Year of Wonders

by Geraldine Brooks

  He stopped me then, not wanting me to speak her name. “I see, I see. Then you may give Mr. Stanley the message and beg him to be so kind as to call upon me no more.”

  It is one thing to know the meanings of words; it is another to grasp their intent. I had no idea what it was that Mr. Mompellion was trying to convey to the old man. But when I passed on the message, Mr. Stanley’s face turned stern. He left directly—and did not come back.

  I HAD MUCH TO DO, outside my hours at the rectory. As well as caring for my sheep, the villagers looked to me still for tonics and small remedies, and for this work I had to keep the Gowdies’ garden, cutting the summers’ herbs and hanging them to dry whenever I had a spare moment to attend to it. I wondered if fate had marked me to be the next in the long line of women that Anys had once spoken of, who tended those plants and knew their virtues. The thought oppressed me, and I turned from it. The Gowdie garden would never again be a tranquil place for me. There were too many memories there: of Elinor, puzzling over a handful of wort and turning to me, her brow creased with a question; of old Mem, her skilled hands twisting twine around bunches of fresh-picked herbs; and of Anys, who should have been my friend ... These memories themselves were no bad thing, but they led, always, to other recollections: the gargle of Mem’s death rattle, the drunken baying of the murderers hauling on the rope that killed Anys, the still, pale body of Elinor, cold under my hands. The mind of a healer, I thought, should not brim so with images of death. And yet some memories cannot be rooted out like weeds, no matter how much one wills to do it.

  The village itself reeled on in a stunned condition. It did not spring suddenly back to life with the opening of the roads. Some few fled the place as soon as they might, but most did not. They stayed, moving through their tasks in a weary daze. And hardly any persons from outside had the courage to make the reverse journey. At summer’s end, some few relatives of the dead ventured here to claim their inheritances, but for most, the fear that the Plague might yet lurk within our village proved too great.

  Mr. Holbroke, from Hathersage, was one of the first to come. I greeted him with gladness, hoping the presence of such an old friend would do something to ease Mr. Mompellion’s melancholy. But the rector would not even see him and required me to send him off directly. Day after day, he sat in his chair, rising only to pace the floor. The weeks of his grieving turned to months, and finally, as summer faded into leaf-fall, a season.

  For many weeks, I searched for ways to rouse him. I tried to bring scraps of good news. The handfasting of my widowed neighbor, Mary Hadfield, to a well-liked farrier in Stoney Middleton. The sisterly friendship that had begun to blossom between the optimistic little Quaker, Merry Wickford, and the grim and damaged Jane Martin, and how it seemed a healing thing for the spirits of both. But none of this touched him at all.

  I begged him to think about his horse, fretting in his stall for want of exercise. I tried to work upon his sense of duty, suggesting that this person or that one might welcome a word from him, of counsel or of prayer. In truth, requests for the rector’s attentions arrived seldom. At first I thought this was a natural reticence born of respect for his own great suffering. But then it came to me that many people in the village did not love him for what he had done here during the long months of our ordeal. Some went so far as to whisper blame upon him for their great losses. To others, he was simply the bitter emblem and embodiment of their darkest days. The unfairness of this pained me, and helped me, when I grew dispirited about my work, to deal with him tenderly. For I thought that perhaps he somehow sensed the feelings of the villagers and that this might feed his melancholy.

  But despair I did, sometimes, despite my best efforts to be hopeful. For no matter what I said, whether I couched my requests gently or firmly, he would answer with the same helpless shrug, as if to say he was powerless to do or to feel anything regarding these matters. All the strength that he had possessed, of mind and of person, seemed to be ebbing, steadily. And so we went on, each day as empty and quiet as the one before, until at last I believed that I was just biding my time, bound by Elinor’s wishes, until Mr. Mompellion wasted away in his room with myself as the only witness.

  AND THEN, at apple-picking time, the Bradfords returned to the village. I have already set down how it was I encountered Elizabeth Bradford and how her demand that Mr. Mompellion attend her ailing mother rekindled all the rage he had felt when that family fled from here, abandoning their duty I have set down, too, my botched attempt to bring him comfort and his flinging of the Bible to the floor.

  I can tell you further that I was hard put to it not to run, after I closed the door to his room. There was a vivid red mark on my forearm where he had seized me, and I rubbed at it, angry myself, but also much confused. I left the rectory by the kitchen door and headed without thinking toward the stable.

  Before he let fall the Bible, he had almost hissed the words of that beautiful Psalm:Your wife will be like a fruitful vine

  Within your house;

  Your children will be like olive shoots

  Around your table ...

  His wife had been hacked down in front of him. My olive shoots had been blighted. Why? His unasked question roared in my head. Just such a why had nagged at my unquiet mind through too many sleepless nights. But that he, too, should be asking it ... Let her speak direct to God to ask forgiveness... but I fear she may find Him a poor listener, as many of us here have done. Could he really have come to believe that all our sacrifice, all our pain and misery, had been for nothing?

  I needed solitude, but I couldn’t bear the weight of my own confusion. I opened the door to Anteros’s stall and slid inside, my back to the wall, holding myself as still as I could. The horse reared once, then stood, blowing and snorting, regarding me sidelong with one large, brown eye. We stayed that way for many minutes. When I judged that he meant me no harm, I eased myself slowly down upon the straw.

  “Well, Anteros, I have come to tell you that he is lost, at last,” I said. “His reason has left him entirely.” That was it, surely. He was mad. There could be no other explanation. The horse seemed to sense my distress, for he had ceased his restless strutting. Every now and then, he raised a hoof and dropped it, as an impatient person might drum his fingers upon a table.

  “It’s no good waiting for him anymore, my friend,” I said. “You and I will have to accept that he has given himself up to his darkness. I know, I know; it is hard to credit, after all the strength he has shown us.” From my pocket I drew out a crumpled paper. It was the draft of the letter to Elinor’s father that Mr. Mompellion had composed just after her murder. It was the last letter he would dictate so; the last before the roads were opened. I had stood with him that day—afraid to let him out of my sight, yes, but also I must own, afraid to be alone with my own grief. He had had trouble commanding even his powerful voice to call out the words of such a dispatch, and at the end he was piping with the cracked timbre of a boy. As he waved farewell to Mr. Holbroke and turned back toward the rectory, he had crumpled the draft and let it fall from his hand. I had run after and caught it, in case at some later time he desired a record of what he had written.

  He had been in a dark mood that day—who would not be?—and yet his faith then had seemed unwavering. In the dim light of the stable, I read the paper again to reassure myself of it, although I made out the hasty scratchings with great difficulty:... Our dearest dear is gone to her eternal rest and is invested with a Crown of Glory and a garment of immortality that makes her shine like the sun in the firmament of Heaven ... Dear Sir, let your dying Chaplain recommend this truth to you and your family. That no happiness or solid comfort can be found in this vale of tears, like living a pious life. And pray retain this rule: never do that thing upon which you dare not first ask a blessing of God, upon the success thereof...

  Sir, pardon the rude style of this paper, and if my head be discomposed you cannot wonder at me; however, be pleased to believe that I am, Dear Sir, your
most obliged, most affectionate, and grateful servant ...“

  Well, I thought, his head was not so discomposed then as it was now. For I doubt he would have dared to ask the blessing of God on his harsh dismissal of Elizabeth Bradford, or on his desecration of the Bible. If Elinor were here, she would be able to advise me what to do for him. But then if Elinor were here, he would not be in this state. I sat there, breathing the sweet rich scent of horse and hay. Anteros snorted then dropped his massive head to my neck and nuzzled me. Slowly, I lifted my hand and ran it down his long nose. “Here we are, alive,” I said, “and you and I will have to make of it what we can.”

  He did not shy at my touch but pushed against my hand as if asking for more caresses. Then he raised his head, as if trying to catch the scent of the outside air. If a beast can be said to have an expression such as wistfulness, then that was how Anteros looked to me. “Let’s go then,” I whispered. “Let’s go and live, since we have no choice in it.” I stood up, slowly, and fetched the bridle from its hook. He did not flinch when he saw it. Only an ear twitched, as if to say, What’s this? He lowered his head, and I slid it on, gentle as I could. I kept a good hold on him as I lifted the bar to the stable door, though I knew well enough that if he wanted to bolt I would have scant chance to keep him. He tossed his head, flaring his nostrils and breathing the longed-for scent of grass. But he did not strain or strive to throw off my hand. I lay my face against his neck. “Good,” I said in a low voice. “Steady for a minute more, and we’ll go.”

  Out in the courtyard, I mounted him bareback, as I had learned to ride as a child. Those horses had been old or spavined creatures, so the feel of Anteros unsaddled underneath me was a surprise. He was all muscle,, gathered like a thunderhead. He could have thrown me sprawling in a second if he’d chosen to, and I was ready for anything, thinking that I’d cling on just as long as I was able. Instead, he danced a little as he felt my weight upon him but waited for my signal. When I clicked my tongue, we were off in a smooth surge. He leapt the wall as neatly as a cat. I barely felt the landing.

  I turned his head for the moors and we galloped. The wind rushed by, blowing off my cap and freeing my hair so that it blew out like a banner behind me. The big hooves beat the ground as the blood throbbed in my head. We live, we live, we live, said the hoofbeats, and the drumming of my pulse answered them. I was alive, and I was young, and I would go on until I found some reason for it. As I rode that morning, smelling the scent of the hoof-crushed heather, feeling the wind needle my face until it tingled, I understood that where Michael Mompellion had been broken by our shared ordeal, in equal measure I had been tempered and made strong.

  I rode for the sake of the movement, not caring where. After a while I found myself in a wide meadow and realized that it was the field of the Boundary Stone. The path that had been so well-trodden throughout our Plague year was already all overgrown. The stone itself was invisible among the high grasses. Easily and easily I brought Anteros to a canter, then a walk, and paced him along the ridge of the spur until I found the stone, marked with its gouged holes. I slid from his back and while he stood, patiently, cropping the pasture, I knelt and pulled the grass away from around the stone. I lay my hands on it and then my cheek. In a score or so of years from now, I thought, someone like me will sit down to rest right here on this stone and her fingers will play idly in those holes, and no one will remember why they were hewn so or the great sacrifice that we made here.

  I lifted my face, looked down the spur to Stoney Middleton, and recalled how I had longed to run down there and escape. Now there was no oath holding me. I gathered the reins and remounted Anteros, and we galloped at speed down the slope, barely slowing through the village, galloping fast again into the fields beyond. I am sure that the good citizens of Stoney Middleton did not know what to make of us. The sun was high before I turned Anteros’s head for the climb back up to our village. As we neared the Boundary Stone we slowed, that powerful horse easing into a surprisingly soft, sweet trot. He was stepping as sedate as a phaeton pony when we reached the rectory yard.

  Michael Mompellion strode out the door in his shirt sleeves, anger and incredulity upon his face. He ran toward us, grasping the horse’s bridle. His gray eyes scanned me, and I suddenly became aware that I was barely decent, riding astride with my skirt tugged up above my placket, my hair loose to my waist, my cap lost upon the moors, my cheeks flushed and misted with sweat.

  “Have you,” he said, and his voice rang off the yard stones, “taken entire leave of your senses?”

  I looked down at him from the height of Anteros’s broad back. For once, I did not flinch from his stare.

  “Have you?” was my reply.

  Anteros tossed his head, as if to shake Michael Mompellion’s hand off his bridle. The rector stared up at me, his eyes now blank as slates. Abruptly, he looked away and let go of the horse, raising his hands to his face and pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes so hard I thought he might maim himself.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, truly, I think my senses have left me indeed.” At that, he dropped to his knees in that filthy courtyard. I swear, it was Elinor I thought of as I watched him collapse like that: how the sight of him, so utterly abject, would break her heart. Before I knew what I was about, I was off the horse and taking him in my arms, as Elinor surely would. He buried his head in my shoulder, and I held tight to him as one would cling to someone falling from a high place. I could feel the hard muscles of his back through the flimsy stuff of his shirt. I had not held a man so in more than two years. It happened then: a sharp pang of desire pierced me and I moaned. He drew back at that and looked at me. His fingers brushed my face and traveled into my wild hair. He buried his hands in the tangles. His grip tightened, and he drew my mouth to his.

  And that is how we were when the stable boy found us. He had been cowering in the tackroom, fearing to be blamed for my wild ride. Now he stood, his eyes wide. We both jumped up and flew apart, putting Anteros’s dark bulk between us. But he had seen what he had seen. Somehow I mastered my voice enough to speak.

  “So there you are, Master Richard. Kindly see to Anteros. He will want water, and he is calm, I think, sufficient to tolerate a brushing after all this time. See that you do it thoroughly.” I cannot think how I kept my voice from trembling as I said all this. My hands were shaking as I handed him the reins and I walked toward the kitchen, not daring to look behind me. Presently I heard the door open and close and the tread of footsteps going up the stairs. I pressed my hands to my temples, trying to calm my breathing. Then I gathered my unruly hair and knotted it up behind as best I could. I was peering into the shiny surface of a hanging pan to see what kind of a job I’d made of it when I saw his reflection as he moved behind me.

  “Anna.”

  I had not heard him come back downstairs, but he stood now in the kitchen doorway. I stepped toward him but he put his hands out and grasped me by the wrists—gently, this time—and held me at bay. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. “I don’t know how to explain my behavior there in the courtyard. But I apologize to you for it—”

  “No!” I interrupted, but he let go of one wrist and placed a finger on my lips.

  “I am not myself. As you know, better than anyone. You have seen how I am, these last months. I don’t know how to explain it, it is beyond any words that I have to describe. But it is as if there is a tempest in my mind, and I cannot see through the murk of it. I cannot think clearly—indeed, much of the time I cannot think at all. There is only a weight in my heart, a formless dread that shapes itself into pain. And then a greater dread of more pain ...”

  I barely heard his words. I know he did not want me to do what next I did. But desire was so strong within me that I did not care. I raised my hand to his hand, where it still lay on my lips, and then I opened my mouth and brushed my tongue lightly against the tip of his finger. He groaned, and as I sucked hard upon his finger he pulled me to him with the hand that was
still upon my wrist. We fell together then, and nothing, I think, could have stopped us. We had each other, wild and hard, right there upon the gritstone floor, and the pain as the rough flags grazed my flesh seemed to match the pain that was in my heart. I do not know how we got upstairs, but later we lay together on the lavender-scented bed. We were tender then, and slow, taking exquisite care for each other. Afterward, as rain rapped lightly on the windows, we rested there, speaking softly of all the things that we had loved in our lives before the ravages of the past year. Of the Plague year itself we did not speak.

  In the late afternoon, when he seemed to have fallen into a light doze, I crept from the bed, dressed, and went to feed my sheep. The rain had stopped and a light wind whispered in the wet weeds. I was forking hay from the stook, when he approached me.

  “Let me do that,” he said. He took the fork and then, pausing, reached down and dusted the straw from my dress, caressing me gently as he did so. He bucked the hay with the economical motion of a practiced hand. At my direction, he hauled the load out into the field and up to where the flock grazed in the shelter of a copse of rowans. Together, we made short work of spreading it. The ewes regarded us with their sweet, blank faces and then went on with the serious business of eating. He broke open a dense clump of hay, releasing a sudden scent of white clover. He lifted it and breathed deeply. When he raised his face, it was lit with a smile the like of which I hadn’t seen there in more than a year. “It smells like the summers of my boyhood,” he said. “I should have been a farmer, you know. Perhaps now I will be.” A rain-soaked bough trembled in a sudden gust of wind, showering both of us and letting fall a drift of slick, late-turning leaves. As I shivered, he reached down and lifted a single leaf from my hair, pressed it to his lips, and kissed it. We walked back down the hill in the low light, and as we neared my cottage, he took me by the hand.