Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

Once again, I awoke in the morning blissfully rested. And once again, the poppy-induced serenity did not last long.

He said if we burned the Plague sore away then the disease would surely follow. But he has only worsened since that night, and I do not know how to help

I saw Kate bending over Richard, closing her hand on the small triangle of parchment she’d laid nearby his wound. But as quick as she was, I saw plainly what she tried to hide. It was a spell, inscribed thus: ABRACADABRA BRACADABR RACADAB ACADA CAD A

“Yes, Anna, even I. For there was a time when I had much that I, too, wanted to forget. That poppy you took from me-it was a relict from that time. I had kept it, you see, even though it is some years since I have resorted to it. But it is a jealous friend and will not lightly loosen its embrace.”

“He begged me to elope with him, and afterward, he promised, he would make it up with my father, who would not stand against the match once he saw the brilliance of my new state. My governess uncovered the scheme and could have thwarted it. But I begged her, and Charles charmed her and finally bribed her into silence with the gift of a ruby pendant that we later learned he had pilfered from his mother’s box. And so she abetted our scheme and kept my father ignorant much longer than would otherwise have been possible.

“I was desperate, and I was deranged,” she said. “I violated my own body with a fire iron.” I drew a ragged breath at this and hid my face in my hands. I could not bear to imagine such suffering, yet I could not prevent my mind from conjuring terrible images of it. I reached out a hand, blindly, and clasped hers once again. “My father engaged the best physician, and so my life was saved. But not my womb, Anna, which they tell me is nothing now but a mass of scars. They gave me poppy at first for the pain, and then I think to keep me quiet.

I made to throw it on the fire, but found I did not have the will to open my hand. I ran a thumbnail across a still-green pod and watched the white sap ooze slowly from the incision. I wanted to lay my tongue on it, to lap the bitterness and feel its sweet sequel. Elinor stood silently, waiting. I tried to read her eyes, but she turned away from me. How was I to face the days and nights to come? There would be no other relief for me; in my two hands I held my only chance of exit from our village and its agonies. But then I realized that this was not quite true. There was our work. I had seen that afternoon how it was possible to lose myself in it. And yet this loss of self was not selfish oblivion. From this study and its applications might come much good. But surely I could not attempt it without clarity of mind. I grasped the bunch then and flung it on the fire. The sap hissed for a moment, and then the pods burst, their showers of tiny seeds falling invisible among the ashes.

The rector had found him, sprawled half in, half out of the grave he had been digging.

No one was troubling with coffins now; there were no more planed timbers to be had nor time to fashion them. Families simply carried their loved ones to their graves, or, if they were not strong enough, dragged them thither with a blanket slung beneath the armpits of the corpse. Mr. Mompellion prayed over each one by candlelight and then helped in piling the soil back into the graves. While he toiled in the churchyard, pleas came from two more families that he attend them in their extremity.

Charity, exhausted by doing more labor, night and day, than should ever be meted out to a girl of ten, had fallen asleep on her pallet in the corner.

Maudie was a good woman, she was. But I never cared enough for her. I worked her to a raveling, even when she was with child. I never gave her kind words or thought of her ease. Instead, I left her alone here to do all the toil while I took the pence her labor earned and spent it buying ale for doxies who let me lie with them. And when God took Maudie from me, I felt it was His wrath on me for my neglect. And I knew I deserved it. But now, if He takes me, too, He punishes not me, but my children. I don’t want Charity married off hastily as her mother was to me, married off to a lout too young to know what affection is, what duty is ... And little Seth ... I would not see him in the poor house, but who will care for him here? Charity is a capable girl, but a ten-year-old cannot be expected to raise a brother and run a farm ...”

“My dear friends, soon God sets us a new test, perhaps the hardest we have yet faced. For soon the weather here will begin to warm, and this Plague-we know from the past accounts of those who have lived through it—this Plague thrives upon warmth. We can hope, we can pray, that it has spent its fury here, but we cannot count upon it. My beloved friends, we must gird ourselves now for the possibility of the worse times that may be coming to us. And we must make our dispositions accordingly.”

Worse in summer?

And so the weeks passed, and the child’s chances waned, until the end of the ninth week drew closer and finally just one more day stood between her and a bleak future in a poorhouse. I suppose I should have known better than to raise this case with Elinor. Or say, rather, that I should not have been surprised by the proposal that followed. “You know about the mines, Anna. You and I together shall get this dish out for the child.”

Inside the croft, I saw the remains of that morning’s breakfast: on the table was a pipkin of lard, the imprints of thin fingers on the slippery white surface betraying that she’d been eating it by the fistful. There was an eggshell, from which she’d sucked the contents raw, and an onion, with bites out of it, that she’d eaten like an apple. Uncouth, perhaps, but sustaining. As we entered the tiny, earth-floored croft, she made haste to clear the table and asked us, most politely, to sit. I wondered at her self-possession and felt a stab that I had not made more of an effort to know her parents. They must have been fine people to impart such manners to their child. Elinor’s thoughts had been tending along a similar vein. “Your mother would be very proud of you, Merry, to see how bravely and how well you are managing here.” “Think thou so?” she said, her dark eyes earnest. “I thank thee for saying it. I feel that Mother watches me still, and Father, and my brothers, too. It brings me comfort to believe that they do, and my life here feels less lonely for

So I was uncommonly glad, one morning as I went out to battle with the well bucket, to mark my father approaching, for I could not think he would grudge me a hand. He was staggering, which was not unusual, but not, this day, from drink. As he advanced, I saw that it was the weight of what he carried that unbalanced him—a large sack that clanked as he walked. He was so bent by the load that I think he might have passed without marking me but when I gave him a good day, he raised his head and hailed me in turn. As he set down the sack, I heard the clang of metal plate. “Eh, girl, and it is a good day, for Widow Brown has paid me in pewter for the graves of her man and boy. I suppose I should thank ye, for learning me the lesson that there’s a profit in the hole-digging trade, these days.”

When I had suggested that he do this work, I had expected that he would take at least some pains about his person, so as not to expose Aphra and his children to the Plague seeds that he might carry from the corpses. But day by day I saw him come and go in the same earth-crusted breeches, and I wondered that even he could be so uncaring.

He had become so fond of his afternoons at the alepot that he let it be known that he would not bury anyone past noon. In his callousness, he would knock upon the doors of the ailing, saying if they wanted a grave he would dig it then and there or not at all. And so a person who yet lived would lie in his sickbed and listen to the rise and fall of my father’s spud. I think that his heartless behavior hastened more than one person into the ground.

No one came near her all through that day or the next. I did not go, and for that I will forever reproach myself. Because out of our negligence and her loneliness came much rage. Much rage and some madness—and a surfeit of grief. For Aphra, and for all of us.

“Tell me,” said Elinor, and so I did, at last. The whole of it. All his brutalities; all the neglect and ill use of my lost and lonely childhood. I told her then what I had learned of what lay behind his depravities, the same terrible stories he had poured into the unwilling ears of a frightened child who had not wished to hear them. How he had been buggered as a boy by the rough men of the fleet and learned to swill down the rum until he did not mind it. How he had gone under the lash of a boatswain’s mate who had not troubled to comb the cat between each stroke, so that the tails landed all in one bloody tangle and left a rend in his back so deep that ever after he could not fully raise his left arm.

As if the poor infant had not been enough imposed upon, Lottie Mowbray was holding the baby aloft and steering the thin stream of his piss into a cooking pot that had evidently just been lifted off the fire. I could not think why, but they clearly had been boiling this pot of piss for some time, for the stink of it filled the croft. She looked up blankly as I entered, and the last of the infant’s pee dribbled onto her skirt.

“The witch told us we should boil the babe’s hair in his piss and that this would keep off the Plague from both ’is innards and ’is outers,” Tom said. “Since the rector was so vexed with us over the bramble charms, I thought to try this’n, in its stead.”

If we balanced the time we spent contemplating God, and why He afflicted us, with more thought as to how the Plague spread and poisoned our blood, then we might come nearer to saving our lives.

By the second Sunday of June we had reached a sorry marker: as many of us were now in the ground as walked above it. The passing of Margaret Livesedge meant that the dead roll now stood at one hundred fourscore souls.

I was jealous of both of them at once. Of him, because Elinor loved him, and I hungered for a greater share of her love than I could ever hope for. And yet I was jealous of her, too; jealous that she was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved. Why should I writhe on my cold and empty bed while she took comfort in his warm flesh?

dead. In the corner, Aphra had Faith’s body strung up like a puppet, suspended by the wrists and ankles from the rafters. The child’s head tilted gracefully to the side, and a curtain of hair hid her ravaged face. Aphra had tried to mask the dead, black Plague flesh with some kind of chalky paste.

To be sure, in her right hand she had a knife, and as she swept by me, waving it in wide, erratic curves, I recognized it as the large miner’s knife she had pulled with such effort from the decaying sinews of my father’s hand. Her other arm was occupied, clutching the maggoty remnant of her daughter’s corpse, and so to come at her from the left should have been a simple matter.

“When you lie with me,” I whispered, “do you think of Elinor? Are you lying with her in your memory?” “No,” he said. “I have no such memories.” I thought he spoke thus to be kind to me. “You needn’t say that.” “I say it only because it is true. I never lay with Elinor.”

My beautiful friend, full of affection, made for love. In lying with him, I had sought to bring her closer to me. I had tried to become her, in every way that I could. Instead, in taking my pleasure from his body, I had stolen from her—stolen what should have been hers, her wedding night. I went to her tombstone and lay down upon it. When my fingers found the place where the unpracticed graver had botched her inscription, that tiny indignity undammed my grief, and the sobs wracked my body until the stone was slick with tears.

Aisha grabs one hand. Elinor clasps the other, and together we plunge into the jostling swarm of our city.

“Whether we also shall one day look back upon this year of flames, germs and war as a year of wonders’ will depend, perhaps, on how many are able—like the passengers on United Flight 93 or the firefighters of New York City—to match the courageous self-sacrifice of the people of Eyam.”