CHAPTER 5: Didacticism

"Hypovolemic shock, Amy," Dr. Foley looked up from stirring his coffee and poked the tip of his teaspoon in my direction. "You don't hear of hypovolemic shock, do you? It's a pity. It's quite a satisfying term." I tilted my head at him. He set his teaspoon down on the edge of his saucer. "One didn't hear of it in medieval Germany, either. Instead one heard of being buried alive."

I imagine I made the kind of excited, wide-eyed face that kids make when you tell them campfire stories, because Dr. Foley chuckled. He took a sip of his well-whitened coffee.

"Hypovolemic shock is how one dies of cholera. One has the familiar symptoms, with the loss of fluid one would expect. And then one's body gives up. I suppose that is too poetic for you, in your new line of work. I suppose you would prefer this: hypovolemic shock comes of not having enough blood to circulate. Some definitions claim losing a fifth of the blood is enough to tip the balance, but of course it's debatable. What isn't?" He chuckled. I squinted at him.

"Yes, yes, I'm coming to it. No need to glare at me." I rolled the seams of my napkin between my fingers and tried to look patient. "When a body nears that form of shock, it can appear dead. And often it is, nearly." He waved his hand a lot like Karne does. I shifted in my chair. "But sometimes it isn't, and that's the trouble."

"Those pictures correspond to outbreaks of Cholera?" I ventured. He nodded, and took a moment to chew his bite of croissant.

"They do, they do. And I was convinced that was all there was to it, but there's more. You see, Amy, there's a series of stories of live burials that occur in the vernacular just where and when those drawings come up in the manuscripts."

"The vernacular?" I raised my eyebrows at him.

"Yes, yes. I've said scholarship on the 'popular culture' of the medieval world is groundless." He made air quotes, and I nearly snorted my coffee. "But now it buttresses my own research, and I find I'm more favorably disposed." I looked over toward the café's bar to avoid smirking at him. He caught me. "Don't you roll your eyes at me, Amy Connell," he teased.

"So you've got sketches of gravesites on manuscripts during date ranges that correspond to Cholera outbreaks. So what?"

"I taught you well," he smiled. He was famous for sneering 'so what?' at students during seminars just to see what they'd do before a hostile audience. "The live burial story, dear, the story. The earliest version is something like this: A woman, the wife of a prominent and wealthy citizen, takes ill and dies during an outbreak of sickness in the town. Though many are dying, and most are buried in haste and with scant ceremony, the woman's position merits a full burial. She has many mourners, and she is seen going to her eternal rest wearing a valuable ring."

"She gets ripped off," I interrupted.

"Oh quite literally," he chuckled. "Her deplorable footman breaks into the vault under the cover of darkness and attempts to wrench the ring from her cold hand. It won't come free. He takes out his boot-knife, and begins to cut off her finger." The waitress came and switched our drained press-pot with a hot one. Dr. Foley inclined his head at her. "Thank you, dear," he said. The woman looked freaked out. I decided not to make things worse by smiling at her.

"So? The finger?"

"Precisely; the finger." He took an extra long time pressing down the plunger in the new pot. At last the metal disc reached the level of the grounds in the bottom. "The good woman awakened from her false death, grappled with the too-hasty footman, and came out victorious."

"How?" I raised my eyebrows.

"She let him have it with his own knife, of course."

"Fine, but she was still in her own grave."

"For heaven's sake, Amy; she didn't stay there." He poured us both a fresh cup of coffee. "It would have been awfully unpleasant."

"What's next?"

"She wandered out of the vault in her bloodied shroud. When she demanded entrance at her home the maid tried to keep her out, thinking she was a spirit. But her husband recognized her as his wife, a victim of premature burial."

"And they lived happily ever after."

"That's doubtful indeed. Cholera always has swept the workers from beneath the wealthy. If one cannot be happy doing one's own laundry, well, there it is." He put the final bite of his breakfast into his mouth and chewed slowly, with his eyes focused at a point past my left shoulder. Once he swallowed he looked me in the eye again. "You'll want to know the rest. This became a very popular story, and was put into a religious frame, of course. When the woman died permanently her first burial shroud, which she had obligingly embroidered with the story of her false death, was displayed above her memorial in the town church."

"She embroidered the shroud?" I know my voice sounded too excited, but spending so much time with embroidery on the brain will do that to you. Dr. Foley noticed, and gave me a strange look.

"Just as I said, Amy. A few writings give quite a description of it; supposedly it was worked with copper." He swiped at the corners of his mouth with his napkin, then folded it to the side of his plate. I took the cue to rise.

"Does it still exist?"

"Lost in the war, of course," he growled. "Wasn't everything?"

"But you think the story is more important than the shroud."

"Only in that it had greater currency," he said, pausing to stand stubbornly at the door I was attempting to hold open for him. I relinquished the door and let him hold it for me. "And that it appears to have made its way into the margins of some young scribes' manuscripts."

"Like a popular ghost story."

"Not a ghost, Amy," he chuckled, "a miraculous preservation from death!"

As I walked Dr. Foley back to his office and made arrangements to meet him for coffee the next afternoon at least a third of my mental energy was still stuck on the woman, her ring, and the story shroud. I remembered to get some book cites from Dr. Foley before I left him to his office hours, and I went directly to the library. There I made two stacks of resources on my table: to my left I had a pile of art history books focused on the Holy Roman Empire, and to my right I had a mountain of books on death folklore. I cracked open a book on tapestries and started skimming the pages Dr. Foley had mentioned.

It took me two hours to get anywhere with the research, even with Dr. Foley's starting point.