The Last Time We Met

October 1352, village of Morstadt, Burgundy

The worst part about the reek of the herbs and flowers stuffed into the beak of the mask I wore was how the stink of Death could not be fully overwhelmed. It pervaded, like that insidious illness which had already killed so many.

The mask, and my large stature, gave me the freedom to walk about freely and provide service to those whose doors had been marked by a charcoal X. Before the Black Death had arrived, I had lived mostly alone, administering poultices and herbal remedies to those brave enough to walk the path through the forest to my cottage. These were usually women, who sought ways to lure a man, or to kill a husband, to get with child or to rid her body of one.

Most others thought me a witch, and I was glad that they stayed away. Others like myself had been burned at the stake. Especially in times like this, people sought to blame someone for what had been taken from them. The early days of the plague had seen many of my distant friends burned, a horror I was none too eager to face.

Now, however, people wanted help from whoever would give it, and they were too busy burning their dead to seek me out.

I passed a church with its doors open. Inside, the pews were more than half full. A pitiful showing for a Sunday, but a crowd for the day before. Though the doors would allow the miasmas to escape, it was foolish for people to gather. They clung to their god, despite everything that pointed to the plague not being the work of the devil. The most pious had died early on, flocking to that temple of pestilence.

Past the church, and along the empty street through the village proper. Once I had feared to tread here. Always there would be some cruel children throwing stones or men spitting or women hissing witch. Now the windows were shuttered to keep out the ashes from the constant fires.

And the stench. The ever-present stench.

The crowded houses gave way to fields and cottages. It was harvest time, but there was little to harvest this year. Last winter had seen a famine near to the great famine from my childhood, when we boiled horse hooves for broth after the rest of the horse had been eaten. Many fields had not been planted for lack of farmers. Other harvests died with their farmers recently dead and gone. These were the fields I raided now, while no prying eyes watched. I had my own gardens that gave me what I needed, but those I tended often had little food stores left.

It was a small home with a thatched roof that I sought, that black mark upon the door. I shook my head at the shuttered windows, then knocked with the metal head of my walking stick.

I heard no reply from within. I entered without the invitation.

Once inside, I shut the door behind me and set the stick and my sack aside. The main hall, where normally Anne would be busy over the hearth, was quiet, too quiet for a family of five. I had last visited four days ago, and Thomas had taken ill, along with the youngest of the children, a girl named Matilde. Thomas's wife Anne had been exhausted from cleaning the blood and vomit, even with the aid of the other two children.

"Anne?" I called out.

A weak cough answered me, and I went to the door which led to the main sleeping chambers. The loft was where the children's mattresses were, accessible by ladder, but in the dim lighting I could make out five shapes among the blankets and bedding. The reek of decay pervaded even through my mask.

I forced myself to step inside. Who had shuttered the windows, I wondered, when the fresh air would provide only relief? I hurried to unlatch them and push them open, that I might have more light. I dreaded what I would find when I turned around.

Thomas was dead, that much for certain. He lay closest to the window. The buboes had swollen up on his neck, and the maggots had made his eye sockets into nests for flies. Little Matilde had sought him out for comfort before she had succumbed. Her hair covered her face, a small mercy.

Then there was Anne, between the other two children. Antoine had flies buzzing about the corners of his mouth even as he gasped for air. Francoise shivered under a blanket. And Anne...

Quickly I set to work. I sewed Thomas inside of the blanket he had died under, Matilde in another. I dragged them outside. It was hard, sweaty work. My breath fogged up the lenses of my mask. This mask had been well-made, not that I had paid for it. Rather, I had discovered a plague doctor racked with a fit of coughing in a ditch near my home. I would have given him aid, but he made the sign of the cross when I tried to move him, and so I stood and watched him dying and took his mask and robes when he was finally too weak to ward me off.

I was no fool to think that this garb would keep me safe from pestilence. But I also knew that contact with the sick would only hasten my own demise, and so I kept on the mask and the gloves and the heavy robes as I touched a torch to the pile of bodies and soiled bedding.

The children's bedding from the second floor I pulled down and made up fresh beds for Antoine, Francoise, and Anne. The children I could move easily, each having lost so much weight that they were light as straw men. Cool cloths for each of their foreheads, a tincture of white birch bark dropped onto each tongue.

Anne, however, I struggled to carry. She vomited blood upon my robe, then her body seized up like a fist while she coughed. If it was only Anne, I would have bathed her, and changed her into a fresh shift. But there were the children, and I could not decide how to proceed.

I loved Anne. The day she had married Thomas my chest had ached and though Thomas had tolerated my visits, watching their easy affection and each child's arrival had brought back that pain, the knowing that Thomas was allowed to touch Anne, but I was not. If not for the children, I might have taken Anne away. A widow would not be missed. She and I could have finally lived a life together.

But if Anne lived and her children did not, she would blame me, for she would give her life for them. She would rather die and they live.

And so I did for her as I did for the children, because I knew I only had strength and time left to bathe one of them. After dark, travel became a danger.

I could choose not to leave. I could stay, and try to nurse them to health. Pressing a cool cloth to Anne's forehead, I considered the possibility. I could stay, and tomorrow I could bathe each one in boiled water laced with peppermint and sage.

But what of others? I loved Anne, but there were others I cared for in the village, old friends who liked to visit for tea or for a card reading, kind folk who deserved my help as much as she did. But I loved Anne.

I could not leave her alone.

And if I should die too?

Well, then we would be together.