Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks
a novel of the Plague
For Tony.Without you, I never wouldhave gone there.
O let it be enough what thou hast done,When spotted deaths ran arm’d through every street,With poison’d darts, which not the good could shun,The speedy could outfly, or valiant meet.
The living few, and frequent funerals then,Proclaim’d thy wrath on this forsaken place:And now those few who are return’d agenThy searching judgments to their dwellings trace.
From Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders,1666, by John Dryden
Table of Contents
Among Those That Go Down to the Pit
I used to love this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of the apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year it would be all right: there’d be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came. I used to love to walk in the apple orchard at this time of the year, to feel the soft give underfoot when I trod on a fallen fruit. Thick, sweet scents of rotting apple and wet wood. This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me.
They brought the apples yesterday, a cartload for the rectory cellar. Late pickings, of course: I saw brown spots on more than a few. I had words with the carter over it, but he told me we were lucky to get as good as we got, and I suppose it’s true enough. There are so few people to do the picking. So few people to do anything. And those of us who are left walk around as if we’re half asleep. We are all so tired.
I took an apple that was crisp and good and sliced it, thin as paper, and carried it into that dim room where he sits, still and silent. His hand is on the Bible, but he never opens it. Not anymore. I asked him if he’d like me to read it to him. He turned his head to look at me, and I started. It was the first time he’d looked at me in days. I’d forgotten what his eyes could do – what they could make us do – when he stared down from the pulpit and held us, one by one, in his gaze. His eyes are the same, but his face has altered so, drawn and haggard, each line etched deep. When he came here, just three years since, the whole village made a jest of his youthful looks and laughed at the idea of being preached at by such a pup. If they saw him now, they would not laugh, even if they could remember how to do so.
‘You cannot read, Anna.’
‘To be sure, I can, Rector. Mrs. Mompellion taught me.’
He winced and turned away as I mentioned her, and instantly I regretted it. He does not trouble to bind his hair these days, and from where I stood the long, dark fall of it hid his face, so that I could not read his expression. But his voice, when he spoke again, was composed enough. ‘Did she so? Did she so?’ he muttered. ‘Well, then, perhaps one day I’ll hear you and see what kind of a job she made of it. But not today, thank you, Anna. Not today. That will be all.’
A servant has no right to stay, once she’s dismissed. But I did stay, plumping the cushion, placing a shawl. He won’t let me lay a fire. He won’t let me give him even that little bit of comfort. Finally, when I’d run out of things to pretend to do, I left him.
In the kitchen, I chose a couple of the spotted apples I’d culled from the buckets and walked out to the stables. The courtyard hadn’t been swept in a sennight. It smelled of rotting straw and horse piss. I had to hitch up my skirt to keep it off the muck. Before I was halfway across, I could hear the thud of his horse’s rump as he turned and strutted in his confinement, gouging clefts into the floor of the stall. There’s no one strong or skilled enough now to handle him.
The stable boy, whose job it was to keep the courtyard raked, was asleep on the floor of the tack room. He jumped when he saw me, making a great show of searching for the snath that had slipped from his hand when he’d dozed off. The sight of the scythe blade still upon his workbench vexed me, for I’d asked him to mend it long since, and the timothy now was naught