Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  Michael Mompellion must have marked this, too, but he did not speak of it directly. Rather, he preached a sermon on the Resurrection. The rain had been siling down for much of the preceding week, and the bare, blackened circle where our goods had been consigned to the flames was hazed all over with a hopeful wash of new green. The rector drew all our eyes there.

  “See, my friends? Life endures. And as fire cannot quench the living spark in a humble patch of grass, neither can our souls be quenched by death, nor our spirits by suffering.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I went out to my yard to search for an egg and found a strange cock discomposing my hens. He was a bold fellow and did not budge when I shooed at him but stepped pluckily toward me, titling his fine red comb and regarding me with a sideways eye.

  “Well, odd’s fish! You’re Andrew Merrick’s cockerel, if I’m not much mistaken!” As I spoke, he fluttered up onto the well windlass and let forth a mighty peal to the morning. “And what might you be doing back here, my feathery friend, when your master sits and bides on yonder lonely peak?” He made me no answer but flew off then, not, as I had thought, in the direction of the hermit-hut on Sir William Hill, but east rather, toward Merrick’s long-abandoned cottage.

  How did the bird know it was safe to return to his old roost? It will ever be a mystery. But later that day Andrew Merrick too, came home, his beard grown long and bushy as an Old Testament prophet. He came, he said, because he trusted in the judgment of his bird.

  Shall I say we rejoiced as the conviction grew in man and beast that the Plague was truly gone from us? No, we did not rejoice. For the losses were too many and the damage to our spirits too profound. For every one of us who still walked upon the Earth, two of us lay under it. Everywhere we went, we passed by the sorry, makeshift graves of our friends and neighbors. We were all of us also exhausted, for each person who lived had, in the course of the year, taken up the duties and tasks of two or three of the dead. Some days, even the effort of thought seemed burdensome.

  But that is not to say there was no lightening in even the heaviest heart, as one by one it came to us that at last our losses were stanched and that we ourselves were spared. For life is not nothing, even to the grieving. Surely humankind has been fashioned so, otherwise how would we go on?

  AT THE RECTORY, there arose a difference between Michael Mompellion and Elinor, the first I had ever marked. She believed he should hold a service of Thanksgiving for our deliverance; he held that the time was yet not ripe and that the risk of premature speaking outweighed any benefit that might be had in owning publicly what we all of us now in our hearts believed.

  “For what will be the effect if I am wrong?” I overheard him say to her. I was passing through the hallway by the parlor and something in his tone arrested me, so that I stopped and listened, even as I knew I should not.

  “If we have done anything at all here, we have succeeded in confining this agony amongst us. For there has been no case of Plague in all of Derbyshire than can be traced to our village. Why risk all we have sacrificed for in the haste of a sennight or two?”

  “But, my love,” Elinor replied to him, her voice soft but insistent. “There are people here—like the widows Hancock and Hadfield and the orphans such as Merry Wickford and Jane Martin and so many others—who have seen every member of their families into their graves. They have suffered enough. Why, when I know you do believe the Plague is gone, must you prolong it? They should not have to bide here, in their loneliness, for one day longer than needs be. They should be free to go on to their kin, or to have their kin seek them here, so that they may begin to find what love and comfort and new life that they can.”

  “Do you not think that I consider them? I, who have considered nothing else these many wretched months?” His voice, as he said this last, had a bitter edge to it that I had never heard him use in their speech together. “Despair is a cavern beneath our feet, and we teeter on its very brink. If I speak, and am mistaken, and the Plague is with us still, would you have me plunge these people into depths from which I cannot hope to fetch them back?”

  I heard the rustle of her dress as she turned and moved toward the door. “As you judge best, husband. But I implore you, do not make these people wait forever. Not everyone is made as firm of purpose as you.”

  As she passed through the doorway, I withdrew into the library. She did not see me as she swept by, but I saw her, her lovely face twisted, struggling to hold back tears.

  I DO NOT KNOW how it was finally decided, but only a matter of days after I overheard that conversation, Elinor whispered to me that the rector had fixed upon the second Sunday in August, provided no new cases blighted us beforehand. There wasn’t any formal announcement, but word passed somehow, swiftly, through the village. When the nominated day arrived at last, we gathered in the Delf’s stippled sunshine for what we fervently hoped would be the last time. People approached one another without fear and shook hands as they had not done, stood close, and chatted easily as they waited for the rector.

  He came at last, wearing a white surplice edged in a lace so fine it seemed like foam. He had never yet worn such a thing—coming as he did into the pulpit vacated by a Puritan, he had chosen to bear himself plainly so as not to inflame passions on matters that he deemed insignificant to the manner of our worship. Elinor, by his side, was also clad in white: a simple gown of summer cotton embroidered delicately with white silk figures. Her arms were laden with blossoms that she’d gathered, all on a whim, from her garden and from the overgrown hedges along the path from the rectory. There were delicate pink mallow flowers, and blue larkspur, deep-throated lilies, and sprays of fragrant roses. As the rector began to speak, she beamed at him, her face all lit, and in the, dappled sunlight her bright, pale hair glowed around her face like a coronet. “She looks like a bride,” I thought. But funerals, too, have flowers, and winding sheets are white.

  “Let us give thanks—” That was all Michael Mompellion had time to say. The shriek that answered him was a raw, ragged thing, a piercing sound that rent the air and echoed around the high, curved walls of the Delf. Only after it stopped could I realize there were words, English words, embedded in the noise.

  “For whaaaaat?” she shrieked again.

  Mompellion’s head had gone up sharply at the first cry, and now we all turned to look in the direction of his gaze.

  Any one of us could have stopped Aphra. I could have done it. The ravages of her madness had thinned her down to a wisp. To be sure, in her right hand she had a knife, and as she swept by me, waving it in wide, erratic curves, I recognized it as the large miner’s knife she had pulled with such effort from the decaying sinews of my father’s hand. Her other arm was occupied, clutching the maggoty remnant of her daughter’s corpse, and so to come at her from the left should have been a simple matter. But instead of falling upon her, we all of us fell back, stumbling in our haste to put as much distance between ourselves and the horror of her as we could.

  “Mom-pell-ion!” She screamed the word as a crake cries, from some deep place within her from which human voices are not usually drawn.

  He, alone, did not back away, but answering to her call, stepped toward her, down from his rocky pediment, and steadily, calmly across the green sward that separated them. He walked toward her as one would walk to greet a lover. His arms, as he raised them, lifted the lace of his surplice in a wide arc. The breeze billowed the delicate stuff. It’s a web and he’ll catch her in it—so was the mad thought that fell into my mind. Aphra ran now, the knife raised above her head.

  He stepped right into the path of it, his arms locking around her, gathering her to him as a father will sweep up a child grown wild with high spirits. His large hand circled her frail wrist, and though I could see the strain in her forearm, his strength was such that she had no chance of breaking his grip. Elinor ran toward both of them, dropping her armful of blossoms and opening her own arms wide. If it were not for the knife, you would have thought they were
a family, meeting again after a long separation.

  Mompellion was speaking to Aphra, his voice a low and soothing hum. I could not hear the words he said, but slowly the tension seemed to go out of her body, and as he eased his grip, I could see her shoulders heave with sobbing. Elinor was stroking Aphra’s face with her left hand, while with her right she reached up to take the knife.

  It might have been all right; it might have ended there. But the rector’s arms, so tight upon Aphra, also encircled the remains of Faith’s corpse. The pressure of that grip proved too much for the fragile bones. I heard the snap: a dry sound like a chicken’s wishbone breaking. The little skull popped free of the spine and fell to the grass, where it rolled back and forth, the empty eye-holes staring.

  I turned away in revulsion, and so I never saw exactly how it was that Aphra, wild in her new frenzy, landed her blows as she did. I know that it was an instant’s work, merely. An instant’s work, to take two lives and leave another ruined.

  The wound on Elinor’s neck was a wide, curved thing. For a second it was just a thin red line, upturned like a smile. But then the blood began spurting in bright bursts, streaking her white dress red. She crumpled to the ground, where the scattered flowers she had carried received her like a bier.

  Aphra had turned the knife on herself and sunk it to the hilt, deep into her chest. Yet somehow she staggered, upright still, the uncanny strength of the lunatic keeping her on her feet. She lurched to where her baby’s skull lay and then dropped to her knees, reached down, and with the most exquisite tenderness, gathered it up in her two hands and pressed it to her lips.

  Leaf-Fall, 1666

  Apple-picking Time

  THEY BURIED FAITH in the garth of my father’s croft, be side the place where her brothers lay. I asked them, and then begged, to lay Aphra there as well. But the men would neither meet my eyes nor listen to my pleading. None wanted her body to lie within the precincts of the village. In the end, young Brand came to my aid. Together we took her corpse up to the moors and Brand toiled to dig her a grave in the rocky earth beside my father’s cairn.

  Elinor we buried in the churchyard. Since the Plague was past, there was no reason not do to so. Young Micha Milne, the son of our dead mason, graved the stone as best he could. But the boy had been but a beginner in the craft when the Plague took his father and was not much skilled. I had to show him where he had mistaken two letters in Elinor’s name. He hacked out the error and patched it as best he could.

  It was Mr. Stanley who prayed at the graveside, for Michael Mompellion was not capable to do it. He had expended the last of his strength in the Delf, fighting those who tried, finally, to lead him away from Elinor’s body. He had clung to her till nightfall and nothing anyone could say would budge him from the spot. In the end, it was the old rector, Mr. Stanley, who commanded the men to remove him by force, so that Elinor’s body could be decently tended.

  That, I did. And afterward, I continued to serve her as best I could, by following the wishes she had spoken when she lay sick with what we had all taken for the Plague. Be a friend to ... my Michael, she had said. How could she have thought that he would let me be so? I did, instead, what was in my power to do. I served him. Most of the time, I might as well have been a shade, for all he noticed me. It was as if he commenced upon a journey at the moment of Elinor’s death, and every day he moved farther and farther away, seeking for some refuge in the recesses of his own mind.

  Attending upon Mr. Mompellion’s grief, at least, gave me a way of managing my own. Walking each day where Elinor had walked and disciplining my mind to think, at every hour, what it was that she might do or say was an exercise that brought me a measure of mental peace. At the least, it cleared my mind of the burden of my own thoughts. As long as I could fill my days in emulation of Elinor, I did not have to closely consider my own state, or my own bleak-seeming future.

  The day after her death he left the rectory, and I followed him, fearing that in his dark state he might mean to throw himself off the Edge. Instead, he walked up to the moors above Mompellion’s Well, where his friend Mr. Holbroke was waiting, by what prior arrangement I do not know. There, he dictated the last of his letters of the Plague year. The first was to tell the earl that he believed the pestilence was fled at last and to beg that the roads to the village be reopened. The second was to Elinor’s father, his patron, bearing the news of her death. Afterward, he returned to the rectory, and he has not left it since.

  The second morning, I arrived at the rectory not long after sunrise, hoping to be at my tasks before he arose so that he would not suffer the empty silence of that large house. Instead, I found him standing on the garden path, near a spot where Elinor had liked to cut flowers. I have no idea how long he had stood there, but later, when I carried fresh linens to his room, I found his bed unslept upon.

  He did not move as I came up the path toward him, nor raise his eyes, nor greet me. As I could hardly push past him, I stood there, too, and gazed with him at the tumble of late-summer roses falling in bright cascades across the old bricks of the garden wall.

  “She loved these, especially,” I said in a whisper. “Sometimes I used to think it was because they were in her image, all pale and creamy, with just a hint of a blush.”

  He turned to me sharply then and raised a hand toward my face, so swiftly that I flinched with the instinct of a child who has been struck too often. But of course he did not mean to hit me, only hush me. His fingers hovered near my lips. “Do not speak, I beg you,” he said, and his voice grated, like a rasp. Then he turned and walked unsteadily toward the house, and it was I who was left on the pathway, fretting at my indiscretion.

  It was a like story the next day. When I arrived for my work I did not find him in his room. Once again, there was no sign that anyone had slept there. I searched for him in the library and the parlor and then in the stable, hoping he had taken the horse out for some healthful exercise. But Anteros was there, strutting, frustrated in his unaccustomed confinement.

  It was midmorning before I found him. This time, he was standing, still and silent, in Elinor’s bedchamber, peering at the place where her head had rested, as if he could still discern some impression of its shape lingering there. He did not turn or move when I opened the door. His legs were trembling slightly, perhaps from the effort of standing so long immobile. There were beads of sweat upon his brow. I said nothing but came quietly to his side and took his elbow, and, with the slightest pressure, steered him away from the bed and back to his own room. He made no effort to resist me but let me lead him, saying nothing. He gave a great sigh as he sank into his chair. I fetched a ewer of steaming water and bathed his face. The scratching of bristles against the cloth brought sudden, sharp memories of Sam Frith, of how I had teased him when he came home all unshaven after long days underground and turned my face away from his kisses until he let me smooth his skin with the blade he kept for the purpose, honed to the keenest edge.

  The rector had not shaved since the day of Elinor’s death. Hesitantly, I asked if he would have me do it for him. He closed his eyes and made no answer. So I fetched the things and set to work. Such a different face from Sam’s. Sam Frith had a face that was as open and blank as an unsown field. The rector’s was all scored with expression lines and haggard now with exhaustion and grief. I stood behind his chair and bent over him, my fingertips, slippery in the creamy lather, sliding gently over his skin. I wiped my hands then, carefully, and set to work with the blade. I lay my left hand along his cheek, to hold the skin taut. My face was just inches from his. As I worked, a long strand of my hair came loose and fell from my cap. It brushed the side of his throat. He opened his eyes and returned my gaze. I drew back. The blade slipped from my hand and rang against the bowl. I felt the prickling of a blush steal over me, and I knew I could not continue. I handed him the blade and brought a glass so that he could finish the job, then I backed out of the room, saying something about fetching a dish of broth. It took me some
time to become composed enough to bring it to him.

  After that, he ceased to move around the house at all, keeping to his room day and night. I fetched Mr. Stanley at the end of the first sennight, hoping to do some good by it. The old man left the rector’s room much agitated. As I brought him his hat, he seemed to be struggling with himself. Finally, he turned to me and, hesitatingly, began to probe me on the rector’s mental state.

  I was thrown into confusion by this. Not—as once would have been the case—because I thought my own opinions worthless. But rather because I did not feel it was my place to betray Mr. Mompellion’s private behaviors, even to well-meaning Mr. Stanley.

  “I am sure I cannot judge, sir.”

  The old man muttered then, more to himself than to me: “I think grief has undone him, yes; quite undone him. I don’t think he comprehended any part of what I said to him. Why else would he laugh when I advised him to accept God’s will?”

  Mr. Stanley was so concerned that he returned the next day and the next, but Mr. Mompellion would not have me admit him. When he came the third time, I went up to bring the news to the rector. The lines about his mouth deepened with annoyance. He stirred from his chair and paced the length of his room.

  “I would have you take a message to Mr. Stanley, if you are capable. Repeat this, please, Anna: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.”

  I repeated the Latin, and as I did so, it fell into my heart that I could grasp the meaning. Before I could school my tongue, I blurted it aloud: “Untrue in one thing, untrue in everything.”

  Mr. Mompellion turned sharply, his brows raised. “How can you possibly know that? ”

  “If you please, Rector, I have gathered a little Latin, a very little, from the great study we made here this past year ... the medical books, you see, are mostly Latin, and we, that is ...”