Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

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.