Year of Wonders

‘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.