Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me.

His eyes are the same, but his face has altered so, drawn and haggard, each line etched deep. When he came here, just three years since, the whole village made a jest of his youthful looks and laughed at the idea of being preached at by such a pup. If they saw him now, they would not laugh, even if they could remember how to do so.

My father loved a pot better than he loved his children, though he kept on getting them, year passing year.

Sam Frith was a miner with his own good lead seam to work. He had a fine small cottage and no children from a first wife who’d died. It did not take him long to give me children. Two sons in three years.

muttering my thoughts aloud like a mad-woman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. I mislike this, for I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place. But I, who always prided myself on grace, now allow myself a deliberate clumsiness. I let my feet land heavily. I clatter the hearth tools. And when I draw water, I let the bucket chain grind on the stone, just to hear ragged noise instead of the smothering silence.

For hundreds of years, the people of this village pushed Nature back from its precincts. It has taken less than a year to begin to reclaim its place.

unctuously

Highlighting all the words ive never seen

incendiary

THE WINTER THAT FOLLOWED Sam’s death in the mine was the hardest season I had ever known. So, in the following spring, when George Viccars came banging on my door looking for lodging, I thought God had sent him. Later, there were those who would say it had been the Devil.

“Maybe so, Mistress,” he replied. “But I grew tired of seeing no farther than the blackened wall at the opposite side of the street and hearing nothing but the racket of carriage wheels. I longed for space and for good air. You cannot believe that what men breathe in London really is air at all, for the coal fires send soot and sulphur everywhere, fouling the water and turning even the palaces into grimy, black hulks. The city is like a corpulent man trying to fit himself into the jerkin he wore as a boy. So many have moved there looking for work that souls are heaped up to live ten and twelve to a room no larger than the one we sit in. Poor souls have tried to add on to their dwellings and garner space as they can, so that misshapen parts of buildings lean out across the alleyways and teeter high atop decaying roofs that you wonder can hold the weight. The gutters and spouts are fixed on any how, so that even long after rain has passed, the wet drips down upon you to leave you always clammy damp.”

“Mistress, I would make you a dozen such gowns to display your beauty!” Then, the playful tone left his voice and it dropped, becoming husky. “I would you might think me worthy to provide for you in all matters.” He crossed the room and placed his hands on my waist, drew me gently toward him, and kissed me. I will not say I know what would have happened then if his skin, when it brushed mine, had not been so hot that I pulled back. “But you are fevered!” I exclaimed, reaching, as mothers will, to lay a hand on his forehead. Thus was a moment lost, for better or worse.

Josiah Bont was a man of few words, and those mostly curses. I did not expect him to understand my strong longing toward what to him must surely seem a useless skill. I have said that he loved a pot. I should add that the pot did not love him, and made of him a sour and menacing creature.

Mr. Viccars had a rich and lovely fabric that he called damask, and I fell to wondering if that bolt of cloth had stood in the same bazaar as the chest and made the same long journey from desert to this damp mountainside.

George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple knob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched, with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.

garret.

As I attempted to lift him to place the pillow, he cried out piteously, for the pain from that massive boil was intense. Then the purple thing burst all of a sudden open, slitting like a pea pod and issuing forth creamy pus all spotted through with shreds of dead flesh. The sickly sweet smell of apples was gone, replaced by a stench of week-old fish. I gagged as I made haste to swab the mess from the poor man’s face and shoulder and stanch his seeping wound.

“For the love of God, Anna”—he was straining his hoarse throat, his voice breaking like a boy, summoning I don’t know what strength to speak above a whisper—“Get thee gone from here! Thou can’t help me! Look to thyself!”

Jaw=dropped

I remember being struck then by how much larger the rector’s hand was—the hard hand of a laboring man rather than the limp, white paw of a priest.

sexton,

“Why did you not call on my aunt and me, instead of Mompellion? A good infusion would have served George better than the empty mutterings of a priest.” I was used to being shocked by Anys, but this time she had managed to outdo even herself, delivering two scandalizing thoughts in a single utterance. The first shock was her frank blasphemy. The second was the familiarity with which she referred to Mr. Viccars, whom I had never yet called by his first name.

The gown was finished all but for the hem, which Anys said she had come that morning to have him adjust for her at a final fitting. When she held the dress up, I saw that the neckline was cut low as a doxy’s, and I could not discipline my thoughts. I imagined her, tall and splendid, her honey-gold hair tumbling loose, her amber eyes half closed, and Mr. Viccars kneeling at her feet, letting his long fingers drift from the hem to caress her ankle and then traveling under the soft fabric, skilled hands on fragrant skin, upward and slowly upward ... Within seconds, I was flushed as scarlet as that damnable dress.

And then, finally, as the coals fell and galled themselves, I at last found the will to toss the dress he had made for me into the grate, golden-green gashed by flames of bright vermillion.

“And so I suppose you need to know whether I lay with George,” Anys declared, in the same un-inflected tone that might have said, ‘And so I suppose you need some yarrow leaves.”

“Why would I marry? I’m not made to be any man’s chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home—it is not much, I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it. And besides,” she said, shooting me a sly sideways glance from under her long lashes, “sometimes a woman needs a draught of nettle beer to wake her up, and sometimes she needs a dish of valerian tea to calm her down. Why cultivate a garden with only one plant in it?”

was still puzzling over this as I reached the woods’ abrupt edge and began skirting the golden fields of the Riley farm. They had been all day scything there—twenty men for twenty acres. The Hancocks, who farmed the Riley land, had six strong sons of their own and so needed far less help than others at their harvest. Mrs. Hancock and her daughters-in-law wearily followed behind their husbands, tying up the last of the loose stalks into sheaves burnished by the sunlight. I saw them that afternoon through Anys’s eyes: shackled to their menfolk as surely as the plough-horse to the shares.

“I believe my mother-in-law had him in mind for Nell,” she said. Nell, the only girl in the Hancock family, was so strictly kept by her many brothers that we often jested that she’d never get wedded, since no man could venture near enough to see what she looked like.

But those fall weeks were flooded with an unaccustomed surfeit of sunlight. The sky was clear blue almost every day, and the air, instead of hinting frost, remained warm and dry. I was so relieved that Jamie and Tom were not ill, I lived in those days as at a fair.

She came back with one hand occupied in holding Edward by the ear and the other extended as far in front of her as possible, dangling something, glossy and black, tied to the end of a string. As she drew closer I could see it was a dead rat, a sorry little corpse, all wet and rheumy-eyed with a smear of bright blood about its muzzle. Behind her, Jamie walked sheepishly, dragging another such. Mary flung the one she carried into the fire, and at her prompting, Jamie reluctantly did the same. “Can you believe it, Anna, the two of them were playing with these loathsome pests as if they were poppets. The woodpile’s full of them, seemingly. All dead, thanks be for small mercies.”

But the damp after the heat brought fleas beyond any infestation I remember. It is an odd thing, how biting pests of all kinds will find one person flavorsome and another not to their liking at all. In my house, the fleas feasted on my tender children,

effusively. I followed him into the street and, when the Hadfields were out of hearing, made bold with the question that was tormenting me. “If you please, sir—the child’s fever—could it be the Plague?” The man waved a gloved hand dismissively and did not even turn to look at me. “No chance of it,” he said. “The Plague, by God’s grace, has not been in our shire these score years. And the child has no Plague tokens on his body. It is a putrid fever merely, and if the parents follow my instructions, he will live.”

“Ignorant woman!” he said, wheeling his horse carelessly so that a damp clod from the late rains flew up and struck me, splattering my skirt. “Are you saying I don’t know my profession?” He flicked the reins and would have been away had I not grasped the horse’s bridle. “Are lumps at the neck and rosy rings on the body not Plague tokens?” I cried. He pulled up sharply and looked me in the face for the first time. “Where have you seen these things?” he demanded. “On the body of my lodger, buried at last full-moon,” I replied. “And you bide near the Hadfields?” “The next door.” At this, he crossed himself. “Then God save you and this village,” he said. “And tell your neighbors to call upon me no more.”

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint.

I told him I loved him and would never forget him, and then I folded my body around my dead baby and wept until finally, for the last time, I fell asleep with him in my arms. When I woke, the light was streaming through the window. The bed was wet, and there was a wild voice howling. Tom’s little body had leaked its life’s blood from his throat and bowels. My own gown was drenched where I’d clutched him to me. I gathered him up off the gory pallet and ran into the street. My neighbors were all standing there, their faces turned to me, full of grief and fear. Some had tears in their eyes. But the howling voice was mine.

declares that the learned doctors place great faith in these new means of combating the Plague.” And so it was that on the very best authority, and with the best of intentions, my poor boy suffered through some treatments that in the end maybe only prolonged his pain.

“You are a good mother, Anna Frith.” She regarded me gravely. “Your arms will not be empty forever. Remember that when the way looks bleak to you.”

There were ten or twelve people in a rough circle, jostling and staggering, their loud voices slurring as if they’d come straight from the Miner’s Tavern. Lib Hancock was among them, stumbling from the effects of drink, which I knew well she was not used to. In the center, upon the ground, was Mem Gowdie, her frail old arms bound before her with a length of fraying rope. Brad Hamilton knelt across her chest as his daughter, Faith, grasped a fistful of the old woman’s sparse silver hair and raked at her cheek with a hawthorn prick. “I’ll have it yet, witch!” she cried, as Mem moaned and tried to raise her bound hands to her face to fend off the blows. “Your blood will drive this sickness from my mother’s body.” In the circle, Hamilton’s oldest boy, Jude, held his mother in his arms. Rubbing her hand over Mem’s scratched and bleeding cheek, Faith stood up unsteadily and smeared the blood on her mother’s neck, where the Plague sore rose throbbing.

After the third, Anys paused. Mem Gowdie’s chest rose by itself. She sputtered, groaned, and opened her eyes. The relief I felt lasted only an instant, for Lib, in a crazed voice, began crying: “Anys Gowdie’s raised the dead! It’s her that’s the witch! Seize her!”

“She ... she admitted it,” he slurred dully. “She confessed she lay with the Devil ...” Mompellion raised his voice to a roar. “Oh, yes, the Devil has been here this night! But not in Anys Gowdie! Fools! Ignorant wretches! Anys Gowdie fought you with the only weapon she had to hand—your own ugly thoughts and evil doubting of one another! Fall on your knees, now!”

We were, in this village, some three hundred and three score souls. Less the babes, the frail elderly, those few who must needs labor even on the Lord’s Day, and the handful of Quakers and nonconformists who bide up on the high farms, the number who gather each week in our church is a firm two hundred and one score worshipers.

Cry now, my friends, but hope, also! For a better season will follow this time of Plague, if only we trust in God to perform His wonders!”

“Dear friends, here we are, and here we must stay. Let the boundaries of this village become our whole world. Let none enter and none leave while this Plague lasts.”

succor

And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.

And so, before we took our leave of the Daniels, I found the phial of poppy in Mrs. Mompellion’s whisket. I closed my hand upon it, stealthy as a practiced thief, and plunged it, deep, into the sleeve of my dress.

My father is a roguing knave, even sober. But with the drink in him he becomes dangerous. I could see we were approaching that stage as his color rose and his mouth turned from grin to snarl. “Don’t think you’re too good now, with your fancy quothings, just o’ cause that priest and his missus make much o’ye,” and at that he grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me down to kneel in front of him. The filth of his fingers left smears of grime on my whisk. I stared at my father’s breeches and noted that they smelled unclean.

saw my mother’s face framed in the iron bars, the desperate look in her wild eyes, the inhuman sounds that came from her throat as the iron bit pressed hard against her tongue. He had clapped the branks on her after she cursed him in public for his constant drunkenness. She had worn the helmet a night and a day as my father led her around, taunting her, yanking hard on the chain so that the iron sliced her tongue. The sight of her with her head in that fearful cage had terrified me, tiny child that I was, and I’d run off and hidden myself. When my father finally drank himself into insensibility, some kindly person cut the leather strap that bound the thing to her jaws. By then her tongue was raw, and it swelled so that it was days before she got her speech back.

I felt a sudden hot gush down my thigh. Fear had made my body betray me, just as when I was a child. Mortified, I crumpled at my father’s feet and, in a tiny voice, begged his pardon. He laughed then, his pride saved by my perfect humiliation. The pressure of his hands eased, and he landed the toe of his boot into my side, just hard enough to push me over into my own mess. I pulled off my pinafore and sopped up as much of the puddle as I could, and then I rushed from the room, too abashed to seek out the innkeeper to arrange for his trap. I ran to my home, weeping and shaking, and as soon as I had the door closed behind me, I stripped every soiled garment and commenced to scrub at myself so roughly that the skin of my thighs turned livid.

Why, I wondered, was God so much more prodigal with his Creation? Why did He raise us up out of the clay, to acquire good and expedient skills, and then send us back so soon to be dust when we yet had useful years before us? And why should this good woman lie here, in such extremity, when a man like my father lived to waste his reason in drunkenness?

“There, there,” I cried, “Where is your mummy?” She gave no answer but fell limp against me. I carried her through the doorway and back into the dim cottage. The fire had guttered in the night, and the room was frigid. Sally’s mother lay upon a pallet, pale and cold and many hours dead. Her father sprawled on the floor beside his wife, one hand twined in hers where it had fallen limply off the pallet. He was fevered, his mouth caked with sordes, and struggling for breath. In a wooden crib by the hearth, a baby mewled faintly.

“Ah, forgive me, Mistress, but these times, they do make monsters of us all. It’s just that I’m so very tired, I can nay bear the thought of harnessing the cart horse twice when once might’ve served.” I bade him sit then and went to my cottage for a mug of broth, for the old man was working far beyond his strength. By the time I returned, had warmed the broth, and he had sipped it down, there were two corpses for his cart after all.