Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  I felt like a piece of stone as I stood there and watched them, ten or twelve now, hurrying off in the direction of my father’s croft. I stood there, and I didn’t move to warn him, or to fetch Mr. Mompellion, or to do anything at all to save him. I stood there, and all I could think of was the sting of his fist and the stink of his breath. I stood there until the mob turned up the hill and out of my sight. And then I went inside and prepared for the labors of my day.

  THE STORM that had threatened at morning blew in by early afternoon. It came from the northeast, in sheets of snow that marched across the far valley in separate leaves, like the pages of a letter whipped from someone’s hands in a wind gust. It was a rare spectacle, and I stood on the hill in the apple orchard, transfixed by the slowing advancing columns of white outlined against the black clouds behind.

  I was there when they came for me, a band of miners, marching up the hill through the trees as they had the night Sam died. This time, Alun Houghton led them. They wanted me, he said, to bear witness at the Barmote Court to what I had seen at the Unwin house. “And to speak, if you will, in defense of your father.”

  “I do not wish to go, Barmester.” After Alun Houghton’s gravelly voice, my words seemed weightless, carried away by the wind. “There is nothing that I wish to say. Anything I have seen, others have seen also. Please do not ask this of me.”

  But Houghton pressed me and would not be satisfied. So, as the snowy fury descended upon us, I made my way with those men who would decide my father’s fate in no less apt a place than the Miner’s Tavern.

  They gathered in the courtyard of the tavern, as they had on the night Merry Wickford brought her dish to the Barmester. They were, of course, fewer, for in the weeks between, the Plague had felled three of the twenty last sworn to the Body of the Mine. There were two long tavern tables in the courtyard itself, and a gallery ran all around, one floor above, from which inn guests, in other times, gained access to their rooms. Of course, there had been no travelers here since the Sunday Oath. The rooms had stood empty for half a year. Some of the miners were up on the gallery, whether to take better shelter from the snow there, or whether to keep a greater distance from their fellows, I cannot say. When the Barmester’s party entered, some six or seven drew close to the railing and peered down at us. The men nearer to us, at the tavern tables, huddled each under his own blanket or cloak as the snow dropped its white flurries upon us. Every expression was grim. I looked around for Aphra but did not find her, and I wondered if she had been too cowed to come among these angry, sullen men. The snowfall in the yard seemed to muffle everything, even the booming voice of Alun Houghton, who had taken his place at the end of the larger table.

  “Josiah Bont!”

  My father, his hands bound in front of him, stood at the far end of the table, held fast by two miners. When he made no response to the Barmester, Henry Swope, the larger of the two, brought his hand down hard on the back of my father’s head.

  “Ye’ll answer ‘Present’ to t’ Barmester!”

  “Present,” said my father in a surly murmur.

  “Josiah Bont, thou well knowest the crimes that have brought you to this place. Thou art not a miner, and in normal times this court would have no dealings with such as thee. But we are all that is left of justice in this place, and justice we will do here. Ye all assembled here must also know that murder and attempted murder are beyond the scope of this Barmote Court. And so we do not bring Josiah Bont here to answer to these things. But the following we do ask him to answer:

  “Ye first item, we set down, that on on the third day of April in the Year of Our Lord 1666, thou art accused of entering the house of Christopher Unwin, miner, where thou did take from hence a silver ewer. What says thee?”

  My father was again silent, his head sunk on his chest. Swope roughly pulled my father’s head up and hissed at him, “Look ’e at yon Barmester, Joss Bont, and pronounce ’e aye or nay before I thump ’e.”

  My father’s voice was barely audible. He must have felt the hatred coming from the men in that courtyard. And even his grog-addled brain must have calculated that to keep them standing in the cold would only enrage them all more and add to the fury in the punishment they finally meted out to him.

  “Aye,” he said at last.

  “Ye second item, we set down, that on the same day and from the same house thou art accused of taking a silver salt dish. What says thee?”

  “Aye.”

  “Ye third item, we set down, that on the same day from the same house thou didst take two brazen candlesticks, cunning wrought. What says thee?”

  “Aye.”

  “Ye fourth item, we set down, that on the same day and from the person of Christopher Unwin thou didst take one nightshirt of cambric. What says thee?”

  Even my father seemed shamed by this last. His head dropped again, and his “Aye” fell muffled into his breast.

  “Josiah Bont, since you do own these crimes, we do find thee guilty. Does anyone wish to speak for this man before I proclaim his penalty?”

  Every eye in the place turned to me then, where I stood by the wall to the right of Alun Houghton, trying to vanish into the shadows. Every eye, including my father’s. His glare was hard at first, the prideful look of a cock o’ the walk. But as I gazed back at him in silence, the look changed to one of surprise, and then confusion, and finally, as the realization that I would not speak came at last upon him, his whole face sagged. There was rage there, but also disappointment, and the slow dawning of a sad understanding. I had to look away then, for that hint of his grief was more than I could bear. Oh, I knew I would pay for my silence. But I could not speak for him. Or, rather, would not.

  There was a shuffling and mumbling then, as the men perceived that I remained mute. When Alun Houghton was convinced I would say nothing, he raised a hand for silence, and when the men stilled, he spoke.

  “Josiah Bont, thou should surely know that theft has ever been a sore matter to miners, who toil far off from their dwelling places and must betimes leave their hard-got ore in places lonely and unwatched. And so our code has penalty enough to deter greedy hands. Your hands have been uncommon greedy. And so the court does hereby impose upon you the age-old remedy: thou shalt be taken from here to the Unwin mine and impaled to its stowes by a knife through the hands.” Houghton looked down at his own large, hairy hands where they leaned upon the table. He lifted them then slapped them down and shook his massive head. “So there you have it,” he said, his voice no longer the formal boom of the Barmester but only that of a sad old man.

  The light was fading as they led my father away. Later, I learned that he whimpered when he saw the blackened stowes rising from the snowy crust upon the moors. I learned that he begged in vain for mercy and howled like a trapped animal when the dagger cleft his flesh.

  The tradition is that once the knife is placed, the convicted man is left, unguarded. It is understood that before very long someone from his kin will come to free him. I believed that Aphra would do it. It never occurred to me that she would not. For whatever I felt toward him, I would not have left my father to die in such a way.

  That night, the snow turned to rain. By morning it was siling down with a force that peeled the soil from the hillsides and filled the streams until they broke brownly over their banks. All the next day, water landed on my windows slantwise, as if hurled from a bucket that never emptied. The very road became like a stream, the water pooling against the houses and running under the doorsills until every piece of spare cloth was too soaked to keep it from seeping inside. To open the door was to admit the deluge; to step outside was to be drenched. So no one went anywhere except of dire need.

  I believe my father died waiting for Aphra, expecting her coming until his last instant. Otherwise he surely would have taken the wolf’s choice: torn his own hands, letting the blade slice through palm flesh and finger sinew to buy his liberty, and his life. Perhaps he remained so disordered by drink that he did not rea
lize the passing of time. Perhaps he fainted from the agony in his hands and so did not feel the seeping cold stealing over his body and slowing his heart until it stopped. I will never know exactly how it was that death claimed him. But I think of his body, needled by the lashing rain until his soaked flesh puckered. I see his mouth open like a cup, filling and filling till the water brimmed and spilled.

  For Aphra did not come. She could not. At a single stroke, three of her four children had sickened with Plague that day. Her youngest, Faith, a girl of three years, was the only one not stricken. Had one of the elder boys been spared, she could have sent him to fetch help. But she had no one to send. And so she chose not to leave her children in that lonely croft while the rain soaked the thatch and the fire waned and they cried for comfort, not to make the long, soaking trek up to the moors to the man whom she blamed for bringing the infection upon them.

  No one came near her all through that day or the next. I did not go, and for that I will forever reproach myself. Because out of our negligence and her loneliness came much rage. Much rage and some madness—and a surfeit of grief. For Aphra, and for all of us.

  THE RAIN EASED late on the second night, and by morning it had been replaced by a stiff wind that blew the water off the tree limbs and began the slow business of drying the saturated gritstones of our dwellings and the sodden earth of our fields.

  And so my father was three days dead before I learned what had become of him. For Aphra appeared at my door that morning, earth clinging to her hands and falling in damp crumbs from her smock. Her cheeks were sunken, and her eyes had dropped into deep, mauve hollows. She was muddy up to her nethers, and she carried her little girl, Faith, clutched to her waist.

  “Tell me he is here, Anna,” she said, and at first I had no idea what she was speaking about. The blank expression upon my face answered her question. She gave a great, animal-like wail and dropped to the floor, beating her fists on the hearth. Her hands were all blisters, which burst and splattered yellow fluid on the gray stone. “He’s still there then! The Devil take you, Anna! You left him there to die!” The child, terrified, began wailing as well. The noise brought Mary Hadfield to my door, and together the two of us grabbed hold of Aphra and soothed her as best we could. But she was wild under our hands as a weasel, thrashing to get free of us.

  “Let me go! Let me go! Since I’m the only one who cares enough to tend to him!”

  I was determined not to let go of her in that state, even though my bowels had turned to water at the implication of her words. In my heart, I hoped my father might have freed himself and just run off. It was the sort of thing he was capable of doing: oathbreaking—to Aphra, to the entire village, even to God—would mean little to him.

  It was some time before I made enough sense out of her confused keenings to understand that her boys were all of them dead. She had buried them that morning. She had dug the grave big enough and laid them side by side, hand in hand. The ruin of her own hands had come not just from the blistering business of digging such a large hole in the water-sodden earth; as I picked the thorns from her wounds, she told me that she had covered the grave with brambles, plaited in threes, so that the power of the Holy Trinity would protect her sons from witches and demons. I thought, but did not say, that the only thing the brambles would protect them from was unearthing by rooting sows, who were about the village now, hungry and scavenging, like so much other livestock whose dead owners could no longer tend or confine them.

  She winced as I salved her raw hands and bound them up with the softest cloths I could find. I thought that the last thing she need face after burying her boys was dealing with, the matter of my father. If he were dead up there these three days, it would be a grisly business. But if he had run off, the discovery of his abandonment would be a grief to her. I said I would send Brand or another of the young men up to the Unwin mine, but this suggestion only set her keening afresh. “They all hate him! I’ll not have them near him! You hate him, too. You needn’t pretend otherwise. Just let me go and give him his due.” In her anguished state, I could not subdue or gainsay her, so I resolved to go with her. But I made her leave the child with Mary Hadfield, so that the little one would be spared whatever we might find.

  Alas, I didn’t comprehend how great a horror, or perhaps I would have spared myself. Small mercy: the stiff wind rattled through the skeletons of winter-killed bracken and the bare legs of dead heather, so that the stench of shit and rot from my father’s half-gnawed guts came to us only in the brief lulls between gusts. The wild creatures had had ample time to do their work, so what was left on the stowes was more like a clumsily butchered beef than the mortal remains of a man.

  Approaching that ruined body was one of the hardest things I have done in my life. I checked when I saw it and thought to turn back and implore someone who was not kin to deal with it. But Aphra marched on. Her fit had passed now, or changed, at least. She had turned cold and calm, muttering and muttering under her breath. She walked straight up to the stowes and tugged at the dagger that held what was left of my father. It was driven hard into the wood and did not budge when she lay her bandaged hands upon it. Only when she planted a boot on the upright and threw her whole body’s weight against it did the knife finally slide free, grating against bone. She looked at it for a long moment then began to wield it on my father’s hair, shearing off large locks and plunging them into her pocket. Then she tore off a piece of my father’s jerkin to wrap the blade and tucked the dagger into her girdle.

  We had brought neither pick nor shovel with us, and the ground up there is so hard, even after such a soaking, that I would have been ill set in any wise to dig a decent hole. Still, I dreaded the thought of carrying this remnant of a corpse any distance. I feared that Aphra would want to bury him on her own ground, near her boys. But she said she would rather lay him right there, at the Unwin mine, so that Christopher Unwin would ever be reminded of the cost of his justice. So I spent the next hour gathering stones to raise a cairn. This, at least, was simply done, for the deads from the mine contained many large toadstones. When it was high enough, Aphra began searching for sticks, and then she shredded pieces from the hem of her placket to bind them. I thought she meant to form a cross for the grave, but when she was done I saw that she had fashioned, instead, a figure that looked like a manikin. This she lay atop the cairn. I commenced to say the Lord’s Prayer, and I thought she was saying it with me in a low, deep-throated murmur. But when I said amen, her muttering continued, and the sign she made at the end of it did not resemble the sign of the cross.

  The Press of Their Ghosts

  THAT AFTERNOON, I cried for my father. I had gone into the rectory kitchen to make a dish of vervain tea for Eli nor, and as I stood there, waiting for the water to boil, the tears welled up and flowed, uncontrollably. The trouble with weeping was that once begun, it became almost impossible to stop. For I had not had sufficient space to mourn for my boys, or for the ruin of the life I had imagined for myself, mothering them both to an honorable manhood.

  My face was all wet and my shoulders shaking, but I tried to make the tea anyway. I lifted the kettle from the hob and then stood there, frozen, unable to remember the simple sequence of actions that I needed next to do. I was standing there still when Elinor came. She took the kettle from my hand, sat me down, and stroked my hair and held me. Elinor said nothing at first, but as my sobs subsided, she began to whisper.

  “Tell me,” said Elinor, and so I did, at last. The whole of it. All his brutalities; all the neglect and ill use of my lost and lonely childhood. I told her then what I had learned of what lay behind his depravities, the same terrible stories he had poured into the unwilling ears of a frightened child who had not wished to hear them. How he had been buggered as a boy by the rough men of the fleet and learned to swill down the rum until he did not mind it. How he had gone under the lash of a boatswain’s mate who had not troubled to comb the cat between each stroke, so that the tails landed all in one bloo
dy tangle and left a rend in his back so deep that ever after he could not fully raise his left arm.

  Elinor winced as I recounted all this, as I must have winced and tried to stop my ears when the tales had been laid upon me. But just as he would not relent from the telling, I found that neither could I. I heard my own voice, droning on and on with the litany of miseries: how he had seen his only friend ripped jowl to calf by barnacles in an unjust keel-hauling; how he had survived the term of his apprenticeship and got ashore at last, only to be picked up by a press gang and forced again to sea; how he had lived ever after in fear that he would somehow be pressed again, even far inland as we lived, and dragged back into his nightmares.

  Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father’s nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more.

  Elinor sat quietly for a time. “I always wondered,” she said at last, “why one like your father bound himself here by the Sunday Oath. For it seemed to me that he was the very type of man who would flee and spare himself if he could. I suppose the fear he had of the press gangs would account for it.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But I think there was more to it. I do believe now that he felt himself protected.” I told her then of Aphra’s strange behaviors during the making of my father’s cairn and the laying of his corpse to rest. “Aphra has ever been superstitious. I believe that she convinced my father that she had somehow obtained chants or charms or somesuch to preserve them from Plague’s infections.”