Year of Wonders

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.