But I could not be laughed out of the terror that had seized me. I felt her face with my hand, but since the evening was warm and we had walked quite far, I could not tell whether the heat of her brow meant fever or no.
“Sit here,” I said, pointing to a large, flat stone under a rowan shade. “Sit here, and I will run ahead and fetch Mr. Mompellion to you.”
“Anna!” she said, and her tone was preemptory. “Stop this at once! You shall do no such thing!” She touched her brow and tossed her head, as if shaking off the heat she surely felt there. “I perceive I am perhaps coming down with a slight cold, and I will not have you fuss and panic me so! I beg you will strive to command yourself. You are not a child, to quail at shadows, after all we have seen and done together. If I am truly ill, you will be the first person I shall confide in. Until then, do not you dare to trouble Mr. Mompellion with this.”
She walked on, briskly. I followed, caught up with her, and reached for her arm. She let me take it, and as we walked I tried to take note of every detail—the way her fingers lay across my wrist, the gentle sway of her body, the measure of her step. I could no longer see the bright buttercups or hear the birdsong. There was a roaring in my ears from my own pounding heart, and my eyes misted and overflowed with tears that ran unchecked down my face.
Elinor stopped and looked at me, a slight smile upon her lips. She raised the hand that clutched her small lace handkin and was about to wipe my tears with it. But then she stopped in mid-gesture, crumpled the white square, and plunged it deep into her whisket.
That told me all. I wept then in earnest, standing right there in the middle of the field.
WHAT SHALL I SAY of the next three days that has not been said already? Elinor’s fever rose. She coughed and sneezed as others have coughed and sneezed, and Michael Mompellion and I tried to bring her comfort, as we had tried to bring comfort to so many others.
I was by her side as much as tact and duty would allow. For of course it was her Michael who had first call upon her last hours, and my role was to keep as much of his own work from him as I myself was capable to do. But some things I could not do, and from time to time he was called away to fulfill obligations at other deathbeds. And so I found myself alone with my Elinor. I bathed her hectic face with linens steeped in mint water and studied her delicate skin, waiting and dreading the moment when her general flush would blossom into the red-black petals of the Plague’s roses. Her hair, so fine, clung damply to her forehead like silvery lace.
To me, she had become so many things. So many things a servant has no right or reason to imagine that the person they serve will be. Because of her, I had known the warmth of a motherly concern—the concern that my own mother had not lived to show me. Because of her, I had had a teacher and was not ignorant and unlettered still. Sometimes, when we worked together on our herbs in the rectory kitchen, I had forgotten she was my mistress; even, at times, I directed her in this or that knack I had mastered of identification or decoction. She never reminded me of my place. In my own heart, I could whisper it: she was my friend, and I loved her. Sometimes, late at night, when fatigue addled my thoughts, I blamed myself for her condition. I thought it was punishment for the sin of my presumption and my jealousy. In the daylight, when I was more lucid, I knew that her illness had no more nor less sense than any other person’s suffering. But in the dark hours, I could not school my heart. Every time Michael Mompellion came to sit by her, the flame of jealousy flared up in me. I would leave her room seething over his greater claim to the place at her side. At first, when he dismissed me, I withdrew myself just outside her door and sat there, to be as close to her as possible. When Mr. Mompellion found me there, he helped me kindly to my feet but told me in clear terms that I was not to hover so, and that perhaps it would be better if I retired to my cottage until he sent for me.
It would have taken more than his word to keep me long away from her. The next day, as I placed the cooling cloths upon her brow, it was as if she read my thoughts. She sighed and gave a faint smile. “That feels so good,” she whispered. Her hand fluttered weakly on mine. “I am a fortunate woman, to have been loved so in my life ... to have been given a husband such as Michael and a friend as dear as you, Anna.” She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them and gazed at me. “I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. Oh, the spark was clear in you when first you came to me—but you covered your light as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass around you. And now, how you shine!” She closed her eyes and squeezed my hand weakly.
After a time, her breathing slowed, so that I thought she had fallen into sleep. I rose as quietly as I could and crept toward the door, thinking to carry away the basin and the spent cloths. But she spoke again, her eyes still closed. “I hope you will find it in your heart to be a friend to Mr. Mompellion, Anna ... For my Michael will have need of a friend.” The sob trying to rise in my throat would not let me answer her. But she did not seem to need an answer, for she turned her face to the pillow then and fell truly into sleep.
I could not have been gone for more than ten minutes, but when I returned I could see at once that her condition had worsened. Her face was even more flushed—so livid that the blood vessels had burst into a fine spidery tracery on her cheeks. I lay the cool cloths upon her, but she tossed under my hand. She began speaking then, in a strange, high, girlish voice, and I understood that she was delirious.
“Charles!” she called. She was giggling, a light, lilting laughter that belied her grave state. Her breathing was fast, as if she were running or riding. I imagined her, a girl in a silken dress, at her leisure in the wide green park of her father’s great estate. She quieted for a few moments, and I hoped she would slip back into sleep. But then her brow knit and her hands, on the counterpane, wrung themselves together. “Charles?” She cried out the name in a pitch still high and childish, but distressed, agitated, keening.
I was glad it was I, and not the rector, who was witness to this. She was moaning now. I clasped her hand and called to her, but she was gone somewhere far beyond my reach. And then suddenly her face changed, and her voice became again her familiar adult voice, but speaking in a whisper so intimate it made me blush. “Michael ... Michael, how much longer? Please, my love? Please ...”
He had opened the door and entered the room without my hearing him, and when he spoke I jumped. “That will do, Anna,” he said, and his voice seemed strangely cold. “I will call you if she needs anything.”
“Rector, she is much worsened. She is delirious ...”
“I can see that for myself,” he snapped, distraught. “You may go.”
Reluctantly, I rose and withdrew to the kitchen until he should call on me. Sitting, waiting, exhausted with worrying, I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke it was to birdsong. Sunshine streamed through the high casements and fell in wide bands, like yellow Maypole ribands, across the kitchen floor. I crept upstairs in the buttery summer light and stood outside her bedchamber, listening for sounds from within.
All was silent. Gently, I eased open the door. Elinor lay sunken into her pillows, the vivid flush all gone from her face. She was pale as the counterpane and still as stone. Michael Mompellion lay sprawled across the foot of her bed, his hands outstretched toward where she lay, as if he reached to catch her fleeting soul.
The cry that I had been fighting back for three days escaped me then, a groan of grief and loneliness. Michael Mompellion did not stir, but Elinor opened her eyes and smiled at me.
“The fever is broken,” she whispered, “and I have been lying here awake this hour, parched for a posset. I could not call for you because I did not want to bestir my poor, tired Michael.”
I flew down the stairs to make that posset. As I heated milk I felt like singing for the first time in nigh on a year. Elinor rose from
her bed briefly that day. I sat her in a chair by the window with the shutters flung wide. As she looked out on her beloved garden, Mr. Mompellion gazed at her, as if he beheld a vision. I kept finding excuses to return to the room with foods and fresh linens and ewers of warm water, just so that I could be sure I had not dreamt that it was so.
The next day, she said she felt well enough to take a turn in the garden, and she mocked the rector and me as I refused to let her walk unsupported and he hovered, proffering unwanted shawls one moment and contriving unneeded shade the next.
Michael Mompellion seemed a man reborn that day and those that followed. To be convinced, as he had been, that Elinor was lost to Plague, and then to find her recovered from an ordinary fever ... I did not have to imagine the wonder he felt, for I felt it also. His face, which had been creased with worry, now lost the furrows about the brow and gained back the laughing lines around the eyes. His step was buoyant as a boy’s, and he approached his grim duties with a renewed energy.
Elinor was taking some air on a bench in the south corner of the garden—a beautiful retreat she had created, all bowered over with her favorite roses. I had brought her a cup of broth and she had kept me by her, talking, as she had not done in an age, about pleasant trivialities such as whether the iris clumps could do with dividing.
Mr. Mompellion saw us there and came striding swiftly from the stableyard. He had ridden from the Gordon farm, where he had been tending to matters left unresolved since Urith Gordon’s death. Since the Gordons were but tenant farmers, and since John Gordon, in his fit, had destroyed all his chattel, there was little to trouble about in terms of an estate. But neighbors had felt uneasy about all the crosses Gordon had fashioned and had not known how to deal with them. The rector had deemed that they should be burned, prayerfully and with respect, and had gone himself to see to it. It was from this task that he had returned.
The day was very warm, and as the rector settled himself beside her on the garden bench, Elinor waved her hands before her face playfully.
“Husband, you reek of woodsmoke and horse sweat! Let Anna warm some water for your toilet!”
“Very well,” he said, jumping to his feet again and smiling. I turned to do as she bade me. As I withdrew into the rectory, I heard him speaking to Elinor in a most animated voice. Presently, when I carried out a basin and some cloths, he was gesticulating broadly.
“I don’t know why it did not come to me before this,” he said. “But as I stood there, offering a prayer over those fiery crosses, I saw it so clearly, it was as if God Himself had placed the truth of it into my heart!”
“Let us pray that it is so,” said Elinor, her face ardent.
She rose then, and the two of them walked off along the path, side by side, leaving me standing there, forgotten. After a moment, I set the things down on the bench and went back inside to my tasks. Whatever engrossed them so, I thought, flinging a washclout into a pail, I would learn of it when they saw fit to tell me. But as I scrubbed hard upon the gritstones, there was a bitterness in my mouth, as if I’d chewed upon a fruit with sour pith.
THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday, and I learned along with everyone else in the village what it was that Michael Mompellion believed that God had shown him.
“To save our lives, my friends, I believe we must undertake here a great burning. We must shed ourselves of our worldly goods—all that we can of what our hands have touched and our bodies worn, all that we have breathed upon. Let us gather these things and bring them here, and then scour our houses as the Hebrews are commanded to do to mark the feast of their deliverance from Pharoah. After, let us gather here this night and offer up our goods with our prayers to God for our own deliverance.”
I saw the faces frowning and the heads shaking around the Delf, for people had already lost so much that further sacrifice such as the rector proposed sat ill with them. For myself, I thought of young George Viccars rising himself from his deathbed and croaking “Burn it all!” If I had done so, that very day, burned his workbox and all those half-sewn garments made from the cloth sent up here from London, I wondered how many of us might have been spared.
This thought wracked me so that I did not have the wit to concentrate on Mr. Mompellion’s words, so I cannot recount how it was that he brought the villagers to a reluctant agreement. I know he spoke of Urith Gordon and how the Plague had struck her down after she had accepted those goods, offered in kindness, of clothing and effects from houses visited by Plague. I know he spoke about the cleansing power of fire and its use by men from the beginning of time as a symbol of rebirth. I know that he spoke, as always, with eloquence and force, and that he used his beautiful voice as an instrument fashioned by God for just such a purpose. Yet we were, all of us, weary of words. What had they brought us, after all?
As the afternoon wore on, the pile for the burning grew only slowly. The rector and Elinor, of course, set the example, carrying out many of their possessions. But even Elinor quailed when it came to the library, and she declared that she could not bring herself to burn the books, “For though there may be Plague seeds within them, yet also may there be the knowledge to rid us of Plague, just that we have not yet got the wit to rightly read the way.”
As for me, there was one thing with which I could not part: the tiny jerkin I had made for Jamie in his first winter and had been saving for Tom when he grew big enough to wear it. This I hid away, embarrassed by my weakness, and gathered up my scant stuff to consign to the flames. It seemed odd, to be scrubbing and sweeping on the Lord’s Day, but the rector had spoken with such conviction that even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental. I boiled cauldron after cauldron, first at the rectory and then at my cottage, and scalded tables, chairs, every board and stone of those dwellings.
I was exhausted when we gathered at the Delf at dusk. I gazed at the sad pile of belongings—the sum of such meager lives. For the first time in many months, I thought of the Bradfords and all their rich possessions locked up in the lonely hush of Bradford Hall. I supposed the Bradfords, safe in their Oxford sanctuary, were the only family from this village left whole. I imagined them, returning one day, sitting at their fine table with all their linens and silver. I saw the colonel’s fat fingers drumming upon the table, impatient for his meal, while the ghost of Maggie Cantwell sobbed silently in the shadows. Perhaps, by then, we would be an entire village of ghosts and not even the Bradfords would dare to venture here, even for the sake of their big house and all its fine things.
We had been stripped bare indeed. At the base of the pyre stood the crib—hewn with such love and joyful expectation—that the Livesedge child had died in. There were hose lying limp that had held the muscled calves of strong young miners. There was much bedding, straw-filled pallets that once had provided sweet rest. All these humble things, waiting mute for the torch, spoke to me of the other losses that could not be piled up and regarded: the daily gestures of tenderness between man and wife; the peace in a mother’s heart at the sight of her sleeping babe; the unique and private memories of all the many dead.
Michael Mompellion stood near the rock outcropt that was his pulpit. He held a flaming brand high in his right hand. The pile of belongings rose before him, and we stood below it, ranged yards apart from one another as always. “Lord God Almighty,” he cried, his voice resonating through the Delf, “as it once pleased You to accept burnt offerings from Your children in Israel, so may it please You to accept these things from us, Your suffering flock. Use this fire to cleanse our hearts as well as our homes, and deliver us at last from the wrath of the disease that assaults us.”
He plunged the brand into the straw spilling from a mattress, and the flames licked greedily upward. It was a clear night, crisp and windless, a night such as are more common here in midwinter than high summer. The fire poured aloft in a twisting column of red and gold, hot sparks leaping wildly as if to join with the cold, white blaze of the stars. The heat seared my face, drying t
he tears on my cheeks. We sang then, against the roar of the burning, the Psalm that we had sung countless times since the Plague came:“Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night,
nor for the arrow that flieth by day,
nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness,
nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
A thousand shall fall at thy side,
And ten thousand at thy right hand,
But it shall not come near thee ...”
Once, we had sung these words with such conviction. I remembered how the music of our singing had soared in the church. Now, our voices were so many fewer, so tired and broken, dragging through the notes by rote. Because we stood so far apart from one another, not all could keep a common tempo, and some lost the pitch, so that our hymn became, verse by verse, more untidy and discordant.
As we sang, the objects in the heart of the blaze lost their singularity and became dark shapes merely, foils for the swirling brightness. For a moment, the black areas within the flames fell into a form that resembled the voids in a skull. The image alarmed me, and I blinked; when I looked again, it was gone.
Between the singing and the crackling of the fire, we did not hear the woman’s cries until she was amongst us. There was a stir behind me, and I turned to see young Brand Rigney and the Merrills’ nearest neighbor, Robert Snee, dragging a struggling figure between them up to the edge of the blaze. The woman was clad all in black, with a black veil tied around her head and falling down over her face. The singing stopped abruptly, as the two young men forced her forward and flung her onto the ground in front of Michael Mompellion. Brand reached down then and pulled back the veil. It was Aphra.