‘And did you?—find proof?’
‘Not definitive. I ran out of time. Such a shame because it's very rare that something like that comes up on public land—mostly old monastery ruins are privately owned. Crown estates usually.’
‘Sorry, I'm not following you.’
‘Well, obviously, when Henry dissolved all the monasteries it wasn’t because he didn’t like God—he just wanted all the land and the enormous revenues attached to the Church to fund his French wars. And our Royal Family still owns most of those old estates. There’s one or two that survived—Buckfast Abbey, for example, just down the road of course. But the rest we can’t get access to. Sometimes things do pop up. I’ve recently heard of one that might become available for a dig. Fingers crossed. I’ve just come back from Ukraine, so I’ve not had a chance yet to follow up on my spy’s information. I suppose you’ve been following what’s happening over there?’
‘I know they have a blue and yellow flag, yes.’
‘Oh. Well the war crimes investigations being done at the mass graves in Mariupol turned up lower level burial pits with much older skeletons. So, it was too good a chance for me to miss, even though it was a bit scary going into a war zone to be honest. But bug-lady here—it’s my mission, my Holy Grail.’
‘Holy Grail?’
‘Well, Ukraine, orGallicia-Volhyniaas it was when these deaths occurred, was known as the epicentre for the spread throughout Europe. It came across from what is now Crimea over the Black Sea from Turkey.’
‘Again, I am not following you. Sorry. What came where?’
She drained her glass. ‘The Black Death. Sorry, didn’t I say that? It’s quite a bit more exciting than the pox. The remains that have been dug up were from bubonic plague pits.Yersinia pestis. It’s one of the most fascinating bacterium you can imagine.’
He sent his pickled onion the same way as his pâté. ‘It’s not something I spend much time imagining.’ Which was another lie, he supposed; he often recalled a tale of six hundred bleeding men striding across Devon, tearing their skin with nails.
‘Most people don’t. But nothing ever really dies.’
‘And did you find it?’
‘Oh, yes. I found your bog-standard bubonic plague.’
‘You found…?’ Aleksey had shifted away from people at dinners once or twice before. He supposed it was an occupational hazard when you mixed with the kind of people he had in the past, especially the Royal Family, but this felt like a good time to declare a Radulf emergency and leave. She was stretching over the table to liberate another bottle of wine as he asked, hesitantly, ‘Is it still…catching…?’
‘Oh, absolutely, it wiped out over half the world, remember—fifty million people in some estimates. Seventy percent death rate at least. We’re not too sure of the numbers for England as there was no official census until much later in the century, but they extrapolated the estimates we do have from deaths of clergy, which were always recorded. But they had no antibiotics available then, of course. Don’t worry,Y. pestisstill pops up all the time all over the world—maybe a couple of thousand cases a year? It’s usually pretty quickly treated with antibiotics nowadays.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Yes.’
‘No? You don’t sound…happy about that.’
‘Have you heard of the term gain of function?’
‘I broke my leg recently. I heard it a lot then, yes.’
She mulled this over for a moment then reassured him with a smile, ‘I think that’s regain function—well I hope it was.’
‘Why? What is this other thing?’
‘That’s how we met Tim, actually.’ She glanced down the table to where he was sitting chatting animatedly to Madeline. Aleksey wondered what they were finding so fascinating. Tim Watson might have had him marked as a human in need of extinction once or twice, now he came to think about it.
Rachel was tapping the table lightly with her fork, drinking absentmindedly, apparently deep in thought about this subject. ‘Gain of function is the cutting edge of microbiology. It increases the transmissibility, lethality and virulence of pathogens. If you can break down the gene sequence of a virus or bacterium you can splice it, combine it, enhance it—and increase its function—you can create a chimera.’
‘Chimera? Is that not a…?’ She offered to top up his glass but he shook his head once more. ‘I’m sorry. I sometimes struggle to translate words. Did you just say you make pathogensmorelethal,moretransmissible?’
‘Look, this is how I explain it to a layman. Take your basic car. What functions does it do?’
‘It allows me to leave places where the Black Death has just been mentioned.’
‘Hah, yes. But other than this driving to and from locations, what else might you want your car to do? A futuristic car, if you like.’
‘You mean…fly?’
