God and the Wedding Dress

by Marjorie Bowen

  Catherine tried to count them, but her senses failed. She leaned against the fence, the basket fell out of her hand and the contents were scattered on the ground.

  Then she saw that something was moving in the door of the cottage — a woman — Ann Hancock. Catherine knew her by sight. Ann had a towel in her hand that dragged on the ground, her attitude was one of great fatigue. Against the cottage wall leaned a spade, stained with earth.

  When the large, lone woman saw Catherine Mompesson, she greeted her without surprise, rather with a little nod, as at something expected.

  “I have buried them all, Alice, Ann, William, Oner, my husband.”

  “You buried them!”

  “Yes,” answered the woman, showing the twist of towel in her hand. “I did not dare to touch them, but I put this about their necks and drew them out and made shallow graves for them. I had one with me to dig for all but the last, and that I had to make myself. I went on my knees, praying for help, but none came.”

  “The Talbots,” Catherine said, “they are dead, too? I heard talk of this in the village and came up. But why did you not send for help?”

  “Were we not asked to keep the infection to ourselves?” replied the woman with a wild sullenness. “And who had I to send? They sickened, one after another. One day two died, the next three, and so there’s none left of either the Talbots or the Hancocks but myself.”

  Catherine saw she was distracted, out of her wits, for she spoke desperately yet with what seemed lack of feeling; she pointed her finger across to the distant height of Stony Middleton, divided from Riley by two narrow dells. And she said that she had made signals to the inhabitants of the houses there, but they had taken no heed, though she believed they had watched her digging the graves for her husband and children, ay, digging, till her arms ached and dragged in the sockets.

  Catherine Mompesson could no longer stand. She went into the dirty cottage and sat down on a wooden chair with wings. She put her face into her hand; she could neither weep nor lament. These people were strangers to her, but their sufferings were as her own. The bleak woman, her hands hanging hopelessly, came into the little house.

  “My husband would have come, Mr. Stanley would have come,” whispered Kate.

  “Thomas Stanley was here,” replied Ann Hancock, “but that was before anyone sickened. He has a great deal to do and many to comfort, we could not expect him to return. Their blood was thickened by corruption. They had a stench even while they lived.”

  “And they had no one to pray for them, and no one to read the burial service?” asked Kate; she asked if there was a Prayer Book in the house, and the woman answered: “Yes.”

  Kate rose; she felt her body light, as if she floated.

  “Come out with me and I shall read the service over their graves. And afterwards, when the pest is past, they may be enclosed and stones put up.”

  She felt a little strength ebb into her veins as she spoke these words. There was help in action. She added:

  “I shall stay and assist you to put the two cottages in order and to burn the bedding. That is what we do in the village, you know. And I have brought some fumigants. Then you must drink some plague water, and I have a pomander.”

  The woman shook her head; the greasy gray hair hung over her yellow face.

  “What shall I do with these cares? I have buried my husband and my children, I have seen my neighbour and his children die and be buried, all in the course of a few weeks. What have I to do with remedies?”

  Ann Hancock sank down by her ash-strewn hearth and her hands fell in her lap. She was a woman who had been robust and comely, but now she looked like a crone of eighty winters; there was dried blood and filth on her hands and a noisome smell came from her draggled clothes.

  “What will you do?” asked Kate.

  The woman said she would go to Sheffield, where she had a son who was bound apprentice; she seemed to take some small relish out of the thought that this son would come back and erect some memorial to his family.

  “Bring me the Prayer Book,” said Kate. “Though my husband or Mr. Stanley will come and read the service over your dead, yet I think God will accept this from a woman, first.”

  She suggested this because she thought that the clergyman might be delayed; there were limits to what the two men could do, since they were employed almost day and night in the village.

  The woman looked at her visitor strangely, and then she seemed to take a little comfort too, while a few soiled tears stained her eyes. She went to a shelf littered with platters and cups and brought down a Prayer Book that had been a treasured possession, it was bound in green leather and clasped with silver roses.

  Kate asked for some pure water, and when Mrs. Hancock came with a stoup from the well, Kate put some of the vinegar she had brought with her into it and the two washed their hands and bathed their faces.

  Then the woman began to shake with sobs, as the water dripped over her flesh sullied with blood and dust; she had been like one quenched in grief, but now under the influence of this human companionship she began to realize her sorrows. She told her story of how they had died, at intervals of two, three or four days. At first all the Talbots had gone and then her own family. She said her husband and sons had gone to the neighbours and helped them to make graves in the orchard, and then died themselves; then she and Ann had buried Alice between them, and then when Ann had died, there had only been the mother left to dig the grave for her; shallow graves they were; a strong wind might blow the rude sods away.

  Catherine took the Prayer Book and the woman went with her into the open. First they went to the graves by the smithy, and there Catherine Mompesson read the burial service over those seven hummocks. And the woman said ‘Amen.’ Kate had no mutinous thoughts. ‘Away with life and mirth,’ she thought, ‘this preludes my end. Why should I block with delays the way between me and Heaven?’

  Then they returned to the other graves; a cloud was over the sun and a wind stirred their garments; close together on the patch of ground by the Hancocks’ cottage the rude mounds were set together and again the Rector’s wife read the burial service — ‘in full and joyous hope of a glorious Resurrection.’

  Then she gave the Prayer Book to the woman and all she had in the basket and told her to remain where she was, lest she carry the plague somewhere else; she was by no means to go to Sheffield, but live at Riley, until she died or the infection was over.

  “Brighten your devotions,” said Kate, “with thought of those who wait for you above.”

  The woman seemed discontented and stupid; she muttered about her only surviving son and her wish to go to find him.

  “No,” said Catherine sternly, “we must obey Mr. Mompesson. You must stay at your post as the others stay at theirs. I shall send help to you, Mr. Stanley will be here as soon as may be, and he must comfort you as God’s mouthpiece. Why do you sigh over this filth and stench? Think of Heaven.”

  Then she put her hood over her head again, for the air was rank and stifling, and went down from the hill-side, marvelling now and then at the steadiness of her own step; the landscape seemed slipping round her in a mist of rainbow colours.

  She saw many other evidences of mortality besides the graves at Riley. It was clear that many of those living in the outlying farms and many of those who had fled from the village and built themselves huts upon the moors had perished, for there were graves and rude stones, set here and there among the ferns and heather.

  These uncultivated graves filled Catherine’s heart with hushed whisperings of pity. As long as her strength lasted, she stopped at each of them and said a prayer and some sentences of the burial service. And she tried to keep in mind their situation so that the Rector or Mr. Stanley, for she had forgotten that he was not qualified to be what she had called him to Ann Hancock, God’s mouthpiece, might come up here and bless them. She wondered if God, in His mercy, would remember that these poor unshriven souls h
ad been unable to show their penitence or to obtain anyone to intercede for them, and if He would deal tenderly with their sins and redeem their bones from among the poor highway herbs and lonely grasses.

  When William Mompesson heard that the pestilence had reached Riley he took his horse and went up immediately to that lonely place.

  But the wife of John Hancock had gone; despite Catherine’s command, she had departed to Sheffield. The people from Stony Dell told him they had seen her go by on the high road without either bundle or staff.

  Now the Rector feared greatly that this woman, escaping from the desolation at Riley, would spread the plague, for she was the only one so far who had disobeyed his commands not to pass the boundaries that ringed the doomed village.

  But this case showed the mercy of God or the whimsy of the scourge, for the woman found her son in Sheffield, as it was afterwards discovered, but did not take the contagion with her, nor any sickness.

  As it was beyond the villagers’ power to disinter the bodies of the Talbots and Hancocks from their shallow graves, a fence was put round them and some stones dragged to mark the place, and it was left to happier times to place some memorial there.

  But the Rector, sitting in the desolate cottage, wrote out in his beautiful handwriting the names of the members of the two families and the date, month and year, when they had died; the actual days he knew not.

  Then he and Mr. Stanley visited the graves that Kate had told them of on the wide moor and consecrated them and said a prayer over each, not knowing for whom they prayed, lad or maid, or one old and weary.

  Now the plague in Eyam was at its height. The heat was intense and seemed to increase from day to day. The stream that ran across the western end of the village was almost dried up, the leaves of the trees seemed to rattle with a metallic sound on the parched boughs, there was not a blade of green in the churchyard, where the ground had not been disturbed to bury the dead and the sods overturned, there was no growing thing. The whole soil seemed poisoned. Flowers shrivelled in the cottage gardens and the few crops were parched in the fields and there were few to gather them in.

  The villagers lived on the provisions placed on the stones in the dell at the head of the glen that the Lord-Lieutenant sent regularly. And there being so many infected that there was scarcely a family free, it seemed to William Mompesson that it was an ill thing to crowd them into the church. So gathering them together at the great antique Cross by the yew tree, the only green thing in the churchyard, and that dark as midnight, he told them that he would preach to them in the open air, in the dell called Cucklett, where there was an elevated stone on the slope at one side that might serve as his pulpit.

  And before he dismissed them after that advice, he gave them some commendation of their behaviour, for none that he knew had disobeyed him, save the poor distracted woman from Riley; but for himself he had little help, he felt sadly loose and stray as if borne before a giddy blast.

  As he descended from the steps beneath the Cross, he called out to Sythe Torre, who was standing amidst the crowd, and said to him:

  “I hear, Torre, that you have taken upon yourself the task of disposing of the dead. It is one for which you are well fitted, may you take this as a penance for those sins that you once almost confessed to me.”

  The giant laughed, heaving his huge shoulders. He boasted:

  “I am not afraid of the plague, master. I put a rag round their necks and drag them out without touching them. And I get what’s in the cottage often enough for my pains, and enough napkins to set me up in linen for life, and my wife and son as well.”

  “Look to your own wife and son,” warned the Rector, “and do not perform this task in a spirit of boasting and profanity, lest thou be punished instead of blessed for it. Ay, I think thou hast slipt, almost to Hell.”

  But Sythe Torre blasphemed, rolling the tobacco in his mouth. He was convinced that he would escape the contagion; he was indifferent to the fate of his neighbours; he had a queer belief that his wife and his son, whom he loved, were immune. As he strode away through the haggard crowd, many frightened and baleful looks followed him. It was certainly a strange thing that not only had Sythe Torre escaped the infection, but he seemed in rude health. He never came to church, he did not join in the public prayers or lamentations, he drank heavily, spending such time as he was not employed in disposing of the dead in sitting in the parlours of the now almost empty taverns and drinking ale and brandy that none dare refuse him though he had not the money to pay.

  But in goods he was becoming a rich man, for he did not hesitate to take the property from an infected cottage from which all others had fled. He stripped the bodies of their clothes, if they had died, when they were attired. He took these to his house and piled them up in the cupboard, for he scoffed at any idea that contagion might lie in the garments.

  The villagers began to regard him with a superstitious awe; they felt that he was in league with the devil, the personification of the plague itself, and there were tales of his meetings with the evil one on the moors.

  The Rector returned to his study and pulling a sheet of paper wearily before him began to write; trying, with trembling hand and eyes dim with fatigue, to keep a register of the dead. It was impossible to do this regularly in the church, the deaths were too frequent, and moreover when one or more died in some beyond the village, the death was not reported, as in the case of the Talbots and Hancocks who had perished, all but one, at Riley, and whose fate would not have been known save for the visit of Kate.

  There were names of the victims to be written down, their ages, their occupations, and, as far as possible, the days on which they died. These facts were not always known to William Mompesson, but they could usually be supplied by Thomas Stanley who, during his ministry, had taken a keen interest in and scrupulously kept all details relating to his parishioners.

  The Rector trimmed the lamp and strove to free himself from the hallucinations that came from fatigue and anxiety. The room seemed full of swarming figures, now appearing in varying shades of gray, now in the white light of stars or moon. Sometimes he thought these fantasies were sent by the Devil to trouble him and deflect him from his duty, at other times that they were heavenly wings sent to console him and thrust his thoughts upwards.

  He tried to concentrate on his task, which was to copy into the register some fresh particulars given him by the dissenter.

  The plague had surely reached its height, it could scarcely be imagined that it could become more frightful. Whenever the Rector went abroad, his ears were assailed by a steady wailing issuing from the desolate houses, and those few who went abroad had a peculiar horror of expected doom stamped upon their pinched features. The place was isolated, too; no traveller passed through the streets, no stranger visited it, there was hardly a cottage that did not house at the same time the living and the dead. The pest-house was always full and it was impossible to venture abroad without seeing Sythe Torre, or one of the miners whom he had elected to assist him, drawing forth some still-warm body by a cord of napkin passed round the neck and placing it hastily in a shallow grave, stamping the earth over it impatiently; for the villagers had it rooted in their mind that the infection lay in the putrid bodies and that the sooner these were got out of sight, the better for the survivors.

  At first the Rector had remonstrated bitterly against this indecency, but in vain, and now the state of misery was such that he could not hope to contend with it; neither he nor Thomas Stanley nor the few men who had remained staunch and level-headed about them could possibly bury the numerous dead with religious rites.

  The villagers were by now familiar with the progress of the disease, and when they beheld the victim sinking into the final stage, the signal would be given and a shallow hole dug in the nearest spot — in a garden or field, sometimes by the roadside. The Rector knew that in some cases the still palpitating bodies had been thrust into pits dug in the kitchens of the houses or at th
eir back doors.

  Until the month of July each family had buried its own dead, but now that had become impossible, for in some families there was no survivor and that was more work than ever for Sythe Torre.

  As the Rector made his register, trying to keep his figures neat and legible, his weary thoughts dwelt with a fascination upon the gigantic figure of the dissolute miner. Only shortly before he had seen him in the streets, half-drunk, shouting out a bawdy song, while he dragged along an old man by cords round his feet. When he had seen the Rector, he had cried out that he had pinners and napkins sufficient to kindle his pipe with while he lived, alluding to the hoard of clothing he had gathered during his fearful occupation.

  The Rector wondered if indeed this fearful man was sent from God or the Devil. How he obtained his strength, which seemed superhuman, and his daring courage that was hardly to be understood.

  ‘For even I, who may boast to be upheld by God, and even Thomas Stanley, who is undoubtedly a holy man, has not the daring of this brute. Shall he watch while I drouse?’

  He continued his list for a while, putting down the names of the Talbots and Hancocks in the register, the Sydalls after that, the family who were supposed to be descendants of the old witch who dwelt on the moors — a father, son and four daughters, all of whom had died in the space of twenty-five days. They had given the infection to the lover of one of the girls, a youth named Rowland, who had resided in the Middleton Dale and caught the infection on coming to visit Demmot Sydall. The Rector had also to add the names of some victims of the families who had fled early in the onslaught of the plague to Cussy Dell and there dwelt in huts. Though they lived so far apart from the village, the pestilence had sought them out, and when Thomas Stanley had last visited them, he had to report that there were four dead.

  Mr. Mompesson had also to record the death of a young woman who had come, unknown to her husband and neighbours, from Coburn to Eyam to visit her mother, and who had died the second day after her arrival in Eyam.