Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

Sam Frith grabbing

Puritans,

Elinor Mompellion

Michael Mompellion

fowls’ clucking and the ordinary promise that comes with any sunrise.

live all aslant here, on this steep flank of the great White Peak.

others are so brimful of endings that they cannot bear to wrench even a scrawny sapling from its tenuous grip on life.

if we had hands enough to do the ordinary tasks—to pull the weeds and prune the deadwood—yet it would not be her garden. We would lack her eye. What made it her garden was the way she could look at a handful of tiny

It was as if she painted with blooms.”

“Miss Bradford is in the parlor. The family is returned to the Hall.

“What answer should I give her, Rector?” “Tell her to go to Hell.”

The other was Anna Frith, a woman who had faced more terrors than many

Elizabeth Bradford was a coward.

thunderous countenance, I knew I had nothi...

insolent slattern!” she cried. “He

pushed past me and was upon the steps to Mr. Mompellion’s room

It is my mother. My mother is very ill. She fears ... she believes she will die of it.

your mother seeks me out to give her absolution like a Papist, then she has made a long and uncomfortable journey to no end. Let her speak direct to God

And my father says he cares not. He has ever been cruel to her, but

is saying the most terrible things ... He has called his own wife whore ...”

The difference was that Elinor had been seated beside him, her gentle voice reading from the Psalms.

The book slipped from his fingers. Instinctively, I leapt forward to catch it, but he grabbed my arm, and the Bible hit the floor with a dull thump.

George Viccars came banging on my door looking for

Alexander Hadfield,

Mr. Viccars’s sixpence would mean a lot in our cottage.

Martin girl minded the baby and Jamie for me

was Mr. Viccars who was on the floor, on all fours, with Jamie on his back, riding around the room, squealing with delight.

most in this village, I had no occasion to travel farther than the market town seven miles distant.

These were a kind of evening I’d never had with Sam, who looked to me for all his

information of the tiny world for which

Sam’s world was a dark, damp maze of rakes and scrins thirty feet under the ground. He knew how to crack

the bawdiness and carousing he had witnessed in the city after the king sailed home from exile.

I send for my whore when, for fear of the clap, I come in her hand and I spew in her lap ...”

And surely the poor man looked mortified the next day, afraid that he had irrevocably offended

Mr. Hadfield had ordered a box of cloth from London

Elinor Mompellion was already in her garden, a pile of prunings

sinewy mind, capable of violent enthusiasms and possessed of a driving energy to make and do.

hungered to learn, she commenced to shovel knowledge my way as vigorously as she spaded the cowpats into her beloved flower beds.

Josiah Bont was a man of few words, and those mostly curses.

When you have been raised in a bare croft, eating with wooden spoons from crude platters, there are a hundred small and subtle pleasures to be garnered in the smooth slipperiness of a fine porcelain cup under your hands in a tub of soapsuds or the leathery scent of a book as you work the beeswax into its binding. As well, these simple tasks engaged only

“Nay, Mistress, I know the signs of this wretched illness. Just get you gone from here, for the love of your babes.”

see the rector astride Anteros, on his way from an errand in nearby Hathersage.

me, the man he was that day. I can recall how naturally he took charge, calming me and then poor Mr. Viccars; how he stayed tirelessly at his

Mompellion would not leave him, even when, toward morning, Mr. Viccars passed into a fitful kind of sleep, his breath shallow and uneven. The

starbursts of crows’ feet beside the eyes—the

marks of a mobile face that has frowned much in contemplation and laughed much in company.

and spoke to me in a silken whisper that

seemed to fall upon my grief like a comforting shawl.

Mr. Mompellion lifted that dead weight as if it were nothing and descended the loft ladder with the limp body slung across his shoulder. Downstairs, he laid George Viccars gently upon a sheet as tenderly as a father setting down a sleeping babe.

in the garth and had trod the soil there into grassless