Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  Elinor and I hastened forward, as the congregation erupted in cries and weeping. I do not know what would have happened if Mr. Stanley had not stepped forward then and bellowed, with a voice that belied his age, “Quiet!”

  In the hush, he delivered himself of a sermon that recalled my childhood to me. It was a terse denunciation of superstition, railing against the unreformed Papistry lingering within our hearts. “If your cow dies, and you do bury it in your field, do you plough it up again a year later because you forgot where you have laid it? No! No capable steward would make such a mistake. Well, then, if you do bury a beloved child, will you not hold in your mind every day of your life the memory of where it is that you laid him? Yes, you say, again. How could you forget? Then what foolishness leads you to think Almighty God will be in any great difficulty, in His infinite power and wisdom, to find these graves, these graves of His flock, these graves of His children, which we scatter now because we must.

  “Cease your feeble weeping! Lift up your voices! Let us sing Psalm Eighty-eight and recall we are not the only ones that God has tested. And then go to your homes in peace and gather next Sunday in Cucklett Delf.”

  Brand had rushed to Mr. Mompellion’s aid, and now he supported the dazed rector down the steps of the pulpit as the grief ravaged voices in the church began to sing that most desperate prayer for healing in sickness:“O Lord, my God, I call for help by day;

  I cry out in the night before thee ...

  I am reckoned among those that go down to the Pit ...

  Thou has caused my companions to shun me;

  Thou hast made me a thing of horror to them.

  I am shut in so that I cannot escape ...”

  The heavy church door thudded shut behind us, cutting off the doleful singing. But Michael Mompellion, staggering with Brand’s help toward the rectory, continued the Psalm in his cracked, weary whisper:“In the morning my prayer comes before thee.

  O Lord, why dost thou cast me off?

  Why dost thou hide thy face from me?”

  Inside the house, we realized that we would not easily get him up the stairs, so Elinor and I ran up to the bedchamber and brought down some quilts to make a pallet in the parlor. As Brand helped him down upon it, he was still reciting:“I suffer thy terrors; I am helpless.

  Thy wrath has swept over me;

  Thy dread assaults destroy me.”

  And with that he rolled over and gave himself up, at last, to the sleep of the exhausted.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON he roused himself to attend two deathbeds, but Elinor and I conspired to keep from him another piece of news that bore more nearly on the living. With so much death around us, it was hard to give any mind to the future, much less to those material matters that usually consume a person’s waking hours. But there was one child’s future that had been weighing very much on my thoughts, that of a nine-year-old girl named Merry Wickford.

  George and Cleath Wickford, a young Quaker couple with three children, had settled in an abandoned croft on the outskirts of the village some five years earlier. They were lowlanders, but their queer faith had caused them to be driven off from their established tenant farm, and while they didn’t get what you would say was a warm greeting here, at least they didn’t have to fear their ricks being fired or their poultry poisoned, as I heard had happened to them where they’d been. They had lived very poor till one summer night almost a year since. George Wickford, up late and pacing because he could not sleep for worry about how to feed his family, saw a great burning drake streaking its white path across the heavens. The lore in these parts is that a burning drake in the night sky marks out the lie of a lead seam below, so George Wickford did not even wait till dawn to hie himself to where he thought the drake’s path had passed across the moors. By morning he had dug out his cross in the turf to mark his claim, had cut his seven timbers for the stowe, and was whittling away at the wooden sprags to hold it upright. For a thousand years, so they say, the law has held that any man might claim himself a lead mine just so, no matter whose is the land it lies upon. He has nine weeks then to show the Barmester a dish of ore, and after, none may take his mine from him whilesoever he can keep it yielding, so long as he pays to the Crown that agreed portion of the ore known as the King’s Dish.

  George Wickford and his Cleath and their three young ones had delved tirelessly at the claim they named Burning Drake. At first they had to scrabble at the earth with only a much-mended pitchfork and ploughshare. The other miners, though not men to scorn at sky-signs, laughed at young George Wickford then, for there was nothing in the lay of the land to give sign of lead beneath, and no one had ever laid a pick anywhere near his claim. But Wickford had the last laugh, for well within the Barmester’s nine weeks he had his required dish of lead—and plenty more. What he had claimed turned out to be a pipe vein. These can be uncommonly rich, being as they are the mineral-lined caverns left behind from some long-ago underground stream. But they are hard to find, since they give no surface sign, and Wickford was considered a fellow blessed by fate.

  That was before the Plague struck. George Wickford had been among the first felled by the disease. Then it took his eldest son, a well-grown lad of twelve years. Cleath and her two younger children had struggled on at the delvings, but then the boy sickened and the mother, between tending him and waning in her own strength, failed to pull the required dish of ore from her mine in three weeks. David Burton, a neighboring miner, took his chance and placed the first nick upon the spindle of her stowe. There was much talk of the rights and wrongs of this in the village, with many censuring David and saying this was no time for such doing. Others defended him, arguing that the lead laws were the lead laws, and it wasn’t the first time sad misfortune had put a claim at risk. I wondered if people would have felt it more nearly if the Wickfords had been members of our church. But to be fair, even I was not sure what to think on the matter, for I had expected nothing different than the loss of our mine when Sam died. And yet the current times did seem to ask us all for every kind of sacrifice, so why not the sacrifice of this tradition, too?

  There was more talk at the end of the sixth week, when David Burton placed his second nick on what happened to be the very day Cleath Wickford laid her other son into his grave. They said the shock of it hastened her own death, for the Plague took her faster than we had yet seen it dispatch any person. She buried her boy in the morning, seeming as well as anyone in that state of , grief can be. By nightfall she was dead, her corpse covered in the rosy rings of Plague tokens. That left only the girl, the child whose name, Merry, now seemed like a cruel joke. She had been a jolly, kindly child, even when the family was counted with the town’s poorest, and it hurt me to see her suffer so much loss. She was left, moreover, in dreadful circumstances, for George Wickford had to his name little but the mine. Wickford had been a prudent man; he had ploughed the monies from his first dishes of lead into better delving tools and he had bought decent food and clothing for the family that had so long had to do without. But the real wealth of the mine was in the ground yet, and young Merry seemed set to lose it in a sennight if someone did not bring out a dish of lead for her. As the days slipped by, I badgered every miner I knew well enough to approach, asking if one of them wouldn’t do this kindness for an orphan. But the men, even the best of them, felt that their loyalty had to lie with David Burton, one of their own, rather than with a child whose family were neither Peakrill folk nor of their faith nor even long among the fraternity of miners. And so the weeks passed, and the child’s chances waned, until the end of the ninth week drew closer and finally just one more day stood between her and a bleak future in a poorhouse.

  I suppose I should have known better than to raise this case with Elinor. Or say, rather, that I should not have been surprised by the proposal that followed. “You know about the mines, Anna. You and I together shall get this dish out for the child.”

  In some ways, this suggestion landed on my ears even more unwelcome than her earl
ier proposal, that I midwife Mary Daniel. I had been afraid of the mines long before they claimed my Sam. I am not a creature for dim, slimy, airless places. I love what lives and grows on the surface of the Earth: I do not care to know the bowels of this hollow country. Though I am curious enough about most men’s lives, I never asked Sam to take me down the mine. Not that I am sure he would have done so, for though he never denied me anything I asked of him, miners are superstitious men, and many believe that each mine holds an elf sprite who is jealous of his miner and mislikes his womenfolk.

  But Elinor had that look upon her face that I now recognized too well. It is hard to describe to one who has not seen it, how her delicate features could set themselves so. I have read that the Greeks could carve marble images so that the very stone seemed to breathe. The accounts I read said that the stone, in these likenesses, passed for tender flesh. When I try to imagine this, I think that perhaps Elinor’s face, when she determined to do something she considered right, resembled one of these marbles. In any wise, I knew now we were headed to the Wickford mine whether I would or no.

  We set off early, for the mine was a long walk from the village. I heard Elinor speaking to Mr. Mompellion in the library, telling him that we were going out in search of necessary herbs. As she came from the room, I noticed that her translucent skin was all flushed. She saw me gazing at her, and her hand fluttered to her blushing throat.

  “Well, and so we shall, Anna, take satchels to gather likely plants on our way.” It was evident how much the slightest concealment or hint of falsehood cost her, even when the lie was fashioned only to preserve her husband’s welfare. “For you know very well,” she added, “that if he winds our true enterprise this day, he will insist on trying to do the labor himself, which would likely be the finish of him in his exhaustion.”

  We made our way first to the Wickford croft to tell the child Merry what we proposed. As we climbed up the muddy track to her croft, she flew out of her door, her little face lit with joy, and it struck me what an odd time we now lived in, that a child of such tender years should be left all alone in her dwelling. I had thought of bringing her back to bide with me, but had decided not to do so, for lonely and haphazard as her life now was, yet it seemed safer and more healthful for her out here, at some distance from the village, than to be brought into daily contact with Plague victims.

  . Somehow, she was managing to live, even thrive. She was a glowing child, even now, pink cheeked and dimpled, with a deep cleft in her chin and a tumble of dark curls that bounced as she skipped around us. Inside the croft, I saw the remains of that morning’s breakfast: on the table was a pipkin of lard, the imprints of thin fingers on the slippery white surface betraying that she’d been eating it by the fistful. There was an eggshell, from which she’d sucked the contents raw, and an onion, with bites out of it, that she’d eaten like an apple. Uncouth, perhaps, but sustaining.

  As we entered the tiny, earth-floored croft, she made haste to clear the table and asked us, most politely, to sit. I wondered at her self-possession and felt a stab that I had not made more of an effort to know her parents. They must have been fine people to impart such manners to their child.

  Elinor’s thoughts had been tending along a similar vein. “Your mother would be very proud of you, Merry, to see how bravely and how well you are managing here.”

  “Think thou so?” she said, her dark eyes earnest. “I thank thee for saying it. I feel that Mother watches me still, and Father, and my brothers, too. It brings me comfort to believe that they do, and my life here feels less lonely for it. I thank thee both for thinking to visit me on this day, for it is hard for me to face the loss of my family’s mine alone.”

  “We intend that you will not have to face any such thing,” I blurted, suddenly glad that Elinor had convinced me to do this.

  “At least,” Elinor added, “we hope that you may not.”

  Merry’s gratitude turned to delight as we explained that we had not come to visit, merely, but to try to save her mine. Plucky little person, she then insisted on coming to do her share. “You may help us, Merry,” I said, “as you helped your parents. You shall have much to do in sorting the bouse we raise into ores and deads and buddling the ore in the wash to rid it of the toadstone. We will rely on you to send word down to us when we have achieved a dish. And mind, it must be a good dish, for David Burton thinks he owns Burning Drake already, and he will be quick to hold the Barmester to an exact measure.” Merry nodded, knowing well the dimensions of the Barmester’s great dish. But Elinor looked puzzled, having never seen the thing, so I explained how it was sized to hold as much ore as an average man is capable to lift up off the ground.

  The child looked troubled still, protesting that she had been down in the mine before and wished to guide us. Elinor seemed - on the point of assenting, but I took her quickly to one side. To be down there with her father and mother, who knew every stone in the mine and had daily delved it, I whispered, was a different matter than being down in the dark with two such as we were, who knew just more than nothing of what we were about. “I would help this child, Elinor, not bury her!” Elinor agreed then and gently told the girl that we needed her above, in case aught went awry and we did not return to the surface by afternoon. Then, and only then, Elinor cautioned, was she to run straight to the rectory and tell Mr. Mompellion what we were about.

  When Sam died I had wrapped his tools in a piece of oiled cloth and set them away, meaning one day to give them to a needy miner. The Wickfords would have been the very ones to have gifted so, I realized with a pang, but my mind had been so much upon my own trials at the time they found their seam that I had forgot all about Sam’s idle kit and my intentions for it. Now, unwrapping the tools, I felt their heft in my hands. I thought of Sam’s big, scarred fists and the hard muscles of his huge arms and wondered how I would wield these things. From amongst the tools I picked out the three essentials of the lead miner: straight pick, short hammer, and wedge.

  Merry’s family, in their thrift, had used a different style of tool: a curved piece whose single tine was balanced by a hammer end and used as either pick or sledge. This tool, lighter but less effective, would be what Elinor would work with. I asked Merry then to look out the leathers her father and brother had worn against the mine’s wet. I did not have Sam’s old breeches and jerkin, which would have been huge on me in any case, for they had been destroyed in his accident. I had had to pull the shreds of the hide out of his mashed flesh.

  Elinor was slight enough to fit into the breeches and jerkin that the elder Wickford boy had worn. I found myself hoping there were no Plague seeds yet upon them. George Wickford had been a slight young man whom poverty had kept lean. I took his leathers and, with a pair of well-honed wool-shears, cut about a third of the length off the legs to fit my stature. Then I plunged a few holes in the waist and ran a rope through like a drawstring to keep the trews upon me. The jerkin flapped loose from my shoulders, but to that I paid no mind. We took the hats, also: sturdy leather hats with ample brims to hold the burning tallow candles that would light our way through the dark while leaving our hands free to work.

  I looked at Elinor when she was attired in her miner’s kit and wondered again about the strange turns this year was bringing us to. She seemed to catch my thought and laughed at herself. “All those ancestors who stared at me from their portraits when I was a girl—all those silken ladies and beribboned men—I wonder what they’d say about their descendent if they could see her now?” I did not tell her that I knew quite well what my Sam would say: “Happen ye mun be planet-struck, woman, to think on doing thus.” He would not, I knew, have been laughing.

  But only Merry Wickford was there to see what we looked like, and to her at least we did not appear absurd. Her little face shone as she gazed at us and saw her only hope. And so we set off to the adit, with Merry leading the way. My feet felt like lead themselves as I trudged along, imagining the day ahead of us. I was breathing hard even at the t
hought of it; just the fear of being in an airless place made me gasp as if I were already down the mine rather than in the open, heather-scented air.

  Wickford had made his shaft well—for all that people here disparaged Quakers for their peculiar beliefs, none could claim that they were not heedful craftsmen in all they did and made. Wickford had wedged great slabs of gray limestone carefully into the walls and hewn sturdy boughs to make sound stemples. But the shaft ran with damp, as most mines do, and mosses and ferns bloomed in the crevices. I could not see how deep the shaft sank before the turning off into the pipe vein, but I knew that the longer I lingered there, the harder it would be to plunge ahead, and so I slung myself over and felt for the first stemple.

  As it happened, the shaft was about six fathoms deep, and there it veered off from the eye above. Wickford had prudently wrought out about six or seven yards sideways before the shaft sank downward once again. That way, I saw, the bucket of bouse could be wound up in easier stages to reach daylight. But once away from the eye, the darkness was complete, so I stopped there to light my candle, dribbling tallow into the brim of my hat to make a base that would hold it fixed in place. The light leapt and trembled as I inched on and down. Merry had said I would find the cave mouth at the base of this second shaft, and so it was. I imagined for an instant how Wickford must have felt when he saw it: the gate to his fortune. By the bouncing light of my candle I could see where he had picked away at the rock to widen the passage, and I eased my way in without difficulty. The floor sloped sharply and was slick with mud, and in minutes I had lost my footing and landed hard, grazing my palm as I tried to break . my fall. The air was already still and stale, just a few feet in from the shaft, and as I sat there in the muck I could feel the panic rise. Despite the cold, the fear-sweat broke out upon me, a thousand little needles prickling my skin. The dread seemed to spread upward through my body. I began to gasp in rapid, shallow breaths. But Elinor was behind me now and I felt her hand easing me up and onward.