Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  Brand shuddered then. “Lord forgive me, I ran off and left her. I been gone out from Bakewell since I was a small boy, and I be changed so much since then that no one now would know me. So I thought if I were not with Maggie, happen I might get to my kin in safety.” But Brand had not gone far when his own goodness drew him back. “I could hear the yelling, see, and I needed to know if she were safe. She’d been good to me in that hard house—oh, time or two she whipped me with a wooden spoon if she didn’t like my way of working, but many a time she stood for me, too. So I crept back again and came up behind a vegetable-seller’s stall. Then I seen what were happening. They’d taken all the bad apples cast into the pig trough,and were hurling them at Maggie. They’d started yelling, chanting: ‘Out! Out! Out!’ And believe me, she were trying to get out of there as fast as she might, but you know she don’t move swift, and with all the yelling she were getting confused and staggering first one way, then t’other. I went to her then and grabbed her arm, and we made a run for it as they kept pelting us. And that’s when she were planet-struck. She just sort of gave way, folded up, like her right leg suddenly were made of string. ‘Lord help me,’ she said, ‘I feel like a lead pig is tied to me foot.’ And ’twere the last words I had from her. She crumbled up right there in the middle of the roadway. And that set the mob off into an even bigger to-do. One or two of the children started hurling stones, and I thought if they all took that up it’d be the finish of us.

  “You’re not going to like it too well, Rector Mompellion, when I tell what I did then. I stole the barrow from the nearest stall and somehow I found the strength to pile her in it. The barrow man cursed me to Hell, but he didn’t give chase. Perhaps he reckoned I’d Plagued the cart by touching it. We been on the way here ever since. Scared to stop, I was, lessen another mob formed to get us.” He shivered then in his exhaustion and began to sob.

  Michael Mompellion reached an arm around the boy’s heaving shoulders and held him tightly. “You did very well, Brand, even to taking the cart. Set your heart at rest over it. One day, after this travail is passed, you may return it. But think no more on it until that day comes. Be sure that you did right. You could have run and sought your own safety, and yet your loyal heart,taught you to do otherwise.” He sighed then. “This Plague will make heroes of us all, whether we will or no. But you are the first of them.”

  Charity had brought a mug of the mutton broth for Maggie, and the two of us tried to prop her up and spoon a little into the good side of her mouth. But it proved futile; her tongue, it seemed, could not lift itself to steer the liquid down her throat. Broth came dribbling out and down her chin. I tried sopping a little piece of oatcake in the broth, but that worked no better, for the poor woman couldn’t chew. A fat tear formed itself in her good eye and ran down to join the strings of drool on her chin. Poor Maggie! Food had been her livelihood and her life. What would become of her if she couldn’t eat?

  “God damn the Bradfords!” The words slipped out of my mouth before I knew I’d uttered them. Rector Mompellion looked at me, but not with the rebuke I’d expected.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Anna,” he said. “I believe He already has.”

  THE CARE OF Maggie Cantwell seemed too big a burden for poor Jakob Merrill, struggling as he was in that one-room croft to rear a girl of ten and a boy not yet six. But he did say he would give Brand a roof until the boy was able to find a better. Mr. Mompellion said he would bring Maggie to the rectory, but I thought that Mrs. Mompellion would exhaust herself if the load of nursing so complete an invalid now were laid upon all the other heavy tasks she had accepted. I said I would have Maggie at my cottage if I could bespeak some more suitable conveyance to bring her there. I did not think that in her present state and circumstance she would be too nice to lie where the Plague had passed by. We aimed to leave her at the Merrills’ till the next morning, so that she could benefit from a full night’s rest and warmth.

  As Mr. Mompellion mounted Anteros to return to the rectory, I set off on foot in the other direction, to the Miner’s Tavern, to see if their horse-trap might be had for her conveyance the next day. It was so cold on the walk that my breath formed little clouds before my face, and I found myself trotting to warm my blood. The Miner’s Tavern stands in a very old building, perhaps the oldest in our village save the church. But where the church is square and proud, the tavern is a strange, bulbous thing, squatting low under its thatch. It is the only building of any size here that is not made of stone but of lathe laid on timber, rendered all over with horse-haired mortar. Over the years, the timbers have buckled and bowed, so that the front of the building protrudes now like the rounded bellies of the men who take too much ale there. Like the church, the tavern is a gathering place, and an important one, for as well as sheltering the pleasures of those who like a pot, it also hosts the gatherings of the Body of the Mine and the miner’s Barmote Court, where all matters vital to the delving and marketing of our ore are decided.

  The tavern has both a large court and a taproom, ample in area and yet so low of ceiling that most of the miners have to bend their heads to enter it. On such a bitter day it was to the taproom that I hurried. Inside, a good fire toasted the air. There was a fair crowd for a weekday morning, and amongst them was my father. It appeared that he had been at the pot for some time.

  “Here, daughter, you look colder than a witch’s tit! Let me buy you an ale to put some color in your cheeks. Ale is the warmest lining of a naked man’s coat, eh?”

  I shook my head, saying I yet had much work to do at the rectory. I did not ask why he was not about his own work, who had four mouths depending on his earning.

  “Ahh, God’s blood, girl! It’s your father who invites you. And you can take back some wisdom to that prating priest of your’n. You tell him you learned this day that there’s more good in a cask of ale than in the four Gospels. You tell him that malt does more to justify God’s ways to man than the Bible! Aye, you tell him that. You tell him you stayed to learn a thing or two at the knee of your father!”

  Why I said this next I do not know. I have said that I am not a prude, and even if I were, my life with my father should have taught me better than to upbraid him before his friends. But my mind, as I have said, was brimful of Scripture, and some lines from Ephesians just then seemed to issue of their own accord in response to his blasphemy. “ ‘Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying.’ ” I had learned this off many years earlier, long before I knew what “edifying” meant.

  The men around him had had a good guffaw at his utterance, but at my stony response, they turned their laughter on him.

  “Eh, Joss Bont, your whelp knows how to nip!” said one, and when I saw the look on my father’s face I wanted to.hush them all. My father is a roguing knave, even sober. But with the drink in him he becomes dangerous. I could see we were approaching that stage as his color rose and his mouth turned from grin to snarl.

  “Don’t think you’re too good now, with your fancy quothings, just o’ cause that priest and his missus make much o’ye,” and at that he grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me down to kneel in front of him. The filth of his fingers left smears of grime on my whisk. I stared at my father’s breeches and noted that they smelled unclean.

  “See? I said you’d learn at me knee, and you’ll damn well do as I tell ye. Someone fetch me a branks to muzzle this scold!”

  The men laughed drunkenly, and the fear rose in me. I saw my mother’s face framed in the iron bars, the desperate look in her wild eyes, the inhuman sounds that came from her throat as the iron bit pressed hard against her tongue. He had clapped the branks on her after she cursed him in public for his constant drurikehness. She had worn the helmet a night and a day as my father led her around, taunting her, yanking hard on the chain so that the iron sliced her tongue. The sight of her with her head in that fearful cage had terrified me, tiny child that I was, and I’d run off and hidden myself
. When my father finally drank himself into insensibility, some kindly person cut the leather strap that bound the thing to her jaws. By then her tongue was raw, and it swelled so that it was days before she got her speech back.

  The pressure of my father’s hands weighed on my shoulders, but somehow I felt as if they were at my neck, choking me. The back of my throat tightened, and I wanted to retch. There was a gob of spittle forming in my mouth, and my impulse was to heave it all over him. But I knew him well enough to reason that if I did so in the sight of his tavern friends, he would beat me senseless. One reason that I do not warm to Aphra as I should is that she merely stood by and allowed it to happen, time after time, when I was a child. The only succour she would offer would be to raise her voice if he struck me on the face, “For we’ll never marry her off if you mar her there.”

  Years later, when Sam Frith had taken me out of that unhappy croft, his hands, caressing me, found the nobbly place near my right shoulder where the bones at the base of my neck had knit awry. I made the mistake of confiding to him how my father, in a drunken rage, had flung me against the wall when I was about six years old. Sam was slow in everything, even to anger. He made me tell him then of all the other beatings, and as I went on, I could feel him, lying in the dark beside me, growing rigid with rage. He got up off the pallet when I had done recounting the last of it, and he did not even tarry to put on his boots, but walked out the door barefoot with the boots dangling from his hand. He had gone directly to my father. “This is from a child who was too small to do it for herself,” he said, and he placed his big fist in my father’s face, knocking him flat in a blow.

  But I had no Sam now. I felt a sudden hot gush down my thigh. Fear had made my body betray me, just as when I was a child. Mortified, I crumpled at my father’s feet and, in a tiny voice, begged his pardon. He laughed then, his pride saved by my perfect humiliation. The pressure of his hands eased, and he landed the toe of his boot into my side, just hard enough to push me over into my own mess. I pulled off my pinafore and sopped up as much of the puddle as I could, and then I rushed from the room, too abashed to seek out the innkeeper to arrange for his trap. I ran to my home, weeping and shaking, and as soon as I had the door closed behind me, I stripped every soiled garment and commenced to scrub at myself so roughly that the skin of my thighs turned livid. I was still tearful and trembling when little Seth arrived at my door to fetch me back to Maggie.

  As soon as I saw her, the contemplation of her predicament shamed me out of my self-pity. Maggie Cantwell would need no cart in the morning. While I was at the Tavern, she had been struck by another spasm that had turned her good side useless. She lay now in a deep, unnatural-seeming sleep from which no word or touch could rouse her. I reached for her hand, where it lay on the coverlet all twisted in upon itself, shapeless, as if it had been boned. I straightened her fingers—strong from the kneading of dough and the lifting of heavy pans, scarred here and there with the white marks of old knife-nicks or the pink pucker of a healed burn. As I had at George Viccars’s bedside, and again at Mem Gowdie’s, I thought of all the varied skills that reposed in Maggie Cantwell. This big woman knew how to hack a haunch out of a side of venison but also how to fashion fancies of the finest spun sugar. She was an economical cook who never wasted so much as a pea pod but boiled it in the stockpot to extract whatever nourishment it might yet contain. Why, I wondered, was God so much more prodigal with his Creation? Why did He raise us up out of the clay, to acquire good and expedient skills, and then send us back so soon to be dust when we yet had useful years before us? And why should this good woman lie here, in such extremity, when a man like my father lived to waste his reason in drunkenness?

  This time, I did not have many hours to dwell on these troubling questions. Maggie Cantwell was gone before midnight.

  The Poppies of Lethe

  HOW DO WE TUMBLE down a hill? A foot placed incau tiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. So it seems apt indeed to speak of the Fall. 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.

  Like most miners, Sam had many accidents before the one that took his life. Once, widening a scrin, he dropped a great toadstone that near to crushed his ankle. Mem Gowdie had set the shattered bone with such skill that all who’d seen the fracture were amazed that afterward he walked without a limp. But the setting had been difficult and she’d had to gouge many bone splinters in the doing, so she had sent Anys to fetch a poppy tincture that he might better bear her probing. She told me then that the poppy she used had been steeping six weeks in grog, and Sam, who did not like to drink but a little ale, winced as he swilled down the five spoonfuls she deemed he needed. Later, he said the dreams he had were the sweetest of his lifetime.

  The day after Elinor Mompellion and I delivered the Daniels’ baby, I had repented of my theft and taken the stolen phial of poppy to the rectory, meaning to somehow slip it back into Mrs. Mompellion’s whisket before its loss was noticed. But every time I had the opportunity, I lacked the will. In the end, I brought it home again and placed it guiltily in a pipkin. I did not have six weeks, nor any grog to make a tincture, but on the night that Maggie Cantwell died I stared at the small plug of tawny resin and wondered what dose it would take to secure a few sweet dreams. I pinched off a sticky morsel of the stuff and put it to my mouth, only to wince at the bitterness. In the end, I cut the plug in half, formed a piece into a lozenge and coated it all over with honey. I swallowed the whole with a swill of ale. Then I stoked the fire and sat staring into its meager wedge of light.

  Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral. One strand widened into a broad, swooping curve on which I could glide, drifting easily like a breeze-borne leaf. The zephyr that carried me was mild and warm, even as I soared in its currents high over the White Peak, breaking through the gray clouds and into a place where the sun so dazzled that I had to close my eyes. Somewhere, an owl hooted, and the note seemed to be pulled and stretched, endless, rich, like the rising call of a hunter’s horn, and then a score of horns, sounding all at once and in the sweetest harmony. The sun glinted off the serried instruments and then I could see the notes of music, molten, dripping like golden rain. Where they touched the ground, they did not scatter but gathered, leaping up again each upon the other. Walls rose, and soaring arches, building a shining city of fantastic towers, one growing out of the next like tight buds unfurling from a thousand various stems. The city was all white and gold, curving in a wide arc round a sea of sapphire. I looked down and saw myself drifting through the winding streets, a cloak billowing behind me. My children were cloaked also, and they gamboled on either side of me, merry little figures, clinging to my hands. On the high, white walls the sun blazed, beating and throbbing like the blows of a bell-clapper.

  I woke to the slow tolling of our church bell, ringing once again for the dead. A pale finger of winter light streamed through a frosty pane and full into my face, which lay pressed against the grit stone floor. I’d lain all night just as I’d landed when I slid from the stool, and my bones, aching from the cold, were so stiff I could barely ease myself upright. My mouth was dry as ashes and tasted as if I’d sucked a gall. I crept around, making up the fire and warming a posset with the slow, crabbed gestures of a crone.

  But my mind was more serene than it had been since that warm day—oh! so far away it now seemed—when I had sat nursing Tom with my toes in the brook and Jamie laughing beside me. By the slant of the light, I could tell I’d slept ten hours—the first unbroken sleep I could remember in an age. I scanned the shelf for the remaining piece of poppy resin and felt panic rise when I could not immediately find it. Stiff as I was, I fell to my hands
and knees, desperately groping between the gritstones to see where it might have fallen. When my hand closed upon it, I felt the relief of the acquitted. Carefully, I placed it back into the phial and hid it again into the pipkin. The thought that it was there, waiting for me, warmed my mind as the posset and the fire were just now beginning to warm my bones.

  When the water lost its chill, I washed my face and raked the tangles from my hair. I could not do much about the rumpled state of my tunic, but I pinned on a clean whisk and hands. The side of my face was still pocked from the imprint of the stone, so I rubbed both cheeks hard and hoped that the cold air would put some roses into them by the time I reached the rectory. As I stepped out into the street, I was clinging to the last wisps of my drugged serenity, as a man fallen into a well might hold fast to the few final threads of a fraying rope. I had not gone but six steps when I dropped again into the dark place of our new reality.

  Sally Maston, my neighbor’s girl of but five years, was standing in the doorway of her cottage, wide-eyed and silent, clutching her bloody groin. She was wearing a flimsy nightdress, the front of which bloomed like a rose from the blood of her burst Plague sore. I ran to her and gathered her up into my arms.

  “There, there,” I cried, “Where is your mummy?”

  She gave no answer but fell limp against me. I carried her through the doorway and back into the dim cottage. The fire had guttered in the night, and the room was frigid. Sally’s mother lay upon a pallet, pale and cold and many hours dead. Her father sprawled on the floor beside his wife, one hand twined in hers where it had fallen limply off the pallet. He was fevered, his mouth caked with sordes, and struggling for breath. In a wooden crib by the hearth, a baby mewled faintly.