Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Poor souls, yet very dangerous,” Mr. Mompellion interjected. He was pacing now. “Most often, the damage they do falls only on themselves, but there have been times when, in mobs, they have laid blame for the Plague on the sins of others—Jews, many times. I have read of how in foreign cities they put hundreds of such innocents to death by fire. We lost the Gowdies to a like madness. I will not lose another soul.”

  He stopped his pacing then. “Anna, kindly pack some oatcakes and some of your salves and tonics. For I believe we must visit the Gordons this night. I will not have this creed spread here.”

  I filled a whisket as he bade me, adding in some brawn and the remains of a large custard I had made for that day’s dinner. Outside, he handed me up onto Anteros, and we rode off for the Gordon farm. We had just made the turn from the main road when I noticed something white, writhing on a turf bank by the roadside. I would never have spoken had I realized what it was, but I took it for a person in distress—ill, as I believed—and cried out to the rector to stop. He halted Anteros with a quiet command and headed the horse in the direction I signed. He clearly read the true case quicker than I, for he checked Anteros after a moment, and I believe he meant to turn back to the road and leave the pair alone. But the girl had seen him, and she let out a wail, at which the man sprawled atop her jumped up, plucking at his breeches with one hand and trying to force his bare yard back inside the cloth with the other. Jane Martin lay sprawled on some turves, her dress pushed up to her head, too drunk even to cover her nakedness.

  I slid off the horse and went to her, pulling down her skirt and searching in the grass for her missing undergarments. Albion Samweys, meanwhile, stood silent and shuffling before the rector, who had remained mounted. Samweys was a miner whose wife had died a month since. He had been a sometime tavern mate of my father’s, although never as given to excess. The rector spoke to him quietly. His voice was oddly flat, sad, if anything, certainly not angry as I—and Albion—had expected.

  “Albion Samweys, you have done wrong here this night. You do not need me to preach it to you. Get you to your home and do not dishonor yourself further.”

  Samweys backed away, unsteadily, bowing and nodding at the rector until I thought he would overbalance himself. Then he turned and, weaving somewhat, made off at a good trot into the dark. The rector dismounted then and strode to where I sat with Jane, trying to steer her limp feet back into her boots.

  “Jane Martin! Get you on your knees!” The voice was a roar. I started at the sound of it, and even Jane, in her stupor, shuddered.

  “On your knees, sinner!” He took a step toward us, a looming black figure. His face, in the dark, was unreadable. I scrambled to my feet and stood between him and the crumpled girl, who was trying to raise herself but falling back, again and again, as her limbs refused to function.

  “Rector!” I said. “Surely you see that the girl is incapable of comprehending you at this time! I beg you, save your reproofs, if you must make them, until her wits are cleared.”

  “You forget yourself.” His voice was quiet now but cold. “This girl knows well what she does here this night. She is in command of the Scriptures as well as I. She has taken the pure vessel of her body and filled it with corruption. She has done this knowingly. She shall be punished—”

  “Rector,” I interrupted. “You know that she has been.”

  There was silence then, broken only by the champing of Anteros’s soft mouth, cropping the wet grass. My head was full of the pounding of my own blood. I could scarce believe I had spoken so. Then I heard a heaving behind me, and the stink on the still air told me that Jane Martin had spewed up the beery contents of her belly.

  “Clean her, then hold the horse while I get her mounted,” he said. I wiped Jane’s mouth with one of the cloths from my whisket. The rector lifted her into the saddle and signaled for me to mount behind her, to hold her on the horse as best I could as he led us back toward her cottage. We did not speak on the descent, nor as we lifted her down and helped her to her pallet, nor as we set off again on our original errand.

  I was glad that it was dark, so that I did not have to meet the rector’s eyes. I was mortified to have been the cause of his witnessing the coupling, and to have been witness, in turn, to his strange fit—so unlike anything I knew of him. We were passing the place where I had spied the pair when he gave a deep sigh. “None of us is master of himself as we should be in these times. I would ask that you forget my outburst this night, and I will do the same regarding yours.” I muttered my assent into the darkness. Anteros had gone a few more paces when the rector spoke again.

  “Especially,” he said quietly, “I will be glad if no word of this business comes to my wife.”

  “Very well, Rector,” I murmured. Of course, he would wish Elinor spared knowledge of our animal nature so coarsely displayed.

  We rode on in silence. When we reached the Gordons’ farm, Urith, at first, refused to open the door to us. “My husband will not have me receive any man when he is not within,” she said in a voice that quavered.

  “Do not be concerned, for Anna Frith is here with me. There can be no impropriety, surely, in receiving your minister and his servant? We have brought some victuals. Will you not break bread with us?” At that, the door opened a crack. Urith peered out, saw me and my whisket, and licked her lips hungrily. I moved forward and threw back the cloth so that she could see the contents. Trembling, she opened the door. She was clad in a rough sort of blanket, belted with a rope at the waist. “In truth,” she said, “I am clemmed. For my husband has fasted me a fortnight on naught but a cup of broth and a heel of bread a day”

  I gasped when I entered the cottage, for all of its furnishings had been removed. Instead, the interior had been decked out in every corner with crosses of rough-hewn wood. Some were large, standing up against the wall; other, smaller ones made of sticks, hung from the rafters by strings. Urith saw me staring. “This is how he does pass his time now, not in farming but fashioning crosses, one upon another.” The air inside the stone-walled cottage was colder than that out of doors, for it seemed that no cooking fire had burned in the hearth for some time. I laid out the oatcakes, the brawn, and the custard upon the cloths that I had wrapped them in, and Urith knelt on the floor and devoured them, even drinking the green tonic down to the dregs. Since there was no stool to sit upon, we stood and watched her eat. I clutched-my arms about me and beat my hands against my sides to try to get warm.

  When she had done she sat back on her heels and sighed deeply, sated for the first time in a fortnight. Then, scrambling to her feet, she looked at us with fear. “I beg you not to tell my husband of this,” she said. “He is already sorely aggrieved at me because I will not go about half naked as he does. It is the first time I have defied him in anything, and I have been sorely punished for it. If he knows I have disobeyed him as well in the matter of the fast ...” Her words trailed off, but her meaning was plain enough. I gathered up the cloths and scanned the floor for crumbs so as not to betray her secret, while Mr. Mompellion questioned Urith gently about how she supposed her husband had come upon the teachings of the Flagellants.

  “I am sure, I do not know how,” she said. “But sometime in the midwinter he obtained a tract from London, studied it, and after became very strange. I pray you will not take offense, Rector, but he became most critical of your sermonizing. He said you do wrong in encouraging people to see the Plague as anything other than God’s wrath made manifest. He said you should rather be leading us in public confessions of each and every sin that any one of us ever has committed, so as we might come upon the transgression that has brought down God’s wrath and root it out from amongst us. It is not enough, he says, to search our soul, but we must scourge our flesh also. He began a fast, and it has become increasingly severe. Then he burned all our bedstraw and insisted we sleep on the bare stones.” She colored a little and went on in a whisper, “By no means were we to take any comfort of each other’s bodies, bu
t lie always chaste.”

  Gordon had ceased to do any farmwork and railed at her when she left her place, beside him on her knees, to go herself and push the plough. “Then, a sennight past, he hauled out the table and benches and burned them in a bonfire, throwing both his suits of clothes upon it.” He had ordered her to do likewise, but she had refused to doff her garments, saying his manner of dress was indecent.

  “He cursed me then, declaring that I should be grateful to him for knowing how to stay the arrows of God’s Plague from striking us.” Her whisper dropped till I could barely make out the words. “He stripped me and burned my clothes.” He proclaimed that her weakness and her failure to make adequate penance would force them to mortify their flesh all the more severely. That is when he had made the leather strop and driven the nails into it. He beat her first and then himself. He had continued his scourgings every day since.

  “You may try to talk to him, Rector, but I doubt he has ears to hear you.”

  “Where do you think I might find him this night?”

  “In truth, I do not know,” she said. “But it has become his habit to deprive himself even of sleep, when he can. Sometimes, he does this by walking the moors until he drops exhausted. Other times he lies himself down on a rock outcropt upon the Edge, where he says the fear of falling if he gives way to sleep helps him stay wakeful until dawn-break.”

  “He was heading toward the Edge when I saw him,” I murmured.

  “Was he so?” said the rector. “Well then, I must go that way also.”

  Mr. Mompellion rose then and laid a hand gently on Urith’s shoulder. “Try to get some rest, and I will do my best to calm your husband’s torments.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. And so we left her, in that bleak, bare cottage, I to go to my own warm hearth and the rector to his search. As to how Urith Gordon could find any rest lying down upon those bare gritstones, I did not rightly know.

  MR. MOMPELLION did not find John Gordon that night, though he walked Anteros back and forth along the Edge until moon-set. Neither could any sign be found of the man on the following day, nor the one after. It was, indeed, a full week before Brand Rigney, out searching for a missing lamb from the Merrills’ flock, spotted the corpse, lying splayed amongst the fallen rocks at the foot of the Edge’s sheerest face. There was no way to retrieve the shattered body, or even to cover it, for to get near meant accessing a track that ran out of Stoney Middleton. That, in turn, meant passing through the town, which we were oathbound not to do. So John Gordon’s flesh was mortified in death as in life, lying naked under the sky, left to the untender mercies of Nature.

  The rector preached a memorial for John Gordon at the Delf the following Sunday. It was a sermon of love and understanding, saying that Gordon had sought to please God, even as he embraced conduct unpleasing to God. “For, beloved friends, remember that God states in the Bible, ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ God does not love pain for its own sake. It is for Him to decide who shall suffer; He, and the vicars he appoints to give you penances. It is not for you to presume to do so.” Urith was there, dressed in clothing that other villagers had sent her when they learned of her plight. She looked a little better, despite her loss, for in the days since her husband’s death she had been able to eat decently again. Villagers had sent her food and bedding.

  But her respite was cruelly brief, for the Plague felled her the following week. While I wondered whether Plague seeds had been carried to her home with the good intentions of people who had gifted her bedstraw and clothing, others drew a different conclusion. Some muttered that perchance John Gordon had walked a true path, and so doing kept the Plague from his door. Whispers passed that Mr. Mompellion’s sermon was mistaken. Most dismissed such talking. But fear, as I have said, was working strange changes in all of us, corroding our ability for clear thought. Within a sennight, Martin Miller had girt his family in sack cloth and fashioned himself a scourge. Randoll Daniel did likewise, though thankfully he did not ask it of his wife and babe. Together, Randoll and the Millers went about the village exhorting others to join them in their bloody self-chastisement.

  At the rectory, Mr. Mompellion wavered between rage and self-reproach. When I would go to clean the library I would find many pages from his hand, close-written and scratched over and written again. Every week he seemed to find it more and more difficult to gather up words for sermons that would ease us and keep us all in heart. It was during this time that he began meeting with his old friend Mr. Holbroke, the rector of Hathersage. I say “meeting,” but I do not use the word in any usual sense. He would walk up to the rise of land above Mompellion’s Well and wait there for his colleague. Mr. Holbroke would draw as near as he dared and the two would converse, if you could call it that, shouting across the gulf between them. If Mr. Mompellion wanted to send a letter to the earl, or to his patron, Elinor’s father, he would dictate it to Mr. Holbroke, so that the letter’s recipient would not be alarmed by receiving a paper from a hand that had touched the hands of Plague victims.

  Sometimes, Mr. Mompellion would return from these encounters a little lifted in spirits. On other occasions, the contact with the outside world seemed rather to press upon his mind, and as I came and went about my tasks, I would hear Elinor talking to him quietly, in her low, soothing voice, always reassuring him, always telling him that he was the author of great good for all of us, no matter how dark the present days might seem.

  One such afternoon, I had stood outside the door with a tray of refreshment, heard their quiet voices—hers, most especially—and crept away so as not to disturb them. Returning a little later with the tray and hearing nothing, I had eased open the door and peeked inside. Elinor had fallen asleep, exhausted, in her chair. Michael Mompellion stood behind her, leaning over her a little. His hand hovered in the air, just above her head.

  He will not chance her rest, even to caress her, I thought. I wondered if any couple had ever dealt so tenderly together. Thank you, God, I thought, for sparing them for each other. And then, as I stood there, spying greedily upon their intimacy, a baser feeling altogether swept over me. Why should they have each other, when I had no one?

  I was jealous of both of them at once. Of him, because Elinor loved him, and I hungered for a greater share of her love than I could ever hope for. And yet I was jealous of her, too; jealous that she was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved. Why should I writhe on my cold and empty bed while she took comfort in his warm flesh? I crept away from the door, trying to still my shaking hands so that the rattling tray would not give me away. I entered the kitchen and walked to the wash trough. There, I set down the tray. From it, I lifted the delicate dishes, his first, then hers, and smashed them, one by one, against the unyielding stone.

  A Great Burning

  THE FIRST TIME I heard Elinor cough, I tried to will my ears into disbelieving it. It was one of those summer days as soft as the blow-ball fluff drifting on the honeysuckle breeze. We were walking back to the rectory in the bright evening, having visited, for once, the well rather than the ill. Elinor had wanted to call upon the six or eight elderly who had survived the Plague even as their vigorous sons and daughters had fallen to it. These widows and widowers were people with whom she had been much concerned before the Plague, but the exigencies of the dying had meant that the living, no matter they be needy, had been left to shift for themselves.

  We had found all but one faring well. James Mallion, a toothless, bent old soul, we had found sitting in the dark, spare from lack of nourishment and most glum in spirits. Together we had lifted him out to take the warm air and fed him a good dinner, which I took the trouble to mash as fine as for an infant. As I spooned the soft food into his mouth and caught the dribbles from his chin, it reminded me of feeding my own babes, and a tear sprang unbidden to my eye. He had grabbed my arm then with his clawlike hand, and his rheumy eyes fixed on me. In a quavering voice, he had asked, “Why should one like me, who is weary of his life and ready
for the harvest, be spared, when all the young ones are plucked up unripe?” I patted his hand and shook my head, unable to command my voice to reply to him.

  Elinor and I spoke of this as we walked back to the rectory, for we still had come no nearer to fathoming why the Plague felled some and yet not others. Those few, like Andrew Merrick, who had taken themselves off to live away from others in caves or rude huts, certainly had escaped infection. So much we knew; proximity to the ill begat illness. But that we had ever known. What remained a puzzlement was why some lived who dwelt all together in one house, sharing with the ailing their food and bedding and even the very air they breathed. I said that Mr. Stanley, when he spoke to those who would hear from him, held that the choice seemed random to us because it rested entirely with God.

  “I know it,” Elinor replied. As we walked, she plucked absently at the honeysuckle vines twining through the hedgerow. Once, I had shown her how to sip the nectar from the blossoms, and now, as we walked, she placed the flowers to her lips and drew out their sweetness as any lowly country lass might do. “Mr. Stanley has ever believed that God bestows suffering on those whom He would spare from torments after death. It is not a view I can embrace, Anna. And yet, how can we know? Mr. Mompellion has ceased to speak on such matters in his sermons. He undertakes now only to uplift our spirits and strengthen our resolve.”

  We fell silent then. I tried to rest my mind from such imponderables by keeping my thoughts only in the moment, watching the lazy wheeling of the kestrels and listening to the raw calls of the corncrakes. When Elinor coughed, I told myself it was a crake I had heard. I neither paused nor turned to look at her but kept on walking. A few minutes later, she coughed again, and this time there was no ignoring it. She stopped as the spasm wracked her, pressing a piece of lace to her mouth. I immediately turned and placed an arm around her shoulders to support her. My face must have shown the depth of my feeling, for she looked at me and tried to smile through the coughing. When it subsided, she pushed me playfully away from her, saying, “Now, Anna, don’t bury me on the basis of a cough, merely!”