Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  “What is the meaning of this?” demanded the rector, as Elinor reached down to assist Aphra to her feet. Aphra pushed the black cloth back from her face and peered around wildly, as if she were searching for a bolt-hole through the crowd, but Brand lay a hand hard on her shoulder.

  “Here is the ‘ghost’ whose visitations have been chousing all of us!” Brand cried. “I caught her, all clad as you see in these black weeds, hiding in the woods near the Boundary Stone, trying frighten my sister, Charity, into parting with a shilling for a charm to fend the Plague away from young Seth.” He flung down a strip of fabric all awkwardly scrawled with foreign words, just such as Elinor had taken from the neck of Margaret Livesedge’s dead baby. He held it up for a moment for all to see, and then dropped it, grinding it into the dirt with his boot.

  “Shame!” yelled a woman’s voice in the crowd. Looking around, I saw that it was Kate Talbot, her face awash with grief. “Thief!” cried Tom Mowbray. The whole congregation erupted then, hurling insults at Aphra, who dropped to her knees and hid her face in her hands as the spittle and clods of earth began to fly.

  “Dunk her!” someone called. “To the stocks!” yelled another voice.

  If the rector doesn’t do something, and quickly, I thought, this crowd will become a mob, and unslakable. We were all of us like wounded animals, our hurts so raw and our fear so great that we would lash out at anyone, especially someone who had acted as evilly as Aphra. I was filled with disgust and anger and felt the urge myself to hurl spittle upon her. I looked around then, I do not know quite why, and saw at the edge of the crowd the tiny, tear-streaked figure of Aphra’s daughter, Faith, her mouth open in a wail that no one could hear for all their own angry din. I turned my back then on the jeering faces and pointing fingers and ran to the child and gathered her into my arms. Whatever was going to happen at the Delf, I did not want that little girl, who was, after all, my half-sister and only surviving blood-kin, to witness it. The child was too shocked to struggle as I carried her away. We were halfway up the hill to the path, but the rector’s voice, rising over the clamor of the crowd, carried clearly all across that basin-shaped dell.

  “Silence! Do not you desecrate this sacred place—this, our church—with such unholy cursing!”

  To my surprise, they all did fall silent then, and I turned to hear what next he would say.

  “The charges against this woman are grave, indeed, and they will be heard, and she will answer them. But not here, not now. That is tomorrow’s business. Go now to your homes, and pray to God to accept the offering we have made this night and to hear our prayer for His divine mercy.”

  There was much muttering then, but the people, accustomed to obeying, did as he said. I took Faith home to my cottage, where the child tossed and whimpered all through the night, wandering in nightmare landscapes into which I could not follow her. For myself, I snatched at threads of sleep, and when I awoke, it was to the sour smell of smoldering ashes.

  WHO AM I to blame Michael Mompellion for what happened that night?

  No one man, no matter how wise or well-intentioned, can ever judge perfectly in all matters. That night, he erred, and erred grievously, and grievously indeed did he pay for it. I believe it was, because his opinion of young Brand was so high. He remembered Brand’s brave loyalty to Maggie Cantwell in her calamity, and he had been proud of the way the youth had stepped into the role of brother to Charity and Seth, taking up the responsibilities of the Merrill farm after Jakob Merrill died.

  Since Brand and Robert had uncovered Aphra’s crime, the rector charged them with confining her until her hearing the next day. He did not think to tell them how she should be confined, nor to admonish them against taking her punishment into their own hands. But the young men’s wrath was so hot that the idea, when it occurred to Robert, seemed to them in their bitterness an apt one.

  Robert Snee kept pigs on his farm. He was a good farmer and had contrived many clever methods to raise his yields. One of his innovations was a way of turning swine shit quickly into useful manure. His practice was to muck out the slops and droppings of the pens together with the spent straw of the stableyard into a deep cavern in the limestone—a natural cistern set conveniently into the side of the hill. He had fashioned a gutter in the low side of the cavern from which he could spud the well-rotted manure into his barrow for spreading.

  It was into this lightless, stinking pit that Brand and Robert threw Aphra. Later, when I saw the place, I could not imagine how she survived the night there. The stench was caustic, scouring the throat and chest. The muck lapped, brown and frothy and alive, high against the limestone—at least high enough, as I judged, that Aphra would have had to tilt her head to keep the slops from splashing into her mouth at the slightest movement. Yet since the manure on which she stood was only semi-solid, it was impossible to be still, for to keep from sinking deeper meant constantly scrambling for handholds in the slimy rock wall. While her muscles ached from the effort, and her chest burned from the rank air, Aphra must have used every shred of her will to keep her consciousness, for had she succumbed to a faint she would have smothered and drowned.

  The woman they dragged out of that pit and brought to the village green the next morning was not Aphra but a gibbering, broken thing. The two young men had tried to clean her, pouring bucket after bucket of icy well water over her, so that she was wet through and shivering. But still she stank, giving off a reek that hit you halfway across the green. Her skin, where it had been immersed all night, was all broken out in blebs. She was too weak and exhausted to stand and so lay on the grass, all curled up on herself and whimpering like a newborn.

  Elinor wept when she beheld her. Michael Mompellion balled his hand into a fist and advanced on Brand and Robert Snee, so that I thought he would strike them. Brand was pale as a ghost and ill with guilt at what he had done. Even Robert Snee, a harder sort of man, looked at the ground and would meet no one’s eyes.

  I had long disliked the spectacles that were enacted on this green, where our fellow villagers had been set in the stocks for swearing or scolding or ungodly behaviors. To be sure, our stocks were nothing so fearful as the Bakewell pillory. In that market town, where people came and went without deep ties one to another, to be pilloried was to be a target of rotten fruit or fish heads or any noisome thing the mob could lay a hand to. One woman, set up there for whoring, had lost an eye to some violent missile. In a small place such as this, one could not treat a neighbor so. But to be bound by the ankles in that splintery wood, under hot sun or chill drizzle, enduring hours of disapproving stares and the catcalls of unmannerly children—this, to me, was degradation more than most deserved. Even Reverend Stanley seldom called for sinners to be stocked, and Mr. Mompellion had actively discouraged it.

  Some dozen had gathered to see to Aphra’s punishment—a large enough number considering our depleted state. Margaret Livesedge’s widower, David, was there, no doubt recalling his wife’s great hopes from the “Chaldee charm,” and how cruelly they had been dashed when their babe died still wearing it. There, too, was Kate Talbot, whose costly Abracadabra spell had not saved her husband. The Merrill children and the Mowbrays had come; simple folk seeking simple justice. There were some few others, also, but if they had been deceived out of their coppers by the so-called ghost, not all were of a mind to admit to it.

  I think that these accusers had gathered ready to mete out a harsh punishment. But when Brand and Robert brought Aphra, so abject and miserable, they all of them seemed to lose the appetite for it, and one by one they melted away. The rector dropped into a crouch near to Aphra and bent his head close to hers. He spoke quietly to her, asking her to make restitution of the money she had choused, and gave her a penance. I could not tell whether she understood any part of what he said. The rector asked for a cart to carry her home, and Elinor and I rode with her. We had to hold her up, so weak was she. Because she cried out for the child Faith, we stopped at my cottage to fetch her. All the rest of the
way, the child, wide-eyed and silent, cowered by her mother, clinging to her thigh.

  Inside Aphra’s croft we heated water and tried to bathe her, prising the manure from under her fingernails and salving her weeping sores. She submitted to our tending for a short while, but as her wits began to return to her, so, too, came her temper, and she began muttering fierce insults upon us, ordering us to go away and calling us all manner of ill things, which I’ll not set down here.

  I did not want to leave her so, nor leave the child Faith with her. “Stepmother,” I said quietly, “I pray you, let me take the child for a day or two until you are recovered in your strength.”

  “Oh, no, you sly doxy!” she shrieked, clutching wildly at the frightened little girl. “Pox take you and your schemes! You think I don’t know?” She dropped her voice and stared at me. “You think I can’t see through you? You’re not my stepdaughter now. Oh, no. You’re too fine for the likes o’ me. You’re her creature,” she said, pointing a trembling finger at Elinor. “That dry-snatched, barren scarecrow would steal my last babe, wouldn’t she?” Elinor flinched. She had turned white, even beyond her natural pallor. She grasped at a chair-back as if she felt faint.

  Aphra’s voice was rising again, the words tumbling from her lips so fast I could barely make them out. “That’s what you’re after, I know it. I know how it’ll be. I’ll not have you blacken me to m’own daughter. I’ll not have your lies poured into her ears.”

  It seemed clear to me that Aphra’s agitation was only causing Faith further upset. I signaled to Elinor, and we went from there, although our attempts at a kind leave-taking did not stop the curses flying after us.

  I worried all morning about the child. Although Faith was three years old, I had never heard her utter a word. If it hadn’t been that she seemed to understand what was said to her, I would have taken her for deaf or simple. Instead, I had begun to believe that fear—of my father, while he lived, and of Aphra’s oddity since—had blenched the will to speak away from her. In the afternoon I walked back out to the croft with a large whisket of food and more ointment for Aphra’s sores. She refused to open the door to me and cursed me foully, until I finally left the food on the step and went away. It was a like story the next day, and the next. Each day, Faith would stand silently at the window, her eyes wide and grave, regarding me as her mother cursed in ways not fit for her to hear. But on the third day, as I stood in the garth, I did not see the child. And when I asked Aphra where Faith was, her only answer was a high-pitched, keening chant in words I could not fathom.

  I went home then and called on my neighbor Mary Hadfield. I begged her to go to Aphra in my place, to see if someone less close to her could be of more use. Mary shook her head and looked doubtful.

  “I mislike this request, Anna. I will not say I don’t. That Aphra tried to pass herself off as the Devil’s creature, and if she doesn’t want the help her own stepdaughter offers, then I say let the Devil take her.”

  I implored her not to feel so and begged her to think of the child, who was innocent and at risk. At this she reconsidered and agreed to do as I asked. But when she returned it was with no better success than I had had, for Aphra had once again refused to open the door and had unleashed a rant on poor Mary so fierce and vile that she vowed never to go near the croft again, child or no.

  I found I could not rest for worrying about Faith. The next day, I again caught no sight of her, nor the next, so on the evening of that day I sat up late and made my way up to the croft in darkness. I do not know what I hoped to accomplish, other than that perhaps the surprise to Aphra of being woken from her sleep might give me a few moments when her guard was down, in which time I might gain some sense of how Faith fared.

  But Aphra was not asleep. From far off I could see that the croft was lit from within by a goodly blaze at the hearth, which itself was odd as the night was so warm. When I drew closer, I could see darting, leaping shadows through the window, and as I came closer still I realized that Aphra was dancing, leaping before her fire and throwing her arms upward as lunatics do when seized by a fit. I had not meant to be stealthy, or to spy, but since the window was uncovered I stood in the shadow of a laurel bush to see if I could determine what it was that this odd behavior might signify. She had sheared off her hair almost to her scalp and stood in a filthy shift that showed a starved, fleshless body beneath. She plunged and leapt, barking out a nonsense chant that rose in pitch to a piercing cry: “Arataly, rataly, ataly, taly, aly, ly ... eeeeeeeee!” She darted then toward the fire, seizing out the ends of andirons that had lain in the blaze, and placed them on the earthen floor so as to form an X. She prostrated herself four times, in each notch of the figure, and then reached up her arms as if in supplication. She seemed to draw something down to her from the rafters, but what it was I could not at first say. She held the dark thing in her two hands, but as her back was toward me I could not make it out, only that it seemed to move and be alive.

  I will own it: I became afraid then. I do not believe in witch-craft nor spells, neither in incubus nor succubus nor familiar spirits. But I do believe in evil thoughts—and in madness. And as the snake slithered out of Aphra’s hands and wound itself around her waist, my impulse was to run away as swift and as silently as I could.

  And yet I did not run but stood rooted there, desperate to get Faith away from the lunatic that her mother had now become. I believe it was the dregs of my own mother-courage-the force within a woman that will drive her to do that for her babe that she would not dream was within her power to do—that impelled me to fling myself against that door so that it gave way and left me standing there, confronting Aphra and her snake.

  She screamed when she saw me, and I might have screamed, too, had my breath not been stolen away by the stench, which was unspeakable. I knew without looking at the corpse that the child was long dead. In the corner, Aphra had Faith’s body strung up like a puppet, suspended by the wrists and ankles from the rafters. The child’s head tilted gracefully to the side, and a curtain of hair hid her ravaged face. Aphra had tried to mask the dead, black Plague flesh with some kind of chalky paste.

  “For pity’s sake, Aphra, cut her down from there and let her lie in peace!”

  “Pity?” she shrieked. “Who has pity? And where, pray tell me, may peace be found?” She hissed then and flew at me with the serpent in her hand. I am not, as a rule, afraid of snakes, but as the firelight blazed red in those two shining eyes and the forked tongue flicked at me, I will own that I quailed. There was nothing I could do for Faith, or for Aphra, so I gave way to my craven impulse and fled from that place as fast as my legs would propel me.

  THE RECTOR WENT to the croft that night, and again, with Elinor, the next morning. But Aphra had the door barred by then, and the window covered over. She no longer paused in her frenzied chanting to hurl abuse at them but simply danced on as if they were not there. The rector stood outside and said the customary prayers for the soul of Faith, as Aphra’s unearthly voice rose, drowning out his words with chants in some heathenish, incomprehensible tongue. At the rectory, there was discussion of bringing a party of men to break the door and bring the child’s body out, but the rector decided against doing so, for the risk to the men from Aphra in her distemper and the corpse in its decay he deemed too great.

  “It is not as if we can do aught for the child but bury her,” he said. “And that we can do in due time, when Aphra’s frenzy has exhausted her.” There was another concern that he did not speak, but Elinor confided it to me. Michael Mompellion did not trust the men he might take to the croft to understand Aphra’s behavior as a lunatic malady, merely, and he did not want to unleash the kind of fear and rumor that encounters with a witch and her snake familiar might bring to the surface. I knew in my heart that he was wise, but the image of that child’s tortured corpse was vivid to me. It robbed me of sleep for many nights—and does so still.

  Deliverance

  I DID NOT GO to Aphra’s croft again. I to
ld myself that with the child dead I had no useful business there. My heart whispered that I should not abandon Aphra to her madness, but I did not listen to it. For the truth is, I did not feel that my grip upon my own reason was strong enough to withstand the horrors of that house. And now, of course, when there is no way to know whether it would have a made a jot of difference, I have had many days and nights in which to blame myself for my decision.

  Within a very little time, I had schooled my mind to avoid the matter of Aphra entirely. I was helped in this by having much else to reflect upon. For during the fortnight that followed the great burning, something happened in the village. At first, none of us marked it. Then, when we began to do so, we none of us spoke of it. Superstition, hope, disbelief—all these made pact with our old friend, fear, and prevented us from doing so.

  I said that something happened. But in truth what I began to take note of was the lack of certain happenings. For after the last Sunday in July, we heard no word of new coughs, or fevers, or Plague sores. For the first sennight I did not, as I said, mark this, for I was still concerned with a number who were already some days ill and approaching death. But by the next Sunday, when we gathered at the Delf, I did my habitual count of persons and was surprised to find that all who had been there when last we gathered for worship were there again. For the first time in almost a year, there was not one newly missing face.