Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks

a novel of the Plague

For Tony.Without you, I never wouldhave gone there.

O let it be enough what thou hast done,When spotted deaths ran arm’d through every street,With poison’d darts, which not the good could shun,The speedy could outfly, or valiant meet.

The living few, and frequent funerals then,Proclaim’d thy wrath on this forsaken place:And now those few who are return’d agenThy searching judgments to their dwellings trace.

From Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders,1666, by John Dryden

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Leaf-Fall, 1666

Apple-picking Time

Spring, 1665

Ring of Roses

The Thunder of His Voice

Rat-fall

Sign of a Witch

Venom in the Blood

Wide Green Prison

So Soon to Be Dust

The Poppies of Lethe

Among Those That Go Down to the Pit

The Body of the Mine

The Press of Their Ghosts

A Great Burning

Deliverance

Leaf-Fall, 1666

Apple-picking Time

Epilogue

Afterword

Praise

Also by Geraldine Brooks

Copyright

About the Publisher

Leaf-Fall, 1666

Apple-picking Time

I used to love this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: there’d be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came. I used to love to walk in the apple orchard at this time of the year, to feel the soft give underfoot when I trod on a fallen fruit. Thick, sweet scents of rotting apple and wet wood. This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me.

They brought the apples yesterday, a cartload for the rectory cellar. Late pickings, of course: I saw brown spots on more than a few. I had words with the carter over it, but he told me we were lucky to get as good as we got, and I suppose it’s true enough. There are so few people to do the picking. So few people to do anything. And those of us who are left walk around as if we’re half asleep. We are all so tired.

I took an apple that was crisp and good and sliced it, thin as paper, and carried it into that dim room where he sits, still and silent. His hand is on the Bible, but he never opens it. Not anymore. I asked him if he’d like me to read it to him. He turned his head to look at me, and I started. It was the first time he’d looked at me in days. I’d forgotten what his eyes could do – what they could make us do – when he stared down from the pulpit and held us, one by one, in his gaze. His eyes are the same, but his face has altered so, drawn and haggard, each line etched deep. When he came here, just three years since, the whole village made a jest of his youthful looks and laughed at the idea of being preached at by such a pup. If they saw him now, they would not laugh, even if they could remember how to do so.

‘You cannot read, Anna.’

‘To be sure, I can, Rector. Mrs. Mompellion taught me.’

He winced and turned away as I mentioned her, and instantly I regretted it. He does not trouble to bind his hair these days, and from where I stood the long, dark fall of it hid his face, so that I could not read his expression. But his voice, when he spoke again, was composed enough. ‘Did she so? Did she so?’ he muttered. ‘Well, then, perhaps one day I’ll hear you and see what kind of a job she made of it. But not today, thank you, Anna. Not today. That will be all.’

A servant has no right to stay, once she’s dismissed. But I did stay, plumping the cushion, placing a shawl. He won’t let me lay a fire. He won’t let me give him even that little bit of comfort. Finally, when I’d run out of things to pretend to do, I left him.

In the kitchen, I chose a couple of the spotted apples I’d culled from the buckets and walked out to the stables. The courtyard hadn’t been swept in a sennight. It smelled of rotting straw and horse piss. I had to hitch up my skirt to keep it off the muck. Before I was halfway across, I could hear the thud of his horse’s rump as he turned and strutted in his confinement, gouging clefts into the floor of the stall. There’s no one strong or skilled enough now to handle him.

The stable boy, whose job it was to keep the courtyard raked, was asleep on the floor of the tack room. He jumped when he saw me, making a great show of searching for the snath that had slipped from his hand when he’d dozed off. The sight of the scythe blade still upon his workbench vexed me, for I’d asked him to mend it long since, and the timothy now was naught but blown seed head and no longer worth the cutting. I was set to scold him about this, and about the filth outside, but his poor face, so pinched and exhausted, made me swallow the words.

Dust motes sparkled in the sudden shaft of sunlight as I opened the stable door. The horse stopped his pawing, holding one hoof aloft and blinking in the unfamiliar glare. Then he reared up on his muscled haunches and punched the air, saying, as plainly as he could, ‘If you aren’t him, get out of here.’ Although I don’t know when a brush was last laid on him, his coat still gleamed like bronze where the light touched it. When Mr. Mompellion had arrived here on this horse, the common talk had been that such a fine stallion was no fit steed for a priest. And people liked not to hear the rector calling him Anteros, after one of the old Puritans told them it was the name of a pagan idol. When I made so bold as to ask Mr. Mompellion about it, he had only laughed and said that even Puritans should recall that pagans, too, are children of God and their stories part of His creation.

I stood with my back pressed against the stall, talking gently to the great horse. ‘Ah, I’m so sorry you’re cramped up in here all day. I brought you a small something.’ Slowly, I reached into the pocket of my pinafore and held out an apple. He turned his massive head a little, showing me the white of one liquid eye. I kept prattling, softly, as I used to with the children when they were scared or hurt. ‘You like apples. I know you do. Go on, then, and have it.’ He pawed the ground again, but with less conviction. Slowly, his nostrils flaring as he studied the scent of the apple, and of me, he stretched his broad neck toward me. His mouth was soft as a glove, and warm, as it brushed my hand, taking the apple in a single bite. As I reached into my pocket for the second one, he tossed his head and the apple juice sprayed. He was up now, angrily boxing the air, and I knew I’d lost the moment. I dropped the other apple on the floor of the stall and slid out quickly, resting my back against the closed door, wiping a string of horse spittle from my face. The stable boy slid his eyes at me and went silently on with his mending.

Well, I thought, it’s easier to bring a small comfort to that poor beast than it is to his master. When I came back into the house, I could hear the rector out of his chair, pacing. The rectory floors are old and thin, and I could follow his steps by the creak of the boards. Up and back he walked, up and back, up and back. If only I could get him downstairs, to do his pacing in the garden. But once, when I suggested it, he looked as if I’d proposed something as ambitious as a trek up the White Peak. When I went to fetch his plate, the apple slices were all there, untouched, turning brown. Tomorrow, I’ll start to work with the cider press. He’ll take a drink without noticing sometimes, even when I can’t get him to eat anything. And it’s no use letting a cellar full of fruit go bad. If there’s one thing I can’t stand anymore, it’s the scent of a rotting apple.

At day’s end, when I leave the rectory for home, I prefer to walk through the orchard on the hill rather than go by the road and risk meeting people. After all we’ve been through together, it’s just not possible to pass with a polite, ‘Good night t’ye.’ And yet I haven’t the strength for more. Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can’t say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth’s wing in the dark.

In the orchard of a summer night, if I close my eyes, I can hear the small voices of children: whispers and laughter, running feet and rustling leaves. Come this time of year, it’s Sam that I think of – strong Sam Frith grabbing me around the waist and lifting me into the low, curved branch of a gnarly, old tree. I was just fifteen. ‘Marry me,’ he said. And why wouldn’t I? My father’s croft had ever been a joyless place. My father loved a pot better than he loved his children, though he kept on getting them, year passing year. To my stepmother, Aphra, I was always a pair of hands before I was a person, someone to toil after her babies. Yet it was she who spoke up for me, and it was her words that swayed my father to give his assent. In his eyes I was but a child still, too young to be handfasted. ‘Open your eyes, husband, and look at her,’ said Aphra. ‘You’re the only man in the village who doesn’t. Better she be wedded early to Frith than bedded untimely by some youth with a prick more upright than his morals.’

Sam Frith was a miner with his own good lead seam to work. He had a fine small cottage and no children from a first wife who’d died. It did not take him long to give me children. Two sons in three years. Three good years. I should say, for there are many now too young to remember it, that it was not a time when we were raised up thinking to be happy. The Puritans, who are few amongst us now, and sorely pressed, had the running of this village then. It was their sermons we grew up listening to in a church bare of adornment, their notions of what was heathenish that hushed the Sabbath and quieted the church bells, that took the ale from the tavern and the lace from the dresses, the ribands from the Maypole and the laughter out of the public lanes. So the happiness I got from my sons, and from the life that Sam provided, burst on me as sudden as the first spring thaw. When it all turned to hardship and bleakness again, I was not surprised. I went calmly to the door that terrible night with the torches smoking and the voices yelling and the men with their faces all black so that they looked headless in the dark. The orchard can bring back that night, too, if I let my mind linger there. I stood in the doorway with the baby in my arms, watching the torches bobbing and weaving crazy lines of light through the trees. ‘Walk slow,’ I whispered. ‘Walk slow, because it won’t be true until I hear the words.’ And they did walk slow, trudging up that little hill as if it were a mountain. But slow as they came, in the end they arrived, jostling and shuffling. They pushed the biggest one, Sam’s friend, out in front. There was a mush of rotten apple on his boot. Funny thing to notice, but I suppose I was looking down so that I wouldn’t have to look into his face.

They were four days digging out Sam’s body. They took it straight to the sexton’s instead of bringing it home to me. They tried to keep me from it, but I wouldn’t be kept. I would do that last thing for him. She knew. ‘Tell them to let her go to him,’ Elinor Mompellion said to the rector in that gentle voice of hers. Once she spoke, it was over. She so rarely asked anything of him. And once Michael Mompellion nodded, they parted, those big men, moving aside and letting me through.

To be sure, there wasn’t much there that was him. But what there was, I tended. That was two years ago. Since then, I’ve tended so many bodies, people I loved and people I barely knew. But Sam’s was the first. I bathed him with the soap he liked, because he said it smelled of the children. Poor slow Sam. He never quite realized that it was the children who smelled of the soap. I washed them in it every night before he came home. I made it with heather blooms, a much gentler soap than the one I made for him. His soap was almost all grit and lye. It had to be, to scrape that paste of sweat and soil from his skin. He would bury his poor tired face in the babies’ hair and breathe the fresh scent of them. It was the closest he got to the airy hillsides. Down in the mine at daybreak, out again after sundown. A life in the dark. And a death there, too.

And now it is Elinor Mompellion’s Michael who sits all day in the dark, with the shutters closed. And I try to serve him, although sometimes I feel that I’m tending just another in that long procession of dead. But I do it. I do it for her. I tell myself I do it for her. Why else would I do it, after all?

I open the door to my cottage these evenings on a silence so thick it falls upon me like a blanket. Of all the lonely moments of my day, this one is always the loneliest. I confess I have sometimes been reduced to muttering my thoughts aloud like a madwoman when the need for a human voice becomes too strong. I mislike this, for I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place. But I, who always prided myself on grace, now allow myself a deliberate clumsiness. I let my feet land heavily. I clatter the hearth tools. And when I draw water, I let the bucket chain grind on the stone, just to hear ragged noise instead of the smothering silence.

When I have a tallow stub, I read until it gutters. Mrs. Mompellion always allowed me to take the stubs from the rectory, and although there are very few nowadays, I do not know how I would manage without. For the hour in which I am able to lose myself in someone else’s thoughts is the greatest relief I can find from the burden of my own memories. The volumes, too, I bring from the rectory, as Mrs. Mompellion bade me borrow any book I chose. When the light is gone, the nights are long, for I sleep badly, my arms reaching in slumber for my babies’ small, warm bodies, jolting suddenly wakeful when I do not find them.

Mornings are generally much kinder to me than evenings, full as they are of birds’ songs and fowls’ clucking and the ordinary promise that comes with any sunrise. I keep a cow now, a boon that I was not in purse to have in the days when Jamie or Tom could have benefited from the milk. I found her last winter, wandering gaunt in the middle of the road, her hide draped loose upon her bony nethers. Her big eyes looked at me with such a vacant, hopeless stare that I felt I was gazing into a mirror. My neighbours’ cottage was empty, the ivy already creeping across the windows and the grey lichens crusting the sills. So I drove her inside and fitted it up as her boose, fattening her through the cold months with their oats – abundant food of which the dead had no need. She had her calf alone there, without complaint. By the time I found him I guess he had been born two hours, his back and sides dried out but still wet behind the ears. I helped him get his first drink, putting my fingers in his mouth and squirting her teat between them onto his slippery tongue. In return, the next night I stole a bit of her rich, yellow birth milk to make a beastings pie, baked with egg and sugar, and took it to Mr. Mompellion, rejoicing when he ate it as if he were my child, thinking how Elinor would be glad of it. The little bull calf is sleek now, and his mother’s brown eyes regard me with a kindly patience. I love to lean my head against her warm flank and breathe the scent of her hide as the steaming milk foams into my bucket. I carry it to the rectory to make a posset or churn sweet butter or skim the cream to serve with a dish of blackberries – whatever I think will best tempt Mr. Mompellion. When I have enough in the pail for our small needs, I turn her out to graze. She has fattened so since last winter that every day now I fear she will lodge halfway through the doorway.

Bucket in hand, I leave the cottage by the front door, for in the mornings I feel more able to meet whomever might be abroad. We live all aslant here, on this steep flank of the great White Peak. We are always tilting forwards to toil uphill, or bracing backwards on our heels to slow a swift descent. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to live in a place where the land did not angle so, and people could walk upright with their eyes on a straight horizon. Even the main street of our town has a camber to it, so that the people on the uphill side stand higher than those on the downhill.

Our village is a thin thread of dwellings, unspooling east and west of the church. The main road frays here and there into a few narrower paths that lead to the mill, to Bradford Hall, the larger farms, and the lonelier crofts. We have always built here with what we have to hand, so our walls are hewn of the common grey stone and the roofs thatched with heather. Behind the cottages on either side of the road lie tilled fields and grazing commons, but these end abruptly in a sudden rise or fall of ground: the looming Edge to the north of us, its sheer stone face sharply marking the end of settled land and the beginning of the moors, and to the south, the swift, deep dip of the Dale.

It is a strange prospect, our main street these days. I used to rue its dustiness in summer and muddiness in winter, the rain all rizen in the wheel ruts making glassy hazards for the unwary stepper. But now there is neither ice nor mud nor dust, for the road is grassed over, with just a cow-track down the centre where the slight use of a few passing feet has worn the weeds down. For hundreds of years, the people of this village pushed Nature back from its precincts. It has taken less than a year to begin to reclaim its place. In the very middle of the street, a walnut shell lies broken, and from it, already, sprouts a sapling that wants to grow up to block our way entire. I have watched it from its first seed leaves, wondering when someone would pull it out. No one has yet done so, and now it stands already a yard high. Footprints testify that we are all walking round it. I wonder if it is indifference, or whether, like me, others are so brimful of endings that they cannot bear to wrench even a scrawny sapling from its tenuous grip on life.

I made my way to the rectory gate without meeting any soul. So my guard was down and I was unready to face the person who, in all the world, I least wished to see. I had entered the gate and had my back turned to the house, refastening the latch, when I heard the rustle of silk behind me. I turned suddenly, slopping milk from my bucket as I did so. Elizabeth Bradford scowled as a droplet landed on the aubergine hem of her gown. ‘Clumsy!’ she hissed. And so I reencountered her much as I had last seen her more than one year earlier; sour-faced and spoiled. But the habits of a lifetime are hard-shed, and I had dropped into a curtsy without willing it, my body acting despite the firm resolve of my mind to show this woman no such deference.

Typically, she did not even bother with a greeting. ‘Where is Mompellion?’ she demanded. ‘I have been rapping upon that door for a good quarter hour. Surely he cannot be so early abroad?’

I made my voice unctuously polite. ‘Miss Bradford,’ I said, ignoring her question, ‘it is a great surprise, and an honour unlooked for, to see you here in our village. You left us in such haste, and so long since, that we had despaired of ever more being graced by your presence.’

Elizabeth Bradford’s pride was so overweening and her understanding so limited that she heard only the words and missed the tone. ‘Indeed.’ She nodded. ‘My parents were well aware that our departure would leave an unfillable gap here. They have always felt their obligations most keenly. It was, as you know, that sense of obligation that caused them to remove us all from Bradford Hall, to preserve the health of our family so that we could continue to fulfil our responsibilities. Surely Mompellion read my father’s letter to the parish?’

‘He did,’ I replied. I did not add that he had used it as an occasion to preach one of the most incendiary sermons we ever had from him.

‘So, where is he? I have been kept waiting long enough already, and my business is urgent.’

‘Miss Bradford, I must tell you that the rector sees no one at present. The late events in this place, and his own grievous loss, have left him exhausted and quite unequal to shouldering the burdens of the parish at this time.’

‘Well, that may be, insofar as the normal run of parishioners is concerned. But he does not know that my family is returned here. Be so good as to inform him that I require to speak with him at once.’

I saw no purpose in further discourse with this woman. And I have to own that I was consumed with curiosity to see if the news of the Bradfords’ return would rouse Mr. Mompellion, or draw forth any sign of feeling. Perhaps wrath could rouse him where charity had not. Perhaps he needed to be singed by just such a brand.

I swept by her and walked on ahead to open the rectory’s great door. She pinched her face at this; she was not accustomed to sharing a doorway with servants, and I could see she had expected me to pass to the kitchen garth and then come and let her in with accustomed ceremony. Well, times had changed in the Bradfords’ absence, and the sooner she accustomed herself to the inconveniences of the new era the better.

She pushed past me and found her own way to the parlour, pulling off her gloves and flicking them impatiently against the palm of her hand. I saw the surprise in her face as she registered the bareness of the room, stripped as it was of all its former comforts. I went on to the kitchen. No matter how urgent her business, she would have to wait until Mr. Mompellion broke his fast, since that scant serving of oatcake and brawn was the only meal I knew with any certainty that he would take. She was pacing, barely able to contain herself, as I passed by some minutes later with the laden tray. I glimpsed her through the open door. Her brow was drawn so low, her scowl so deep, that she looked as if someone had grabbed her face from beneath and dragged it groundwards. Upstairs, I took a minute to compose myself before I knocked on the door. I did not want to say, or look, more than I should when I announced to the rector his caller.

‘Come,’ he said. He was standing by the window when I entered, and the shutters, for once, were opened. His back was to me as he spoke. ‘Elinor would be sorry to see what has become of her garden,’ he said.

I did not know at first how to answer that. To speak the evident truth – yes, indeed, she would – seemed likely only to feed his gloom. To deny his proposition would be a falsehood.

‘I expect she would understand why it is so,’ I said, bending to set out the dishes from his tray. ‘And even if we had hands enough to do the ordinary tasks – to pull the weeds and prune the dead-wood – yet it would not be her garden. We would lack her eye. What made it her garden was the way she could look at a handful of tiny seeds in the bareness of winter and imagine how they would be, months later, sunlit and in flower. It was as if she painted with blooms.’

When I straightened, he had turned and was staring at me. The shock of it went through me once again.

‘You knew her!’ He said it as if it had only just come to him.

To cover my confusion, I blurted out what I had hoped to convey with care. ‘Miss Bradford is in the parlour. The family is returned to the Hall. She says she needs to speak with you urgently.’

What happened next astonished me so much that I almost dropped the tray. He laughed. A rich, amused laugh the like of which I hadn’t heard for so long I’d forgotten the sound of it.

‘I know. I saw her. Banging on my door like a siege engine. Truly, I thought she meant to break it down.’

‘What answer should I give her, Rector?’

‘Tell her to go to Hell.’

When he saw my face, he laughed again. My eyes must have been wide as chargers. Wiping a tear of mirth from his own, he struggled for composure. ‘No, I see. You can barely be expected to carry such a message. Put it into whatever words you like, but convey to Miss Bradford that I will not see her, and get her from this house.’

It was as if there were two of me, walking down those stairs. One of them was the timid girl who had worked for the Bradfords in a state of dread, fearing their hard looks and harsh words. The other was Anna Frith, a woman who had faced more terrors than many warriors. Elizabeth Bradford was a coward. She was the daughter of cowards. As I entered the parlour and faced her thunderous countenance, I knew I had nothing more to fear from her.

‘I am sorry, Miss Bradford, but the rector is unable to see you at present.’ I kept my voice as level as I could, but as her jaw worked in that angry face, I found myself thinking of my cow worrying at her cud, and I felt the contagion of Mr. Mompellion’s strange fit of mirth. It was all I could do then to keep my composure and continue. ‘He is, as I said, not currently performing any pastoral duties, nor does he go into society or receive any person.’

‘How dare you smirk at me, you insolent slattern!’ she cried. ‘He will not refuse me, he dare not. Out of my way!’ She moved for the door, but I was quicker, blocking her path like a collie facing down an unruly tup. We stared at each other for a long moment. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said, picking up her gloves from the mantel as if purposing to leave. I stood aside then, meaning to show her to the front door, but instead, she pushed past me and was upon the steps to Mr. Mompellion’s room when the rector himself appeared on the landing.

‘Miss Bradford,’ he said, ‘do me the kindness of remaining where you are.’ His voice was low but its jussive tone stopped her. He had shed the hunched posture of the past months and stood tall and straight. He had lost flesh, but now, as he stood there, animated at last, I could see that gauntness had not ravaged him but rather given his face a kind of distinction. There had been a time when, if you looked at him when he was not speaking, you might have called his a plain face, save for the deep-set grey eyes that were striking, always, for their expressiveness. Now, the hollowness of his cheeks called attention to those eyes, so that you could not take your gaze from them.

‘I would be obliged if you would refrain from insulting members of my household whilst they are carrying out my instructions,’ he said. ‘Please be good enough to allow Mrs. Frith to show you to the door.’

‘You can’t do this!’ Miss Bradford replied, but this time in the tone of a very young child who has been thwarted in its pursuit of a plaything. The rector was standing half a flight of stairs above her, so that she had to gaze up at him like a supplicant. ‘My mother has need of you…’

‘My dear Miss Bradford,’ he interrupted coldly. ‘There were many people here with needs this past year, needs that you and your family were in a position to have satisfied. And yet you were not…here. Kindly ask your mother to do me the honour of advancing the same tolerance for my absence now that your family arrogated for so long in regard to its own.’

She was flushed now, her face a blotchy patchwork. Suddenly, surprisingly, she began to cry. ‘My father is not any longer…my father does not…It is my mother. My mother is very ill. She fears…she believes she will die of it. The Oxford surgeon swore it was a tumour but there is no question now…Please, Reverend Mompellion, her mind is much disordered; she will take no rest and speaks of nothing but seeing you. That is why we are come back here, that you may console her and help her face her death.’

He was silent for a long moment, and I felt sure that his next words would be a request to me to look out his coat and hat so that he could go to the Hall. His face, when he spoke, was sad, as I had so often seen it. But his voice was strange and rough.

‘If your mother seeks me out to give her absolution like a Papist, then she has made a long and uncomfortable journey to no end. Let her speak direct to God to ask forgiveness for her conduct. But I fear she may find Him a poor listener, as many of us here have done.’ And with that he turned his back and climbed the stairs to his room, closing the door behind him.

Elizabeth Bradford threw out a hand to steady herself and gripped the banister until bone of her knuckles showed through the skin. She was trembling, her shoulders shaking with sobs that she struggled to suppress. Instinctively, I went to her. Despite my years of aversion for her, and hers of contempt for me, she folded up into my arms like a child. I had meant to help her to the door, but she was in such a state that I could not bring myself to shove her out, though it was clearly the rector’s wish that she be gone. Instead, I found myself shepherding her to the kitchen and easing her down upon the bucket bench. There, she gave herself up so completely to sobbing that the little piece of lace she used as a handkin was soaked through. I held out a dishclout, and to my astonishment she took it and blew her nose as indelicately and unselfconsciously as an urchin. I offered her a mug of water and she drank it thirstily. ‘I said the family was back, but in truth it is just my mother and me and our own servants. I do not know how I can help her, she grieves so. My father will have none of her ever since he learned the truth of her condition. My mother has no tumour. But what she has, at her age, may surely kill her just the same. And my father says he cares not. He has ever been cruel to her, but now he excels himself in his wretchedness. He is saying the most terrible things…He has called his own wife whore…’ And there she finally stopped herself. She had said more than she intended. Far more than she should. Rising from the bench as if it had suddenly turned to a hob that was blistering her noble backside, she squared her shoulders and handed me the soiled dishclout and the empty mug without a thank you. ‘I can find my own way out,’ she said, brushing past me without a glance. I did not follow her, but I knew she was gone by the slam of the great oaken door.

It was only with her going that I gave myself pause to be astonished by what Mr. Mompellion had said to her. His mind had become even darker than I had thought. I was concerned for him. I did not know what I could do to bring him comfort. Nevertheless, I climbed the stairs to his room as quietly as I could and listened outside his door. Inside there was silence. I knocked gently, and when he did not answer I opened the door. He was seated with his head in his hands. The Bible, as always, was beside him, unopened. I had a sudden, keen memory of him, sitting just so, at the end of one of the darkest days of the past winter. The difference was that Elinor had been seated beside him, her gentle voice reading from the Psalms. It was as if I heard it still, a low hum, so soothing, broken only by the soft rustle as she turned the pages. Without asking his leave, I picked up the Bible and turned to a passage I knew well:

‘Bless the Lord, O my soul;

And forget not all his benefits,

Who forgives all your iniquity,

Who heals all your diseases,

Who redeems your life from the Pit…’

He rose from his chair and took the book from my hand. His voice was low, but brittle. ‘Very well read, Anna. I see my Elinor may add a credential as a fine teacher to her catalogue of excellent qualities. But why did you not choose this one?’ He flipped a few pages, and began to declaim:

‘Your wife will be like a fruitful vine

Within your house;

Your children will be like olive shoots

Around your table…’

He raised his eyes and glared at me. Then slowly, deliberately, he opened his hand. The book slipped from his fingers. Instinctively, I leapt forward to catch it, but he grabbed my arm, and the Bible hit the floor with a dull thump.

We stood there, face-to-face, his hand tightening on my forearm until I thought he might break it. ‘Rector,’ I said, struggling to control my voice. At that, he dropped my arm as if it were a burning brand and raked his hand through his hair. The pressure of his grip had left a welt, throbbing. I could feel the tears welling in my eyes, and I turned away so that he would not see them. I did not ask his leave to go.

Spring, 1665

Ring of Roses

The winter that followed Sam’s death in the mine was the hardest season I had ever known. So, in the following spring, when George Viccars came banging on my door looking for lodging, I thought God had sent him. Later, there were those who would say it had been the Devil.

Little Jamie came running to tell me, all flushed and excited, tripping over his feet and his words. ‘There a man, mummy. There a man at the door.’

George Viccars swept his hat from his head as I came from the garth, and he kept his gaze down on the floor, respectfully. Different from all those men who look you over like a beef at saleyard. When you’re a widow at eighteen, you grow used to those looks and hard towards the men who give them.

‘If you please, Mistress Frith, they told me at the rectory you might have a room to let.’

He was a journeyman tailor, he said, and his own good, plain clothes told that he was a competent one. He was clean and neat even though he’d been on the road all the long way from Canterbury, and I suppose that impressed me. He had just secured a post with my neighbour, Alexander Hadfield, who presently had a surfeit of orders to fill. He seemed a modest man, and quiet-spoken, although when he told me he was prepared to pay sixpence a week for the attic space in my eaves, I’d have taken him if he was loud as a drunkard and muddy as a sow. I sorely missed the income from Sam’s mine, for I was still nursing Tom, and my small earnings from the flock were only a little augmented by my mornings’ work at the rectory and occasional service at the Hall, when they needed extra hands. Mr. Viccars’s sixpence would mean a lot in our cottage. But by the end of the week, it was me who was ready to pay him. George Viccars brought laughter back into the house. And later, when I could think at all, I was glad that I could think about those days in the spring and the summer when Jamie was laughing.

The young Martin girl minded the baby and Jamie for me while I worked. She was a decent girl and watchful with the children but Puritan in her ways, thinking that laughter and fun are ungodly. Jamie misliked her sternness and was always so glad when he’d see me coming home that he’d rush to the door and grab me around the knees. But the day after Mr. Viccars arrived, Jamie wasn’t at the door. I could hear his high little laugh coming from the hearth, and I remember wondering what had come over Jane Martin that she’d actually brought herself to play with him. When I got to the door, Jane was stirring the soup with her usual thin-lipped glare. It was Mr. Viccars who was on the floor, on all fours, with Jamie on his back, riding around the room, squealing with delight.

‘Jamie! Get off poor Mr. Viccars!’ I exclaimed. But Mr. Viccars just laughed, threw back his blond head, and neighed. ‘I’m his horse, Mrs. Frith, if you’ve no objection. He’s a very fine rider, and he rarely beats me with the whip.’ The day after that, I came home and found Jamie decked out like a Harlequin in all the fabric scraps from Mr. Viccars’s whisket. And the day after, the two of them were at work slinging oat sacks from the chairs to make a hiding house.

I tried to let George Viccars know how much I valued his kindness, but he brushed my thanks away. ‘Ah, he’s a fine little boy. His father must have been more than proud of him.’ So I tried to repay him by making a better table than we might otherwise have had, and his praise for my cooking was generous. The neighbour towns at that time had no tailor, so Mr. Hadfield had work to spare for his new assistant. Mr. Viccars would sew long into the evening, burning down a whole rushlight as he sat late by the fire plying his needle. Sometimes, when I was not too tired, I would set myself some chore near the hearth to keep him company awhile, and he would reward me with many tales of the places he’d sojourned. He had seen much for a young man, and his powers of description were good. Like most in this village, I had no occasion to travel farther than the market town seven miles distant. Our closest city, Chesterfield, lies twice as far, and I never had cause to journey there. Mr. Viccars knew the great cities of London and York, the bustling port life of Plymouth, and the everchanging pilgrim trade at Canterbury. I was pleased to hear his stories of these places and the manner of life of the people biding there.

These were a kind of evening I’d never had with Sam, who looked to me for all his information of the tiny world for which he cared. He liked to hear only of the villagers he’d known since childhood, the small doings that defined their days. And so I gave him such news as the arrival of Martin Highfield’s new bull calf and the expectation of Widow Hamilton for her wool-clip. He was content just to sit, exhausted, his big frame spilling from the chair that seemed so small when he was in it. I would prattle of what I’d heard of the villagers and the children’s doings and he would let the words wash over him, gazing at me with a half smile no matter what I said. When I ran out of talk, his smile would widen and he’d reach for me. His hands were big, cracked things with broken, blackened nails, and his idea of lovemaking was a swift and sweaty tumble, a spasm and then sleep. Afterward, I would lie awake under the weight of his arm and try to imagine the dim recesses of his mind. Sam’s world was a dark, damp maze of rakes and scrins thirty feet under the ground. He knew how to crack limestone with water and with fire; he knew the going rate for a dish of lead; he knew whose seams were likely to be Old Man before the year turned, and who had nicked whose claim up along the Edge. Inasmuch as he knew what love meant, he knew he loved me, and all the more so when I gave him the boys. His whole life was confined by these things.

Mr. Viccars seemed never to have been confined at all. When he entered our cottage, he brought the wide world with him. He had been born a Peakrill lad in a village near to Kinder Scout but had been sent off to Plymouth to take up tailoring, and in that port town had seen silk traders who traversed the Orient and had befriended lace makers even from among our enemies the Dutch. He could tell such tales: of Barbary seamen who wrapped their copper-coloured faces in turbans of rich indigo; of a Musalman merchant who kept four wives all veiled so that each moved about with just one eye peeking from her shroud. He had gone to London at the end of his apprenticeship, for the return and restoration of King Charles II had created prosperity among all manner of trades. There, he had enjoyed much work sewing liveries for courtiers’ servants. But the city had tired him.

‘London is for the very young and the very rich,’ he said. ‘Others cannot long thrive there.’ I smiled and said that since he had yet to pass his middle twenties he seemed young enough to me to be able to dodge footpads and withstand late nights in alehouses.

‘Maybe so, Mistress,’ he replied. ‘But I grew tired of seeing no farther than the blackened wall at the opposite side of the street and hearing nothing but the racket of carriage wheels. I longed for space and for good air. You cannot believe that what men breathe in London really is air at all, for the coal fires send soot and sulphur everywhere, fouling the water and turning even the palaces into grimy, black hulks. The city is like a corpulent man trying to fit himself into the jerkin he wore as a boy. So many have moved there looking for work that souls are heaped up to live ten and twelve to a room no larger than the one we sit in. Poor souls have tried to add on to their dwellings and garner space as they can, so that misshapen parts of buildings lean out across the alleyways and teeter high atop decaying roofs that you wonder can hold the weight. The gutters and spouts are fixed on any how, so that even long after rain has passed, the wet drips down upon you to leave you always clammy damp.’

He had also grown weary, he said, of gentlemen who bespoke a household’s liveries and then left him to wait a year or more for the settlement of his accounts. ‘And I can tell you that by then I felt myself lucky to be paid at all,’ he added, for he had had colleagues driven destitute by lordly defaulters.

When he had ascertained I was not by any means of a Puritan bent, he shared with me some tales of the bawdiness and carousing he had witnessed in the city after the king sailed home from exile. At first I felt sure he embroidered these as skilfully as the fabrics under his hand, and so I challenged him one evening, as we sat companionably, he on the floor, long legs crossed and draped with the linen piece he was stitching, me at the table, my fingers greasy as I patted out the oatcakes and slung them up on a string before the fire to dry.

‘No, Mistress. If anything, I am exaggerating in the contrariwise direction, for I have no wish to offend you.’

I laughed at this and told him I was not too nice to hear the truth and wished to know how things stood in the world. I may have urged him too much in this way, or perhaps it was the second mug of my own good ale that I poured for him, for he launched then into some tales of the king travelling in disguise to a whorehouse and having his pockets thoroughly picked there. Mr. Viccars was surprised when I laughed at this and told him I hoped the lady in question made off with a king’s ransom, for certainly she had earned it in servicing such a one and many worse.

‘You don’t blame her for choosing a living of lustfulness and debauchery?’ he enquired, his eyebrow raised in mock severity.

‘May be I might,’ I replied. ‘But before I blamed, I would like to know the extent of her choices in the hard world that you have described to me. If you are drowning in a sewer, your first concern might be that you are drowning, not how vile you smell.’ Perhaps I spoke too frankly at this, for his next revelation about the works of the king’s favourite poet, the Earl of Rochester, did shock me, so much so that I remember yet the main part of the lines he declaimed. Mr. Viccars was a fine mimic. Before he gave me the verses, he fixed his frank, open countenance into a parody of a foppish sneer and turned his own gentle voice into a lordly bray:

‘I rise at eleven, I dine at two,

I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do

I send for my whore when, for fear of the clap,

I come in her hand and I spew in her lap…’

I didn’t let him get any further in his recitation, stopping my ears with my hands and excusing myself directly, for truly although I am loath to judge others, I can scarce credit that the nobles and gentry who so stand upon their superiority to such as we can yet be so base as to make the worst of us seem like angels. Later, lying in my room with my babies curled on the pallet beside me, I was sorry I had acted so. I longed to learn about the places and the people that I could never hope to see, and now I feared I would appear such a prude to Mr. Viccars that he would no longer speak freely with me.

And surely the poor man looked mortified the next day, afraid that he had irrevocably offended me. I told him then that I had had it directly from our rector that knowledge is not itself evil, it is only the use to which one puts it that may imperil the soul. I said I was grateful for the insight into the state of our country’s highest councils and would be more grateful still to hear other such poems, for are not all His Majesty’s loyal subjects bound to strive to emulate their king? And so we made a jest of it, and as spring softened into summer, so we became more easy with each other.

Mr. Hadfield had ordered a box of cloth from London and there was great excitement when the parcel arrived, as there always is at the coming of goods from the city, with many in the village interested to see what manner of colour and figure might now be worn in town. Because the parcel arrived damp, having travelled the last of its journey in an open cart unprotected from rain, Mr. Hadfield asked Mr. Viccars to see to its drying, and so he contrived lines in the garth of our cottage and slung the fabrics out to air, thus giving everyone ample chance to look and comment. Jamie made a game of it, of course, running up and down between the flapping fabrics, pretending he was a knight at a joust.

Mr. Viccars was so well fixed with orders that I was surprised indeed when, just a few days after the London fabrics arrived, I returned from my work to find a dress of finespun wool lying folded on the pallet in my room. It was a golden green, the colour of sunlight-dappled leaves, of modest style, but well cut and flattering, its whisk and hands trimmed in Genoa lace. I’d never had so fine a thing – even for my handfast I’d worn the borrowed dress of a friend. And since Sam had died I’d been in the one shapeless smock of rough serge, Puritan black, innocent of any adornment. I expected to go on so, for neither my means nor my inclination had led me to look to bedecking myself. And yet I held the soft gown up to me and walked by the window, thrilled as a girl, trying to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the pane. It was in the glass I saw Mr. Viccars standing behind me, and I dropped the dress, embarrassed to be caught so immodestly preening. But he was smiling his big open smile, and he looked down deferentially when he grasped my mortified state.

‘Forgive me, but I thought of you directly I sighted that cloth, for the green is exactly the colour of your eyes.’

I felt my face flush, and my vexation at blushing just made my cheeks and throat burn all the hotter. ‘Good sir, you are kind, but I cannot accept this dress from you. You are here as my lodger, and glad I am to have such a one as you. But you must know that to be man and woman under one roof is a perilous matter. I fear that we approach too near to terms of friendship…’

‘I would we may,’ he interrupted quietly, his expression now serious and his eyes on mine. At that I blushed scarlet all over again and knew not how to answer him. His face also was rather flushed, and I wondered if he, too, was blushing. But then, as he took a step towards me, he staggered a little and had to fling a hand against the wall to steady himself. At this I felt a small surge of anger, thinking that he had been helping himself to the ale jar and preparing myself in case his behaviour began to resemble the grog-swilling oafs I had sometimes had to deal with since Sam died. But Mr. Viccars kept his hands to himself, raising them to his brow and rubbing at it, as if it pained him. ‘Have the dress in any wise,’ he said quietly. ‘For I mean only to thank you for keeping a comfortable house and welcoming a stranger.’

‘Sir, I thank you, but I cannot think it right,’ I said, folding the gown and holding it out to him.

‘Why do you not seek advice on the morrow when you are at the rectory?’ he said. ‘Surely if your pastor sees no harm in it, there may be found none?’

I saw some wisdom in what he proposed and assented to it. If not the rector – for I could not see opening my heart on such a matter to him – I knew that Mrs. Mompellion would know how to advise me. And there was still, I was surprised to discover, woman enough alive within me to want to wear that dress.

‘Will you not at least try it upon yourself? For a workman likes to know where he stands in the mastery of his craft, and if you learn on the morrow that you mayn’t accept this gift in all propriety, at least you will have rewarded my pains and gratified my pride of workmanship by letting me see how I have done.’

Did I do right, I wonder, in so readily agreeing to his suggestion? I stood there in the doorway, fingering the fine stuff, and my curiosity to have the dress upon my body overbore my sense of what was or was not fit to do. I waved Mr. Viccars down the stairs to await me and shrugged myself out of my rough tunic. For the first time in months, I noticed how dingy were the linens I wore beneath, blotched with sweat and stained by leaking milk. It seemed improper to put the new dress over these unclean things, so I slipped them off as well and stood for a moment, regarding my own body. Hard work and a lean winter had robbed me of the softness left behind after Tom’s birth. Sam had liked me fleshy. I wondered what Mr. Viccars liked. The thought stirred me, so that my skin flushed and my throat tightened. I gathered up the green dress. It slid softly over my bare flesh. My body felt alive as it hadn’t in a long time, and I knew quite well that only part of the reason was the feel of the dress. As I moved, the skirt swayed, and I felt an urge to move with it, to dance again like a girl.

Mr. Viccars had his back to me, warming his hands at the fire. When he heard my tread on the stair, he turned and caught his breath, and his face brightened in a smile of appreciation. I twirled, making the skirt swirl around me. He clapped his hands and then held them wide. ‘Mistress, I would make you a dozen such gowns to display your beauty!’ Then, the playful tone left his voice and it dropped, becoming husky. ‘I would you might think me worthy to provide for you in all matters.’ He crossed the room and placed his hands on my waist, drew me gently towards him, and kissed me. I will not say I know what would have happened then if his skin, when it brushed mine, had not been so hot that I pulled back.

‘But you are fevered!’ I exclaimed, reaching, as mothers will, to lay a hand on his forehead. Thus was a moment lost, for better or worse.

‘It is true,’ he said, releasing me and once again rubbing at his temples. ‘All this day I have felt a grudging of ague, and now it rises and my head pounds, and I do feel a most dreadful ache probing at my bones.’

‘Get you to your bed,’ I said gently. ‘I will give you a cooling draught to take up with you. We will speak again of these things on the morrow, when you are restored.’

I do not know how Mr. Viccars slept that night, but I rested ill, confused by a tumble of thoughts and reawakened feelings that were not entirely welcome to me. I lay a long time in the dark, listening to the babies breathe their slight, soft, animal breaths beside me. I closed my eyes and conjured the feel of Mr. Viccars’s hands landing gently on my waist and tightening their grip there. I was like one who forgets all day to eat until the scent from some other’s roasting pan reminds her she is ravenous. My hand reached in the darkness and closed around Tom’s tiny, budlike fist, and I realized that though I loved the touch of my children’s little hands, there was another kind of touch – hard and insistent – for which my body hungered.

In the morning, I rose before cock crow so as to accomplish my household chores before Mr. Viccars descended from his garret. I did not wish to encounter him until I had had more space to examine my desires. I left the children in their sleepy tangle, tiny Tom curled up like a nutmeat in its shell, Jamie’s slender little arms flung wide across the pallet. They both smelled so sweet, lying there in their night-warmth. Their heads, covered in their father’s fine, fair down, gleamed bright in the dimness. My heavy, dark hair could not have been more unlike their pale curls, but their small faces, insofar as you can discern such things in features so unformed, were said by everyone to favour my own looks more than their father’s. I put my face to their necks and breathed the yeasty scent of them. God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.

Downstairs, I fanned the embers and relaid the fire and then went out to the well to draw the day’s water, setting a big kettle to heat and drawing a basinful to wash myself as soon as the ground-chill had gone from it. Drawing more, I scrubbed the gritstone flags, and while they dried I drew my shawl around me and took my broth and bread out into the brightening garth, watching the sky’s edge turn rosy and the mists rise from the two streams that bracket our hamlet. Our village has a fair prospect, and that morn the air was rich with summer’s loamy fragrance. It was a morning fit for the contemplation of new beginnings, and as I watched a whinchat trailing a worm to feed his young, I wondered if I, too, should look for a helper in the rearing of my boys.

Sam had left me the cottage and the sheepfold behind, but they had nicked his stowe the day they brought his body out of the mine. I told them that day that they need not wait to nick it again, for three weeks, six weeks, or nine, I could neither shore the fallen walls nor was I in purse to have another do it. Jonas Howe has the seam now, and being a good man, and a friend of Sam’s, he feels he has choused me, although why he should I know not, as it can hardly be a swindle when the law here time out of mind has made it plain that those who cannot pull a dish of lead from a mine within three nicks may not keep it. He said he would make miners of my boys alongside his own when they were of age. Though I thanked him for his promise, I was not sincere when I did so, for I firmly hoped not to see them in that rodent life, gnawing at rock, fearing flood and fire and crushing fall. But the tailoring trade was another gate’s business, and I would be pleased to have them learn it. Beside, George Viccars was a good man with a quick understanding. I enjoyed his company. Certainly, I had not shrunk from his touch. I had married Sam for far less cause. But then again, I was not fifteen anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

When I’d broken my fast I searched the bushes for a brace of eggs for Mr. Viccars and another for Jamie. My fowl are unruly and never will lay in their roost. Then I returned inside to knead the dough for the morrow’s bread and covered it to rise in a bowl near to the fire. I decided to leave the remaining chores for the afternoon and returned upstairs to set Tom to my breast so that Jane Martin would find him with full belly when she arrived shortly to watch over him. As I hoped, he barely stirred as I lifted him, greeting me only with a single long stare before closing his eyes and commencing his contented suckling.

As a result of my early rising, I was at the rectory well before seven, and yet Elinor Mompellion was already in her garden, a pile of prunings rising high beside her. Unlike most ladies, Mrs. Mompellion did not scruple to toil with her hands. Especially she loved to work in her garden, and it was not uncommon to see her face as streaked with dirt as a charwoman’s from carelessly pushing back wisps of hair that loosened as she dug and weeded.

At five and twenty, Elinor Mompellion had the fragile beauty of a child. She was all pale and pearly, her hair a fine, fair nimbus around skin so sheer that you could see the veins pulsing at her temples. Even her eyes were pale, a white-washed blue like a winter sky. When I’d first met her, she reminded me of the blow-ball of a dandelion, so insubstantial that a breath might carry her away. But that was before I knew her. The frail body was paired with a sinewy mind, capable of violent enthusiasms and possessed of a driving energy to make and do. Sometimes, it seemed as if the wrong soul had been placed inside that slight body, for she pushed herself to her limits and beyond, and was often ill as a result. There was something in her that could not, or would not, see the distinctions that the world wished to make between weak and strong, between women and men, labourer and lord.

The garden was fragrant that morning with the sharp tang of lavender. It seemed that the colours and patterns of the plantings changed by the day under her skilled hands, the misty blues of forget-me-nots ceding to the rich midnight larkspurs, then easing to the soft pinks of the mallow flowers. Under every window she had set bowpots of jessamine and gilly flowers so that the scents wafted sweetly through the house. Mrs. Mompellion called the garden her little Eden, and I believe God did not mislike her claim, for all manner of flowers flourished there, far beyond what are commonly expected to grow and thrive through the hard winters on this mountainside.

That morning I found her on her knees, deadheading the daisies. ‘Good morning, Anna,’ she said as she saw me. ‘Did you know that the tea made of this unassuming little flower serves to cool a fever? As a mother you’d do well to add some herb lore to your store of knowledge, for you never can be sure when your children’s well-being might depend upon it.’ Mrs. Mompellion never let a minute pass without trying to better me, and for the most part I was a willing pupil. When she had discovered that I hungered to learn, she commenced to shovel knowledge my way as vigorously as she spaded the cowpats into her beloved flower beds.

I was ready to take what she gave. I had always loved high language. My chief joy as a child had been to go to church, not because I was uncommonly good, but because I longed to listen to the fine words of the prayers. Lamb of God, Man of Sorrows, Word made Flesh. I would lose myself in the cadence of the phrases. Even as our pastor then, the old Puritan Stanley, denounced the litanies of the saints and the idolatrous prayers of the Papists for Mary, I clung to the words he decried. Lily of the Valley, Mystic Rose, Star of the Sea. Behold the Handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done unto me according to Thy Word. Once I realized that I could memorize bright snatches of the liturgy, I set myself to do it every Sunday, adding to my harvest like a farmer building his stook. Sometimes, if I could escape from under my stepmother’s eye, I would linger in the churchyard, trying to copy the forms of the letters inscribed upon the tombstones. When I knew the names of the dead, I could match the shapes engraved there with the sounds I reasoned they must stand for. I used a sharpened stick for my pen and a patch of smoothed earth as my tablet.

Once, my father, carting a load of firewood to the rectory, came upon me so. I started when I saw him, so that the stick snapped in my hand and drove a splinter into my palm. Josiah Bont was a man of few words, and those mostly curses. I did not expect him to understand my strong longing towards what to him must surely seem a useless skill. I have said that he loved a pot. I should add that the pot did not love him, and made of him a sour and menacing creature. I cringed from him that day, waiting for his fist to fall. He was a big man, ever quick with a blow – and often for less cause. And yet he did not strike me for shirking my chores, but only looked down at the letters I had attempted, rubbed a grimy fist across his stubbled chin, and walked on.

Later, when several of the other village children taunted me about it, I learned that my father had actually been crowing about me at the Miner’s Tavern that day, saying that he wished he had the means to have me schooled. It was an easy boast, one he would never have to make good upon, for there were no schools, even for boys, in villages such as ours. But the news of this warmed me and made the children’s teasing a small matter, for I had never had a word of praise from my father’s lips, and to learn that he thought me clever made me begin to think that perhaps I might be so. After this, I became more open and would go about my work muttering snatches of Psalms or sentences from the Sunday sermon, meaning purely to pleasure my ear but earning an undeserved name for religious devotion. It was just such a reputation that led to my recommendation for employment at the rectory, and thus opened the door to the real learning that I craved.

Within a year of her coming, Elinor Mompellion had taught me my letters so well that, though my hand remained unlovely, I could read with only some small difficulties from almost any volume in her library. She would come by my cottage most afternoons, while Tom slept, and set me a lesson to work upon while she went on the remainder of her pastoral visits. She would call in again on her way home to see how I had managed and help me over any hurdles. Often, I would stop in the midst of our lessons and laugh for the sheer joy of it. And she would smile with me, for as I loved to learn, so she loved to teach.

Sometimes, I would feel some guilt in my pleasure, for I believed I gained all this attention because of her failure to conceive a child. When she and Michael Mompellion arrived here, so young and newly wedded, the entire village watched and waited. Months passed, and then seasons, but Mrs. Mompellion’s waist stayed slim as a girl’s. And we all – the whole parish – benefited from her barrenness, as she mothered the children who weren’t mothered enough in their own crowded crofts, took interest in promising youths who lacked preferment, counselled the troubled, and visited the sick, making herself indispensable in any number of ways to all kinds and classes of people.

But of her herb knowledge I wanted none; it is one thing for a pastor’s wife to have such learning and another thing again for a widow woman of my sort. I knew how easy it is for widow to be turned witch in the common mind, and the first cause generally is that she meddles somehow in medicinals. We had had a witch scare in the village when I was but a girl, and the one who had stood accused, Mem Gowdie, was the cunning woman to whom all looked for remedies and poultices and help with confinements. It had been a cruel year of scant harvest, and many women miscarried. When one strange pair of twins was stillborn, fused together at the breastbone, many had begun muttering of Devilment, and their eyes turned to Widow Gowdie, clamouring upon her as a witch. Mr. Stanley took it upon himself to test the accusations, taking Mem Gowdie with him alone into a field and spending many hours there, dealing with her solemnly. I do not know by what tests he tried her, but after, he declared that he conceived her entirely innocent as to that evil and upbraided the men and women who had accused her. But he also had harsh words for Mem, saying she defied God’s will in telling folk that they could prevent illness with her teas and sachets and simples. Mr. Stanley believed that sickness was sent by God to test and chastise those souls He would save. If we sought to evade such, we would miss the lessons God willed us to learn, at the cost of worse torments after our death.

Though none now dared whisper witch against old Mem, there were some who still looked aslant at her young niece, Anys, who lived with her and assisted at confinements and in the growing and drying and mixing of her brews. My stepmother was one of these. Aphra harboured a wealth of superstitions in her simple mind and was ever ready to believe in sky-signs or charms or philtres. She approached Anys with a mixture of fear and awe, and perhaps some envy. I had been at my father’s croft when Anys had come with a salve for the sticky-eye, which all the young ones were catching at the time. I had been surprised to see Aphra stealthily hiding a scissors, spread full open like a cross, under a bit of blanket upon the chair upon which she invited Anys to sit. I chided her for it, after Anys was gone. But she waved off my disapproval, showing me then the hag-stone she’d draped over her children’s pallet and the phial of salt she’d tucked into the doorpost.

‘Say what you will, Anna. That girl walks with too much pride in her step for a poor orphan,’ my stepmother opined. ‘She carries herself like one who knows summat more than we do.’ Well, I said, and so she did. Was she not well skilled in physick, and weren’t we all the better off on account of it? Had Anys not just brought us a salve for the sticky-eye that would soothe the children’s pains far quicker than Aphra or I had means to do it? Aphra simply made a face.

‘You’ve seen the way the men, old and young, sniff around her as if she were a bitch in heat. You can call it physick all you like, but I think she’s brewing up more than cordials in that croft of her’n.’ I pointed out that when a young woman was as fine figured and fair of face as Anys, men hardly had to be bewitched into interest in her, especially if that young woman had no father or brothers to remind them where to keep their eyes. Aphra scowled as I said this, and I felt I probed near the place where her ill will to Anys resided.

Aphra, neither handsome nor quick-witted, had settled for marriage with my dissolute father when she had passed six and twenty years with no better man making her an offer. They did well enough together since neither expected much. Aphra enjoyed a pot almost as much as my father, and the two of them spent half their lives in drunken rutting. But I think that in her heart Aphra had never ceased to pine for the kind of power a woman like Anys might wield. How else to account for her ill thoughts towards one who did only good by her and her children? It was true enough that Anys was refractory and cared not for the conventions of this small and watchful town, yet there were others less upright who did not draw such disapproval as she. Aphra’s superstitious mutterings found many willing ears amongst the villagers, and sometimes I worried for Anys on account of it.

I let Mrs. Mompellion wax on about the efficacy of rue and chamomile and busied myself rooting out the thistleweeds, as it is labour that requires hard pulling and can tend to make Mrs. Mompellion very faint if she stoops over it too long. Presently, I went to the kitchen to begin the day’s real labour and in the scrubbing of deal and sanding of pewter consumed the morning hours. There are some who imagine that the work of a housemaid is the dullest of drudgery, but I have never found it so. At the rectory and at the Bradfords’ great Hall, I found much enjoyment in the tending of fine things. When you have been raised in a bare croft, eating with wooden spoons from crude platters, there are a hundred small and subtle pleasures to be garnered in the smooth slipperiness of a fine porcelain cup under your hands in a tub of soapsuds or the leathery scent of a book as you work the beeswax into its binding. As well, these simple tasks engaged only the hands and left the mind free to wander unfettered down all manner of interesting pathways. Sometimes, as I polished the Mompellions’ damascene chest, I would study its delicate inlays and wonder about the faraway craftsman who had fashioned it, trying to imagine the manner of his life, under a hot sun and a strange God. Mr. Viccars had a rich and lovely fabric that he called damask, and I fell to wondering if that bolt of cloth had stood in the same bazaar as the chest and made the same long journey from desert to this damp mountainside. Thinking of Mr. Viccars broke my reverie and reminded me that I had not raised the problem of the dress with Mrs. Mompellion. But then I realized it was nigh to noon and Tom would be fair-clemmed and mewling for his milk. So I left the rectory in haste, thinking that the matter of the dress and its propriety could be raised with Mrs. Mompellion at some later time.

But that later time never came. For when I arrived at the cottage, the quiet inside was of the old kind in the days before Mr. Viccars joined our household. There was not laughter or merry shouting from within, and indeed, in the kitchen I found only a sullen Jane Martin distracting Tom with a finger of arrowroot and water, while Jamie, all subdued, played alone by the hearth, making towers from the bavins and thus strewing bits of broken kindling everywhere. Mr. Viccars’s sewing corner was as I’d left it that morning, with the threads and patterns piled neat and untouched from the night before. The eggs I’d left for him lay still in their whisket. Tom, seeing me, squirmed in Jane Martin’s arms and opened his wide, gummy mouth like a baby bird. I reached for him and set him to nurse before I enquired about Mr. Viccars.

‘Indeed, I have not seen him. I believed him to be gone out early to the Hadfields’,’ she said.

‘But his breakfast is uneaten,’ I replied. Jane Martin shrugged. She had made it plain by her manner that she misliked the presence of a male lodger in the house, although since Rector Mompellion had sent us Mr. Viccars she had had to hold her peace about it.

‘He a bed, Mummy,’ said Jamie forlornly. ‘I goed up to find him but he yelled me, “Go ’way.”’

Mr. Viccars must be ill indeed, I reasoned. Anxious as I was to attend to him, I had to complete Tom’s feeding first. Once he was satisfied, I drew a pitcher of fresh water, cut a slice of bread, and climbed to Mr. Viccars’s garret. I could hear the moans as soon as I set a foot on the attic ladder. Alarmed, I failed to knock, simply opening the hatch into the low-ceilinged space.

I almost dropped the pitcher in my shock. The fair young face of the evening before was gone from the pallet in front of me. George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple knob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched, with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.

‘Please, water,’ he whispered. I held the cup to his parched mouth, and he drank greedily, his face distorted from the grief of the effort. He paused from his drinking only as a spasm of shivering and sneezing racked his body. I poured, and poured again until the pitcher was drained. ‘Thank you,’ he gasped. ‘And now I pray you be gone from here lest this foul contagion touch you.’

‘Nay,’ I said, ‘I must see you comfortable.’

‘Mistress, none may do that now except the priest. Pray fetch Mompellion, if he will dare to come to me.’

‘Say not so!’ I scolded him. ‘This fever will break, and you will be well enough presently.’

‘Nay, Mistress, I know the signs of this wretched illness. Just get you gone from here, for the love of your babes.’

I did go at that, but only to my own room to fetch my blanket and pillow – the one to warm his shivers and the other to replace the drenched thing beneath his horrible head. He moaned as I reentered the garret. As I attempted to lift him to place the pillow, he cried out piteously, for the pain from that massive boil was intense. Then the purple thing burst all of a sudden open, slitting like a pea pod and issuing forth creamy pus all spotted through with shreds of dead flesh. The sickly sweet smell of apples was gone, replaced by a stench of week-old fish. I gagged as I made haste to swab the mess from the poor man’s face and shoulder and stanch his seeping wound.

‘For the love of God, Anna – he was straining his hoarse throat, his voice breaking like a boy, summoning I don’t know what strength to speak above a whisper – ‘Get thee gone from here! Thou can’t help me! Look to thyself!’

I feared that this agitation would kill him in his weakened state, and so I picked up the ruined bedding and left him. Downstairs, two horrified faces greeted me, Jamie’s wide-eyed with incomprehension, and Jane’s pale with knowing dread. She had already shed her pinafore in preparation to leave us for the day, and her hand was upon the door bar as I appeared. ‘I pray you, stay with the children while I fetch the rector, for I fear Mr. Viccars’s state is grave,’ I said. At that, she wrung her hands, and I could see that her girlish heart was at war with her Puritan spine. I didn’t wait to see who would win the battle but simply swept by her, dumping the bedding in the dooryard as I went.

I was running, my eyes down and fixed on the path, so I did not see the rector astride Anteros, on his way from an errand in nearby Hathersage. But he saw me, turned and wheeled that great horse, and cantered to my side.

‘Good heavens, Anna, whatever is amiss?’ he cried, sliding from the saddle and offering a hand to steady me as I gasped to catch my breath. Through ragged gulps, I conveyed the gravity of Mr. Viccars’s condition. ‘Indeed, I am sorry for it,’ the rector said, his face clouded with concern. Without wasting any more words, he handed me up onto the horse and remounted.

It is so vivid to me, the man he was that day. I can recall how naturally he took charge, calming me and then poor Mr. Viccars; how he stayed tirelessly at his bedside all through that afternoon and then again the next, fighting first for the man’s body and then, when that cause was clearly lost, for his soul. Mr. Viccars muttered and raved, ranted, cursed, and cried out in pain. Much of what he said was incomprehensible. But from time to time he would cease tossing on the pallet and open his eyes wide, rasping ‘Burn it all! Burn it all! For the love of God, burn it!’ By the second night, he had ceased his thrashing and simply lay staring, locked in a kind of silent struggle. His mouth was all crusted with sordes, and hourly I would dribble a little water on his lips and wipe them; he would look at me, his brow creasing with effort as he tried to express his thanks. As the night wore on, it was clear that he was failing, and Mr. Mompellion would not leave him, even when, towards morning, Mr. Viccars passed into a fitful kind of sleep, his breath shallow and uneven. The light through the attic window was violet and the larks were singing. I like to think that, somewhere through his delirium, the sweet sound might have brought him some small measure of relief.

He died clutching the bedsheet. Gently, I untangled each hand, straightening his long, limp fingers. They were beautiful hands, soft save for the one callused place toughened by a lifetime of needle pricks. Remembering the deft way they’d moved in the fire glow, the tears spilled from my eyes. I told myself I was crying for the waste of it; that those fingers that had acquired so much skill would never fashion another lovely thing. In truth, I think I was crying for a different kind of waste; wondering why I had waited until so near this death to feel the touch of those hands.

I folded them on George Viccars’s breast, and Mr. Mompellion laid his own hand atop them, offering a final prayer. I remember being struck then by how much larger the rector’s hand was – the hard hand of a labouring man rather than the limp, white paw of a priest. I could not think why it should be so, for he came, as I gathered, from a family of clergy and had but recently been at his books in Cambridge. There was not much between Mr. Mompellion and Mr. Viccars in age, for the reverend was but eight and twenty. And yet his young man’s face, if you looked at it closely, was scored with furrows at the brow and starbursts of crows’ feet beside the eyes – the marks of a mobile face that has frowned much in contemplation and laughed much in company. I have said that it could seem a plain face, but I think that what I mean to say is that it was his voice, and not his face, that you noticed. Once he began to speak, the sound of it was so compelling that you focused all your thoughts upon the words, and not upon the man who uttered them. It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.

He turned his eyes on me then, and spoke to me in a silken whisper that seemed to fall upon my grief like a comforting shawl. He thanked me for my assistance through the night. I had done what I could; bringing cold and hot compresses to ease the fevers and the shivering; making infusions to purify the air in that small, ill-smelling sickroom; carrying away the pans of bile and piss and sweat-drenched rags.

‘It is a hard thing,’ I said, ‘for a man to die amongst strangers, with no family to mourn him.’

‘Death is always hard, wheresoever it finds a man. And untimely death harder than most.’ He began to chant, slowly, as if he were groping in his memory for the words:

‘My wounds stink and are corrupt,

My loins are filled with a loathsome disease and there is

no soundness in my flesh.

My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore,

My kinsmen stand far off…’

‘Do you know that Psalm, Anna?’ I shook my head. ‘No; it is unlovely and not much sung. But you did not stand aloof from Mr. Viccars; you did not stand far off. I think that George Viccars passed his last weeks happily in your family. You should console yourself in the joy that you and your sons were able to give to him, and the mercy that you, especially, have shown.’

He said he would carry the body downstairs where the sexton, who was elderly, might more easily retrieve it. George Viccars was a tall man and must have weighed near to fourteen stone, but Mr. Mompellion lifted that dead weight as if it were nothing and descended the loft ladder with the limp body slung across his shoulder. Downstairs, he laid George Viccars gently upon a sheet as tenderly as a father setting down a sleeping babe.

The Thunder of His Voice

The sexton came early for George Viccars’s body. Since there were no kin, his funeral rites would be simple and swift. ‘Sooner the better, eh, Mistress,’ the old man said as he hauled the corpse to his cart. ‘He’s nowt to linger ’ere for. Too late to stitch hissef a shroud.’

Because of the long night’s labour, Mr. Mompellion had bidden me not to come to the rectory that morning. ‘Rest instead,’ he said, pausing at the doorway in the early light. Anteros had been tethered all night in the garth and had trod the soil there into grassless craters. I nodded, but anticipated little rest. I had been commanded to serve at dinner at the Hall that afternoon, and before that I would have to scour the house from bottom to top and then figure on the disposition of Mr. Viccars’s effects. As if he’d caught my thought, the rector paused as he raised his foot to the stirrup, patted the horse, and turned back to me, coming close and dropping his voice. ‘You would do well to follow Mr. Viccars’s instructions as to his things,’ he said. I must have looked baffled, for I wasn’t sure for the moment to what he was referring. ‘He said to burn everything, and that may be good advice.’

I was still on my hands and knees in the attic, scrubbing the worn floorboards, when the first of Mr. Viccars’s customers came rapping on the door. Before I opened it, I knew the caller was Anys Gowdie. Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her. Despite the common opinion of her in the village, I had always had admiration for Anys. She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed. No matter how freely they might besmear her character, and no matter how many charms they might dangle about themselves in her presence, there were few women who would do without her in the birthing room. She brought a calm kindness with her there, very different from her sharp manner in the streets. And she had a deft-handedness in difficult deliveries that her aunt had come to rely upon. I liked her, too, because it takes a kind of courage to care so little for what people whisper, especially in a place as small as this.

She had come looking for Mr. Viccars, to collect a dress he had made for her. When I told her what had befallen him, her face clouded with sorrow. And then, typically, she upbraided me. ‘Why did you not call on my aunt and me, instead of Mompellion? A good infusion would have served George better than the empty mutterings of a priest.’

I was used to being shocked by Anys, but this time she had managed to outdo even herself, delivering two scandalizing thoughts in a single utterance. The first shock was her frank blasphemy. The second was the familiarity with which she referred to Mr. Viccars, whom I had never yet called by his first name. On what terms of intimacy had they been, that she should call him so? My suspicions were only heightened when, after rummaging through the whisket in which he kept his work, we found the dress that he had made for her. For all the years of my childhood, when the Puritans held sway here, we wore for our outer garments only what they called the Sadd Colours – black for preference, or the dark brown called Dying Leaf. Since the return of the king, brighter hues had crept back to most wardrobes, but long habit still constrained the choices of most of us. Not Anys. She had bespoke a gown of a scarlet so vivid it almost hurt my eyes. I had never seen Mr. Viccars at work on it, and I wondered if he had contrived to keep it from me, in case I remarked upon it. The gown was finished all but for the hem, which Anys said she had come that morning to have him adjust for her at a final fitting. When she held the dress up, I saw that the neckline was cut low as a doxy’s, and I could not discipline my thoughts. I imagined her, tall and splendid, her honey-gold hair tumbling loose, her amber eyes half closed, and Mr. Viccars kneeling at her feet, letting his long fingers drift from the hem to caress her ankle and then travelling under the soft fabric, skilled hands on fragrant skin, upward and slowly upward…Within seconds, I was flushed as scarlet as that damnable dress.

‘Mr. Viccars told me to burn his work for fear of spreading his contagion,’ I said, swallowing hard to ease the tightness in my throat.

‘You shall do no such thing!’ she exclaimed, and I foresaw in her dismay the difficulty I would have with all his clients. If Anys Gowdie, familiar as she was with the face of illness, felt so on the matter, it was unlikely any others would be persuadable. Few of us here live in ample circumstances, and none loves waste. Anyone who had placed a deposit on work from Mr. Viccars would want whatever of that work he had accomplished, and notwithstanding Mr. Mompellion’s injunction, I had no right to withhold it from them. Anys Gowdie left with her harlot’s gown folded under her arm, and as the day wore on and the news of Mr. Viccars’s death spread, as news does here, I was interrupted again and again by his clients claiming pieces of his work. All I could do was to pass on what he had said in his delirium. Not a one of them consented to having his or her garment – even were it only a pile of cut-out fabric pieces – consigned to the fire. In the end, I burned only his own clothes. And then, finally, as the coals fell and galled themselves, I at last found the will to toss the dress he had made for me into the grate, golden-green gashed by flames of bright vermillion.

It was a long walk, and all uphill, to Bradford Hall, and I was as tired as I’ve ever been as I set out that afternoon for my employment there. And yet I did not go direct, but rather headed east, towards the Gowdie cottage. I could not get Anys’s ‘George,’ or her scarlet gown, out of my mind. Generally, I am not a gossip. I care not who tumbles whom in what warm boose. And now that Mr. Viccars was dead, it hardly mattered, to me or any person, where he might have put his prick. And yet, even so, I had a month’s mind to know how matters had stood between him and Anys Gowdie, if only to take the measure of his true regard for me.

The Gowdies’ cottage was set off at the eastern edge of town, after the smithy, a lonely dwelling at the edge of the big Riley farm. It was a tiny place, just one room propped upon another, so ill-built that the thatch sat rakishly atop the whole like a cap pulled crooked across a brow. The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home. Inside, the tiny room had a low-beamed ceiling. The light was always dim, to protect the virtue of the drying plants. At this time of year, when the Gowdies were cutting their summer herbs, the bunches hung from the beams in such profusion that you had to bend almost double when you entered the door. Always when I visited, I wondered that tall Anys contrived to live in such a place, for surely she could not stand upright. The Gowdies always had a fire going for the making of their draughts, and since the flue of the ancient chimney drew poorly, the air was smoky and the walls black with soot. Still, at least the smoke was sweet-scented, for the Gowdies always burned rosemary, which they said purified the air of any sickness that ailing villagers might unwittingly carry when coming there for help.

There was no answer when I knocked upon the door, so I walked round to the stone wall that sheltered the Gowdies’ physick garden. The garden had been part of our village for as long as I could remember. I had always assumed that Mem planted it, but once, when I had said something about that to Anys, she had mocked me for my ignorance.

‘This garden, as any fool could see, was old before Mem Gowdie was even thought of.’ She had run her hand along the bough of an espaliered plum, and I saw that, of course, the tree, with its gnarled and knotty trunk, was ancient. ‘We do not even know the name of the wise woman who first laid out these beds, but the garden thrived here long before we came to tend it, and it will go on long after we depart. My aunt and I are just the latest in a long line of women who have been charged with its care.’

The stone walls sheltered a profusion of plants. I knew by name less than a tenth part of what grew there. Many of the herbs had already been harvested, revealing the careful regularity of the stone-edged beds, sown to a plan that only Anys and her aunt understood. Anys knelt now amidst a clump of glossy green stems. Each tall stalk held a cluster of buds opening into blooms of midnight-blue. She was digging at the roots and rose as I came down the straw-strewn path, dusting the soil from her hands.

‘It is a handsome plant,’ I said.

‘Handsome – and potent,’ she replied. ‘They call it wolf’s bane, but it is bane to more than those poor creatures. Eat a small piece of this root and you will be dead by nightfall.’

‘Why do you have it here, then?’ I must have looked stricken, for she laughed at me.

‘Not to serve you for your supper! The wort, ground and mixed with oils, makes a very good rub for aching joints, and we will have many of those in this village as the winter hardens. But I do not think you came here to admire my blue flowers,’ she said. ‘Come inside and take a drink with me.’

We entered the cottage, and she set the bunch of roots upon a crowded workbench and washed her hands in a bucket. ‘Be kind enough to sit, Anna Frith,’ she said, ‘for I must needs sit, too, or crick my neck standing here.’ She shooed a grey gib-cat off a rickety chair and pulled up a stool for herself. I was grateful to have found Anys alone. I would have been pressed to account for my visit had it been old Mem working solitary in the garden, and I would have been ill-set to raise the matter on my mind if her aunt were sitting at our elbow. As it was, I hardly knew how to begin upon such a delicate subject. Although we were of an age, Anys and I had not grown up together. She had been raised in a village closer to the Dark Peak, and had been sent to her aunt when her mother died untimely. She had been about ten years old. I remember the day she arrived, sitting straight and tall in an open cart while all the village came out to peer at her. I remember it so vividly because she returned every stare and never flinched from the pointed fingers. I was a shy child then, and I remember thinking that if I had been her, I would have been hiding under the burlaps, wailing my heart out.

She handed me a glass of strong-smelling brew and poured herself one, also. I inspected the contents of my cup. It was an unappealing shade of pale green, with an even paler froth atop it. ‘Nettle beer. It will strengthen your blood,’ Anys said. ‘All women should drink it daily.’

As I lifted the cup, I remembered, with embarrassment, how as a child I had joined with others to mock Anys Gowdie, who would stop by the path or in the midst of a field and pluck fresh leaves, then eat them where she stood. It shamed me to recall how we had taunted her, crying out, ‘Cow! Cow! Grass-eater!’ Anys had only laughed and looked us over, one by one. ‘At least my nose isn’t stuffed with snot, like yours, Meg Bailey. And my skin isn’t bubbling with blebs, like yours, Geoffry Bain.’ And she listed all our defects to us, standing there taller than any other child her age and glowing with good health, all the way from the top of her glossy head to the tips of her fine, strong fingernails. Not so very much later, when I was first with child, I had gone to her, humbled, and asked her to guide me in what greens I could gather and eat to strengthen myself and the babe I carried. It had been an odd thing, at first, the taste of such stuff, but I had soon felt the benefit of it.

The nettle beer, however, was new to me. The flavour, as I sipped, was mild and not unpleasant, while the effect on my tired body was refreshing. I held the cup to my lips longer than I needed, so as to postpone launching myself upon my awkward subject. I need not have troubled. ‘And so I suppose you need to know whether I lay with George,’ Anys declared, in the same uninflected tone that might have said, ‘And so I suppose you need some yarrow leaves.’ The cup trembled in my hand, and the green stuff sloshed onto the swept-earth floor. Anys gave a short laugh. ‘Of course I did. He was too young and handsome to have to slake his fires with his fist.’ I hardly know how I looked at that, but Anys’s eyes as she regarded me were lit with amusement. ‘Drink up. You’ll feel better. It was naught more to either of us than a meal to a hungry traveller.’

She leaned forwards to stir some leaves steeping in a big black kettle near the fire. ‘His intentions to you were otherwise. If that’s what’s worrying you, set your mind easy. He wanted you to wife, Anna Frith, and I told him he’d do well with you, if he could talk you round to it. For I see that you’ve changed somewhat since Sam Frith passed. I think you like to go and come without a man’s say-so. I told him your boys were his best chance to win you. For, unlike me, you have them to look to, so you can never live just for yourself.’

I tried to imagine the two of them lying together discussing such things. ‘But why,’ I blurted, ‘if you were on such terms, did you not marry him yourself?’

‘Oh, Anna, Anna!’ She shook her head at me and smiled as one does at a slow-witted child. I felt my colour rise. I was confounded as to what I had said that had amused her so. She must have sensed my vexation, for she stopped smiling, took the cup from my hand, and looked at me with seriousness.

‘Why would I marry? I’m not made to be any man’s chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home – it is not much, I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it. And besides,’ she said, shooting me a sly sideways glance from under her long lashes, ‘sometimes a woman needs a draught of nettle beer to wake her up, and sometimes she needs a dish of valerian tea to calm her down. Why cultivate a garden with only one plant in it?’

I smiled hesitantly, as if to show that I could see the jest, for it fell into my heart that I wanted her good opinion and would not have her think me a dim and simple girl. She rose then to be about her work, and so I left her, more confused than when I’d arrived. She was a rare creature, Anys Gowdie, and I had to own that I admired her for listening to her own heart rather than having her life ruled by others’ conventions. I, meanwhile, was on my way to be ruled for the afternoon by people I loathed. I trudged on towards Bradford Hall, passing through the edge of the Riley woods. The sun was bright that day, and strong shadows from the trees fell in bands across the path. Dark and light, dark and light, dark and light. That was how I had been taught to view the world. The Puritans who had ministered to us here had held that all actions and thoughts could be only one of two natures: godly and right, or Satanic and evil. But Anys Gowdie confounded such thinking. There was no doubt that she did good: in many ways, the well-being of our village rested more on her works, and those of her aunt, than on the works of the rectory’s occupant. And yet her fornication and her blasphemy branded her a sinner in the reckoning of our religion.

I was still puzzling over this as I reached the wood’s abrupt edge and began skirting the golden fields of the Riley farm. They had been all day scything there – twenty men for twenty acres. The Hancocks, who farmed the Riley land, had six strong sons of their own and so needed far less help than others at their harvest. Mrs. Hancock and her daughters-in-law wearily followed behind their husbands, tying up the last of the loose stalks into sheaves burnished by the sunlight. I saw them that afternoon through Anys’s eyes: shackled to their menfolk as surely as the plough-horse to the shares.

Lib Hancock, the eldest brother’s wife, had been a friend to me since childhood, and as she straightened for a moment to ease her back, she raised a hand to shade her eyes and perceived that it was I, walking at the field’s edge. She waved to me, then turned for a word to her mother-in-law before leaving her work and crossing the field towards me.

‘Sit with me for a short while, Anna!’ she called. ‘For I am in need of a rest.’

I was in no hurry to get to the Bradfords’, so I walked with her to a grassy bank. She dropped down on it gratefully and closed her eyes for a moment. I rubbed at her shoulders and she purred with the ease my kneading hands brought her.

‘A sorry business about your lodger,’ she said. ‘He seemed a good man.’

‘He was that,’ I said. ‘He was uncommonly kind to my boys.’ Lib tilted her head back and gave me an odd look. ‘And to me, of course,’ I added. ‘As to everyone.’

‘I believe my mother-in-law had him in mind for Nell,’ she said. Nell, the only girl in the Hancock family, was so strictly kept by her many brothers that we often jested that she’d never get wedded, since no man could venture near enough to see what she looked like. Knowing what I now knew of Mr. Viccars, I laughed despite my sadness.

‘Was any woman in this village not considering the bedding of that man?’

I have said that Lib and I were close – we had ever exchanged girlish confidences. It was this habit, I suppose, that led me into the account I made her then, a bawdy confession of my own lust, which I had the right to confide to her, and then that which I did not: the news I’d just learned of Anys’s sport with my lodger.

‘Now, Lib,’ I said at last, rising reluctantly to continue on my way, ‘mind you do not prate my news all around the Hancock house this night.’

She laughed at that, and pushed me playfully on the shoulder. ‘Oh, and as if I’d be talking of tumblings in front of Mother Hancock and that houseful of men! You’ve got a peculiar view of our household, you have. The only mating fit for remark at the Hancock table is when the tups get put to the ewes!’ We both laughed then, kissed each other, and parted to our diverse toils.

At the edge of the field, the hedgerows were deep green in their glossy leaves and the blackberries beginning to plump and redden. Fat lambs, their fleeces gilded by sunlight, grazed in lush grasses. But for all its loveliness, the last half mile of this walk was always unpleasant to me, even when I wasn’t so fatigued. I disliked all of the Bradford family, and I especially feared the colonel. And I misliked myself for giving way to that fear.

Colonel Henry Bradford was said by all to have been an intelligent soldier who had led his men with uncommon valour. Perhaps his military success had made him arrogant, or perhaps such a man should never have retired to the quiet life of a country gentleman. In any case, there was no sign of wise leadership in the way he conducted his household. He seemed to take a perverse amusement in belittling his wife. She was the daughter of a wealthy but ill-connected family, a vapid beauty whose looks had stirred a brief infatuation in the colonel that lasted just until he pocketed her marriage portion. Since then, he had never let pass an opportunity to disparage her connections or slight her understanding. She, though still quite beautiful, had become brittle after long years of such treatment. Cowed and nervous, she fretted constantly over where next her husband would find fault, and so kept her staff on constant edge, always reordering the household routine so that the simplest tasks became effortful. The Bradfords’ son was a rake-shamed, drunken fanfarroon who fortunately stayed mostly in London. On the rare occasions he was at the Hall, I tried to find excuses for declining work there, and when I could not afford to do so, endeavoured to stay out of his line of sight and made sure I could never be entrapped into being alone with him. Miss Bradford was, as I have said, a proud and sour young woman, whose only glimmer of goodness seemed to come from a real solicitude for her unhappy mother. When her father was away, she seemed able to quiet her mother’s nerves and soothe her fretfulness, and one could work there without fear of tirades. But when the colonel returned, everyone, from Mrs. Bradford and her daughter down to the lowliest scullery maid, tensed like a cur waiting for the boot.

Since Bradford Hall had a moderately large staff, I was only required to serve at table for parties of some size or importance. The Hall had a great room that looked very well when arranged for dining. The two big bacon settles were pulled out from the walls, their dark oak polished to a rich, black gleam. At leaf-fall, just after the hogs were slaughtered, the scent of the new-cured flitches hanging inside could be overpowering. But by late summer, the bacon was long eaten and only a faint and pleasant smoky aroma remained beneath the fresher scents of beeswax and lavender. Silver shone in the low light and the canary, glowing in large goblets, warmed even the cold faces of the Bradfords. No one, of course, ever thought to tell me who the guests were that I would be waiting upon, and so I was pleased to see at least the friendly faces of the Mompellions among the dozen at that day’s dinner.

The colonel’s pride was gratified by the presence of Elinor Mompellion at his table. For one thing, she looked exquisite that afternoon in a simple gown of creamy silk. A few fine pearls gleamed in her pale hair. But more than her delicate beauty, Colonel Bradford appreciated her substantial connections. She had been a member of one of the oldest and most extensively landed families in the shire. It was noised about that in choosing Mompellion, she had spurned another suitor who might have made her a duchess. Colonel Bradford would never be able to fathom such a choice. But then, there was so much about her that eluded him. All he grasped was that a connection with her enhanced his own standing, and to him that was all that mattered. As I dipped to take away her soup plate, Elinor Mompellion, seated to the colonel’s left, placed a hand lightly on the forearm of the London gentleman to her right, interrupting the flow of his prattle. She turned to me with a grave smile. ‘I hope you are feeling quite well after your dreadful night, Anna.’ I heard the ring of the colonel’s butter knife dropping onto his plate and the hiss of his indrawn breath. I kept my eyes on the dishes in my hand, afraid to risk a glance in his direction. ‘Quite. Thank you, ma’am,’ I murmured quickly and slid on to clear the next plate. I feared if I gave her a second’s chance she would continue to converse with me, causing Colonel Bradford to expire from shock.

At the Hall, I had learned to keep my mind on my duties and let the talk, which was mostly trivial, wash over me like the twittering of birds in a distant thicket. At that large table, little of the conversation was general. Most people exchanged empty pleasantries with those seated next to them, and the result was a low buzz of mingled voices, broken occasionally by Miss Bradford’s affected, mirthless laugh. When I left the room with the meat platters, that was the state of things. But by the time I returned, carrying desserts, all the candles had been lit against the gathering dark and only the young Londoner next to Mrs. Mompellion was speaking. He was a style of gentleman we did not much see in our small village, his periwig so large and elaborate that his rather pinched, white-powdered face seemed lost beneath its mass of tumbling curls. He wore a patch on his right cheek. I expect that whichever of the Bradfords’ servants attended his toilet had been unfamiliar with how to affix such fashionable spots, for it flapped distractingly as the young man chewed his food. I had thought him rather absurd on first glimpse, but now he looked grave, and as he spoke, his hands fluttered from lace cuffs like white moths, throwing long shadows across the table. The faces turned towards him were pale and alarmed.

‘You have never seen anything like it on the roads. Innumerable men on horseback, wagons, and carts bulging with baggage. I tell you, everyone capable of leaving the city is doing so or plans to do it. The poor meantimes are pitching up tents out on Hampstead Heath. One walks, if one must walk, in the very centre of the roadway to avoid the contagion seeping from dwellings. Those who must move through the poorer parishes cover their faces in herb-stuffed masks contrived like the beaks of great birds. People go through the streets like drunkards, weaving from this side to that so as to avoid passing too close to any other pedestrian. And yet one cannot take a hackney, for the last person inside may have breathed contagion.’ He dropped his voice then and looked all around, seeming to enjoy the attention his words were garnering. ‘They say you can hear the screams of the dying, locked up all alone in the houses marked with the red crosses. The Great Orbs are all on the move, I tell you: there is talk that the king plans to remove his court to Oxford. For myself, I saw no reason to tarry. The city is emptying so fast that there is little worthwhile society to be had. One rarely sees a wigg’d gallant or a powdered lady, for wealth and connection are no shield against Plague.’

The word dropped like an anvil among the tinkling silverware. The bright room dimmed for me as if someone had snuffed every candle all at once. I clutched the platter I carried so that I would not drop it and stood stock-still until I was sure of my balance. I gathered myself and tried to steady my breath. I had seen enough people carried off by illness in my life. There are many fevers that can kill a man other than the Plague. And George Viccars hadn’t been near London in more than a year. So how could he have been touched by the city’s pestilence?

Colonel Bradford cleared his throat. ‘Come now, Robert! Do not alarm the ladies. The next thing they will be shunning your company for fear of infection!’

‘Do not joke, sir, for on the turnpike north of London, I encountered an angry mob, brandishing hoes and pitchforks, denying entry to their village inn to any who were travelling from London. It was a low place, in any wise, nowhere I would have sought shelter even on the filthiest of nights, so I rode onwards unmolested. But before long, to be a Londoner will not be a credential worth owning to. It will be surprising how many of us will invent rusticated histories for ourselves, mind me well. You’ll soon learn that my chief abode these last years was Wetwang, not Westminster.’

There was a little stir at this, for the town the young man was mocking was a good deal bigger than the one in which he was presently being entertained. ‘Well, good thing you got out, eh?’ said the colonel, to cover the lapse. ‘Clean air up here, no putrid fevers.’

Down the table, I noticed the Mompellions exchanging meaning looks. Trying to still my shaking hands, I set down the dessert I carried and stepped back into the shadows against the wall. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ the young man continued, ‘but some few are staying in town who have the easy means to go. Lord Radisson – I believe you are acquainted with his lordship – has been bruiting it about that he feels it his duty to stay and “set an example.” Example of what? A wretched death, I warrant.’

‘Think of what you are saying,’ Mr. Mompellion interrupted. His voice – rich, loud, grave – cut off the Bradfords’ airy laughter. Colonel Bradford turned to him with a raised eyebrow, as if to censure rudeness. Mrs. Bradford tried to turn her titter to a cough. Mr. Mompellion continued, ‘If all who have the means run each time this disease appears, then the seeds of the Plague will go with them and be sown far and wide throughout the land until the clean places are infected and the contagion is magnified a thousandfold. If God saw fit to send this scourge, I believe it would be His will that one face it where one was, with courage, and thus contain its evil.’

‘Oh?’ said the colonel superciliously. ‘And if God sends a lion to rip your flesh, will you stand steadfastly then, too? I think not. I think you will run from the danger, as any sensible man would.’

‘Your analogy is excellent, sir,’ said Mr. Mompellion; his voice had the commanding timbre that he used in the pulpit. ‘Let us explore it. For I will certainly stand and face the lion if, by running, I would cause the beast to follow me, and thus draw him closer to the dwelling places of innocents who demand my protection.’

At the mention of innocents, Jamie’s little face flashed before me. What if the young Londoner were correct? Jamie had lived in George Viccars’s pocket. All that day before the illness first rose in him, Jamie had been climbing on his back, prancing by his side.

The young man broke into the silence that greeted Mr. Mompellion’s speech. ‘Well, sir, very bravely stated. But I must tell you that those who know this disease best – and that would be the physicians and the barber-surgeons – have been the fleetest of foot in leaving town. One cannot get cupped for a cough or bled for the gout, no matter if you have a sovereign to give in fee. Which leads me to conclude that the physicians have written us a clear prescription, and that is this: the best physick against the Plague is to run far away from it. And I, for one, intend to follow that prescription religiously.’

‘You say “religiously,” but I think your choice of word is poor,’ said Mr. Mompellion. ‘For if one speaks “religiously,” then one must recall that God has the power to keep you safe in peril, or to bring peril to overtake you, no matter how far or fast you run.’

‘Indeed, sir. And many who believed that now are rotting corpses passing through the streets in cartloads, on their way to the great pits.’ Miss Bradford raised a hand to her brow, ostentatiously feigning a faintness that her avid eyes belied. The young man turned to her, reading her desire for morbid detail, and continued, ‘I have had it from one whose man had need to go there in fruitless search of a kinsman. He reported that the corpses are tipped in, afforded no more respect than one would give a dead dog. A layer of bodies, a few spades of soil, and then more bodies tumbled in atop. They lie there so, just like yonder dessert.’ He pointed at the layered cake, which I had set down upon the table. I saw the Mompellions wince, but the young man smirked at his own wit and then turned pointedly towards the rector.

‘And do you know who were the fastest to follow the physicians out of the city, sir? Why, it were the Anglican ministers, just such as yourself. There’s many a London pulpit being filled by a nonconformist on account of it.’

Michael Mompellion looked down then and studied his hands. ‘If what you say is true, sir, then I am indeed sorry for it. I will say that if it be the case, then my brothers in faith are the lesser men.’ He sighed then and looked at his wife. ‘Perhaps they might believe that God now is preaching to the city, and what needs add their small utterance to the thunder of His voice?’

There was a full moon that night, which was fortunate, for otherwise I’m sure I would have fallen into a ditch as I stumbled home, almost running despite my exhaustion, as the thistles tore at my ankles and the briars caught at my skirt. I could barely speak to the Martin girl as she roused herself heavily from her fireside slumber. I threw off my cloak and rushed up the stairs. A square of silvery light bathed the two little bodies. Both breathed easily. Jamie had an arm round his brother. I stretched out a hand to his forehead, terrified of what I might feel. My fingers brushed his soft skin. It was blessedly cool.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Oh, thank you, God.’

Rat-fall

The weeks that followed George Viccars’s death ushered in the loveliest September weather I ever recall. There are some who deem this mountainside bleak country, and I can see how it might seem so: the land all chewed up by the miners, their stowes like scaffolds upon the moors, and their bings like weedy molehills interrupting the pale mauve tide of the heather. This is not a vivid place. Our only strong hue is green, and this we have in every shade: the emerald velvet mosses, the glossy, tangled ivies, and in spring, the gold-greens of tender new grasses. For the rest, we move through a patchwork of greys. The limestone outcropts are a whitish-grey, the millstone grit from which we build our cottages a warmer greyish-yellow. Grey is the sky colour here, the dove-breast clouds louring so upon the hilltops that sometimes you feel you could just reach up and bury your hands in their softness.

But those autumn weeks were flooded with an unaccustomed surfeit of sunlight. The sky was clear blue almost every day, and the air, instead of hinting frost, remained warm and dry. I was so relieved that Jamie and Tom were not ill, I lived in those days as at a fair. Jamie himself was downcast, having lost his dear friend Mr. Viccars. In truth, the death of his father had been easier for him to bear, because with Sam down the mine for most of Jamie’s waking hours, the two had spent little time in each other’s company. In the few short months he had lived with us, Mr. Viccars had become an indispensable companion. His death left an emptiness that I resolved to fill, taking time to make our simple chores into something of a game so that Jamie would not feel the loss so keenly.

At day’s end I liked to know that the ewes were each with their lambs and none had caught themselves up in briars or burrows. So in the afternoons, when I went to check the flock, I would take Jamie and Tom with me, and we would dawdle along our way, stopping to find what story each clump of stones or hollow tree might yield us. A line of fungus marching up a fallen branch might become, in our tale, the stairway to a faery’s bower, while an acorn cap might be the cup left behind by a party of feasting wood mice.

Our flock is small, just one and twenty ewes. From the time I married Sam, my rule has been to make mutton of any who proves an inept mother, and the result is an easy lambing when the weather is with us. We had had a good lambing back in the spring, so the last thing I was looking for that day was a ewe in labour. But we found her, and fortunate, for she was lying upon her side, panting in the shade of a rowan whose redding leaves also seemed quite out of season in that heat. Her tongue was out, and she was straining. I unslung Tom and laid him on a patch of clover. Jamie stood behind me as I knelt down and ran my hands inside the ewe, trying to stretch her. I could feel the nub of a nose and the hardness of one hoof, but I could barely get all my fingers in to grasp it.

‘Mummy, may I help?’ said Jamie, and looking at his tiny fingers I said yes, sitting him down in front of me with the ewe’s rear open before us like a big, glistening blossom. He slid his little hands easily up into that slippery wetness and exclaimed as he felt the nobbly knees of her backward baby. I braced against the ewe with my heels and together we tugged, he gripping the knees with his small strength while I strained at the hoofs. Suddenly a bundle of wet wool flew out with a big, sucking slosh, and the two of us fell backwards on the grass. It was a fine lamb, small but strong, an unexpected gift. The ewe was a young one that had not lambed before, and I was pleased to see her set straight to work cleaning the caul from her babe’s face; presently the lamb rewarded her with an enormous sneeze. We laughed, Jamie’s eyes round and proud and happy.

We left them, the mother licking the remains of the yellow sac off her baby’s fleece, and wandered from the field and into the copse where the stream runs, to wash the blood and muck from our own hands and clothes. The water bubbled and sang over the layers of shale. Because the day was warm and we were hot from our efforts, I stripped Jamie down to his skin and let him splash naked while I rinsed his smock and my pinafore and flung them over a bush to dry. I had unpinned my whisk, untied my cap, and pulled off my hose. My skirt tucked up, I found a flat rock and sat down to feed Tom, letting the rills run over my toes while Jamie paddled. I stroked the fine, downy hair on Tom’s head and watched Jamie splashing in the cool water. He had lately reached that age when a mother looks at her babe and finds him a babe no longer, but a child full formed. The curves have turned into long, graceful lines: the fat and folded legs stretched out into lithe limbs; the rounded belly slimmed to a straight-standing body. A face, suddenly capable of the full range of expression, has smoothed its way out of all those crinkled chins and plumped-out cheeks. I loved to look at Jamie’s new self, the smoothness of his skin, the curve of his neck, and the tilt of his golden head, always gazing curiously at some new wonder in his world.

He was springing from stone to stone, waving his arms wildly to keep his footing as he chased the darting, blue-bodied dragonflies. As I watched, one alit on a branch near my hand. The glassy panes of her wings caught the light in rainbow colours, like the stained windows in our church. I laid a finger softly on the twig and could feel the swift shivering and hear the faint hum from her vibrating wings. Then she took off, swooping down upon a passing wasp. Her legs had seemed flimsy as threads, but they snapped around the wasp like an iron trap. Still in flight, her powerful jaws closed on the insect and devoured it. So it goes, I thought idly. A birth and a death, each unlooked for.

I leant back against the stream’s bank and closed my eyes. I must have dozed for a moment, or otherwise I surely would have heard the tread of boots coming through the trees. As it was, he was almost upon me when I opened my eyes and met his, lifted from the open book he carried. I jumped up, fumbling and tugging at my bodice. Tom opened his pink mouth and howled indignantly at the interruption to his feeding.

The rector raised a hand and smiled kindly. ‘He is quite just to protest my intrusion. Do not discompose yourself, Anna. I’m sorry to have startled you, but I was so lost in my book, and in the loveliness of this day, that I was not aware there was anyone else in the copse.’

I was too surprised and mortified by the rector’s sudden appearance to make any civil reply to him. To my further astonishment, he did not walk on then, but sat down upon a neighbouring rock and pulled off his own boots so that his feet, too, could dandle in the rills. He reached down into the clear water and cupped his hands, splashing the coolness onto his face and then running his fingers through his long, black hair. He lifted his face up to the dappled sunlight and closed his eyes.

‘How easy it is to feel the goodness of God on such a day!’ he whispered. ‘Sometimes I wonder why we shut ourselves up in churches. What can man make, after all, that evokes the Divine as a place such as this?’

I maintained my stupid silence, unable to quiet my mind to think of any answer. Tom continued to cry loudly. Mr. Mompellion looked at him, squirming in my arms, and then reached across to take him from me. Surprised, I gave him over, and then was even more surprised at the practised way that Mr. Mompellion held him, up against his shoulder, firmly patting him on the back. Tom stopped crying almost at once and let forth a huge, wet belch. The rector laughed. ‘I learned from caring for my little sisters that one who is neither mother nor wet nurse must hold a babe so, upright, so that it ceases to search for the teat.’ I must have looked amazed at this, for Mr. Mompellion glanced at me and laughed again. ‘You must not think that a minister’s life is lived entirely among lofty words spoken from high pulpits.’ He inclined his head to where Jamie, downstream from us, was so engrossed in building his stick dams across the stream that he had barely raised his head to register the rector’s presence. ‘We all begin as naked children, playing in the mud.’

At that, he handed Tom back to me, rose, and made his way downstream towards Jamie. Halfway there, he set his foot on a moss-slicked stone. His arms fanned in crazy circles as he tried to regain his balance, and Jamie jumped up in the water, laughing with the wild, uncouth mirth of a three-year-old. I frowned and glared at Jamie, but Mr. Mompellion threw back his head and laughed along with him, splashing the few yards left between them with his hands outstretched to grab my squealing little boy and toss him high into the air. The two of them played so for a time, and then Mr. Mompellion turned back towards me and Tom and settled himself once more on the bank near us. He sighed, and closed his eyes again, his lips curved in a slight smile.

‘I pity those who live in towns and do not learn to love all this – the sweet scent of wet weeds and the ordinary, daily miracles of creation. It was of these I was reading when I interrupted you. Would you like to hear some words from my text?’

I nodded, and he reached for his book. ‘These are the writings of Augustine of Hippo, a monk who grew great in his theology long ago on Africa’s Barbary Coast. Here he asks himself what we mean when we talk of miracles.’

I can recall only snatches of what he read. But I do remember how his voice seemed to blend with the cadences of the stream and give the words an enduring music. ‘Consider changes of day and night…the fall of leaves and their return to the trees the following spring, the infinite power in seeds…and then give me a man who sees and experiences these things for the first time, with whom we can still talk – he is amazed and overwhelmed at these miracles.’

I was sorry when he ceased reading, and would have asked him to go on, if I had not been struck silent by awe of him. For though I worked every day in his house, it was only with his wife that I had easy communication. It was not that he was harsh in manner by any means, but he often seemed so lost in large matters that he did not notice the small doings of his household. I tried my best to come and go and do my tasks without distracting him, and I can say with some pride that there were very few times that he had had cause to notice me. And so I sat there, mute and meditating, and he must have taken my distant look for vacancy or boredom, for he stood up all of a sudden and reached for his boots, saying that he had imposed upon me quite enough and must be about his business.

At that, I did find a small voice in which to thank him most sincerely for his consideration in sharing these great thoughts with me. ‘For it is wonderful to me that a lofty thinker such as this should have so close a communion with the ordinary things of the soil and of the seasons.’

He smiled kindly. ‘Mrs. Mompellion has spoken to me of your understanding. She believes it is superior, and I see it may be so.’ He took his leave then and turned back towards the rectory. I lingered there with the children for a while, thinking that what was true of Augustine was true also of our minister, and what a strange thing it was to have such a man, so open and so kindly, in our pulpit.

At last, I called to Jamie and we, too, set our feet on the path for home. All along the way, Jamie kept darting off like a swallow, swooping down to pluck the blowsy, late-blooming dog roses. When we neared the cottage, he made me wait by the door while he ran on inside. ‘Close your eyes, Mummy,’ he cried excitedly. Obediently, I waited, my face buried in my hands, wondering what game he was devising. I heard him thump up the stairs, scrambling, as he did when he was in a hurry, on all fours like a puppy. A few moments passed, and then I heard the upstairs casement creak open.

‘All right, Mummy. Now! Look up!’ I tilted my face and opened my eyes to find myself in a velvet rain of rose petals. The soft, sweet-scented shower brushed my cheeks. I pulled off my cap and shook out my long hair and let the petals land in its tangles. Little Tom gurgled with joy, his fat fists batting at the bright cascade of pink and creamy yellow. Jamie leant out over the sill above me, shaking the last few petals from a corner of sheet.

‘This,’ I thought, smiling gratefully up at him, ‘this moment is my miracle.’

And thus we passed the wondrous days of our reprieve, and I busied myself in preparation for a winter that was hard to conceive of on those heavy afternoons, when the bees buzzed into hives that brimmed with the heather-scented honey. There were apple ladders poking through the trees and tripods going up all around, waiting for a day cool enough for the hog butchering. Though we had none of our own swine, I always helped my neighbours the Hadfields in return for a portion of bacon. Alexander Hadfield was a fastidious man who preferred cutting cloth to hacking at flesh and bone and would not soil even his second-best suit of clothes in any manner of outdoor work. So Mary’s eldest by her first husband would do the slaughter and the butchery. Jonathan Cooper was a big lad like his late father and made short work of it, while his little brother Edward ran about with Jamie, finding ways to shirk the small chores we laid on them. Every time we sent them to fetch a bavin to keep the cauldron boiling, the two of them would disappear behind the woodpile, howling with delight over some new game they’d invented. Finally, Mary left off washing the guts for the sausage casings and went to see what manner of mischief they’d devised themselves. She came back with one hand occupied in holding Edward by the ear and the other extended as far in front of her as possible, dangling something, glossy and black, tied to the end of a string. As she drew closer I could see it was a dead rat, a sorry little corpse, all wet and rheumy-eyed with a smear of bright blood about its muzzle. Behind her, Jamie walked sheepishly, dragging another such. Mary flung the one she carried into the fire, and at her prompting, Jamie reluctantly did the same.

‘Can you believe it, Anna, the two of them were playing with these loathsome pests as if they were poppets. The woodpile’s full of them, seemingly. All dead, thanks be for small mercies.’ Since we couldn’t halt our work, Mary called Alexander to deal with the rat-fall, and the two of us shared a quiet laugh as her man, too nice to give a hand with the hog butchery, dispatched bloody rodent corpses instead. Somehow, the sight of him at his task eased our load a little bit as we toiled on, competing against the fading light to get the fat rendered and the sides salted. It was, as ever, hard and hateful work, but I kept my mind fixed on the smell of the bacon sizzling in my skimmer and thought how Jamie would enjoy it a few weeks hence.

When at last the skies clouded it was almost a relief. The misty rains seemed restful to the eyes, rinsing the landscape. But the damp after the heat brought fleas beyond any infestation I remember. It is an odd thing, how biting pests of all kinds will find one person flavoursome and another not to their liking at all. In my house, the fleas feasted on my tender children, leaving them covered in madding welts. I burned all our bedstraw before I went to see the Gowdies for a balm. I was half hoping to find Anys by herself again, for I longed to talk more with her, to learn how she had come to understand the world as she did. I thought that she could teach me much about how to manage alone as a woman in the world, how to embrace my state and even exalt in it, as she seemed to. She had hinted frankly enough about her many lovers, and I found myself consumed to know how she managed them, and the nature of her own feelings towards them.

And so I was disappointed when it was old Mem who met me on the step, her shawl saying she was on her way out, and her hasty manner making me think she was due at some confinement, though whose it might be I could not think, for none that I knew who were with child were yet within a month of their time.

‘Ah, I could have saved you the walk, Anna, as I’m on my way to the Hadfields. Young Edward Cooper is burning up with fever, so I’m bringing him a draught.’ I turned to walk back with her, fretful at this news. Although she was very aged, her hair thin and silvery where it escaped her fraying cap, Mem was straight and lithe as a green cornstalk, and she moved with the vigour of a man. As we hurried to the Hadfields, I had to lengthen my own stride to keep up with her. When we got to the cottage, a strange pied horse was tethered to the post by the watering trough. Mary met us at the door, flustered with anxiety and, it seemed, embarrassment. ‘Thank you, thank you indeed for coming, Mem, but Mr. Hadfield sent to Bakewell for the barber-surgeon, and he is with Edward now. I am sure we are all grateful for your wisdom in these matters, but Mr. Hadfield said we must not stint here, and surely Edward’s father, God rest him, did leave me in purse to handle the expense.’

Mem made a sour face. She did not think any more of barber-surgeons than they were wont to think of cunning women such as she. And yet Mem helped us as she could for pence or payment in kind as each of us was set to manage it, while the surgeons would not stir without the clank of shillings to line their pockets. Bowing coldly, Mem turned and walked away. But I was curious, and so I lingered until Mary signalled me to follow her. The barber-surgeon had asked to have the child brought downstairs, as I expect he would not deign to work in the crowded upper room. Mr. Hadfield had cleared his tailor’s bench and little Edward was laid naked upon it. At first, I could not see the child for the surgeon’s dark bulk was in my way, but as he stepped aside to reach into his bag, I winced. The poor little soul was covered in squirming leeches, their sucking parts embedded in his tender arms and neck, and their round, slimy nethers flicking and twitching as they feasted. I supposed it was fortunate that Edward was too far gone in his feverish delirium to understand what had befallen him. Mary’s face creased with concern as she held the child’s limp hand. Mr. Hadfield stood beside the surgeon, nodding deferentially at his every utterance.

‘He is a small child, so we need not draw overmuch to restore the balance of his humours,’ the surgeon said to Mr. Hadfield, who was holding Edward’s shoulders. When the time had elapsed to his satisfaction, he called for vinegar and applied it to the engorged creatures so that they twitched all the harder, their jaws relaxing as they sought to escape the irritant. With a series of deft tugs, he pinched them off, a spurt of bright blood following, which he stanched with linen scraps that Mr. Hadfield provided him. He rinsed each leech in a cup of water and dropped it into a leather pouch alive with writhing lobes. ‘If the child is not improved by nightfall, then you must purge and fast him. I will give you a receipt for a tincture that will open his bowels.’ The man was packing his bag as Mary and her husband thanked him. I followed him into the street and, when the Hadfields were out of hearing, made bold with the question that was tormenting me.

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