Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  Could a day contain two occasions of such utter misery? That day did, and more than two. Before sunset, no less than four families were visited so, by deaths that reached across generations, snatching children and parents with the same dread hand. The Mompellions reeled from one grievous scene to the next; while the rector prayed with the dying, wrote out their wills and consoled where he could, I helped Mrs. Mompellion with the tending and feeding and finding of kinfolk willing to care for the newly orphaned or soon-to-be so—no easy matter, especially if the child was already sick. We had fallen naturally into this way of dividing our toil; the rector would deal with the business that accompanied dying, while his wife and I managed the matters of those left alive.

  My work that day was to make the Maston children as comfortable as I might. Their mother’s body I readied for the sexton. For the father I could do little. He lay insensible, barely breathing. When poor old Jon Millstone arrived with his cart and found that the man was not yet dead, though near as good as, I heard him cursing under his breath. I must have looked sternly at him, for he swept his soiled cap from his head and wiped a hand across his brow.

  “Ah, forgive me, Mistress, but these times, they do make monsters of us all. It’s just that I’m so very tired, I can nay bear the thought of harnessing the cart horse twice when once might’ve served.” I bade him sit then and went to my cottage for a mug of broth, for the old man was working far beyond his strength. By the time I returned, had warmed the broth, and he had sipped it down, there were two corpses for his cart after all.

  I listened to him go and settled to what would surely be a desolate night, a deathwatch merely. The infant was barely clinging to life. Sally tossed and sneezed, restless in her fever. In the early evening, Mrs. Mompellion appeared at the door, her face so pale it looked transparent as a frosted pane. “Anna,” she said. “I am just come from the Hancock farm. It is a death house this night. Swithin, the youngest son, is dead, and Lib lies very grave. Anna, I know she was dear to you once. If you wish, I will bide here while you go to her.”

  I would not have left the children’s side, nor laid extra toil upon Mrs. Mompellion, for any less cause. But the rift with Lib was like an ache, and I longed to ease it. By the time I toiled to the Hancock farm, my old friend was too far gone for speech. I sat with her and stroked her face, willing her to waken for just a word, that I might say something to mend the breach between us.. Even such small relief was not granted to me. And so this silent leave-taking with my oldest friend was but another sadness heaped upon the weight of grief I carried.

  It was very late when I returned to relieve Mrs. Mompellion at the Maston cottage, but it was a good thing I got there when I did, for it snowed not long after, just enough time, as I judged, as it would take her to have hastened safe inside the rectory’s warm walls. It was a wild snow, the kind that blew hard against the cottage and chinked every crevice in the stone. I built the fire up and laid every piece of cloth I could find upon the children. Most winters, we feared storms such as this one. We would watch and wait to see how heavy the falls would lie and how deep would rise the drifts in our narrow lanes and wonder if the snow would close our roads. But now the white banks might grow as high as they would; our roads were as good as closed in any wise.

  This storm swiftly spent its fury. The wind dropped not long after midnight, and the baby died in the deep silence that followed. Little Sally lasted into the afternoon of the following day but passed with the early fading of the light. Having bathed her thin body and wrapped her in clean linen, I left her, lying alone, until Jon Millstone found the time to take her. “Sorry, little one,” I whispered. “I should sit up with you this night. But I must save my strength for the living. Lie peaceful, my lamb.”

  And so I trudged home in the near-dark, stopping at the sheepfold only long enough to fling some hay to my diminished flock. For myself, I did not bother to eat. Instead, I poured boiling water over the remaining poppy resin, stirring in a half cup of heather-scented honey to mask the bitterness, and carried the mug up to my bed. In my dreams that night, the mountains breathed like sleeping beasts and the wind cast a rich blue shadow. A winged horse flew me through a sky of black velvet, over shimmering deserts of golden glass, through fields of falling stars.

  Once again, I awoke in the morning blissfully rested. And once again, the poppy-induced serenity did not last long. This time, it was no outward horror that plunged me back into our hard reality, but my own realization, lying warm in my bed, that I had no further means to secure such oblivion. I lay there, staring up at the beams of my own ceiling, and remembered my last visit to the Gowdies-how the bunches of drying herbs had brushed against Anys’s honey-gold hair. Surely there must have been some poppy fruits hanging there among the goldenseal and the burdock ? Perhaps there were already carefully prepared tinctures, put up in cupboards? Or resin in phials such as I had stolen from Mrs. Mompellion? I determined to go straight there and see what I might be able to secure for myself.

  The snow had rizen onto the windward side of rocks and trees, where it gleamed like lacquer. My hens huddled in a frost-free corner of the garth, their feathers fluffed against the cold, each standing on one leg while warming the other in its down. I grabbed up some handfuls of hay and stuffed them into my boots to keep my feet dry and warm on the long, damp walk. The sky hung low, deep gray and threatening further snowfall. The pastures were a mottle of yellow and white: thawed patches of cropped stubble laid against bright swathes.where snow lay unmelted in furrows. From the high point could see down to the Riley farm, where the -stooks from the harvest still stood in the field, mildewed now and useless. Our custom says the church bells must ring over the stooks for three Sundays before the bringing of the harvest home. But it was the death knell that had tolled over these stooks, and more than thrice. Since the scytliing of this field,.Mrs. Hancock had buried her husband, three of her sons, and one daughter-in-law. This day she would lay Swithin and Lib into the ground. I could not bear to think of her suffering, and so I trudged on, picking my way across frozen turves and trying to avoid the sticky patches of thawing mud. Then I noticed something else amiss. By this hour, the oily black smoke of the Talbot smithy should have been pouring from the new-fired forge. In that still, cold air the smoke should have been drifting and rolling like a dark mist into the valley. But it was the forge itself that was cold, and the Talbot cottage silent. Heavily, I set my feet on the track up to the smith’s house, knowing well enough what I would find when I got there.

  Kate Talbot opened the door, her fist pressed hard into the small of her aching back. She was round-bellied with her first child, due at Shrovetide. As I had expected, the smell of rotten apples filled the house. That scent, once beloved, now was so married in my mind with sickrooms that it made me gag. But there was another smell, also, in the Talbot house: the odor of burned meat left to rot. Richard Talbot, the strongest man in our village, lay wasted and whimpering upon his bed like an infant, the flesh of his groin singed black as a roasted beef. The place where the iron had seared was laid open to the muscle, seeping pus and green with putrefaction.

  I could not take my eyes from this terrible wound. Kate saw me staring and wrung her hands. “He demanded I do it,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Two nights ago, he bade me fire up the forge and heat the poker till it glowed red. I could not bring myself to lay it on him, Anna, so he grabbed it from my hand, feeble as he was, and buried the brand in his own flesh. I can still hear his screaming. Anna, my Richard is a man who has been kicked by horses and smashed by hammers and burned a score of times by hot irons and falling coals. But this pain he gave himself must have been the agony of Hellfire. Afterward, he lay in a cold sweat, trembling for an hour. He said if we burned the Plague sore away then the disease would surely follow. But he has only worsened since that night, and I do not know how to help him.” I muttered some empty words of comfort, knowing that Richard Talbot would be dead of the rot, if not the Plague, likely before nightfall. />
  Because I lacked words, I looked around for tasks. The room was chill, for Kate said her back pain was so sharp that she had not been able to bring in more than one log at a time, and the fire had burned down to mere embers. I went out to haul in a bushel-skep of,wood, and as I reentered the room I saw Kate bending over Richard, closing her hand on the small triangle of parchment she’d laid nearby his wound. But as quick as she was, I saw plainly what she tried to hide. It was a spell, inscribed thus:ABRACADABRA

  BRACADABR

  RACADAB

  ACADA

  CAD

  A

  “Kate Talbot!” I chided. “Surely you know better than these wicked follies!” Her tired face fell, and the tears started. “No,” I said, instantly regretting my harshness and reaching out to embrace her. “I’m sorry I spoke so. I know you turn to this because you do not know what else to do.”

  “Oh, Anna,” she sobbed. “I do not, in my heart, believe in it, and yet I bought this charm because that which I do believe has failed me. Richard has ever been a good man. Why does God wrack him so? Our prayers in the church bring no relief. So the voice of the Devil whispers to me, ‘If God will not help you,’ he says, ‘mayhap I might ...’ ”

  At first, she would not say how she had come by the charm, for the charlatan who had choused her out of a shilling for it had also told her that a death curse would come upon her if she told. But I pressed her, trying to make her see that all of it was a malign trick to take her money. Finally, -she swallowed hard.

  “No, Anna, it were no trick. Wicked, yes, and vain, maybe, but magic, in truth. For the charm were given me by the ghost of Anys Gowdie.”

  “Nonsense!” I blurted. But she was pale as the drifting snow outside. More gently, I pressed her: “Why say you so?”

  “I heard her voice in the wind last night when I went out to fetch in a log. She said to place a shilling on the lintel and in the morning a potent charm would lie there in its stead.”

  “Kate,” I said, as gently as I could. “Anys Gowdie is dead and gone. And if she were alive, as I devoutly wish she were, and able to help us, she would not come with worthless charms, for you know her cures were always practical things, made of common earthly weeds and worts, that she in her wisdom knew the health-giving use for. Throw that paper away, Kate,” I said, “and put aside these foolish, poisonous thoughts. For I am sure we will find that someone of this village-corrupt and greedy, but very much alive—was the voice you heard in the windy night.”

  Reluctantly, she opened her hand and let the parchment flutter down on to the bavins. As I blew on the embers, a bright flame leapt up and seized it. “Take your ease now,” I said, “and I will tend to your chores here. With rest you might find the world a small bit brighter.”

  She lowered her swollen body down upon the bed beside her husband’s. I went out to fetch in more wood and heard a piteous mooing from the byre. The cow’s bag was hard as stone for want of milking. When the beast felt my fingers bringing her relief, she turned and gazed at me with gratitude. Afterward, I gathered a few eggs from the garth and baked them with the fresh milk into a curd that Kate could sup on when she wakened.

  Having done what I could, I continued on my own errand. While I had been with the Talbots a stiff wind had blown up, cracking the ice on the black branches in a series of sudden, sharp reports. At the Gowdies’ cottage, the snow lay in unswept drifts, and I moved through them knee-deep, like wading a river. At the door, I paused, fighting down the guilt I felt at invading the property of the dead. As I stood there, trying to find courage, snowmelt dripped down the thatch and landed upon my neck like icy fingers. I began to wrestle with the damp-swollen door, but my hands, cluzened from the cold, were clumsy. Finally, I dragged it open a crack. Something shot by me in a gray blur, so sudden and swift that I flinched and flattened myself against the wet wood. It was only the Gowdies’ gib-cat, who leapt onto the roof, spitting and yowling against my intrusion. I shoved and pushed until the door finally budged enough to admit me. I sidled my way into the dark. Something brushed my face and I gasped, but it was just a frond of meadowsweet that had loosed itself from a bunch hanging by the door.

  The wind whipped around the house, its sighs and whispers like a hundred haunting voices. I felt myself trembling and told myself it was the cold, merely. Since the Gowdies were too poor for glazing, the cottage had but a wind-eye up under the eaves, and this they had stuffed with rushes since the first cool days of leaf-fall. I was damp through and needed to kindle a fire for light as well as warmth, but it was so dim in the soot-stained room that I had to feel all around the hearth for the flint and tinder. When I found them, my hands shook so that- as many times as I tried, I could not strike a spark.

  A sudden light blazed behind me.

  “Stand back from the hearth, Anna.”

  I jumped up, dropped the flint, caught my foot in a loose hearthstone, and slipped, facedown onto the earthen floor. Terrified, I raised my head and turned, blinded by the light emanating from the ghost of Anys Gowdie. She hovered in the air above me, white-gowned and brilliant.

  “Are you all right?” Elinor Mompellion asked, climbing down the loft ladder with a candle held high in front of her.

  Shock, relief, and mortification all descended upon me at once, and with such force that I burst into tears. “Have you injured yourself?” Mrs. Mompellion said, bending over me, her face, in the circle of candle glow, creased with concern. She raised a corner of her white pinafore to wipe the place where my forehead had struck the floor.

  “No, no,” I said, struggling for command of myself. “I landed hard on my wrist, merely. I-I did not expect to find anyone else here this day, and I was startled.”

  “It seems we shared the same idea,” she said, and I, in my confusion, thought she meant that she had come searching for the poppy also. Before I gave voice to my misunderstanding, she continued: “I came here late yesterday, for it seems evident to me, as I see it must have also to you, that we must take stock of these herbs and such remedies as the Gowdies may have left here. The key to defeating this Plague, I am convinced, must lie here, in the virtue of such plants as can be used to nourish those who remain in health. We must strengthen our bodies that we may continue to resist contagion.” She had taken my place at the hearth now, and by dribbling a little candle wax on a bavin had kindled a promising flame.

  “I became so engrossed in sorting and naming the plants that I barely noticed the light fading, and by the time I realized I must needs set out for home, it had begun to snow. I decided it was best to sleep the night here rather than toil the long way to the rectory in such weather. Mr. Mompellion, I knew, would reason I was needed for the night at someone’s sickbed. And indeed, I slept so well in this quiet place that I believe I would be sleeping still if your struggles with the door had not waked me. And now we must set to work, for Anna! There are riches here indeed!” And she launched then on a catalogue of what she had so far identified and the virtues of the tonics we could make and distribute.

  As I listened to her plans, so selfless and suffused with hope, I felt the wretchedness of my own selfish scheme for escape into a false oblivion.

  “Mrs. Mompellion, I—”

  “Elinor,” she said, interrupting, “you and I cannot work on such terms as we now are and continue with the old forms. You must call me Elinor.”

  “Elinor ... I have something to confess to you. I came here not seeking herbs to help others. Only myself.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, quietly. “You came for these.” From the ceiling rafter, she reached up and effortlessly unstrung a bunch of pregnant seedpods. “The Greeks called them the Poppies of Lethe. Do you remember? We read about it together. Lethe—the Greeks’ river of forgetfulness. Once the souls of the dead tasted its waters they forgot their past lives. It is natural to want to forget, Anna, when every day is a brimful of sadness. But those souls also forgot those that they had loved. You do not want that, surely? I have heard some preac
h that God wants us to forget the dead, but I cannot believe so. I think He gives us precious recollections so that we may not be parted entirely from those He has given us to love. You must cherish your memories of your babes, Anna, until you see them again in Heaven.”

  “I took the poppy from your whisket at the Daniels’ cottage.”

  “I know it,” she said. “And did it bring you sweet dreams?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “The sweetest I have ever known.”

  She nodded, her fine hair lit like a halo in the firelight. “Yes,” she said. “I remember well.”

  “You?” I said, startled. “You have used this thing?”

  “Yes, Anna, even 1. For there was a time when I had much that I, too, wanted to forget. That poppy you took from me-it was a relict from that time. I had kept it, you see, even though it is some years since I have resorted to it. But it is a jealous friend and will not lightly loosen its embrace.” She stood up then, reached into a pipkin in the corner, and measured a quantity of crumbled chamomile into a pot. The kettle hanging in the hearth had begun to steam. From it, she poured just enough water to make a pungent tea.

  “Do you remember on the way to the Daniels’, Anna, that I said to you that I had never birthed a child?”

  I nodded dumbly. I could not think where this was leading.

  “I did not say I had never been with child.”

  I must have looked confused at this, for I had worked for Mrs. Mompellion, laundering her clothes and changing her linens, since the day she arrived in our village, still a new bride. If she had been with child I would have known it almost as soon as she herself did. Indeed, I had been watching for her terms, as I wished it for her so.