Chapter 7: The Tithe of Flesh

The cart creaked to a halt, its wheels sucking at the mud. The bundled shape stirred, a low moan escaping the sacking. Tom’s mind, a frantic ledger of inventory and risk, slammed shut the column marked ‘Medicine’ and opened one marked ‘Liability’. A sick woman. A hostile tithe-collector. A village on the edge of panic.

Fulke dismounted, his boots landing with a wet thud. He was a thin man, with the grey, pinched look of a ledger that had never known a smile. He gestured at the cart with a whip-handle.

“Alice of Thorncroft. Spinning woman. Good hands, quick wit. The pestilence has taken her husband and her eldest boy. She’s next, the priest says. He’s already said the mass for the dead over her.” He spat. “Saving the parish the cost of a second burial.”

Tom’s stomach turned. He’d seen the reports, the statistics of the plague’s march through Europe. But those were numbers. This was a woman, a life, being delivered like a bill of exchange. Joan had come to stand beside him, her face pale but her jaw set. She looked at the bundle, then at Tom.

“She’s alive, at least,” Joan murmured. “That’s more than the priest’s prayer would have done for her.”

Fulke’s eyes, small and hard as flint, flicked to her. “Careful, widow. Your tongue’s been sharp enough to cut cheese for years. It’ll find a whetstone soon enough.”

Baldric stepped forward, his bulk blocking the doorway. “You’ve made your delivery, Fulke. You can be on your way. The steward’s work is here.”

“Oh, I’ll stay,” Fulke said, folding his arms. “I want to see this miracle. His lordship, Sir Hugh, will be interested to know if his new steward is a servant of God or a servant of the Other Fellow.” He nodded towards the barn. “I’ve a letter from him, you know. He’s demanding an accounting of the autumn grain. He’s heard rumours of strange goings-on at Wykeham. Ploughs that cut deeper, seed that grows faster. He wants to know if it’s sorcery or thrift.”

Tom’s heart hammered against his ribs. Sorcery. The word was a pyre waiting for fuel. He forced himself to breathe, to think in logistics. *Step one: secure the patient. Step two: remove the threat.*

He walked to the cart. The woman’s face was slick with sweat, her skin a mottled patchwork of white and angry red. A swelling, the size of a hen’s egg, was visible at her neck. A bubo. The plague’s signature. In his world, it was a treatable infection. Here, it was a death sentence.

“Help me carry her inside,” he said to Baldric. “Joan, prepare a bed in the far stall. Boil water. Lots of it.”

They lifted the woman, who was light as a bundle of sticks, and carried her into the barn’s dim interior. Tom’s warehouse goods were stacked high around them, a silent, anachronistic audience. Fulke followed, his presence a cold draught.

Tom worked with a speed born of desperate knowledge. He donned a pair of leather gloves from his kit—a luxury of his old life—and cut away the woman’s filthy dress. The swelling at her throat was hot to the touch, a tight, angry globe of pus.

“Joan, I need a sharp blade. And my satchel. The one with the red cross.”

Joan fetched it, her eyes wide as she watched him handle the tools. He used a lancet, sterilised in the boiled water, to make a clean, decisive cut. The pus, thick and yellow, burst forth with a foul smell. Alice moaned, her body convulsing.

“Hold her,” Tom commanded. Baldric pinned her shoulders.

Tom packed the wound with a poultice made from crushed yarrow and a paste from his own stores—an antiseptic clay that had no business existing in the fourteenth century. He then administered a draught of willow-bark tincture, a bitter liquid that would fight the fever.

Fulke watched from the shadows, his face unreadable. “You cut her. You spill her humours. The Church teaches that disease is God’s punishment. You seek to undo His will.”

Tom straightened, wiping his hands on a cloth. He looked the tithe-collector in the eye. “I seek to save a life. If God’s will is that she die, then my knife will not stop it. But if His will is that she live, then He has given me the knowledge to help. Which is it, Fulke? Are you so sure of God’s mind that you would let a woman die to prove a point?”

The silence in the barn was thick enough to choke on. Joan’s hands trembled as she cleaned the wound. Baldric stood rigid. Fulke’s lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.

“You speak like a heretic,” Fulke said softly. “But I have a letter to deliver. And a lord to serve. I will tell Sir Hugh that his steward is a man of… unusual skill.” He turned on his heel, his cloak swirling. At the door, he paused. “The woman’s life hangs by a thread, steward. If she dies, it will be said you killed her with your blade. And the village will have a witch-burning to cheer their hearts.”

He was gone. The hoofbeats retreated down the muddy road.

Tom sagged against a crate of turnip seed, his legs weak. Joan looked at him, her expression a mixture of awe and fear. “You… you truly believe you can save her?”

“I can try,” he said, his voice hoarse. “That’s all I can do. Try.”

He looked at the woman, Alice, her breathing shallow, her face a mask of pain. He thought of the plague’s true toll—not just the death, but the terror that preceded it, the despair that followed. He thought of the tithe-collector’s threat, and the letter to Sir Hugh. He was no longer just a manager of goods. He was a man managing a crisis that could swallow him whole.

He turned to Baldric. “That letter. Sir Hugh’s letter. He wants an accounting. He wants to know what I’m doing.”

Baldric nodded, his scarred face grim. “He’ll be home by Michaelmas. And when he sees your fields, your flocks, and your strange tools, he will ask harder questions than Fulke.”

Tom looked around at the warehouse, at the steel ploughshares and the books of veterinary science, the seeds of a future that had no place here. He had wanted to save a village. Now he had to save himself from the man who owned it. The woman on the pallet groaned, and Tom knew his first battle was only just beginning. The war for his own survival, and for the soul of this generation, was about to be fought in a muddy barn, one life at a time. He had spent his modern gifts to save one woman. The cost of that mercy, he was only beginning to calculate.