Sometimes, from amidst the hushed hum of discussion, a voice rose excitedly, and I saw to my shame that my father and Aphra were among a small group whose gestures and head-shakes indicated that they did not agree with the rector’s scheme. Mr. Mompellion moved toward these unconvinced, and before long, Mr. Stanley joined them. My father and his wife had drawn a little away, and I came near to them to try to overhear what it was they were saying to each other.
“Think of our bread, husband! If we take to the road, who will feed us? Like as not, we will starve there. Here, he says we will have it surely.”
“Aye, ‘he says.’ Well, I say that you cannot eat ‘he says.’ Fine words make piss-poor fodder. Oh, aye, I’m sure he and his lady wife will get their bread from his friend the earl, but when have the likes of them ever given a ha’penny for the likes of us?”
“Husband, where are your wits? It’s nowt love of us will keep them to their word, but love of their own fine skins. It’s a surety that the earl wants his estate kept free from Plague, and how better to do that than give us cause to bide here? A few pennethworth of bread each day would look like a good bargain to him, I’ll be bound.” She was a shrewd woman, my stepmother, in spite of all her superstitious fancies.
She saw me then and seemed about to beckon me over to help her plead her case. But I wanted no part of responsibility for any person’s decision other than my own, and I turned my face away.
When the Mompellions came to where I stood, Elinor Mompellion held out both her hands and took mine tenderly as the rector spoke to me. “And you, Anna?” he said. The intensity of his gaze was such that I had to look away from him. “Tell us you will stay with us, for without you, Mrs. Mompellion and I would be ill set. Indeed, I do not know what we would do without you.” There was no turmoil within me, for I had made my decision. Still, I could not command my voice to give him a reply. When I nodded, Elinor Mompellion embraced me and held me to her for a long moment. The rector moved on, whispering quietly to Mary Hadfield, who was weeping and wringing her hands most piteously. By the time he mounted the steps again and faced us, he and Mr. Stanley between them had shored up every doubter. All of us in the church that day gave their oath to God that we would stay, and not flee, whatever might befall us.
All of us, that is, except the Bradfords. They had slipped out of the church unnoticed and were already at the Hall, packing for their flight to Oxfordshire.
Wide Green Prison
I LEFT THE CHURCH that morning borne aloft by a strange bliss. It seemed we all partook of it: the faces that had been so gaunt and careworn now seemed warm and alive, and we smiled as we caught one another’s eyes, aware of the common grace our decision had brought upon us. And so I was not prepared for the harried look of Maggie Cantwell, pacing by my gate. Maggie was the Bradfords’ cook, and as a consequence of her employment had not been in church that morning. She still had on the large white pinafore she wore in the kitchen of Bradford Hall, and her big ruddy face was puce with exertion. A bundle of belongings lay in the snow at her feet.
“Anna, they have turned me off! Eighteen years, and ordered out on a second’s notice!” Maggie had family in Bakewell, but whether she would go to them, or if they would receive her, I did not know. Still, I wondered that she had come to me for shelter, for my house and the Hadfields’ and the Sydells’ were notorious now as the Plague cottages. I motioned her to come inside, but she shook her head. “Thank you, Anna, and I mean no disrespect. But I am afraid to venture into your cottage, and I know you will understand me. I have come to ask your help to gather my few poor possessions from the Hall, for the Bradfords mean to leave this hour, and they have told us all that after their departure the Hall will be locked and guarded and none of us may enter in it. Only think, it has been our home, too, for all these years, and now they put us out without a roof or a way to earn our bread!” She had been nervously wringing a comer of her pinafore in her fleshy hands, and now she raised it to her cheek to catch her tears.
“Come, Maggie, we don’t have time for this now,” I said. “Your goods will be safe here. I will fetch a handcart and we will go directly for the rest of your things.” And so we set off, Maggie, who was above forty years old and very stout from the enjoyment of her own fine cooking, laboring for breath as we toiled through the snowdrifts back up the hill to the Hall.
“Think of it, Anna,” she panted. “There I was, basting the joint for the Sunday dinner, when they all storm in from church, early like, and I’m thinking, Ooh, there’ll be what for if the meal’s not on the table when the colonel looks for it, and I’m rushing meself and worrying at Brand, me pantry boy, when in comes the colonel hisself, who, I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure, never set foot in the kitchen until this very day, and it’s turned off, we all are, just like that, and no thank you or how’ll ye do, just put the food on the table and clear out.”
While still far from the Hall, it was possible to perceive the uproar underway there. This was no stealthy retreat. The Hall hummed like a struck hive. Horses stamped in the drive as maids and footmen staggered in and out, bent under the weight of boxes. We entered through the kitchen and could hear the scurrying feet above us, punctuated by the high, imperious voices of the Bradford ladies giving their commands. Not particularly wanting to be noticed by the Bradfords, I crept behind Maggie up the narrow backstairs to the attic she shared with the maid-servants. The little room had a steeply sloping roof and a high, square window through which the cold snow-light poured. There were three cots crammed in the tiny space, and by one of them crouched a pale, wide-eyed girl named Jenny, who was breathing hard, trying to tie her spare smock and few small possessions into a bundle and fumbling the knot in her hurry.
“Lordy, Cook, she says we are to be out of here this hour, yet she gives us no time to tend to our own going. I’m off my feet fetching and carting her things, and no sooner have I packed a sash than she says, no, take it out, this one rather. They are taking none of us, not even Mrs. Bradford’s maid, Jane, who you know has been with her since a girl. Jane cried and begged her, but she just shook her head and said no, that she and all of us have been too much about the village and might already have Plague in us, so they just mean to leave us here to die, and in the streets, for none of us has a place to go to!”
“No one is going to die, and certainly not in the streets,” I said as calmly as I could. Maggie had a small oak coffer wedged tight beneath her bed, but her girth was such that she couldn’t bend down low enough to get it. I dragged at it while she folded the quilt her sister had made for her. Such, with the small sack of clothing she’d left on my step, was the sum of her life’s goods. With a little care, we managed to work the coffer down the narrow stair, she taking most of the weight while I steered from above as best I could. In the kitchen, she paused, as I thought, for breath. But then I saw that her eyes were filling again. She ran her big red hands over the scored and scorched deal table. “My life, this is,” she said. “I know every mark on this and how it came there. I know the heft of every blessed knife in here. And now I’m to turn me back and walk away with nothing.” Her head drooped and a tear hung suspended on her fleshy cheek for a moment, then splashed onto the table.
Just then, there was a commotion from the courtyard. I glanced out the kitchen door in time to see Michael Mompellion pulling up Anteros in a scatter of stones. He was off the horse and upon the steps before the startled groom had gathered up his dropped reins. He did not wait to be announced.
“Colonel Bradford!” His voice in the entrance hall was so loud that all the clatter quieted at once. The dust sheets were already upon the large furnishings in the Hall. I crept behind the bulk of a shrouded settle, and from the cover of a fold of sheet I could see the colonel appear at the door to his library. He had a volume he’d evidently been considering for packing in one hand and a letter in the other. Miss Bradford and her mother appeared at the top of the stairs, hesitating there, as if unsure of the etiquette of this encounter.
“Rector Mompellion?” said the colonel. He kept his voice low, in deliberate contrast to the rector’s, and affected a quizzical tone. “You should not have troubled yourself to ride here to fare us well, so hard and in such haste. I had planned to make my adieus to you and your fair wife in this letter.”
He extended his hand with the letter. Mompellion took it absently but didn’t look at it. “I do not want your good-byes. I am here to urge you to reconsider your departure. Your family is first here. The villagers look to you. If you quail, how may I ask them to be brave?”
“I do not quail!” The colonel replied coldly. “I am merely doing what any man of means and sense must do: safeguarding what is mine.”
Mompellion took a step toward him, his broad hands outstretched. “But think of those you are putting at risk ...”
The colonel stepped back, keeping his distance from the rector. His voice became a slow, soft drawl, as if to mock the urgency of the rector’s. “I believe, sir, that we have had this conversation, here in this very Hall, albeit then in a hypothetical context. Well, now the hypothesis is proven, and I mean to do as I said I would. I said then, and I say now, that my life and the lives of my family are of more consequence to me than some possible risk to strangers.”
The rector was not to be gainsaid. He moved toward the colonel and clutched him by the arm. “Well, if the plight of strangers cannot move you, think of the good you might yet do here, among the villagers that know you and look to you. There will be much to be managed in this time of peril. Your courage has long been celebrated. Why not add a new chapter? You have led men to war. You have the skills to command all of us through this crisis. I do not have such skills. Furthermore, I am a new-comer to this place; I do not know these people as you and your family know them, who have been here for many generations. I could learn much from your counsel as to how best go on as events unfold here. And while I am pledged to do my utmost to bring these people comfort, from you and your wife, and from Miss Bradford, the smallest gesture would mean so much more.”
On the landing, Elizabeth Bradford stifled a snort. Her father glanced up at her, his eyes sharing her amusement. “How flattering!” he exclaimed with a sneer. “Really, you do us too much honor. Dear sir, I did not raise my daughter to have her play wet nurse to a rabble. And if I desired to succor the afflicted I would have joined you in Holy Orders.”
Mompellion dropped the colonel’s arm as if he had just become aware that he had picked up something foul. “One does not have to be a priest to be a man!” he cried.
He turned and strode toward the hearth. Colonel Bradford’s ceremonial swords hung crossed above the mantle in a pair of gleaming arcs. The rector held the colonel’s letter still but seemed to have forgotten that he did so. The parchment crumpled under his hand as he reached out for the mantle and leaned against it, heavily. He was struggling for command of himself. From where I crouched, I could glimpse his face. He breathed in, deeply, and as he breathed out it seemed that he willed away the deep lines drawn all about his brow and jaw. It was like watching someone don a mask. His expression was still and calm when he turned his back to the hearth and again faced the colonel.
“If you must send your wife and daughter away, then I pray you, stay here yourself and do your duty.”
“Do not presume to tell me my duty! I do not tell you yours, although I might say that you would do well to look to that delicate bride of yours.”
Mompellion colored a little at this. “My wife, sir, I will admit I implored to leave this place when I first suspected what now we know in fact. But she refused, saying that her duty was to stay, and now she says I must rejoice in it, for I could hardly ask of others what I had not lain upon the nearest to me.”
“So. Your wife, it seems, is expert at making poor choices. She certainly has had some practice.”
The insult was so broad that I had to swallow a gasp. Mompellion’s fists clenched, but he managed to maintain his level tone. “You may be right. But equally do I believe that the choice you make today is wrong, terribly wrong. If you do this thing, your family’s name will be a hissing in the laneways and the cottages. The people will not forgive you for abandoning them.”
“And you think I care for the opinion of a few sweaty miners and their snotty-nosed brats?”
Mompellion drew a sharp breath at that and took a step forward. The colonel was a masty man, but Mr. Mompellion was a full head taller, and though I could no longer see his face from where I crouched, I imagine his look must have been the same fierce thing I had seen up at the clough on the night of Anys’s murder. The colonel raised his hand in a conciliating gesture.
“Look, man, do not think I disparage your efforts this day. A very pretty sermon. You are to be complimented upon it. I do not say that you do ill in making your congregation feel righteous in staying here. On the contrary, I think it was very well done of you. They may as well have some comfort, since they have no choice.”
Since they have no choice. I felt myself tumbling from the high plain onto which Mr. Mompellion’s sermon that morning had lofted me. What choice had we, after all? Perhaps, if my children yet lived, there might have been some decision to make; perhaps I would have been driven to consider a desperate flight to some uncertain destination. But I doubted it. For as Aphra had said to my father, it is not easy to surrender the safety of a roof and the certainty of bread for the perils of an open road, with winter setting in and no clear destination at its end. Villages in these parts did not love vagrants at any time, and whipped them on their way. How much less welcome would we be once the word went out of whence we came? Fleeing one danger would have exposed my children to many more. And, as it was, with my boys both lying in the churchyard, I had less than no reason to leave. The Plague already had taken from me the greatest part of what I had to lose; what was left of my life seemed to me, at that moment, barely worth the effort of saving. I realized then that I deserved no great credit for swearing I would stay. I would stay because I had small will to live—and nowhere else to go.
The colonel had turned away from the rector, back toward his library, and now he let his eyes travel over his bookshelves with feigned indifference as he continued to speak. “But I, as you yourself so astutely perceived, do have a choice. And I propose to exercise it. Now, if you will excuse me, I have, as you will appreciate, a great many other choices to make in consequence, such as, for instance, whether to pack the Dryden or the Milton. Perhaps the Milton? Dryden’s themes are ambitious, but his rhymes grow rather tedious, do you not think?”
“Colonel Bradford!” Mompellion’s voice rang through the Hall. “Enjoy your books. Enjoy them now! For there are no pockets in a shroud! Perhaps you do not care for the judgment of this village, but if you do not value these people,, there is one who does. He loves them dearly. And be sure, He is the one to whom you will have to answer. I do not lightly speak of God’s judgment, but on you I say the vials of His wrath will be opened, and a terrible vengeance poured down! Fear it, Colonel Bradford! Fear a far worse punishment than Plague!”
And at that, he turned, strode back into the courtyard, leapt upon Anteros, and cantered away.
THERE WAS NO HISSING in the street as the Bradfords’ carriage passed out of the village on its way to the Oxford road. Men doffed their caps and women curtsied, just as we had always done, simply because that was what we had always done. With the exception of the coachman, who was to be turned off when they reached Oxford, the Bradfords had not retained a single one of their servants. In fact, Colonel Bradford had that morning hired two of the Hancock boys, who never had worked for him, to stand guard at the shuttered and bolted Hall. He told them he was doing so because he did not trust any of his own people to keep their fellows locked out of their longtime home. There were tearful scenes at the last when those who had nowhere to go fell on their knees by the Bradford carriage, grabbing at the hems of the ladies’ traveling mantles and kissing the toe of the colonel’s boot. Mrs.
Bradford and her daughter seemed about to relent in the case of their maids, and inquired of the colonel whether two or three of the young women might not take shelter in the stables or the well house, but Colonel Bradford refused them even that.
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share. By nightfall, all the Bradfords’ servants had been taken in by one or other village family—all but Maggie and Brand, the pantry boy, who each came from Bakewell and, not being bound by what we now called the Sunday Oath, decided to journey on there and see if their own blood kin would take them in. The rector had charged them with carrying letters he had written to all of the surrounding villages, so that everyone would know as soon as possible exactly how we purposed to go on. And that was almost all they carried. After all the rush to gather her coffer, Maggie decided to leave it behind in the end lest her kin in Bakewell fear that Plague seeds were secreted within it. Maggie and Brand left on foot, the stout woman on the arm of the slender boy, and I suspect not a few in the village envied them as they turned and waved at the Boundary Stone.
And so the rest of us set about learning to live in the wide green prison of our own election. The weather warmed that week, and the snow melted into sticky slush. Generally, the day after such a thaw would have brought a clatter of traffic to the streets, as carters held back by the snow made up on late deliveries and travelers needing to be somewhere took to the roadway. But this time the thaw brought no such busy movements, and so the consequences of our oath began to come clear to us.
It is hard to say why the oath weighed upon me, for it was perhaps only a half dozen times a year that I ventured beyond the limits in which we had now confined ourselves. And yet I found myself walking that Monday morning in the direction of the Boundary Stone, which sat at the edge of a high meadow, just at the point where a spur of land plunged suddenly away down the hill to the village of Stoney Middleton. The path there was well worn from much traffic. As children we had loved to run down, headlong and heedless, often losing our footing in the rush of our own momentum and ending up at the bottom in a muddy tangle of skinny arms and grazed knees. Oftentimes I had made the long, hard climb back up the hill knowing I faced a thrashing for my stained and wrinkled smock.