Year of Wonders

‘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.