheaf of pages, stapled together in one corner. “You were looking in the wrong pile,” she said, smiling.

  “Great,” she said, taking the papers from Caroline and stuffing them in her briefcase. “While we’re out, we’ll swing by and take a look at this field. We should probably go ahead and place the marker, just in case, if we can do it without this Mr. Sarin seeing us. Is the geography such that we can sneak in there?”

  “There are a couple of big trees and it’s surrounded by a sort of thicket. I wouldn’t exactly call it woods, but the place is pretty private. I think the dig site will land pretty far from the cottage.”

  “Then I think we should risk it. And while we’re there, maybe I’ll get some ideas for how to change this guy’s mind.”

  Janie slammed her pencil down on the tabletop in frustration, nearly breaking it, bruising her fingers in the process. It was an unusual display of temper for a woman customarily so self-possessed, but one that she felt was entirely justified. When the elderly caretaker of the property had, without offering an explanation, politely but firmly refused her own plea for permission to dig, she’d resorted to nearly begging him, and then she’d called everyone she could think of who might have the authority to overrule him. Her ear ached from a day of unproductive telephoning. She couldn’t find a soul in any of England’s thousand or so ministries willing to countermand Sarin’s stubbornly immovable position.

  What annoyed her most was the old caretaker’s continued unwillingness to give her a reason for his refusal. Having seen that particular piece of ground during the previous day’s fieldwork, she couldn’t say that there was anything terribly precious about it. It was just an ordinary field, very slightly sloped, with a lot of weeds, unruly shrubs, and a few notable rocks. There was an old thatch-roofed stone cottage at the far end of the field in which Janie thought the caretaker probably lived. The one remarkable feature was a pair of old oaks, almost leafless, that grew from opposite sides of the dirt drive and met above it, twisting together in an ancient embrace. It was a sad and tired-looking place, not quaint and charming as she’d expected it to be. “I can’t imagine what kind
of care he thinks he’s taking,” she’d commented to Caroline at the time. “The place isn’t exactly Kensington Gardens.”

  Janie walked to the refrigerator in her small hotel suite and selected a ripe nectarine. With a small sharp knife she sliced carefully through the smooth amber skin; the ripe flesh pulled gently away from the pit with little effort. Such a simple pleasure, she thought, one of those things you take for granted until all these changes make them hard to get. It was wonderfully juicy—she had to suck and bite at the same time to keep the juices from dripping onto her clothes. She ate it slowly, savoring the sweet juices, remembering a time when she would have eaten two or three such nectarines in a day without giving a minute’s thought to where they came from. She licked her fingers, wiped her hands on her jeans and picked up the phone, then dialed the English eight-digit number, which left her American index finger dangling in hopeless anticipation of the ninth.

  The phone rang twice in rapid succession; she could just barely hear it ringing through the wall separating her efficiency from Caroline’s. Then she heard the familiar voice saying, “Hello?”

  “Look sharp, darlin’, this is your boss calling, and I’m in, to borrow a local phrase, a ripping bad mood.”

  “Oh, fabulous. Just what I need today, the boss in a bad mood. What is it now?”

  “Same thing as yesterday,” Janie said. “Bureaucratus nervosa. No known treatment. Invariably fatal.”

  “Explain to him about involuntary vasectomies, Madam Surgeon.”

  Janie chuckled. “I don’t know if they’re doing them in England yet. And I’m not a surgeon anymore, in case you forgot, which is why I’m doing this stupid stupid project in the first place. I should have listened to John and dug up something local. I think we’re just going to have to pay our Mr. Sarin a visit.”

  The old caretaker closed the fragile book carefully when he heard the sound of the approaching car. He pulled the lace curtain aside and looked out through the uneven glass of the window in his ancient cottage. Shading his eyes against the late afternoon light, he tried to view the field beyond the old oaks through the eyes of his arriving visitors. What were they seeing? he wondered, feeling suddenly nervous. Could they possibly know?