Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.

My Tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. Because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. I used to wonder if it was so because the memory of Heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go. This, I thought, must be the kindness that God does for them and for us, since He gives so many infants such a little while to bide with us.

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

For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.

Why, I wondered, did we, all of us, both the rector in his pulpit and simple Lottie in her croft, seek to put the Plague in unseen hands? Why should this thing be either a test of faith sent by God, or the evil working of the Devil in the world? One of these beliefs we embraced, the other we scorned as superstition. But perhaps each was false, equally. Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.

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.

For life is not nothing, even to the grieving. Surely humankind has been fashioned so, otherwise how would we go on?

I understood that where Michael Mompellion had been broken by our shared ordeal, in equal measure I had been tempered and made strong.