Dust to Dust (3 page)

Not going up to Cambridge proved to be no drawback for Motram. His sheer ability had taken him through a couple of successful post-doctoral fellowships at prestigious American universities where he had established himself as a researcher of international repute in the mechanics of viral infection. His particular interest lay in the epidemiology of plagues of past times, although this generally had to take a back seat to the study of more modern problems for which it was easier to attract funding.

John had met Cassie shortly after getting a lectureship at the University of Newcastle, where she had been in her final year of a medical degree, and had decided very quickly that she was the girl for him – a choice not entirely applauded by Cassie’s parents, who’d held higher social aspirations for their clever daughter. However, their love had survived the slings and arrows of outraged parents and they had married six months later.

The marriage had been successful from the outset, surviving the strain of the first few years of the demanding work that goes with being very new in their chosen professions, particularly for Cassie who, as a junior doctor in a busy hospital, seemed to be on call every hour of the day and night. Life had got easier with Cassie’s move into general practice and John’s growing academic reputation, which had made it easier for him to obtain research funding.

Two children had come along and the Motrams had been in a position to give them the best possible start in life. Their daughter, Chloe, was currently a translator with the European Commission in Brussels, and their son had followed his mother into medicine and was establishing a career in surgery. There were no grandchildren as yet but the possibility was a warming thought for both of them, and Cassie, who had an eye for décor, kept an eye out for possible changes to one of the upstairs rooms in their cottage which she felt might be ‘nice for little people’.

FOUR

John Motram took his time on the walk through the streets of Oxford, savouring the undoubted charm of the place and letting its history seep into his bones. He smiled as he realised that his affection for its dreaming spires was not entirely born of academic regard; being an avid fan of Inspector Morse was certainly playing its part. He found himself keeping an eye out for a Mark Two Jaguar.

Nothing disappointed him about the interior of Balliol College either. Everything just got better.

‘The Master will see you now,’ said a suitably deferential woman who looked as if she might have been a pillar of her church guild, sensibly dressed from her high collar with the cameo brooch to her polished brogues.

Motram was shown into a large office that couldn’t fail to impress. Minimalist it was not; metal and plastic pointedly failed to make an appearance. Wood – old polished wood – reigned supreme, comfortable in the light that came in through a series of tall, leaded windows that also admitted the sound of chimes and bells, confirming Motram’s arrival at the appointed hour of eleven a.m.

A tall, patrician man rose from behind his desk and smiled. ‘Dr Motram, good of you to come. I’m Andrew Harvey, Master of Balliol. Please come and sit down. You must be wondering what all this is about.’

It wasn’t a question, but Motram, who’d been thinking about little else for the past week, said, ‘I think I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued.’

‘Quite so,’ said Harvey. ‘I’m afraid microbiology isn’t exactly my field, but I understand that you are an expert on both the viruses of today and the epidemics of the past, shall we say?’

‘That’s a fair enough description.’

‘What is it that intrigues you about past plagues, doctor?’

‘Their cause. What many people don’t realise is that microbiology is a very young science. Bacteria weren’t discovered until the late 1800s and viruses even later, so the identification of the causes of the great epidemics of the past has been based largely on guesswork … or presumption.’

Harvey smiled at the acid emphasis Motram had put on the last word. ‘I understand there is … something of a disagreement between you and your academic colleagues over the origin of the Black Death. Am I right?’

‘You are.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Motram frowned slightly. He didn’t quite see where all this was leading, but he continued, ‘There’s a general assumption among the public and indeed some of my colleagues that the fourteenth-century pandemic generally called the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the population of Europe, was caused by an outbreak of bubonic plague.’

‘I’m afraid I have to admit to being one of the public who subscribe to that view,’ said Harvey. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’m convinced it was caused by a virus.’

Harvey looked slightly bemused and Motram smiled, recognising the problem. ‘There is a very big difference between bacteria and viruses,’ he said. ‘They are completely different entities but, for some reason that escapes me, people appear reluctant to take this on board.’

‘Ah, educating the public,’ sighed Harvey, relaxing into his chair with a slightly amused expression on his face. ‘Never an easy business. But in what way are they different, doctor?’ He managed to endow the question with the unspoken rider,
And does it matter?

‘Bacteria can exist independently,’ Motram explained. ‘They are living entities in their own right. They have all they need to grow and divide provided they can find suitable nutriment. Viruses can only exist inside living cells. In fact, there is a longstanding argument over whether they should actually be regarded as living things at all.’

Harvey nodded. ‘I see.’

‘Another major and more practical difference is that you can treat bacterial infections with antibiotics: antibiotics are useless against viruses.’

‘So what makes you think Black Death was caused by a virus and not plague – which presumably, in the light of what you’ve just said, is a bacterium?’

Motram nodded. ‘A rod-shaped bacterium called
Yersinia pestis
, named after a Russian microbiologist called Yersin who worked with Louis Pasteur. It was originally called
Pasteurella pestis
after his boss, but in the end justice prevailed.’

Harvey gave a slightly pained smile that suggested
too much information
and Motram cut short the lecture. ‘I suppose I began to wonder about ten years ago when I was studying the rate of spread of Black Death in Europe. It was all wrong for a bacterial infection like plague and it didn’t show the seasonal differences you would expect.’

‘Was the spread faster or slower than you expected?’

‘Much faster. Plague is primarily a disease of rats. Human beings get it from fleas, but Black Death spread like wildfire, as if it were an airborne infection like flu.’

‘Are you alone in your suspicions?’

‘Not any more,’ said Motram. ‘Scientists have been working on a genetic mutation in human beings which confers resistance to certain virus infections. It’s called Delta 32: basically it leads to the absence of a receptor on the surface of certain cells in the body, which denies viruses access to the cells they would normally infect.’

Harvey nodded, then said, ‘I’m sorry, I must seem terribly dense but … where does the connection with Black Death come in?’

‘Before Black Death swept over Europe, we estimate that the Delta 32 mutation was present in the general population at a frequency of about one in forty thousand.

‘And after?’ asked Harvey.

‘About one in seven.’

Harvey let out his breath in a low, silent whistle. ‘Now I see,’ he said. ‘So people without the mutation were much more susceptible to Black Death than those few at the time who had it.’

‘Precisely. It was clearly an enormous advantage to have the Delta 32 mutation,’ said Motram. ‘What, of course, is absolutely crucial from my point of view is that the mutation stops
viruses
from entering cells, not bacteria. Bacteria don’t need to enter cells. It makes absolutely no difference to them whether you have the Delta 32 mutation or not.’

‘So there we have it,’ said Harvey. ‘Game, set and match to you, it would appear. Black Death was caused by a virus, not a bacterium.’

‘I believe so.’

Harvey picked up on Motram’s guarded response. ‘So shouldn’t that be an end to the argument?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid not. The old guard still insist Black Death was caused by plague and see the new findings as academic stuff and nonsense – Disraeli’s third kind of lie, if you like.’

‘Statistics.’ Harvey smiled.

‘Even those who’ve moved to the virus camp are now falling out over which virus it might have been. Smallpox is one of the favourites and it’s been shown that that could have exerted the selective pressure necessary for such a dramatic genetic shift in the population while plague certainly couldn’t. There are others who propose it could have been due to a combination of infections, and there is of course one other intriguing possibility, that it could have been caused by a completely different virus altogether – something that existed then but is unknown to us today.’

‘A killer from the past,’ said Harvey, raising his eyebrows. ‘Do pardon my ignorance, but isn’t it possible to find out what caused it simply by … digging up the past, so to speak?’

‘It’s been tried on a number of occasions,’ said Motram. ‘But we’re talking about seven hundred years ago. Mortal remains tend not to last that long.’

Harvey rested his elbows on his desk and formed a steeple with his fingertips as he appeared to gaze off into the middle distance. ‘You know, I seem to remember reading something about a group of workers claiming to have recovered plague from Black Death victims … somewhere in Europe, I think.’

Motram nodded. ‘France. They found plague bacilli in the dental pulp of an exhumed corpse. Trouble is, no one else has been able to reproduce their findings. Everyone else has drawn a blank.’

‘So the French findings are … doubtful?’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Motram. ‘There seems little doubt that the body they examined was a plague victim, but without wholesale corroboration you can’t really say that plague caused Black Death, only that plague caused the death of the body they were examining.’

Harvey nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, it would help enormously if you were to come across a number of victims of Black Death preserved in good condition?’

‘Indeed it would,’ said Motram, ‘but after seven hundred years the chances of that are—’

‘That’s really why I asked you here, Dr Motram.’

FIVE

The door opened and tea was brought in on a silver tray, leaving Motram to wonder if Harvey had a button behind his desk to press at an appropriate moment.

‘Milk or lemon?’

‘Neither,’ replied Motram. ‘Just as it comes please.’

‘Good man. A decent Darjeeling needs no assistance.’

Motram accepted the china cup and saucer from the pourer – the woman who had shown him in – and reflected on how long it had been since he had held a cup and saucer in his hands. A mug in need of some interior scrubbing sat on his own desk up north.

‘How much do you know about Balliol, doctor?’

‘I understand it’s probably the oldest college in Oxford.’

‘So old that the foundation date is uncertain but generally taken as about 1263.’

Motram smiled. ‘Even before Black Death.’

‘Indeed, even before that,’ Harvey agreed. ‘Our co-founders were John Balliol, a wealthy man with estates in both France and England, and his wife Devorgilla, the daughter of a Scottish nobleman and a truly remarkable woman in her own right. Their offspring, also John Balliol, became King of Scotland, although a completely unremarkable one it has to be said and perhaps best forgotten. Devorgilla, however, is well remembered. Apart from co-founding this college and giving it its first seal, which we still have today, she endowed a new Cistercian abbey in Dumfries and Galloway – a daughter house of Dundrennan Abbey. It was to be called New Abbey but, for reasons some people find macabre, it ended up bearing the name of Sweetheart Abbey.’

Harvey paused to take a sip of his tea. Motram reflected that the man knew exactly the right place to pause in a story.

‘When Devorgilla’s husband died in 1269, she was beside herself with grief. She had his heart removed and embalmed so that she might carry it with her in an ivory and silver casket wherever she went.’ Seeing the expression that appeared on Motram‘s face, Harvey said, ‘I see you are experiencing the same mixture of admiration and revulsion that many feel on hearing this tale.’

Motram smiled and said, ‘Sorry. Please, go on.’

‘When she had the abbey built in his memory in 1273, the monks decided to call it
Dulce Cor
– sweet heart – instead of New Abbey as had been originally intended, and so it has remained for well over seven hundred years. She and her husband lie buried there today, the casket clutched to her chest.’

‘Quite a story,’ said Motram, giving no indication that he was wondering what on earth it had to do with him.

‘Recently, the college has come into possession of something which adds a little more to the tale,’ said Harvey. ‘Some old papers rescued from a house in the Scottish Borders have shed light on the family responsible for the embalming of John Balliol’s heart, the Le Clerks. Apparently, they were renowned for their expertise in the preservation of the dead and passed down their skills through generations of the family. When Black Death …’ Harvey paused to enjoy the flicker of interest in Motram’s eyes when he seemed to be coming to the point, ‘affected England in 1346, the Scots were left largely untouched at first and, with ever an eye to the main chance, thought they saw an opportunity to invade. An army was raised and encamped in the forests around Selkirk awaiting the order to advance. It never came: Black Death arrived first. Men died in their hundreds in the woods of the Scottish Borders.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Motram, and he could. The image of Black Death breaking out in a hugely crowded military camp in the forest, turning it into a hell of squalor, filth and infection, filled his mind. Deserters would be running off in all directions but would only spread the infection rather than escape it. Bodies would pile up and be left to rot. The stench of filth and decomposition would fill the air, accompanying the moans of the sick, the groans of the dying …