Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  All at once, the voices began: some in slurred murmurs, some crying out loudly upon the Lord, others weeping and beating their breasts. At that time, you see, we all of us believed that God listened to such prayers.

  Venom in the Blood

  THE SNOW THAT BLEW in on that night’s wind blanketed the village and brought a deep silence upon us. People crept through the white streets to their business, hunched over and muffled in their shawls as if in hiding. Bad news passed in whispers. Witch’s blood did nothing to aid Grace Hamilton, who died of Plague that week, leaving her children Jude and Faith sickening. The storm buried my lost sheep and reduced my flock by a third. I was blurred and vacant from the blow to my head and slept for nigh on a whole day and night before I was steady enough to resume my search for them. By the time I found the poor beasts, huddled together in the ley of a rock outcropt, the snow had covered them in a high white drift and froze them near solid. At the time I was so disordered that my first thought was to be grateful that fewer living things now depended on my care.

  Michael Mompellion held a funeral for Anys but Mem Gowdie was not there to witness it. She had got the coughing sickness from her near-drowning and lay insensible in the rectory, where Elinor Mompellion had insisted she be brought. Together, we tended her, which very soon came to nothing much more than sitting by her bed and listening to the rattle of her breath. She had asked, when she was still able to speak, for a comfrey salve on her wounded face. We bound it there with fresh linen, but the bandage would hardly stay upon her sunken cheek. Her skin, friable as a dry winter leaf, bloomed purple and yellow with bruises from the blows she had received. When Mem had delivered both my boys, her strong, skilled hands had soothed my terrors and made my labors easy. Now, her fingers looked as frail as finch’s bones, and when I held them in mine I feared that the slightest pressure would snap them.

  Her last day was the hardest for me. Toward the end, her breathing would cease entirely for many minutes, and I would think she was at last at peace. But then her throat would give a wet gurgle, straining for air, and her chest would rise and fall in a series of swift, shallow pants. After a moment or two, these would slow and diminish, until she again stopped breathing. This happened more times than I could credit. Each time, the pauses in which she did not breathe grew ever longer. The waiting became unbearable. When the end came, at last, I did not recognize it, but sat there, expecting the greedy rasp that would again begin the cycle. It was not until I heard the rectory clock chime the quarter hour, and then the half, without any breath between them, that I finally called the Mompellions to acknowledge Mem’s passing. She died just five days after Anys. With the two of them went the main part of the physick we relied upon, along with the best chance our women had of living through their confinements with healthy infants in their arms.

  Neither did the Law of the Land do anything about the killings: the justice of the peace from Bakewell refused to come near our village or accept from us any persons for arrest, saying that no gaol in the parish would consent to hold them until the next assizes. Instead, those few from the mob who were not struck down with the Plague skulked amongst us, gaunt and haunted and awaiting God’s judgment. By the following Sunday a mere five of the dozen who’d been at the clough that night were well enough to put on the penitents’ garb and go barefoot to church to make their prayers for forgiveness.

  When Sunday morning dawned, white and windless, we all trudged thither, the ice-crusted snow crunching beneath our feet. John Gordon was one of those who slipped into the corner of contrition, meeting no one’s eyes but bending solicitously over Urith, who clung to his arm, the whiteness of her penitent’s robe showing up the purple bruising all around her swollen, broken nose. Lib Hancock, too, was there. She walked past me as I stood in my pew and did not meet my eyes.

  Pale and hushed, we took our appointed places, the grieving and the guilty. We were, in this village, some three hundred and three score souls. Less the babes, the frail elderly, those few who must needs labor even on the Lord’s Day, and the handful of Quakers and nonconformists who bide up on the high farms, the number who gather each week in our church is a firm two hundred and one score worshipers. Since our places are set from long tradition, an absence is as obvious as a missing tooth. That Sunday, the growing roll of dead and ailing left many empty spaces.

  Michael Mompellion did not use his pulpit that Sunday as I had expected. All week, throughout the funeral for Anys, and later, when he had looked in almost hourly on Mem, he had been thin-lipped and taut as a bowstring, as if struggling to contain a terrible rage. For most of that week, he had not taken his customary, companionable dinner with Elinor but worked instead alone in his library composing, as I thought, a sermon that would lacerate. One night, late in the week, as I was making my way bent double under a load of hay for the sheep, I caught sight of him, walking in the storm-stripped orchard with a stooped figure beside him. It was bitter cold, for the snow clouds had blown away, and the stars seemed mirrored in the icy glitter of the white-crusted fields. It was strange to me that the rector should choose such a night for an outdoor audience. But then I recognized the figure at his side and understood why he would not want to announce such a meeting.

  Mr. Mompellion was conferring with Thomas Stanley, the Puritan who had quit our parish more than three years since, on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, in the Year of Our Lord 1662. Parson Stanley had told us then that he could not in conscience accept the order to use the Book of Common Prayer, and that he was but one of hundreds of priests who were resigning his pulpit on that day. It had been a strange thing for us, to have our small village suddenly thrust into the high matters of king and parliament. It may seem odd that one like me, who grew up in the shadow of such large matters as the execution of one king and the exile and return of another, had stayed so ignorant of her own times. But our village was far from any important road or vital strong point, and our men were valued more for the delving of lead than the firing of it. So all these great events barely lapped at the foot of our mountain and never caught any of us in their flow, until the matter of how and with whom we prayed.

  Mr. Stanley was a sincere man, uncommonly gentle for a Puritan and no fanatic, but still his Sunday had been a severe Sabbath and his church had been a cheerless place, innocent of lace or polished brass and stinting even in the beauty of its prayers. Not long after his protest, a law passed saying that dissenting clergy should keep at least five miles from their old parishes, so that they might not stir up differences. Another law prescribed harsh penalties—fines and prison and even transportation—for all meetings of more than five persons for any worship save that of Common Prayer. Accordingly, Mr. Stanley moved from the rectory and left the village, and we were without a resident priest for almost two years, until the Mompellions came. By then, Mr. Stanley’s wife had died, leaving him alone among strangers. It was not in the Mompellions’ nature to turn the old man away from the place and people he best knew. I do not know what words were said or what pacts made, but one day he was amongst us again, having slipped quietly back into a croft on the high farm of the Billings, a nonconformist family. By the time the Plague arrived amongst us, he had been returned here for almost a year, an old man who kept his own counsel, lived very private and stayed well clear of village affairs. And if two or even three times five souls gathered from time to time in the Billings’ parlor, none of us were inclined to inquire the purpose for it.

  But now, it seemed, Mr. Mompellion had sought out Mr. Stanley. It was not until Sunday that I was able finally to know why. Mr. Mompellion climbed the pulpit steps, and instead of the frown that had creased his brow all week, his face that morning looked serene. And so he launched into the sermon that sealed our fates, and yet he was more than halfway into it before anyone in the church realized where he was leading us.

  “ ‘Greater love no man hath than this, that he lay down his life for a friend.’ ” He said the familiar words and then dropped his head, letting the fragme
nt of text hover in a silence so lengthy that I worried he had forgot what next he purposed to say. But when he looked up, his face was alight and wreathed in such a smile that the church felt suddenly warmer. His words flowed then, cadenced as a poem. He spoke with passion about God’s love and the sufferings His son had endured for our sake, and he held every single one of us in his gaze, making us feel the power of that love and reminding us of how it had fallen, in our time, upon each of us. He intoxicated us with his words, lifting and carrying us away into a strange ecstasy, taking each of us to that place where we kept our sweetest memories.

  And then, finally, he approached his point. Were we not bound to return this love to our fellow humans? Even to lay down our own lives, if that was what God asked of us? He had not, until then, mentioned the Plague, and I realized with a surprise that for the half hour he’d been speaking, I had not thought of it, who had thought of nothing else in many weeks.

  “Dear brothers and sisters,” he said then, his voice bathing us in affection, “we know that God sometimes has spoken to His people in a terrible voice, by visiting dread things upon them. And of these things, Plague—this venom in the blood—is one of the most terrible. Who would not fear it? Its boils and its blains and its great carbuncles. Grim Death, the King of Terrors, that marches at its heels.

  “Yet God in His infinite and unknowable wisdom has singled us out, alone amongst all the villages in our shire, to receive this Plague. It is a trial for us, I am sure of it. Because of His great love for us, He is giving us here an opportunity that He offers to very few upon this Earth. Here, we poor souls of this village may emulate Our Blessed Lord. Who amongst us would not seize such a chance? Dear friends, I believe we must accept this gift. It is a casket of gold! Let us plunge in our hands to the elbows and carry away these riches!”

  He dropped his voice then, as if to let us in on a great secret. “There are some who would say that God sends us this thing not in love, but in rage. They will say Plague is here because we have earned it in our sinning. For is not the first Plague in all of human history the one that God sent to smite Egypt? Did not Pharaoh disobey God, and was his mighty kingdom not laid waste for it? And in the dark of night, when our firstborn is snatched from us”—here, he paused, his gaze moving across the many pews between us until his eyes, bright and glistening, looked straight into mine—“at such a time, it is easier to believe in God’s vengeance than His mercy.

  “But I do not think God sends us this Plague in anger. I do not think we here in this village are Pharaoh in His eyes. Oh, yes, surely we have sinned in our lives, each one of us, and many times. Do we not find Satan like a lapwing crying before us with enticement and vainglory, to draw our mind far away from the God of our salvation? Friends, all of us, in our time, have listened to the false music of those cries. There is none here who has not followed them—and fallen. None whose mind has not been tossed with corrupt fancies.

  “But I think our God does not send this Plague as a punishment for our sins. No!” His eyes traveled across the congregation, searching out the miners and their families, and addressing himself to them, particularly. “Like the ore that must be melted all to liquid to find the pure metal, so must we be rendered in the fiery furnace of this disease. And as the smith tends his furnace, all through the night if need be, to secure the valuable ore within, so is God here, near to us, nearer, perhaps than He has ever come, or ever will come, in all our lives.” Five pews in front of me, I saw the white head of Alun Houghton, Barmester to our miners, coming slowly erect on his massive shoulders as the rector’s words penetrated his understanding. The rector seized the moment and stretched out his hand toward him. “Therefore, let us not flinch, let us not fail! Let us choose not the dull luster of our base state when God would have us shine!”

  “Amen!” Houghton’s gravelly voice rumbled. A scattering of “Amens” followed from the other miners.

  The rector turned his eyes then to where the Hancocks, the Merrills, the Highfields, and the other farming families sat. “My friends, the plough that now runs deep in your furrows did not always do so. You know that many backs broke to wrest that soil from clutching root and stubborn stump; you know that hands bled, dragging forth the rocks that sit arrayed now as the fences that mark out worked land from wilderness. Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and, yes, loss. Each one of you has cried for the crop blighted by drought or pest. Cried, as you did what you knew you must, and ploughed each plant under, so that the soil could be renewed in the hope of the better season coming. Cry now, my friends, but hope, also! For a better season will follow this time of Plague, if only we trust in God to perform His wonders!”

  He looked down then and wiped his hand across his brow. The church was utterly still. We were all of us entirely concentrated on the pulpit and the tall man who stood there, his head bent as if gathering the strength to go on.

  “Friends,” he said at last, “some of us have the means to flee. Some of us have relatives nearby who would gladly shelter us. Others have connections upon whom we could prevail. Some few of us have means to go far from here—anywhere we choose.”

  My concentration broke as the Bradfords shifted in the foremost pew. “But how would we repay the kindness of those who received us, if we carried the seeds of the Plague to them? What burden would we bear if, because of us, hundreds die who might have lived? No! Let us accept this Cross. Let us carry it in God’s Holy Name!” The rector’s voice had been gaining in power till it rang like a bell. But now he dropped back into a tone of intimacy, like a lover addressing his beloved. “Dear friends, here we are, and here we must stay. Let the boundaries of this village become our whole world. Let none enter and none leave while this Plague lasts.”

  He turned then to the material particulars of his scheme for our voluntary beseigement, to which it seemed he had already given much thought. He said he had written to the earl at Chatsworth House not so many miles distant, setting out his proposal and asking aid. The earl had undertaken that if we sealed ourselves off he would provision us all from his own purse with our basic needs in food, fuel, and medicines. These would be left at the Boundary Stone at the southeastern edge of the village, to be collected only when the carters who had carried them were well clear. Those who wished to purchase other items would leave payment either in a shallow, spring-fed well to the north of Wright’s Wood, where the flow of the water would carry away any Plague seeds, or in holes gouged into the Boundary Stone that would be kept filled with vinegar, which was said to kill contagion.

  “Beloved, remember the words of the Prophet Isaiah: ‘In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and trust shall be your strength.’ ” He paused and repeated the phrase: “In quietness and trust,” letting the words sink to a whisper, and from the whisper into silence. “In quietness and trust ... Is that not how we should all wish to be?” Yes, we nodded, of course it was. But then, his voice came back, ringing into the very silence he had created. “But the Israelites did not trust, they were not quiet. Isaiah tells us this. He says: ‘And you would not, but you said: No! We will speed upon horses ... we will ride upon swift steeds ... A thousand shall flee at the threat of one, at the threat of five you shall flee, till you are left like a flag staff on the top of a mountain, like a signal on a hill.’ Well, my beloved, I say we shall not flee like the faithless Israelites! No, not at the threat of five, or of ten, or even of a score of deaths. For loneliness awaits those who flee. Loneliness—like a flag staff on a mountain. Loneliness and shunning. The shunning that has ever been the leper’s lot. Loneliness, shunning, and fear. Fear will be your only faithful companion, and it will be with you day and night.

  “Beloved, I hear you in your hearts, saying that we already fear. We fear this disease and the death it brings. But you will not leave this fear behind you. It will travel with you wheresoever you fly. And on your way, it will gather to itself a host of greater fears. For if you sicken in a
stranger’s house, they may turn you out, they may abandon you, they may lock you up to die in dreadful solitude. You will thirst, and none shall quench you. You will cry out, and your cries will fade into empty air. For in that stranger’s house, all you will receive is blame. For surely they will blame you, for bringing this thing to them. And they will blame you justly! And they will heap their hatred upon you, in the hour when your greatest need is love!”

  The voice eased now, and soothed: “Stay here, in the place that you know, and in the place where you are known. Stay here, upon that piece of Earth whose golden grain and gleaming ore has ever nourished you. Stay here, and here we will be for one another. Stay here, and the Lord’s love will be here for us. Stay here, my dearest friends. And I promise you this: while I am spared no one in this village will face their death alone.”

  He advised us then to reflect and pray and said that shortly he would ask us for our decision. He came down from the pulpit and went amongst us with Elinor beside him, radiant and kindly, speaking quietly to any who would have words with him. Some families stayed in their pews, their heads bent in prayerful reflection. Others rose and wandered restlessly, forming into clusters here and there, seeking advice from friends and loved ones. It was only then that I noticed that Thomas Stanley had entered the church and taken a place in the very last pew. Now, he came forward, speaking softly to all those who had been, or secretly still were, of a precisian leaning and who perhaps had difficulty in trusting Mr. Mompellion. Quietly, the old man was making clear his full support of the younger.