Year of Wonders

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.