Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  And so he worked on, until the light failed. And then he sent word to the various houses that they might bring their dead for the burials. It was a sorry procession. No one was troubling with coffins now; there were no more planed timbers to be had nor time to fashion them. Families simply carried their loved ones to their graves, or, if they were not strong enough, dragged them thither with a blanket slung beneath the armpits of the corpse. Mr. Mompellion prayed over each one by candlelight and then helped in piling the soil back into the graves. While he toiled in the churchyard, pleas came from two more families that he attend them in their extremity. I would have kept the messages from him until morning, but Elinor said it would not be right to do so. When he came in, she carried the heated water for his toilet and fetched him fresh linens while I prepared a nourishing meal. He ate quickly and then put on his coat and rode off to keep his word.

  “He cannot go on like this,” I said to Elinor as the sound of Anteros’s hoofbeats faded.

  “I know it,” she replied softly. “His body is strong, but I fear that the strength of his will far exceeds it. It can drive him to do what.any normal man cannot do. Believe me, I have seen this, for better and for worse.”

  THE RECTOR GOT little sleep that night, and the next day brought no respite. In the morning I went with him to the Merrill farm, where Jakob lay dying. Brand, who had lived with the Merrills since his return with Maggie Cantwell, had taken five-year-old Seth away to the sheepfold, to do some necessary chores but also to get the boy out of sight of his father’s agony. Charity, exhausted by doing more labor, night and day, than should ever be meted out to a girl of ten, had fallen asleep on her pallet in the corner. As I patted out oatcakes for the children’s supper, the rector spoke quietly with Jakob Merrill, asking him gently if there was aught he wished to say or have done before he might become too ill to think clearly.

  Merrill’s face was florid with fever and he got each breath by terrible effort. “Rector Mompellion, I know it is unseemly to fear death, but I do fear it. I fear it, for I have sinned in my life. My wife, Maudie, who lies in her grave these last five years ... I have sinned against her, and I fear I will be punished for it ...” In his agitation, he had lifted himself up from his pallet, but the effort sent him into spasms of coughing. The rector reached out for him and raised him up, holding him close and letting him lean across his shoulder as Merrill tried to clear his rattling chest. The rector didn’t even seem to notice the sputum and spittle that splattered his coat. When the spasm passed, he eased Jakob down again upon the bed. I handed the rector a mug of cool water, and he cradled Jakob’s head as he held it up to the man’s dry lips.

  Jakob Merrill closed his eyes, wincing with pain. “Rector, you did not know Maudie, for she died birthing Seth before you came to us. Maudie was a good woman, she was. But I never cared enough for her. I worked her to a raveling, even when she was with child. I never gave her kind words or thought of her ease. Instead, I left her alone here to do all the toil while I took the pence her labor earned and spent it buying ale for doxies who let me lie with them. And when God took Maudie from me, I felt it was His wrath on me for my neglect. And I knew I deserved it. But now, if He takes me, too, He punishes not me, but my children. I don’t want Charity married off hastily as her mother was to me, married off to a lout too young to know what affection is, what duty is ... And little Seth ... I would not see him in the poor house, but who will care for him here? Charity is a capable girl, but a ten-year-old cannot be expected to raise a brother and run a farm ...”

  Mr. Mompellion laid his large hand tenderly upon Jakob Merrill’s face. “Hush now, for I hear your concerns.” His voice was low and even. “And now I tell you this: do not dwell any more on things in the past that you cannot change. Who made man frail of the flesh? Who made our lusts, our low ways and our high? Did not God? Is not He the author of it all? The appetites we have all come from Him; they have been with us since Eden. If we slip and fall, He understands our weakness. Did not mighty King David lust, and was he not driven through his lust to do great wrong? And yet God loved David, and gave us, through him, the glory of the Psalms. So, too, does God love you, Jakob Merrill.”

  Prone upon the pallet, Merrill gave a sigh and closed his eyes as the rector continued: “When God took your wife to him, he punished you, it is true, but her He did not punish. No! He crowned Maude Merrill with a crown of righteousness. He freed her from all toil and tiredness. And, Jakob, He bathed her in boundless love, so much love that her need for the love that you withheld has been requited. Your wife’s sufferings have been washed away long since, washed away and forgotten. And she has seen your remorse and knows your feelings to her now, so that when you meet in Heaven you may join hands in that perfect union that God means marriage to be. So think of this no more-or rather, think of it with joy.

  “As for your children, why do you not commit them to the care of God, whose love for them is mightier and more constant than yours? Believe this, and then you will see that God has already made provision for your children. Did He not send young Brand to you, and did you not take him in to your home in his need? Do you not see God’s hand at work there? I do, Jakob. For now, in your need, Brand is here for you: a good young man who has shown much character and has no place of his own in the world. Make him part of your family, Jakob, so that he might stay on here as he is, and so you will give to Charity and Seth an older brother to care for them.”

  Jakob Merrill’s hand tightened on the rector’s, and his brow unknotted. He asked the rector then to help him make a last will to bind such an arrangement, and the rector pulled out the parchment he always carried upon his person, as he often was asked to write wills these days. It took much time, for Jakob Merrill was failing fast and having great difficulty both marshaling his thoughts and forcing his voice, but the rector’s patience seemed limitless. While he had been talking to Jakob Merrill, the fluency of his speech and the clarity of his expression had belied the fact that he had been attending at deathbeds since dawn. The rector called me over to witness Jakob Merrill put his mark; where the rector’s clear hand ended, Jakob struggled to inscribe a faint and wobbly cross. It was only when I took up the parchment to blot it and set it carefully away, that I saw the telltales of the rector’s exhausted mind.

  “In ye name of God, amen. I”—here Mr. Mompellion, in a moment of mental darkness, had written his own name instead of Jakob Merrill’s and then had scored it out with a series of loops before inscribing the name of the farmer—“Jakob Merrill in ye county of Derby, yeoman, on this”—here the rector’s mind had failed him again, for he had left the date blank, probably because he wasn’t able to recall it—“being sick and weak but in good memory, do make this my last Will and Testament. First, I bequeath my soul into ye hands of God who made me, depending my salvation upon the account of Jesus Christ my redeemer. I give all my estate, house, land, goods, and chattels, moveable and unmoveable, quick and dead, that it has pleased God, to endow me with, to my son Seth, my daughter Charity, and to Brand Rigney, formerly servant of Bradford Hall, whom I do assign as my heir equally with mine own natural children in the hope that he will dwell with them as a brother and be guardian over them.”

  I did not say anything to the rector about the missing date, for it was not for me to be reading Jakob Merrill’s private will, and I doubt that Mr. Mompellion would have given it to me if he had known that I could read at all. Indeed, I did not purpose to read the words; it was only that my eyes could not prevent me as I blotted the document and set it in the tin box that Merrill had pointed to. Charity was stirring in her corner then, so I warmed the child some caudle, instructed her how to complete the making of the stew I had begun, and set out with the rector.

  Elinor met us, her face creased with concern. Two more bodies awaited their graves. Mr. Mompellion sighed and shrugged off his coat. He did not wait even for some nourishment but went straight to the churchyard.

  I let go of my pride then, and took my cour
age into my hands instead. Without telling Elinor what I proposed, I trudged out to my father’s croft, hoping that the day was young enough to find him sober still. Happily, Aphra and her children remained in health, although, as always, the little ones looked thin and ill fed, for my father and Aphra both liked better the act that led to the begetting of children than they did the providing for them.

  I noticed that Steven, their eldest boy, had an angry welt across his cheek, and I did not need to ask how it had come there. I carried some of the herbs we had been preparing and showed Aphra how to make them up into the tonic that Elinor and I had devised. My father, who had not yet risen from his pallet, stirred himself as we talked. He rose, cursing his aching head and asking me if I had brought a draught for him as well. I held my tongue and forbore from saying that the cure for his malady was a little continence, for I wanted his help that day, and I would be hard pressed to get it if I angered him.

  Speaking with a respectful deference that I did not feel, I explained the plight at the rectory, and, flattering him about his great strength and fortitude, beseeched his help. As I had expected, he cursed and said he had more than enough work to lay his hand to, and that it would do my “prating priest” a power of good to get his white hands dirty. So I offered him his choice of my lambs for that Sunday’s dinner and another at the new moon. These were generous terms, and though my father cursed and haggled and thumped the table till the platters rattled, he and I eventually came to an agreement. And so I bought Mr. Mompellion a respite from the graveyard. At least, I told myself, my father’s clemmed children might get a portion of the meat.

  THE WEEKS of that cold season wore me to a wraith. There were demands upon me every minute. You may note I do not say every waking minute, for sometimes I was wanted night and day, and I snatched at sleep as I could, at the bedside of the dying or upon a stool propped against a wall in the rectory kitchen. Yuletide passed and we barely marked it. At Shrovetide, I delivered Kate Talbot of a healthy baby girl and, as I put the babe into her arms, I hoped it might ease her grief over the loss of her husband. A week later, I midwifed Lottie Mowbray, a poor and simple woman who yet managed to deliver her baby with the least complaint or difficulty I had yet encountered: Every day we had occasion to bless the earl of Chatsworth. As he had pledged to do before we undertook the obligations of our oath, he continued to provision us. Every day, the carters came with their loads to the Boundary Stone, or to the little spring we had come to call Mompellion’s Well. People like Kate Talbot, who had lived by her husband’s skilled work, or Lottie and her husband, Tom, who struggled to eke an existence even in good times, would have starved without the earl’s provisioning. But from the Bradfords, safe in their-Oxfordshire haven, whom we might have expected to send some token of concern, we received neither alms of any sort nor even kindly word.

  At the rectory, the kitchen had begun to look like an alchemist’s den, swathed in fragrant steam. Chopped leaves bled green onto my well-scrubbed table, turning the bleached wood a grassy color. I set my morning to the rhythmic thump of my own knife, and its tattoo became, to me, the hopeful music of healing. Elinor had some knowledge of this kind, and she wore her eyes red trying to glean more from diverse books upon the subject.

  But chiefly we learned by doing, first trying one way and then another to extract a plant’s virtues. Some leaves I seeped in slick and viscous oil, some into sharp-smelling spirit, some into plain, clear water. Then I waited to see which medium would yield the best results. Elinor worked beside me many mornings, her fine skin staining easily with plant tannins till sometimes it looked as if she were wearing pale brown gloves. With boiling water and our store of dried herbs, we made teas; when they were too bitter we dribbled thick spoons of honey to turn them into syrups. We evaporated some teas until they were potent decoctions, for we found that many people would take a little of a potion sooner than a lot. And then I chopped again, bundles of roots wrested out of the frosty ground. Some I packed in crocks and poured in oil enough to steep them. When I judged the plant had given up its virtue I plunged my hands into the silky pulp and kneaded in a piece of beeswax until I had a drawing salve to smooth on angry Plague sores. We saw our work as having two natures: the one, to ease the suffering of the afflicted, and the other, more important but far less certain in its outcome, to bolster up the defenses of the well.

  Elinor and I distributed our preparations and tried to show people how to find and recognize the new shoots of the wild leaves that they should eat to shore up their health. We learned much about how to ease common ailments and injuries, and though we were loath to turn aside from our main work, somehow we found ourselves sought out for the kinds of preparations the Gowdies once so readily supplied. After a little time, we began to learn some of what they had known: that a compound of mullein and rue, sweet cicely and mustard oil makes an excellent syrup for quieting a cough; that boiled willow bark eases aches and fevers; that betony, bruised for a green plaster, speeds mending of wounds and scrapes. There were some satisfactions in this work, bringing as it did comfort, ease, and the healings of small hurts.

  But for what we most wished for, we had to wait. We knew it might be many weeks before we could hope to see, from our ef forts, some abatement in the death roll. As the days lengthened, we spent much time at the Gowdies’, trying to understand the layout of the physick garden and what was sown there, studying the small packets of saved seeds to determine which would yield what plant, readying the soil to assure the continued supply of our strengthening herbs.

  Only on Sunday did we cease from the constant round of gathering and gardening, making and visiting. And of all days of the week, it was Sunday that I now dreaded. What had been my favorite day was now accursed to me, for it was on Sunday, in church, that our failure to arrest the Plague’s ravages was apparent in the emptying pews and missing faces. There were also, I should say, some few new faces. For Mr. Stanley had commenced to attend Mr. Mompellion’s services ever since the Sunday Oath, and in the weeks since, the Billings family and some others from among the nonconformists had begun to come as well. They did not join in all the hymns, nor did they. follow the words of the Book of Common Prayer, but that they gathered with us at all was a wonder, and I was not the only one who seemed glad of it.

  It was on the first Sunday in March that Michael Mompellion surrendered to the inevitable and closed the church. He stood in the pulpit that morning, his knuckles white on the oak, straining with the effort to support himself. Elinor had insisted that I move up and share her pew, since I was, she said, now a part of the rectory family. So I was close enough to see the exhausted tremor in his body and the lines etched in his face as he struggled to command his voice.

  “My dear friends,” he said. “God has tried us sorely these months. You have met His test with courage, and be sure you will be rewarded for it. I had dared to hope, we all had hoped, that the test would not be so long nor so hard as it has been, as it continues to be. But who can presume to read the mind of God? Who can understand the intricacy of His great design? For God is subtle ; He does not point always at what He intends, but is more dark, and we must seek His face and entreat Him that He will, in His mercy, show it to us. Beloved, do not lose sight, during this our search, of God’s great love and tenderness. For all of you who love your children know that affliction, too, can be a means of evidencing your care for them. Who but a negligent father allows his children to grow up unguided by sometime chastisements? And yet the good father does not knit his brow in rage at such times, but deals the necessary penances with love in his eyes, in hope of his children’s betterment.”

  He paused then and looked down, trying to gather his strength. “My dear friends, soon God sets us a new test, perhaps the hardest we have yet faced. For soon the weather here will begin to warm, and this Plague-we know from the past accounts of those who have lived through it—this Plague thrives upon warmth. We can hope, we can pray, that it has spent its fury here, but we cannot count upo
n it. My beloved friends, we must gird ourselves now for the possibility of the worse times that may be coming to us. And we must make our dispositions accordingly.”

  There were moans as he spoke, from the people scattered in the church. Someone started weeping. As he said he must close the church, Mr. Mompellion began weeping, too, his exhaustion making his tears invincible. “Do not despair!” he said, struggling to smile. “For a church is not a building, merely! We shall still have our church, but we will have it in the midst of God’s own creation. We will meet and pray together under the ceiling of Heaven, in Cucklett Delf, where the birds shall be our choir, the stones our altar, the trees our spire! In the Delf, friends, we may stand at safe distance from one another, so that the ill do not infect the well.”

  Despite the tenor of his words, his face became more haggard as he came to the part of his message that would fall the hardest on our ears. “Beloved, as well as our church, we must close our churchyard, for it has become impossible to bury our dead in a timely way, and with the coming of the warm weather, what is now unseemly will become unsafe. Beloved, we must shoulder the grim task of burying our own dead as soon as we may, in whatever near ground we can ...”

  There were howls now and terrified shouts of “No!”

  He raised his hands high, calling for quiet. “Beloved, I know what you fear. Believe me, I know it. You fear that God will not find those who are laid down to rest outside of hallowed ground. You fear that your loved ones will be lost to you in eternity. But this day, I say to you, you have hallowed all the ground of this village! You have hallowed it by your sacrifice in this place! God will find you! He will gather you to Him! He is the Good Shepherd, and He will not abandon even the least of His flock!”

  The strain was too much for him then. He lowered his hands to grasp the pulpit railing but missed his grip. There was no more strength left in him. He slid to the floor in a faint.