The sweat year
The chapel was a priory of nursing sisters. When the sweating sickness came, the prioress went down into the crypts to make a cure for everything.
The village is sick again. Her notes are in the margins of the recipe pages you bring up.
A grimoire page: Dried herbs
Two from the river farms at noon, sweating. Dead by vespers. Sister Ethel says it is the sweat, as in her mother’s time, and that it passes.
A grimoire page: Herbal tea
Ethel puts bitterroot in it now, so they sleep. She says the root screams when you pull it. It does. Pull it anyway.
A grimoire page: Poultice
Forty in the nave. The physician came from town as far as the gate and sent in a letter on bleeding. We bled them. They die bled.