Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  And so I was disappointed when it was old Mem who met me on the step, her shawl saying she was on her way out, and her hasty manner making me think she was due at some confinement, though whose it might be I could not think, for none that I knew who were with child were yet within a month of their time.

  “Ah, I could have saved you the walk, Anna, as I’m on my way to the Hadfields. Young Edward Cooper is burning up with fever, so I’m bringing him a draught.” I turned to walk back with her, fretful at this news. Although she was very aged, her hair thin and silvery where it escaped her fraying cap, Mem was straight and lithe as a green cornstalk, and she moved with the vigor of a man. As we hurried to the Hadfields, I had to lengthen my own stride to keep up with her. When we got to the cottage, a strange pied horse was tethered to the post by the watering trough. Mary met us at the door, flustered with anxiety and, it seemed, embarrassment. “Thank you, thank you indeed for coming, Mem, but Mr. Hadfield sent to Bakewell for the barber-surgeon, and he is with Edward now. I am sure we are all grateful for your wisdom in these matters, but Mr. Hadfield said we must not stint here, and surely Edward’s father, God rest him, did leave me in purse to handle the expense.”

  Mem made a sour face. She did not think any more of barber-surgeons than they were wont to think of cunning women such as she. And yet Mem helped us as she could for pence or payment in kind as each of us was set to manage it, while the surgeons would not stir without the clank of shillings to line their pockets. Bowing coldly, Mem turned and walked away. But I was curious, and so I lingered until Mary signaled me to follow her. The barber-surgeon had asked to have the child brought downstairs, as I expect he would not deign to work in the crowded upper room. Mr. Hadfield had cleared his tailor’s bench and little Edward was laid naked upon it. At first, I could not see the child for the surgeon’s dark bulk was in my way, but as he stepped aside to reach into his bag, I winced. The poor little soul was covered in squirming leeches, their sucking parts embedded in his tender arms and neck, and their round, slimy nethers flicking and twitching as they feasted. I supposed it was fortunate that Edward was too far gone in his feverish delirium to understand what had befallen him. Mary’s face creased with concern as she held the child’s limp hand. Mr. Hadfield stood beside the surgeon, nodding deferentially at his every utterance.

  “He is a small child, so we need not draw overmuch to restore the balance of his humors,” the surgeon said to Mr. Hadfield, who was holding Edward’s shoulders. When the time had elapsed to his satisfaction, he called for vinegar and applied it to the engorged creatures so that they twitched all the harder, their jaws relaxing as they sought to escape the irritant. With a series of deft tugs, he pinched them off, a spurt of bright blood following, which he stanched with linen scraps that Mr. Hadfield provided him. He rinsed each leech in a cup of water and dropped it into a leather pouch alive with writhing lobes. “If the child is not improved by nightfall, then you must purge and fast him. I will give you a receipt for a tincture that will open his bowels.” The man was packing his bag as Mary and her husband thanked him 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.”

  His foot was in the stirrup, such was his impatience to be gone. The saddle leather creaked as he settled his ample rump. “But, sir,” I continued, hardly crediting my own forwardness, “if there has been no Plague here these twenty years, then perhaps you have seen no cases against which to rightly judge the child’s condition.”

  “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.” Then he was off, heading down the road at such a gallop that he almost collided with Martin Miller’s haywain as it turned the sharp bend by the Miner’s Tavern.

  LITTLE EDWARD COOPER was dead before sunset. His brother, Jonathan, lay ill a day later, and Alexander Hadfield but two days after that. At the end of a sennight, Mary Hadfield was widow for a second time in her life, and her two sons lay in the churchyard beside their dead father. I was not there to see them buried, for by then I had mourning of my own to do.

  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.

  The fever rose in him suddenly, before noon, while I was working at the rectory. Jane Martin sent for me straightaway, for which I was grateful. She took Jamie with her to her mother’s house, so that I could focus all my thoughts and care on Tom. He cried for a while, when he tried to suckle and couldn’t find the strength for it. Then he just lay in my arms, staring at me wide-eyed and whimpering now and then. Soon, his stare became unfixed and distant, and finally he simply closed his eyes and panted. I sat by the hearth and held him, amazed that I hadn’t noticed how long his little body had grown, spilling out of my arms now, when once he’d fit in the crook of my elbow. “Soon you will be with your father,” I whispered. “He’ll still be able to hold you like that. You’ll be so comfortable in his strong arms.” Lib Hancock came, carrying fresh farm cheese, which I could not eat, and saying words of comfort that blurred into nonsense in my head. In the afternoon, my stepmother came to take her place. Her words I do remember, for they seared me so.

  “Anna, you are a fool.”

  I looked up in astonishment, dragging my eyes off Tom’s little face for the first time that day. Her plain, pasty features came into focus through my tears, and I saw that her expression was one of exasperation.

  “Why do you let yourself love an infant so? I warned you, did I not, to school your heart against this?” It was true. Aphra had seen three of her own babies into the ground before their first year, one through fever, one through flux, and one, a lusty boy, who had just stopped breathing in his bed, with nary a mark upon him. I had stood with her through all these deaths, marveling at her dry eyes.

  “It is folly and ill fortune to love a child until it walks and is well grown. As you now see, as you now see ...”

  Her voice lost its hectoring tone as she saw my eyes filling up. She reached a hand to pat me on the shoulder, but I shrugged her off. “God made your heart hard, Stepmother,” I said. “You may thank Him for it. He did not do me such a kindness. For I loved Tom from the moment I first reached down and touched the crown of his head, all wet and bloody as it was ...”

  I was weeping then and could not continue. But even as I spoke so, I knew that it was true that fear of losing him had marched beside that love, every moment of the short time I had him with me. Aphra handed me a hag-stone and mumbled some strange words over it. “You must hang it over him to keep evil spirits from snatchin
g away his soul.” I took the hag-stone from her and held it in my hand till she left the cottage. Then I flung it into the fire.

  When I heard footsteps in the dooryard soon after, I cursed silently, for I knew in my heart that my time with Tom was slipping speedily away, and I did not want to share it. But the gentle knock and the quiet greeting told me it was Elinor Mompellion. I called to her to enter, and with a few soft footsteps she was kneeling beside us, enfolding us in her arms. She did not upbraid me for my grieving but shared in it with me, and so calmed my weeping and my rage. Afterward, she drew a chair near to the window and read to me from Our Lord’s words of love for little children until the light became too dim. I listened to her as an infant to a lullaby, not marking the meaning but taking ease from the sound. I believe she would have stayed all night had I not told her that I would take Tom up to my bed.

  I crooned to him as I climbed the stairs and laid him down upon our pallet. He lay just as I placed him, his arms splayed limply. I lay down beside him and drew him close. I pretended to myself that he would wake in the wee hours with his usual lusty cry for milk. For a time his little pulse beat fast, his tiny heart pounding. But toward midnight the rhythms became broken and weak and finally fluttered and faded away. 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.

  Sign of a Witch

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my father would talk some times of his boyhood as a prentice seaman. Usually, he told us these tales when we had misbehaved, to scare us into better comportment. He spoke of the lash and the pickling that followed, where a man freshly scourged was untied from the mast and dunked into a barrel of stinging brine. He said the cruelest of the boatswains would lay on the whip so that the blows fell time and again on the same place, where the skin had already been peeled in long strips. The most skillful, he said, could land the lash so exactly as to work right through the muscle until the very bone lay bare.

  The Plague is cruel in the same way. Its blows fall and fall again upon raw sorrow, so that before you have mourned one person that you love, another is ill in your arms. Jamie was crying bitterly for his brother when his tears turned into the fevered whimpering of the ill. My merry little boy loved his life, and he fought hard to hold on to it. Elinor Mompellion was at my side from the first, and her gentle voice is what I remember best from those dim, woeful days and nights.

  “Anna, I must tell you that my Michael suspected Plague from the moment he attended Mr. Viccars’s sickbed. You know that he was but lately a student at the University at Cambridge, and he sent at once to his friends, asking them to inquire of the great physicians who are teachers there, to find out what could be known of the latest preventives and remedies. This very day he has had some answer back.” She unfurled the letter from her pocket and scanned it. I peered over her shoulder, trying to make out the sense of it as best I could, for I have had but little experience with handwriting, and though this was written very fair, the reading of it was difficult for me. “The writer is a dear friend of Mr. Mompellion’s, and so you see he spends much time upon salutations and expressions of concern and hopes that Mr. Mompellion may yet be mistaken in his suspicions of the nature of the disease amongst us. But here, finally, he comes to the point and 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.

  Where Mr. Viccars’s sore had erupted near his neck, Jamie’s rose in his armpit, and he cried piteously from the agony of it, holding his slender little arm far out to his side so as not to hurt himself by the pressure of his own flesh. I had already tried cataplasms of Bay salt and rye meal, made into a paste with egg yolk and strapped across the sore with a piece of soft leather. But the tumor just continued to grow from walnut-size to the dimensions of a goose egg, yet resisted to burst. Mr. Mompellion’s friend had written out in detail a receipt from the College of Physicians, and with Mrs. Mompellion’s help I tried this next. It called for the roasting in embers of a great onion, hollowed out and filled with a fig, chopped rue, and a dram of Venice treacle. Lucky for us, as I then thought, Mem Gowdie had both the dried figs and the treacle, which is honey mixed with a great number of rare ingredients, its making long and exacting.

  I roasted those onions, one after the other, even though the discomfort of their pressure on the swollen place made my child scream and toss and run damp with pain-sweat. It is the hardest thing in the world to inflict hurt on your own child, even if you believe you act for his salvation. I cried as I bound on the hated poultices, then I held him and rocked him and tried to comfort him as best I could, distracting him with all his favorite songs and stories, as many as I could wrack my brain to invent.

  “Long ago and far away, there lived a little boy,” I whispered to him in the wee hours of the night. I felt the need of fending off the silent dark with a constant stream of chatter. “He was a good little boy, but very poor, and he lived all his life in a dark room where he had to work long and hard, toiling all day and all night until he was very tired. And that room had just one door, yet the little boy had never passed through it and didn’t know what was beyond. And because he didn’t know, he was afraid of the door, and though he longed to know what there was outside his room, he never had the heart to lift his hand and turn the knob and see. But one day a bright angel appeared to the little boy, and she said to him, ‘It’s time. You’ve been very good, and you’ve done your work well. Now you can set it aside and come with me.’ She opened the door, and beyond was the most beautiful, sunny garden the boy had ever seen. There were children there, laughing and playing. And they took the little boy by the hand and showed him all the wonders of his new home. And so he lived and played in that golden light for ever and ever, and nothing ever hurt him again.” His eyelids flickered and he gave me a wan smile. I kissed him and whispered, “Don’t be afraid, my darling, don’t be afraid.”

  In the morning, Anys Gowdie brought a cordial that she said was decocted from the tops of feverfew with a little wormwood in sugared sack. As she and her aunt always did when they brought their remedies, she laid her hands gently on Jamie before she gave him the draft and murmured softly: “May the seven directions guide this work. May it be pleasing to my grandmothers, the ancient ones. So mote it be.” She had also brought a cooling salve, fragrant of mint, and she asked me if she might apply it to the child to lower his fever. She sat upon the floor with her back to the wall and her knees raised and laid his little body along her thighs, so that his head rested on her knees and his feet at her hips. Her touch was tender and rhythmical, as she brought her hands in long strokes across his brow and down body and limbs. As she stroked him, she sang softly: “Two angels came from the East. One brought fire, one brought frost. Out, fire! In, frost! By all the Mothers’ gentle ghosts.” Jamie had been restless and whimpering, but he calmed as she crooned to him. His eyes fixed on hers with an intent stare, and he grew quiet under her touch.

  Anys stroked Jamie and hummed to him until he fell into a blessed sleep. When I lifted him from her lap and laid him upon the pallet, his skin had lost its livid color and felt cool to my touch. I thanked her from my heart for the relief she had brought to him. Generally, it was her way to shrug off thanks or praise with a gruff set-down, but that morning she was tender with me and took my outstretched hand. “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.”

  Anys, I now see, knew well enough that her care would bring my boy but a brief respite. Hour by hour, as the good effects of the draught and the salve wore off, the fever rose again, and by afternoon he had become delirious. “Mummy, Tom’s calling you!” he whispered urgently in his tiny, cracked voice, flailing his good arm as if to summon me.

  “I’m here, my darling. Tell Tommy I’m right here.” I tried to keep the tears out of my voice, but at the mention of Tom my aching breasts began to seep milk until it soaked in great dark patches right through my bodice.

  Elinor Mompellion brought a little silk bag for Jamie, through which she had run a soft riband. “It contains a palliative sent by one of the rector’s acquaintances in Cambridge,” she said. “He directed that it be hung so as to fall over the sufferer’s left pap—that would be over his heart, you see.”

  “But what is within it?” I asked hopefully.

  “Well, ah, I did inquire as to the contents, and I was not persuaded of any great good to come therefrom ... but the man who sent it is a well-esteemed physician, and he says it is a remedy much thought of among the Florentine doctors who have had a large experience with Plague.”

  “But what is it?” I asked again.

  “It contains a dried toad,” she said. I wept then, even though I knew her intentions were all of the best. I could not help myself.