Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Indeed,” she said. “If that is so, Aphra and your father are not alone in embracing such beliefs.” She went to her whisket then and brought out a piece of stained, frayed cloth. She showed it to me and then let it flutter on to the hearth. She had made the tea for the two of us, and she sipped it absently as she watched the fabric burn. The marks on the cloth were clumsy, as if the hand that had made them was not used to forming letters. As best I could make it out before the flame tongued them black, the words were a nonsense foursome: AAB, ILLA, HYRS, GIBELLA.

  “I had this from Margaret Livesedge, who lost her baby daughter yesterday. A ‘witch’ gave it her. The ghost, as she said, of Anys Gowdie. The ghost told her the words were Chaldee—a powerful spell from sorcerers who worshipped Satan, naked and painted with snakes, at each full moon. She had her twine the cloth like a snake around the child’s neck where the Plague sore was. As the moon waned, the Plague sore, too, was supposed to diminish.” Elinor shook her head sadly. “Either Margaret has lost her reason and is having visions of women who are not there, or someone took a silver shilling off her for this wicked nonsense. Anna, I don’t know what shocks me more in all this: that someone preys upon their desperate fellows, or that they besmirch the memory of Anys Gowdie in passing themselves off as her shade, or that people here are so desperate and credulous that they listen to these midnight whisperings and pay their last mite for these worthless amulets.”

  I told her then of finding Kate Talbot’s ABRACADABRA on that snowy day when we’d met each other unexpectedly at the Gowdie cottage. “We must tell Mr. Mompellion of these things,” she said. “He must preach against them and warn people not to fall into these superstitions.” The rector was out, writing a will for the miner Richard Sopes, but presently we heard Anteros blowing and snorting in the stableyard. Elinor went to greet him while I prepared some broth and oatcake, and when I carried it into the library, the two of them were deep in conference. Elinor turned to me.

  “Mr. Mompellion, too, has come upon these talismans. It seems the madness is spreading as fast as the disease amongst us.”

  “Indeed,” he said, “I am come back here to fetch one of you to the Mowbray croft, for the infant there needs your herb-knowledge.” He had come in from the stableyard coatless, and he looked chilled, so I hurried to fetch him a jacket.

  “Then it isn’t Plague, rector?” I asked, stretching up to assist him into the garment.

  “No, no; it is not the Plague this time, or not as yet at least. But I found the babe’s fool parents out in the Riley field, passing the poor naked child back and forth through the bramble hedge. By the time I got up to them his tender little body was all scratched and sliced, with the fools smiling and saying that they’ve protected him so from invasion by Plague seeds.” He tugged at his shirt sleeves and sighed. “It took hard words and harsh looks from me to get it out of them, but finally they told me they’d had the instructions and the incantations from the ghost of Anys Gowdie, who’d visited them in the dark. I wrapped up the poor child in my cloak and made them carry him home, where I said I would send one of you directly with a salve for his scrapes.”

  I told Elinor that I would go, since I needed some useful occupation to divert my mind. I made the salve as quickly as I could. The bramble leaf itself has that in it to soothe its own thorns’ pricks, so I compounded some with silverweed and comfrey and a little cooling mint and bound the result with almond oil. It was a sweet-smelling ointment, and its scent lingered on my hands. But the stench as I neared the door of the Mowbray croft drove the fragrance from my nose.

  As if the poor infant had not been enough imposed upon, Lottie Mowbray was holding the baby aloft and steering the thin stream of his piss into a cooking pot that had evidently just been lifted off the fire. I could not think why, but they clearly had been boiling this pot of piss for some time, for the stink of it filled the croft. She looked up blankly as I entered, and the last of the infant’s pee dribbled onto her skirt.

  “Lottie Mowbray, what new foolishness is this?” I demanded, gently lifting the whimpering infant from her hands. This was the boy I had midwifed just after Shrovetide and I had wondered, even then, how someone like Lottie, who was herself in many ways a child, would manage to care for him. The father, Tom, was little better than simple himself, scraping a poor living as plough-boy or mine-hand-whatever plain tasks his neighbors had need of him to do. But he was a gentle-seeming soul who was kind to Lottie and besotted by the babe. “The witch told us we should boil the babe’s hair in his piss and that this would keep off the Plague from both ’is innards and ’is outers,” Tom said. “Since the rector was so vexed with us over the bramble charms, I thought to try this’n, in its stead.”

  I had brought a lambskin from my cottage and I spread this before the fire. Tenderly as I could, I laid the little one down upon it and unwrapped the dirty cloths that Lottie had swaddled him in. He began to give a thin cry, for in places the cloth had stuck to the bleeding scratches.

  “And how much,” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm so as not to alarm the infant, “did the woman take from you for this advice? ”

  “Thruppence for the first, and tuppence the second,” Lottie replied. “And I reckon it were a bargain, for she says that once the Plague be full upon a child, the charms for lifting it cost a lot more than them as holds it at bay.” I happened to know, because Tom Mowbray had sometimes worked for Sam, that even in good times five pence was his whole sennight’s wage.

  It was difficult to contain my anger. I did my best, for one could not blame simpletons like the Mowbrays for falling prey to such superstitions. But my wrists were limp with rage at this predatory woman, whomsoever she be. I tried to make my fingers light as butterflies upon the baby as I washed his scrapes and dressed them with my salve. When I was finished, I wrapped him in the piece of clean linen that Elinor had given me and tucked him up, with the lambskin, in the hollowed-out log the Mowbrays used for a cradle. Then I took the stinking piss pot to the door and flung its contents far out into the yard. Lottie cried out at this, so I took her by the shoulders and gave her a gentle shake. “Here,” I said, holding out the salve. “This costs you nothing. In the morning, if the room is warm enough, leave him bare awhile so the air can work upon his cuts. Then dress them, as you just saw me do it, with the salve. Feed him as well as you are able, and stay clear of any whom you know to be sick. That is all we can do against this Plague. That, and pray to God for deliverance, for it will not come from Satan, or for those who work in his shadow.” I sighed then, for her blank gaze told me I was wasting my breath.

  “See that you scour that pot well before you cook in it again,” I said. “Put water in it and boil it on the fire this night. Do you understand?” At that, she nodded dumbly. Potscrubbing, at least, was something she could grasp.

  As I walked away from the croft, I caught my toe on a loose stone and stumbled, grazing the hand that I flung out to break my fall. My anger magnified this small hurt and I cursed. As I sucked at the injured place, a question began to press upon me. Why, I wondered, did we, all of us, both the rector in his pulpit and simple Lottie in her croft, seek to put the Plague in unseen hands? Why should this thing be either a test of faith sent by God, or the evil working of the Devil in the world? One of these beliefs we embraced, the other we scorned as superstition. But perhaps each was false, equally. Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.

  I walked on, nursing my injured hand and probing my heart on these matters. Did I really believe that God put the rock in my path to trip me? Some would say certainly: the finger of God places every speck of dust. I did not see it so. Yet I would have inclined to believe God’s hand at work if, as a result of the rock, I’d struck my head and lay now fatally injured. So where, exactly, in the design of the world, did I believe that matters tilted the scale sufficient to garner God’s notice? If I did not think He cared for the lie of a rock, why
should I believe that He cared for a small life such as mine? It came to me then that we, all of us, spent a very great deal of time pondering these questions that, in the end, we could not answer. If we balanced the time we spent contemplating God, and why He afflicted us, with more thought as to how the Plague spread and poisoned our blood, then we might come nearer to saving our lives.

  While these thoughts were vexing, they brought with them also a chink of light. For if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village full of sinners or a host of saints.

  WE GREETED OUR MAYING with a mixture of hope and fear: the hope, I suppose, that comes naturally into the human heart at the end of any hard winter; the fear that the gentler weather would bring with it an increase in disease. The season eased in with an unaccustomed steadiness, as if the skies knew we could not cope, this year, with the sudden reversals that are more typical here—one day mild, encouraging the tender tips of grass shoots, the next bringing a biting frost to scorch all the new growth back to dun lifelessness. This year, the shoots opened and the buds swelled into bloom unblighted. Small, unseen creatures bustled through fields gilded by daffodils: The old apple trees burst into snowy blossom and cast their scent adrift on the warming breeze. Once, walking through the hazy mist of bluebells, I was pierced by a memory: “This gladdened me once.” And for a moment, I stopped, and paused, and tried to grasp that sentiment. As I stood there, I thought of Jamie, still a babe, reaching up his tiny arms to try and clasp the moon. My effort was just as doomed. Then I had to walk on, toward the melancholy tasks awaiting me beside yet another deathbed.

  In the fair weather my ewes lambed easily, which was a blessing given all else I had to do. Sometimes, the sight of those tiny creatures moved me, their clean fleeces so dazzling white against the lush new grass, springing on all fours in their joy to be alive. At other times, I would gaze at them and wonder if I would be yet living to see them grown, to clip their fleece or put them to tups to birth lambs of their own. At those times, I would feel a witless anger at their simple gamboling. “Stupid beasts,” I would mutter, “to be happy to be here, of all the accursed places in this world.” Those were the times when I had heard of yet another, and another, and another still, falling to the sickness.

  For the warm weather brought death more than we had thought possible. Even Cucklett Delf, beautiful as it was now, all decked with tumbles of hawthorn blossom lacier than our finest altar cloths, had become unable to conceal from us our diminishment. Every Sunday the spaces between us grew greater and the distance from the rector’s rocky pulpit to the last row of worshipers grew less.

  “We are become Golgotha—the place of skulls,” said Michael Mompellion, preaching to us in the Delf on the last Sunday in May. “And yet we are also Gethsemane, the garden of waiting, and of prayer. Like our blessed Lord, we can only implore God: ‘Take this cup away from me.’ But then, like him, beloved friends, we must add the words, Not my will, but Thine, be done.”

  By the second Sunday of June we had reached a sorry marker: as many of us were now in the ground as walked above it. The passing of Margaret Livesedge meant that the dead roll now stood at one hundred fourscore souls. Sometimes, if I walked the main street of the village in the evening, I felt the press of their ghosts. I realized then that I had begun to step small and carry myself all hunched, keeping my arms at my sides and my elbows tucked, as if to leave room for them. I wondered then if others had these fell thoughts, or whether I was drifting slowly into madness. There had been fear here, since the very beginning, but where it had been veiled, now it had become naked. Those of us who were left feared each other and the hidden contagion we each might carry. People scurried, stealthy as mice, trying to go and come without meeting another soul.

  It became impossible for me to look into the face of a neighbor and not imagine him dead. Then, I would find my mind turning over how we would manage without his skill at the plough or the loom or the cobbler’s bench. We were sorely depleted already in trades of all kinds. Horses who threw a shoe went without since the death of the farrier. We were without malter and mason, carpenter and cloth-weaver, thatcher and tailor. Many fields lay covered in unbroken clods, neither harrowed nor sown. Whole houses stood empty; entire families gone from us, and names that had been known here for centuries gone with them.

  Fear took each of us differently. Andrew Merrick, the malter, went off to live all alone, save for his cockerel, in a rude hut he built for himself near the summit of Sir William Hill. He would steal down to Mompellion’s Well in the dark of night to leave word of his needs. Since he did not know his letters, he would simply leave a cup containing a sample of the thing he needed—a few grains of oats, the bones of a herring.

  Some slaked their dread in drink and their loneliness in wanton caresses. Of these, the strangest case was Jane Martin, the strict young girl who had tended my babes. The poor wretch saw all of her family into their graves and then, though barely more than a child, became an alehouse haunter, seeking insensibility in the pot. Within a month, she had shrugged off her Sadd Colors and her tight-lipped ways, and it pained me when I overheard some of the young souses joking as to how she’d changed from being “colder than a ley wall” into “a bawdy jade who could scarce keep her legs closed.” One evening, when I came upon her weaving an uncertain way home in the dark, I took her into my cottage, thinking to get her warm and sober in a safe bed and speak some sense to her in the morning. I fed her some stew of mutton neck, but she quickly brought the whole of it up again and was still so wretchedly ill the next morning that I don’t believe she heard much of anything I tried to say to her.

  But it was John Gordon’s fear that led him upon the queerest path. Gordon, who had beaten his wife the night of Anys Gowdie’s murder, had ever been a solitary and difficult soul, so no one was much surprised when, in early spring, he and his wife stopped coming to Sunday services at Cucklett Delf. As they lived at the far edge of the village, I had not seen John for many weeks. Urith I had seen and had some short speech with, so I knew that their absence from the Delf was by choice and not caused by illness. Urith had ever been a woman of few words. She was kept so cowed by her husband that she crept here and there, timid and silent, afraid of conversation lest it somehow led her into conduct of which her husband did not approve. I had noticed that Urith looked thinner, more haggard and gaunt than usual, but as the same could be said for most of us, I did not think too much of it.

  Yet John Gordon’s altered appearance was another gate’s business. I had gone late to the well one evening, on a day that had been filled with tending the sick, to fetch a sack of salt bespoke for the rectory kitchen. The light was fading, and it took me a long time before I recognized the stooped figure making a halting way up the steep track through the trees. Although the evening was chill, the man was naked to the waist, with only a piece of sacking bound around his loins. He was spare as a corpse, his bones like shiny knobs, pressing almost through his flesh. He carried a staff in his left hand, on which he leaned heavily, for the effort of the walk was clearly costing him dear. In the gathering dusk I could not at first see what it was that his right hand held. But as I began to descend from the well and draw nearer to him, I finally made it out. It was a scourge of plaited leather, into the ends of which had been driven short nails. As John Gordon moved up the path, I perceived that he stopped, every five paces or so, straightened, and raised the scourge to strike himself. One of the spikes was bent crooked, like a fishhook, so that where it connected with. the skin it caught and tore away a tiny piece of flesh.

  I dropped the salt sack and ran toward him then, crying out. Close to, I could see that he was a mass of scabs and bruises, with fr
esh blood trickling into the dried tracks of earlier injuries.

  “Please,” I cried, “Cease this! Do not punish yourself so! Rather, come with me and let me lay a salve upon your wounds!”

  Gordon only stared at me and went on murmuring. “Te Deum laudamus, te judice ... te Deum laudamus, te judice ... ” He applied the lash to himself in rhythm with his prayer. The hooked nail caught in his flesh and raised up a little tent of skin. He gave a tug and skin tore. I flinched. His low voice never faltered.

  He pushed past me,then as if I were not there and went on, in the direction of the Edge. I picked up the salt and hurried on to the rectory. As unwilling as I was to lay any new burden on Mr. Mompellion, this was, as I thought, a situation only he could know how to address. He was in his library, working on sermon. It was not my habit ever to disturb him there, but when I told Elinor what I had seen, she insisted that the news could not wait.

  He stood up at once at our knock and looked at us with grave attention, knowing we would not interrupt him for a small matter. When I told him what I had witnessed, he pounded his fist upon the table.

  “Flagellants! I feared it.”

  “But how?” said Elinor. “Far as we are from the cities, how should this thing arise here?”

  He shrugged. “Who can say? Gordon is a lettered man. It seems that dangerous ideas may spread on the very wind and seek us out near or far, as easily as the seeds of disease have done.”

  I did not know what they were speaking about. Elinor, sensing my confusion, turned to me.

  “They have ever been the specter that stalks with the Plague, Anna,” she said. “Flagellants walked the lanes of this land many hundreds of years ago, when disease and war were here. At the time of the Black Death, they gathered again, sometimes in very great numbers, passing from town to town, drawing the souls of the troubled to them. Their belief is that by grievous self-punishment they can allay God’s wrath. They see Plague as His discipline for human sin. They are poor souls—”