It’s clear from the nervous energy in the house the next morning that Mom and Aunt Irene have both heard about Liam Barrett. When I leave Kira asleep upstairs I find Mom curled up on the couch with her sketchpad, fingers blackened with charcoal, drawing meaningless patterns on the page. Something about the shape of them reminds me of The Yellow Wallpaper.
Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere.
Aunt Irene is near the refrigerator, sniffing at a carton of milk. “Power went off again,” she says, lips curled. “This is no good. Happy with toast?”
The bread is stale and neither of us trusts the butter not to have spoiled so we have the toast plain, both of us standing close to the stove. The heat is enough to keep the small space warm despite the chill rolling off the river.
“Leave her for now,” Aunt Irene says when my gaze drifts back to the sitting room. “She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She’s pretty upset.”
I shrug, try on an adult tone: “Kira’s okay, though. She’ll be fine.” I can hear my own false confidence.
Aunt Irene wipes the crumbs from the counter into her hand. “Your mum wants to take her in to the Centre today.”
I munch on the dry toast, swallow then ask, “Will you tell her? Kira, I mean? About the video?”
“Should we?”
I let the thought roll around in my mind. Liam Barrett on the table, his skin pale and bloodless. Then the twitch of his nerveless muscles. The image fills my mind like a dark cloud.
“I don’t think it would help much, would it? You know how irritable she can get. There’s no point in scaring her.”
Aunt Irene nods slowly. “Do you want to come with me today? I can show you around the university. It’ll be good for you. I don’t want to leave you here by yourself.”
“It’s just a Lazarus effect, right?”
Her eyes drift toward the living room, settling on Mom’s half-finished mug of tea. Mom’s charcoals make a scratching sound, like an animal scrabbling to get out. “Try not to worry too much,” my aunt says, the same thing everyone has been saying for ages. “It’s no good for you either.”
“The pestilence which first began in the land inhabited by the Saracens, grew so strong that it visited every place…”
One of Aunt Irene’s undergraduates is reading to her, rapid-fire. I can see him from where I’m sitting in the hall outside her office. He’s a year or two older than me, gawky and skittish. On his nose sit thick Harry Potter glasses, which he pushes up as he looks over his paper. “Robert of Avesbury writes that the Black Death began in England in the county of Dorset. Those marked for death, he tells us, were scarcely permitted to live longer than three or four days.”
“That’s enough, Martin, thank you,” Aunt Irene says. “Have you looked at the spread of the plague to York in 1373? Thomas Stubbs, a Dominican friar, wrote that following Christmas the River Ouse flooded and burst its banks. The sickness raged until the feast of St. James the Apostle, which would be, let me see, late July? So, six months then…”
It turned out Aunt Irene had forgotten she had scheduled a catchup tutorial with one of her students. She’s a bit like that sometimes, lost in her own head. Waiting isn’t too bad though. I’ve curled up in a chair outside her office with a copy of The Hobbit. But I barely pay attention to it, my focus shifting back to their conversation.
“It was the same confluence of events back then,” Aunt Irene says, “the changing weather patterns and shifts in the climate. For a long time scholars thought the plague was spread predominantly by rats carrying fleas but the story’s more complicated than that. Black rats were rare in northern Europe yet those regions were still devastated by the second outbreak. There’s evidence now that warmer temperatures were spreading diseases such as malaria and dengue.”
“So as the climate changed, so did the transmission of all those diseases?”
“That was part of it, certainly, but scientists can’t agree why. Perhaps it’s that the shifts in the climate had already weakened the population. An unusually heavy rain in the spring of 1315, followed by harsh winters and cold summers, meant that most of the crops failed. It took more than five years for Europe to recover, and in the meantime there was widespread famine. Children were often orphaned and left to fend for themselves. Remember the story of Hansel and Gretel?”
The student, Martin, gulps, his sharp Adam’s apple bobbing. Aunt Irene must see the look on his face as well because her tone softens. “All right, then,” she says. “That should be enough to go forward with. I want you to do some reading on rainfall patterns in the north of England. Shall we meet again once term picks up?”
“I’ve got—” He frowns and glances at the doorway, me beyond it, but doesn’t finish. “I’ll find a way to make it work. I appreciate you seeing me early since I missed so much before Christmas.” He stuffs his books into a leather satchel, then stops, pushes his glasses up his nose again. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I had some bad news this week. From the hospital.” I can hear a familiar jingling noise. He’s pulling back his sleeve to show Aunt Irene something: a medical ID bracelet, just like Kira’s. “I’ve just been diagnosed. I mean, the tests came back positive.” He’s red-faced now. “My clinician says I don’t need to worry. Not yet. But there were complications back in December…I wanted you to know so you didn’t think I was an utter incompetent.”
“Oh, Martin, I had no idea. You shouldn’t have come in. This essay can wait. How are things at home?” I can’t quite make out Aunt Irene’s face.
“My parents died two years ago. It’s just my big sister Cath and me now but she’s clever. She’s handling it really well.”
Aunt Irene catches me staring and she stands to close the door the rest of the way, muffling their conversation. Embarrassed at being caught eavesdropping, I pretend to be reading but can’t concentrate. A few minutes later the door opens again and out comes the student. He wipes at his nose with his sleeve, glances at me.
“That’s a good one.” He nods at the book, trying out a smile and I return it. He stands there, looking a little bit lost. Is he waiting to be dismissed by me as well? Part of me wants to hug him but I don’t. Of course I don’t.
“Sophie, you can come in now,” Aunt Irene calls. He hoists his satchel over his shoulder and with the barest lifting of two fingers in a wave, he disappears. “Sorry, sweetie,” my aunt says when the door is closed behind me. “You shouldn’t have had to listen to that.”
“It’s fine,” I say, though it’s her who looks more upset. I wonder if this is the first time a student has told her they have JI2.
I glance around, looking for a way to distract her. I’ve never been in her office before, which in many ways feels like an extension of the house. The smell of old paper, musty but comforting. Her desk is the opposite of Dr. Varghese’s, cluttered with papers, receipts, a cheap vase with no flowers. Two enormous maps take up most of the north wall, one of them a replica of the Hereford Mappa Mundi that dates to the thirteenth century. I can spot the word Ierusalem in barely legible script at the centre. There—the British Isles sits in the bottom corner. Dotting the map are sketches of plants and animals, exotic birds, headless monsters with eyes glowing in their chests, minotaurs, phoenixes, camels and elephants. The second is a modern survey map of England with various pins and flags sticking out with labels bearing her spiky handwriting.
“So tell me about what you’re doing here.”
“What…” She shakes her head as if it’s a radio set to the wrong channel. “It’s a map of abandoned villages. Places where people used to live until disease struck, mostly the Black Death.”
“It happened in 1349, right? That’s what you and Martin were talking about.”
“Top marks, niece of mine.”
“You don’t find it morbid working on this? I mean, now of all times?” Morbid is Mom’s word for it, the word she uses when Aunt Irene isn’t around.
She smiles faintly. “Morbid…well, maybe. When I was younger, I was fascinated by disasters. I used to keep newspaper clippings. Bits from museum brochures, whatever I could find. It was the really strange bits that I loved best.” She stares at the pins on her map, then casually ruffles the curls of paper attached to them. “I remember reading that during the Black Death in some places there weren’t enough churchyards to deal with the dead. So they laid all the bodies on top of one another. A macabre lasagna—that’s how a monk from Florence described it. I couldn’t conceive of a disaster that large. I knew it had happened but it seemed so far removed from my own safe life. There wasn’t anything in my experience that helped me understand it.”
Her neck flushes hotly when she sees my look.
“Mom doesn’t like talking about stuff like this. She says we need to stay positive. No bad thoughts, you know?”
“Bad thoughts, well. That’s one way of looking at it.”
I can tell from her tone that she doesn’t approve. “So how do you look at it then?”
“How much do you know about the spread of diseases?” she asks.
“Not much, I guess. Not enough.” I feel embarrassed, like I’ve been caught out not doing my homework.
“Shall we go for a wander?” She gathers up some papers from her desk and slides them under her arm, gesturing me out into the hall. New College is like a palace. Even the undergraduate residence wings are roofed with golden spires. But for all that it’s beautiful it doesn’t feel like a happy place. More like everyone’s holding their breath, the students and faculty.
While she leads me through a series of arched corridors, she tells me about her work. “Disease shaped our development, not just at a superficial level, but our biology as well. Our genome is riddled with the debris of ancient viruses, invaders, colonizers who inserted their genes into our own. They changed us, and we changed them in return. We twisted them to our own uses. These things, these fossils, they come alive while we are beginning to form in the womb. They defend our cells from infection, and guide us in our growth.”
She leads me out into a quadrangle lit up by the pale January light.
“But diseases have a history as well,” she says. “That’s what I’m interested in. Think about this: it was only when people began to gather in larger communities, during the Neolithic period, that the opportunities for diseases to spread increased dramatically. Diseases require people to be in close proximity to one another, to domesticated animals. That’s when they become endemic, or perpetually present.”
“So disease is the price we pay for being close to one another.”
“That’s a good way of looking at it, yes.” Aunt Irene wears her interests so plainly it seems almost embarrassing at times—but wonderful too. She isn’t afraid of people knowing what she cares about, unlike most of the girls I knew back home. “Disease presents us with the worst picture of humanity we can imagine. It shows us our fallibility, our mortality. At a basic level it makes us fear for our lives, for our communities, and that fear can be a powerful incentive for violence. But in times of plague there are also stories of great kindness, generosity and heroism. It’s the testing ground of a civilization.”
She pauses while a group of undergraduates rush past us, forcing us to one side. One of them offers a wave of apology to Aunt Irene. He has fine features, dark wavy hair and a slight widow’s peak that reminds me of the portrait of Lord Byron in my Selected Poems. I feel a pang of longing that he’s part of this place, part of her life here.
“I’m not upsetting you, am I? Talking about it like this?” Aunt Irene asks.
I hesitate. Seeing the close knots of students here reminds me of back home, Jaina and I waiting in line at school while nurses took blood samples. I was freaking out, and worried about Kira, but I didn’t want to show it. Some of my other friends began acting weird after Kira’s diagnosis. They never said anything, not directly, but they stopped coming over to the house and they got obsessive about smearing on disinfectant whenever I was around. It just made things worse, their fake sympathy and their silence.
“No,” I tell Irene softly. “It’s good to talk about it.”
“Come on. Let’s get you something to eat.”
We hole up in the Senior Common Room, which is a bit like a private club for professors. I’m the youngest person here by decades. The couches are covered with blue and gold fabric that reminds me of chintzy hotel wallpaper. My aunt heaps my plate with cheese, crackers and a giant slice of chocolate cake.
It’s only when she sits me down opposite her and her face goes serious that I realize maybe there’s more to this visit than I thought.
“What is it?” I ask, stomach sinking.
She stares for a minute longer and then shakes her head, smiling ruefully. “You’re smart as a whip, aren’t you?” When I start to push the cake away from me she holds up her hands. “It’s nothing bad, I promise. Or at least I don’t think so. It’s just—I’m involved in a project that might be interesting for you.”
“For me?” My eyebrows inch up.
“I don’t like to go on about my work too much.”
“Because of Kira?”
She makes a noise but doesn’t answer properly.
“Please. I want to know, really.”
“You must be wondering about what’s happening. After the news last night.” A faint look of distaste crosses her face.
“What you’re studying has something to do with that?”
She takes a deep breath and smooths back her hair. “Everyone is searching for precedents for what we’re seeing, anything that might help pin down the mode of transmission or help us to understand the disease cycle. Diseases don’t spontaneously generate. Like I was saying, they have a history, they come from something.”
“From what exactly?”
She slices off a hunk of cake with her fork and smiles. “Sorry. This stuff is always on offer but I can’t bear to take a whole slice for myself. Mind sharing?”
I don’t feel that hungry anyway.
“Did you know that most of the quads in the College used to be burial pits for plague victims?” she asks after a minute.
“There are bodies underneath us right now?”
“There was a team of microbiologists that did studies on the plague victims to see whether there was a bacterium—Yersinia pestis—or something else, something we haven’t discovered yet. My research has to do with that—the potential links between JI2 and earlier epidemics.”
“But, c’mon,” I say half-jokingly, “it can’t be as bad as the Black Death.”
She takes another bite of the cake, not saying anything. In the lull, a sudden wave of homesickness hits me, a longing for normal conversation.
“The issue isn’t just scale. We’ve been processing samples of tooth pulp tissue taken from victims buried in plague pits in the Middle Ages, and earlier. Our original plan was to confirm previous findings, that the bacterium which caused the Black Death was present at those sites. But we found something else. Traces of altered DNA, evidence of a hormone they’ve detected in patients who have JI2.”
I try to work through the implications of this. “You think they had it?”
She looks at me steadily. “Some of them, maybe. What if the bubonic plague wasn’t the only cause of death? What if there were two outbreaks happening at the same time? Think about what JI2 causes: a weakened immune system, which makes victims more susceptible to other diseases. Almost half the population of Europe died in the plague and we still don’t know for sure why it was so devastating.”
“But what about the…” It feels strange to say the words, even comical. “The jitterbug. The Lazarus effect? Do the doctors at the Centre have any idea what it is?”
“That’s what we need to find out. The Centre has decided to fund a project of mine. They’ve offered me a lab at the hospital, space to complete some of my work.” She glances away almost shyly now, as if she’s worried about overstepping. “I thought you might help me with the background research. It’s transcribing notes, mostly, and admin work. But if you really are interested, it would be a chance to learn more. There’s a small pot of money for it.”
“You’d really let me help?”
She nods, a slow smile spreading across her face. For a moment I can glimpse another person there, someone younger. The girl who would clip stories from the newspaper, searching for clues as to why things turned out the way they did. “Sometimes the dead are our only way of finding answers.”
“Even now?”
“Especially now, niece of mine.”