When I encountered Aphra at the Boundary Stone, I begged her to insist that he take more care in this, but she just laughed. “You spend all your time at the Gowdies’ studying weeds and teas,” she said. “Happen ’t would be better if you bethought what other knowledge those two held in their heads.” I pressed her to say more clearly what she meant, but it was no use. Aphra could be a stubborn soul, and the more I tried to reason with her on this, the more she withdrew, saying only that my father now was proving a good provider for the first time in his history, and she was not about to scold him over it.
One day not long after, I glimpsed my father, through the window of my cottage, swaggering down the street with a bale of finespun wool, taken from the weaver’s cottage, slung over his shoulder. I rushed out into my garth, enraged. “Father!” I called. “You know that bale is a thieving price to charge Mrs. Martin for the hour’s toil of burying her husband. How can you chouse the suffering so? You bring disgrace upon us by such conduct.” He made me no reply, just hawked and spat a glistening gob of green phlegm at my feet and continued on his way to the tavern.
Though Mr. Mompellion’s strength had come back to him in some measure since his collapse in the church, he now knew he could not do the sexton’s work as well as his own. So my father had no check on his increasing greed. On Sundays, we gathered now at Cucklett Delf as the rector had bidden us. When I stood in the sloping basin with the black boughs of the rowans arching above me, I saw the great wisdom in what the rector had wrought by moving us all there. For there we were not confronted by the memories of the past and haunted by the missing faces. We could stand where we would on that sward, although most of us kept to the old order, with the yeomen and the miners toward the front, then the artisans, then the crofters and the hands. We placed ourselves so that some three yards separated each family group, be-, lieving this to be sufficient distance to avoid the passing of infection. The rector had chosen for his pulpit a massive outcropt of limestone, weathered into the shape of an arch. From there, his voice filled the Delf. He tried to find sweet words to salve our sorrows, and their music mingled with the tinkling of the nearby brook.
My father, did not come to the Delf, not the first Sunday nor any following. In normal times he would have been paraded to the village green and set in the stocks there for such behavior. But none now had the strength or will to pursue such things, and the stocks had stood empty for many months. In consequence, as the weeks passed his wickedness only grew. He had become so fond of his afternoons at the alepot that he let it be known that he would not bury anyone past noon. In his callousness, he would knock upon the doors of the ailing, saying if they wanted a grave he would dig it then and there or not at all. And so a person who yet lived would lie in his sickbed and listen to the rise and fall of my father’s spud. I think that his heartless behavior hastened more than one person into the ground.
Mr. Mompellion sought him out at his croft, trying an appeal to any shred of good left deep within him. I went with him; I felt I should do so, though I dreaded such a visit. Although it was but early afternoon, my father was well soused, lying upon his pallet in a stained smock. He got up when we entered and pushed past the rector with a grunt. He barely stepped beyond the door to make his water, but just stood there shamelessly in full sight of both of us.
I had felt from setting out that the rector’s effort would be wasted, and now I knew it with certainty. It was a long time since my father’s coarse ways had put me to the blush: after I married Sam I had tried to school my feelings so that I would no longer hold myself accountable for what my father did or did not do. But it pained me to have the rector treated so.
“Sir,” I muttered, “do not subject yourself to my father’s loutish manners. Let us leave this place, for no good can be wrested from him in this state.”
The rector only looked down at me kindly and shook his head with a slight smile. “We are here Anna, and I will say what I came to say.”
His argument was eloquent and, upon my father, entirely wasted. Mr. Mompellion said that the whole village understood the value of the work he performed and the risk he was shouldering; that it was not marvelous that he should feel entitled to some reward for such labor, for even in the tales of the ancients, the ferryman who carried souls across the Styx had required his guerdon. “But, Joss Bont, I beg you to be proportionate.”
“Pro-poor-tionate!” my father sneered. “Aye, and poor is what you’d have me, you leech!” My father launched then into a long, self-pitying rant about how ill-used he’d been as a boy at sea, and how he’d never yet earned a fair day’s pay as ploughman or wood-cutter or in any of the other manner of labor he’d turned his hand to since.
“You bleed us dry, you do. Your kind, all of you, think nothing of breaking our backs for a pittance. And then you go on like we should lick your boots for the ha’penny you fling us.” Flecks of foam formed at the corners of his mouth as he raised his voice, and his spittle flew across the room. “And when I finally find a way to make summat from me sweat, you come ’ere trying to tell me what I can and cannot be taking for me toil! Hah! You might have honey-tongued me daughter into emptying your pisspots, but Joss Bont won’t be foxed by the likes of you! Bury the poxy dead yourself, if you feel so strong on’t.” He turned his back on us then. “Girl, get your priest out of here before I push ’im out,” he said.
“Save your strength for your spud, Joss Bont.” Michael Mompellion’s face was quiet, but his voice was so cold I thought it would blast my father like an ice storm. “Do not waste it upon ejecting me, and I will waste no more breath seeking the goodness in your heart, for I perceive you have none left in it.”
My father made no reply to this but simply flung himself again upon his pallet and, as I held open the door to the croft for the rector, rolled over and showed us his back. In the next few weeks, the rector did return to digging graves, somehow finding the strength to bury those so poor as to have nothing that my greedy father coveted. For myself, I was glad I no longer shared a name with him, as his became increasingly cursed in every croft and cottage.
And then he finally committed an act so vile that even our population, diminished and exhausted, was spurred at last to action. Christopher Unwin, the last surviving son of a family that had numbered twelve before the Plague claimed eleven of them, had lain nine days in his sickbed, much longer than most survive when once afflicted. I had visited him several times, as had Elinor and Michael Mompellion. We had begun to pray that he might be, like Margaret Blackwell, that one out of a hundred persons who gets the Plague and yet lives through it.
And then, one morning, just after I had carried in the brawn and oatcake for the Mompellions’ breakfast, I found Randoll Daniel pacing in the kitchen garth. My first thought was that Mary or the babe had sickened, and my heart sank at it, for the little boy, the first babe I had delivered, was dear to me.
“No, by God’s grace,” Randoll said, “they are both well. No, it is my friend Christopher Unwin I am come about. Mary made a stew for my supper last night, and this morning I thought to bring him a portion. But he would not take any, and said he feels himself to be failing. He asked me to hasten here to fetch the rector.”
“Thank you, Randoll. I will tell Mr. Mompellion.”
The rector had scarce begun his meal, and so I thought to save the news until he had done with it. But Elinor had heard voices in the garth, and she summoned me to learn Randoll’s business. I had no choice then but to tell it. The rector set down his fork, pushed his plate of uneaten food away, and rose wearily from the table. Elinor made to rise, too, but she looked even paler than usual that morning, so I quickly suggested that I go with Mr. Mompellion while she stayed behind to tend the kettles of our herbals.
We walked together to the Unwins’ house, and as we went, the rector asked many questions regarding my work of the previous day, whom I had visited and how they fared, what tonics I had administered and which I deemed most useful. Somewhere in the pass
ing weeks, I had lost my shyness in his presence, and now I found I could talk to him without reserve. He told me of those that he had seen, and then he gave a great sigh. “How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick.”
The Unwin house stood west of the rectory, beside the village green. As we passed by the overgrown square, the rector inclined his head toward the stocks. A strand of ivy had grown up and through one of the ankle holds. Rust bloomed on the latches. “That, I would say, could be counted also as a good thing brought by this grim season; that the stocks and the cucking stool and all such barbarous implements have fallen into disuse. I would I could persuade the people here to keep it so, even when this trial is past.”
We had reached the Unwin gate. The house stood back from the road, in what had been a handsome garden. The family had prospered from its lead seam for many years, and their house had grown, through well-built additions, into one of the finest in the village. Now, after so many deaths, the place had a mournful, neglected look. The rector, who had visited many times in the course of the family’s trials, let himself in at the front door and called up to Christopher, where he lay alone in the room he had lately shared with his wife and infant son. The young man answered in a weak voice, but that he answered at all was a great relief.
While I fetched a mug from the dresser to pour some cordials for the sick man, the rector went on ahead of me to the upstairs bedchamber. When I entered a few moments later, the rector was standing at the window with his back to me, staring out into the Unwins’ field. I noticed that his fists, at his sides, were working, as if what he saw was greatly discomposing him. When he turned, I saw that it was indeed so: his brow was knotted and his scowl fierce.
“How long has he been at this?” the rector demanded of Christopher, who was sitting propped against a bolster, looking less grave than I had expected.
“Since shortly after sunup. I awoke to the sound of his spud.”
I colored then, in mortification and anger both. I walked to the window and saw, as I expected, my father standing waist-deep in the half-dug pit. I could imagine him, his greedy eye already counting the booty he would haul off from the Unwin house, for who would be left to gainsay his theft when Christopher followed his family into the ground? I felt sure then that it was simply the fact of my father’s digging that had caused the young man to believe his state worsened, for he looked to me much improved. His expression was alert and his skin color good, and I could see no signs of Plague upon him.
“I will go and speak with my father,” I said to the rector in a small voice. “I shall send him away directly, for I do not think the young master will have need of such services, on this or any other approaching day.”
“No, Anna. You stay here and attend to Mr. Unwin. Leave me to deal with Josiah Bont.”
I did not protest, but felt much relieved. I was bathing Christopher Unwin’s face with some lavender water and speaking to him encouragingly of the signs of his returning health when the sounds of raised voices came ringing up from the field. My father was cursing Michael Mompellion in the foulest language, unwilling to hear that the young man within was far from needing the grave he had dug. The rector, furthermore, was not standing mute, but answering my father in the kind of language I had never heard from him: coarse words that he did not learn from the great Divines at Cambridge.
My father bellowed that since he had labored, he intended to be paid, “Whether the crack of Unwin’s arse feels the dirt this day or no.”
I went to the window then and saw him, his chest pushed out, almost touching the rector’s chest, as they stood face to face at the lip of the grave. He made as if to head for the house—thinking, I expect, to claim his loot—but the rector put out a hand and seized him. My father tried to throw off the grip, and I saw the surprise register on his face ,when he found he wasn’t able. His fist rose and I cringed, knowing the weight of it. Michael Mompellion stood stock-still. He doesn’t realize that the man really means to hit him, I thought. But there I underestimated him. Mr. Mompellion waited just long enough for the whole force of my father’s bulk to be committed to the punch, and at the very last instant stepped deftly to the side so that my father’s own momentum caused him to stumble. As his head went down, the rector landed a swift blow to the back of his neck, and when he crumpled, he shoved him, hard. For an instant my father teetered at the grave’s edge, his hands flailing wildly, his face almost comical in its rictus of astonishment. And then he toppled, landing with a wet slurp in the mud below. I saw the rector peering into the hole, probably assuring himself that my father wasn’t badly hurt, although the streak of curse words coming from the pit testified to his essential soundness. As the rector turned toward the house, I backed away from the window, for I suspected that he would not want to know that this scene had a witness.
I went to the kitchen then to make a meal for Christopher, for he said he felt the stirrings of some appetite. When I returned, he ate like the healthy young man he soon would be, while the rector jested with him on how the two of them that morning had choused more than the Reaper.
LATER THAT DAY, I learned that my father had been thrown out of the Miner’s Tavern, so violent had his temper become as he drank and pined over his lost booty and his muddy humiliation. I was glad at last that the innkeeper had begun to set some limits upon his depraved behavior, but I worried for Aphra’s children, in case he should vent his drunken rage upon them. I took my concerns to Elinor, who had the idea of sending for the children on the pretext of some employment in the Gowdies’ physick garden. Certainly, there was much to do there that we hadn’t yet managed, tilling and weeding and manuring for the large crop of plants we hoped to raise that season. I took the message, and worded it as tactfully as I could, so that Aphra might know there was a place for her also, if she wished to be out of her croft. But Aphra saw through my hint and laughed at me outright.
“Don’t you worry about me, girl. I have my own ways of bridling that mule.”
And so I left her to do so if she could and resolved for my part to put the thoughts of my father from me, to let my shame over him subside again to just another nagging sadness—one more grim thought to ponder in my wakeful nights.
I rose just before dawn, ill rested, and went to the well to draw water. It was one of those rare days in early April when Nature lets us taste the sweet spring that is coming. It was so unexpectedly mild that I lingered in the garth, breathing the soft scents of the slowly warming earth. The sky was beautiful that morning. A tumble of fluffy, tufted clouds covered the whole from horizon to dome, as if a shearer had flung a new-shorn fleece high into the air. As I watched, the rays of the rising sun lit the edge of each cloud, turning it silver, until suddenly the fleece became instead a mesh of shining metal. Then, the light changed again, and the silvery gray turned deep rose-red. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. My father had taught me that verse. I thought absently about bringing the sheep into the fold before the gathering of the storm that this lovely sky foretold.
My reverie was broken by a bellowing. A figure from a nightmare hove into view. His skull was cleft across the crown, and his hair was matted into curtains of dried blood. He was covered in clods of dirt and smears of clay, naked save for the torn remnants of a winding sheet that trailed behind him. The figure cried out again, and I realized that the name he called was my father’s. My first thought was that one of my father’s shallow graves had spewed forth a ghostly sleeper awakened for revenge. Just as soon as the thought formed, I threw it off as impossible. And with that shred of sense came the knowledge that the figure in the torn shroud was Christopher Unwin.
My neighbors, those few gaunt survivors, had come out of their cottage
s in response to Christopher’s cries. There was horror in their faces. I ran to him then and begged him to come inside where I could tend his hurts. “Nay, Mistress, I will not, for what hurts me most is beyond your tending.” I tried to take his arm then, but he threw me off, steadying himself, instead, against the gritstone wall.
“Your father tried to kill me in my sleep this night. I woke in my bed to see his spud bearing down upon me. And then, when I woke again, I was in my grave! That spawn of Satan had laid me there, though I was yet quick as you are. Lucky for me, in his laziness and lust to be at my possessions, he scattered just a crust of earth to hide me and not enough to smother me entire. And lucky also that I am a miner and not affeard to lie my face into the ground.” The men nodded at this. Our miners have always had a tradition that if one of them is injured down the shafts, he will recover quicker if a sod of turf is lifted and he lies for a time facedown to the ground in the fresh-dug dirt. “Still,” Christopher . continued, “I had to scramble like a mole to get free. I tell you, it’s him that will eat dirt this day and never see the light of morn again!”
“Aye!” yelled a voice from the other side of the roadway. “Aye! It’s past time that villain was dealt with!” The crowd was thickening now as yarn gathers itself on a spindle. Someone had brought out a cloak to throw around Christopher. “I thank you,” he said, his voice issuing from soil- and blood-caked lips. “That swine not only tried to rob me of my life—he stole the very clothes I lay in.”