She reached out a hand then and turned my face to look full into hers. “Anna, the child I carried was not Mr. Mompellion’s.” She read the shock in my face, and her soft fingers, warm from holding her steaming mug, fluttered on my cheek, as if to soothe me. Then her hand dropped and sought mine, as it lay in my lap, and she laced her slender fingers into my chapped and calloused ones. “It is a story full of pain, but I tell it to you now because I want you to know me. I have already asked much of you, Anna, and before this terrible time passes I may ask a great deal more. I want you to know who it is that lays these burdens upon you.”
She turned her face to the fire then, and as she spoke we looked at the flames, rather than at each other. The story she unfolded began on a vast and beautiful Derbyshire estate, in rooms warmed by richly woven carpets and watched over by the pensive eyes of ancestral portraits. She had been the beloved only daughter of a gentleman of great wealth. She was indulged—spoiled, she said—especially after her mother died. Her father and her older brother had been loving but often absent,, entrusting her care to a governess who was more learned than she was wise.
Elinor’s childhood was filled with pleasure and with the acquisition of knowledge, which to her meant very much the same thing. “I blush, Anna, to say this to you, knowing what you have made of yourself from such scant stuffs as your life has provided. For myself, any fancy I had to know a thing—Greek or Latin, history, music, art and natural philosophy—all I had to do was express a wish, and these treasures would be laid out before me. And I learned these things. But of life, Anna, and of human nature—of those I did not learn.” Her father thought to keep her sheltered from the world, and so she did not leave the estate nor enter into any but a most restricted society. She had been just fourteen when a neighbor, a young man of twenty and the heir to a dukedom, had begun pursuit of her.
“When my father returned from an absence and found that the two of us had been riding out alone almost daily, he told me that it must cease at once. Oh, he was not stern with me—perhaps had he been sterner I would have heeded him more readily. But perhaps it would have made no difference: For Anna, I was thrilled with this young man and his attentions. He flattered me in every conceivable way. He made me laugh, and he would interrogate everyone in the household about what I liked and did not like and cut the cloth of his behavior to suit that intelligence. My father told me only that I was far too young for any such intense friendships. He told me he had many plans for me—a presentation at Court, a trip at his side to the great cities of the ancient world. But as he said these things, I could only think, guiltily, how much more I would enjoy them on the arm of Charles-my young man. My father did not tell me that he had doubts about Charles himself, grave doubts about his character, that subsequent events proved well-founded. Perhaps he did not wish to be confronted by the sorts of queries that I would have raised in response to such information. For we lived very quiet, and I had been entirely sheltered from the world that my father and my brother—and Charles—knew all to well.”
Elinor, who loved her father, had obeyed his wishes at first. But when his affairs took him from the estate again a month later, the young man renewed and redoubled his pursuit. “He begged me to elope with him, and afterward, he promised, he would make it up with my father, who would not stand against the match once he saw the brilliance of my new state. My governess uncovered the scheme and could have thwarted it. But I begged her, and Charles charmed her and finally bribed her into silence with the gift of a ruby pendant that we later learned he had pilfered from his mother’s box. And so she abetted our scheme and kept my father ignorant much longer than would otherwise have been possible.
“With her help, we stole away at dead of night. How can I tell you now why it was that I would do such a thing? I was like the Starlover in Sidney’s poem: ‘My young mind marred, whom love doth windlass so.’ We planned, as I thought, to make for the Fleet, where marriages could be bought at any hour without license. But I had never seen London, and so when Charles proposed that we first try this or that entertainment or excursion, I did not hesitate to say, yes, yes, let us do it all.
“You will have guessed what I will next tell you, that the union was consummated before it was consecrated.” Elinor said this in a small voice. “And then it gradually became clear even to me that he did not intend to have it consecrated at all. I mean to tell you everything, Anna, so hear this: I was so lost in the fires of my own lusts that I did not greatly care.”
Elinor was weeping now, soundlessly, the tears pooling in her pale eyes. I reached up a hand. I wanted to touch her, to wipe them away, but deference, instilled in me since birth, stayed my hand. Elinor looked at me then, and her gaze told me that my touch was welcome. So with the tips of my fingers I brushed the tears from her cheek. Then she grasped my hand and held it, as she went on to tell how she and Charles had lived together for more than a fortnight until, one evening, he simply failed to return to the inn where they were hiding. He had abandoned her.
“There were days when I would not let myself believe it. I told myself all manner of falsehoods, that he had fallen ill somewhere, that he had been called off on secret, high state business. It was some time before I faced the fact of my ruin and called upon those who still, somehow, loved me.” Her father and brother, who had been,frantically searching for her, came swiftly. They carried her home, where the matter was to have been entirely hushed up. But she was with child.
Her face, as she revisited these memories, had become increasingly drawn. The tears flowed freely now, but still she did not give way to sobbing but simply dashed them away with the heel of her hand and went on. It was as if the tale, once embarked upon, compelled her.
“I was desperate, and I was deranged,” she said. “I violated my own body with a fire iron.”
I drew a ragged breath at this and hid my face in my hands. I could not bear to imagine such suffering, yet I could not prevent my mind from conjuring terrible images of it. I reached out a hand, blindly, and clasped hers once again.
“My father engaged the best physician, and so my life was saved. But not my womb, Anna, which they tell me is nothing now but a mass of scars. They gave me poppy at first for the pain, and then I think to keep me quiet. And I might very well still be wandering, lost in those empty dreams, if it were not for Michael.”
And so I learned that Michael Mompellion was not, as I had always thought, the scion of a distinguished clerical family. His father had been a cleric, it is true, but a curate merely. Michael, the eldest of three children, was but a small boy at the outbreak of the civil war. His father had been swept up in the turmoil, acquiring for himself powder and match, sword and halberd. Instead of leading people to their prayers, he had led them to war on behalf of the parliament. At first, his troop did well enough, but after the king escaped from the hands of the army, the second phase of the war went ill for him. The cavaliers routed the forces in his parish and plundered his own dwelling of all that was portable—brass, pewter, and cloth. Michael’s father made off through the lines to save his own life. The next day, attempting to return home, he was mistaken by a party of his own men and mortally wounded.
As a result, the family was destitute, and Michael, as eldest, had to be sent from his home into a situation where he could be provided for. He had been placed into service with the steward of Elinor’s family estate. So all his childhood learning had come at the elbow of the farrier and the cooper, the gamekeeper and the tenant farmers. He had grown up ploughing ground and bucking hay, breaking colts and shoeing mares, learning every detail of the estate’s complexity.
“Before long, he was offering suggestions for its better management.” Her voice seemed to strengthen now, for in this part of the story she took pride. “His intelligence caught the attention of my father, who undertook Michael’s education. He went to the best of schools, where he excelled, and then on to Cambridge. When he came home, he found me, frail from my long illness. They would carry me
out to the garden each day, and I would sit there, too lost in my own grief and remorse to get up out of my chair. Michael offered me his friendship, Anna. And, later, his love.”
She was smiling slightly now. “He brought the brightness back into my dim world. He understood suffering,, having felt it in his own life. He took me into the crofts of my family’s tenants and taught me how to read people’s lives. He showed me sorrows far worse than mine and pain far less deserved. He instructed me how futile it is to wallow in regret for that which cannot be changed and how atonement might be made for even the gravest sins. Even mine, Anna. Even mine.”
Gradually, with his encouragement, she regained some physical strength. Mental peace followed more slowly. “At first, I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled itself.” They were wed soon after he took Orders. “To the world at large, it seemed that I stooped to marry him,” she said softly. “But as you now see, the sacrifice in the match was all on the side of my dear Michael. More sacrifice than anyone could imagine.”
We sat for a while, staring into the fire, until a log suddenly shifted and sent a scatter of sparks onto the earth floor. Elinor stood up then, abruptly, and smoothed her long, white pinafore. “And now, my dear Anna, now that you know everything, will you still work with me?”
I was too stunned by all I had heard to say anything, so I simply rose from my stool, grasped both her hands, and kissed them. How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to. Many things about the rector now seemed clearer to me—his physical strength, his easiness with all manner of trades and classes of people. So, too, did Elinor’s kindness and her unwillingness to judge the faults in others.
Elinor embraced me, and I felt certain at that moment I would do anything for this woman, anything she asked of me. “Good, then,” she said, drawing away, “for there is much to do. Look, look at this.” She reached into the pocket of her pinafore and pulled out a folded parchment. “I have made a list of all who have succumbed so far to the Plague and have laid it down upon a map of the dwellings in this place. From this I believe we can grasp how this pestilence spreads, and to whom.”
There it was, our Plague-scoured village, the names of all its three hundred and three score sorry souls pinned to the map like insect specimens on a board. Under the names of near fifty, Elinor had drawn a black line. I had not conceived that the sickness already had undone so many. The map showed it clearly: the way the contagion had spread out from my cottage, a starburst of death.
Elinor pulled on my sleeve, urgent. “Look at the names of the victims. What is the first thing that you notice?” I stared at the map dumbly. “Can you not see? The Plague does not distinguish between man and woman, for each are fairly represented in the dead roll. But it does make a distinction—it selects the very young over the very old. Almost half of the dead here have been not yet sixteen years of age. The rest are persons in their prime. None, as yet, have been silver-hairs. Why, Anna? Why? Here is what I think. I think the old in this village have lived long because they are good fighters of sickness; veterans, if you like, in the war against disease. So, what must we do? We must arm the children, make them stronger—give them weapons with which to fight. We have been trying, in vain, to cure the sick, and we have failed at it. ‘Of all those who have got the Plague, only one—old Margaret Blackwell—has lasted more than a week with it.”
Margaret, the cooper Blackwell’s wife, had sickened at the same time as the Sydells, and though she still ailed, it did seem as though she was destined to live through her ordeal. Because she had not died, some now doubted that she had Plague at all. But I had seen the swelling in her groin and tended her when it burst and spewed forth its pussy infection. Others claimed it was a boil or cyst merely. But I held it was a Plague sore, and so Margaret might be our first survivor.
“For most,” Elinor continued, “the onset of the disease spells the end of life. What we must do, here in this sorry little cottage, is find all the herbs of a strength-giving virtue and combine them in a tonic to fortify the healthy.”
And so for the rest of that day, we pored through the books that Elinor had carried from the rectory, looking first for the names of plants said to be strengthening for any of the many body parts the Plague seemed to attack. It was tedious going, for the rectory’s books were in Latin or Greek, which Elinor had to translate for me. Eventually, we discovered that the best of them was a volume by one Avicenna, a Musalman doctor who, many years since, had set down all his learning in a vast canon. When we had the names of the plants, we went through the herb bunches, trying, sometimes with great difficulty, to match the descriptions in the books with the drying leaves and roots before us. Outside, we searched the snow-blasted garden for any sturdy plants whose worts we could yet dig before the ground froze solid. By afternoon, we had assembled the weapons for our armory. Nettle for the blood. Starwort and violet leaves for the lungs. Silverweed to cool a fever. Cress for the stomach. The worts of blow-ball for the liver, bat-weed for the glands, and vervain for the throat.
Elinor thought the last of these perhaps the most important. She called it the holy herb of Saint John and read out a prayer recommenced to be said over the plant before we pulled up the roots.
“Hallowed be thou vervain, as thou growest on thy mound
For in the Mount of Calvary there thou was first found.
Thou healedest our savior and stanched his bleeding wound.
In name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
I take thee from the ground.”
We gathered all the bunches we could carry into a burlap to carry to the rectory kitchen. I was about to extinguish the fire in the grate when Elinor reached out and stayed my hand. “What about these, Anna? What shall we do with them?” She held out the poppies. “It is for you to decide.”
I felt the panic rise in me. “But, surely, we need these for the succor of the many afflicted here,” I said, although my thoughts had sped immediately to my own needs rather than those of the dying.
“The Gowdies were sensible of the risk posed by this thing, Anna. They have only enough here to relieve a handful of grave cases. How should we choose who should suffer and who should be soothed?”
Without speaking, I reached for the bunch. I made to throw it on the fire, but found I did not have the will to open my hand. I ran a thumbnail across a still-green pod and watched the white sap ooze slowly from the incision. I wanted to lay my tongue on it, to lap the bitterness and feel its sweet sequel. Elinor stood silently, waiting. I tried to read her eyes, but she turned away from me.
How was I to face the days and nights to come? There would be no other relief for me; in my two hands I held my only chance of exit from. our village and its agonies. But then I realized that this was not quite true. There was our work. I had seen that afternoon how it was possible to lose myself in it. And yet this loss of self was not selfish oblivion. From this study and its applications might come much good. But surely I could not attempt it without clarity of mind. I grasped the bunch then and flung it on the fire. The sap hissed for a moment, and then the pods burst, their showers of tiny seeds falling invisible among the ashes.
By the time we closed the stubborn door behind us, the wind had died and the air seemed milder. I would try to be the woman that Elinor wished me to be. And if I failed, I had learned enough from our work that day to know where to look for the pale green shoots of poppy, pushing through the soil of the Gowdies’ garden, come the spring.
Among Those That Go Down to the Pit<
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As WE APPROACHED the rectory, we saw Michael Mompellion in the churchyard, his coat off, the wide sleeves of his white shirt rolled up past his forearms, his hair damp from his own sweat. He was digging graves. Three long holes lay open around him, and he was at work on the fourth.
Elinor hurried to him, reaching up to wipe his brow. He stepped back from her and waved away her hand. His face was gray with exhaustion and he leaned upon the spud, heavily. She begged him to stop and rest, but he shook his head. “I cannot stop. We need six graves this day, one of them for poor Jon Millstone.” Our aged sexton had died that morning. The rector had found him, sprawled half in, half out of the grave he had been digging. “His heart gave out. He was too old for the labor that of late has been laid upon him.”
Looking at Mr. Mompellion, I worried that he, too, might drop. He looked worn to a nub. It seemed he had not slept the previous night but gone from one deathbed to the next. His pledge that none should die alone had become a heavy burden upon him. It was clear that he could not survive if now he attempted the sexton’s work as well. I hurried to the kitchen, warmed a mug of purl for him, and carried it back out to where he stood, waist deep in the dirt.
“Sir, this is not seemly work for you,” I said. “Let me fetch one of the men from the Miner’s Tavern to do it.”
“And who will come, Anna?” He placed a hand to his back and winced as he straightened. “The miners are ill set trying to pull ore enough from their claims to keep their mines from being nicked. The farmers are become too few to gather in the grain or milk their kine. How can I lay this melancholy work upon them? Those who are still in health to do it should not be asked to risk such proximity with the dead.”
Year of Wonders Page 15