I had Elinor’s book in my luggage, one of the few belongings I had brought with me. It was her precious final volume from Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. I had packed it, despite its weight, as a memory of her and the work we’d tried to accomplish together. One day, I thought, I will learn to read the Latin and memorize everything that great book contains. Elinor and I had marveled that an infidel of long ago should have owned such a wonderful amount of knowledge. I thought then of all that the Musalman doctors might have discovered since it was written, and suddenly it seemed to me that I had been brought to this sunlit city so that I might learn more of the craft that had become my vocation. I paid off the nurse, providing for her return passage, reasoning that I could find another in so large a city.
The ship’s captain tried to dissuade me from disembarking, talking of Barbary pirates and uncouth Spanish exiles. But when he saw I was fixed in my purpose, he kindly assisted me. The captain knew of Ahmed Bey, which was not strange, since his writings and his travels have made him the most famous doctor in Barbary. What was astonishing, to me at least, given my circumstances and condition, was the speed with which the Bey reached his decision to take me in. Later, when we knew each other better, he told me that he had just come from noon prayer, at which he had called on Allah to take pity on a tired old man and send him some assistance. Then, he had entered the women’s quarters and found me, sipping coffee with his wives.
I am one of his wives now, in name if not in flesh. He said it was the only way he could bring me into his household that would win acceptance here. Since it was obvious that I was not a virgin, the mullah needed no male guardian to give consent for me, and so the rite was simply accomplished. We have spoken much since then about faith: the adamantine one by which the doctor measures every moment of his day, and that flimsy, tattered thing that is the remnant of my own belief. I see it like the faded threads of a banner on a battlement, shot-shredded, and if it once bore a device, none could now say what it might have been. I have told Ahmed Bey that I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do, for now.
I think that the Bey is the wisest and kindest man I have ever known. Certainly he is the gentlest and the sweetest-spoken. He was flattering about the skills with which I came to him, but I have learned so much from him in the years since that I now understand it was only the honey-tongued way of his people to say so. Ahmed Bey’s medicine does not rely upon tearing at the body with sharp probes and blistering cups like the barber-surgeons at home. His way is to strengthen and nourish, all the time studying the workings of the well body and the nature of disease: how it spreads, and to whom, and how its course runs like or different in this person and in that.
I think that by the time I arrived here he had reached a point of despair, for the Musalmans’ wives are so strictly kept that they quail at the sight of a strange man at their sickbeds, and he had anguished for many years over the numbers whose husbands would see them die rather than send for his assistance. And so I think he would have taken any woman of normal intelligence who was willing to learn from him. I have repaid his trust by bringing many safely through their labors and showing them ways to preserve their health and that of their children. As I continue to study and learn, I hope to accomplish a worthy life’s work here. I am reading Avicenna now, or Ibn Sina, as I have correctly learned to call him. I am reading his writings not in Latin, as I had imagined, but in Arabic.
It has taken my eyes a long time to get used to the brightness of this place. For one who lived so long in a misty world, the vividness here can sear the sight. There are colors that I do not even know how to describe to one who has not seen them. Who can say what color an orange is, who has not seen the thing itself? And the fruits called persimmons that hang on the branches beyond my window; sometimes, they glow so against the blue sky that I would say they are a color like to new-beaten copper, flaring in sunlight. Other times their hue seems more of a golden pink, glowing faintly like the cheeks of Ahmed Bey’s grandchildren when they run and tumble in the women’s courtyard.
We have an abundance here of every vivid hue, except green. There is no grass, and the leaves of the palms are coated with a fine sand that covers them all in its dusty yellow mantle. I think it , is green, perhaps, that I miss more than any other thing. One day, in Ahmed Bey’s great library, I found a large book bound in fine-grained leather, dyed exactly to the color of the summer pastures at home. I carried the book here to my room and propped it on my table, where my eyes could rest on it. I did not realize it was the Bey’s sacred text, which unbelievers are not to lay a hand upon. It was the only time in these three years that he spoke harshly to me. He apologized for it, after I explained, and sent me a silken carpet figured all over with the great tree that the Arabs call Anisa, Tree of Life. Its twining leaves and branches glow greener than anything that even Elinor could grow, in that beautiful garden of our past.
Like my eyes, my ears, too, have had to learn the different way of being in this place. From fearing silence, I have learned to long for it. For it is noisy here, night and day. The streets teem with people, and the cries of the peddlers are incessant. It is sunset now, and the summons of prayer callers rings, urgent and soulful, from scores of high minarets. The hour after the sunset prayer is my favorite time to walk in the city, for the air has begun to cool and the pace becomes less hectic. Many of the women know me now and greet me as I go about the streets. As is the way of their culture, they know me by the name of my firstborn, and so here I am Anna Frith no longer, but Umm Jam-ee-mother of Jamie. It pleases me to have my little boy remembered so.
It took me a long time to name the Bradfords’ baby. I did not call her anything during that terrible sea voyage, I think because I was sure we would not survive it. When we came here, Ahmed Bey suggested Aisha, which is his word for “life.” Later, I learned that the women in the market also use it as their word for bread. It is an apt name, for she sustained me.
She is waiting for me in the women’s courtyard, her white haik dragging in the dust as she skips toward me, straight through the small garden where Maryam, Ahmed Bey’s eldest wife, cultivates herbs to flavor her tea. The air is suddenly tangy with the fragrance of crushed mint and lemon thyme. Maryam unleashes a torrent of scolding, but her tattooed face is crinkled with gentle amusement. I smile at the old woman and salaam, reaching for my own veil where it hangs, limp and ready, on a peg by the street door.
I look around then for the other one. She is hiding behind the blue-tiled fountain. Maryam inclines her head to show me where. I pretend I have not seen her and walk right past, calling her name. I turn swiftly and snatch her up into my arms. She gurgles with delight, her small soft hands patting my cheeks as she plants her wet kisses on my face.
I birthed her here, in the harem. Ahmed Bey helped in her delivery, but I did not need his assistance in her naming. When I toss the little haik over her head, she pulls it expertly into place so that all I can see are her wide gray eyes. She has her father’s eyes.
We wave good-bye to Maryam and push open the heavy teak door. The warm air catches our veils and sends them billowing behind us. Aisha grabs one hand. Elinor clasps the other, and together we plunge into the jostling swarm of our city.
AFTERWORD
THIS BOOK is a work of fiction inspired by the true story of the villagers of Eyam, Derbyshire.
I first visited Eyam (pronounced “eem”) quite by chance in the summer of 1990. I was based in London then, working as Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Between assignments in hot, troubled places like Gaza and Baghdad, I tried to find respite in the English countryside. It was on one of these hikes—or rambles, as the English euphoniously call them—that I came upon an intriguing finger post, pointing the way to the PLAGUE VILLAGE. There, I found the history of the villagers’ ordeal, and their extraordinary decision, set out in a display in the parish church of Saint Lawrence.
The account was so touching and ter
rible that it took root in my imagination. For the next few years, as I reported the news of modern tragedies in places such as Bosnia and Somalia, my thoughts often returned to Eyam, and I began to realize that it was this story, above all others, I longed to tell. That feeling only became stronger when I went to live in a rural Virginia village about the same size as Eyam. There, the story of the quarantine and its costs grew even more vivid to me. What would it be like, I wondered, to make such a choice and to find that in consequence, two-thirds of your neighbors were dead within a year? How would faith, relationships, and social order survive?
The summer before last, I returned to Eyam to do further historical research and refresh my memory of the Peak District’s austere and beautiful landscape. I spent time with Eyam’s local historian, John G. Clifford, author of the informative Eyam Plague 1665-1666. I visited the small but expertly curated village museum. William Styron once wrote that the historical novelist works best if fed on “short rations” by the factual record. Much has been written about Eyam—books, plays, even an opera—yet facts remain scant. In Eyam, debate continues on issues such as what the village population was before the plague, how the infection got there, how many died. But at the same time, there is a wealth of anecdote handed down over the years, and from this I’ve borrowed heavily: the role of flea-ridden cloth as the possible plague vector; the greedy grave digger who buried a man alive; the prescient cockerel who knew when it was safe to come home.
For the rest, I delved into seventeenth-century medical texts, journals, sermons, and social histories. My library now includes tomes such as A History of Lead Mining in the Pennines, which is not a volume I ever expected to own. Anys Gowdie’s “confession” is adapted from the account of a Scottish witch trial included in Richard Zacks’s lively collection of documents on sexuality, History Laid Bare. (The Gowdie confession differs from the many similar ones extracted under torture in that the accused woman claimed, most eloquently, to have enjoyed sex with the devil. The more standard line was that Satan was a lousy lover.)
While I have used some real names of Eyam villagers, I have done so only when my account does not press far beyond the known detail of their lives. Where I have invented, I have altered or created names to indicate this. Thus, Michael Mompellion reflects the true rector of Eyam, the heroic and saintly William Mompesson, only in the admirable aspects of his character and deeds. The darker side I have given his fictional counterpart is entirely imagined. William Mompesson had two children with his wife, Catherine, and sent them away from Eyam before the quarantine was agreed upon. Catherine chose to stay and help the sick, and died herself of plague. After her death, William Mompesson included a line in one of his letters: “My maid continued in health; which was a blessing, for had she quailed, I should have been ill set....” Trying to imagine who this woman could have been, how she may have lived, and what she might have felt provided the voice for my novel.
The book’s title came as I tried to listen to words as Anna might have heard them, with all their attendant religious echoes. To a secular mind like mine, it always seemed incongruous that Dryden should have chosen the Latin phrase “annus mirabilis” to describe that terrible year of 1666, marked by plague, the Great Fire, and the war with the Dutch. But Anna surely would have believed that “God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” She also would have been familiar with God’s words to Moses: “Thou shalt do my wonders”—which included calling down upon the Egyptians the first plague in recorded human history.
Like her seventeenth-century contemporaries, Anna did not know what plague was or how it spread. Yersinia pestis-Bubonic plague, Black death, pest—is an overwhelming infection by bacteria that produce potent toxins. The plague sores—buboes—are lymph nodes that have been turned into necrotic, hemorrhagic tissue. Within a day or two, vast numbers of bacteria find their way into the blood stream, resulting in fever as high as 106 degrees F, hemorrhage, and thrombosis. While rat death had been observed to accompany plague since ancient times, it wasn’t until 1898 that a scientist named P. L. Simond reported in the Annales d’Institute Pasteur (or “the annals of the Pasteur Institute”) his discovery that fleas that had fed on infected rats were responsible for transmitting the disease to humans in some 90 percent of cases. (Occasionally, the bacillus enters a victim’s lungs and is then passed on to others in airborn droplets. Rarely, plague is contracted by direct infection of cuts or lesions while handling a dead, infected rodent.) In England in 1666, the afflicted population missed the mark, believing cats and dogs might be spreading the disease. The resulting slaughter of these animals eliminated predators of the rat and thus probably extended the pandemic. Plague still exists: the World Health Organization reports between 1,000 and 3,000 cases a year. It is no longer a mass killer because of antibiotics.
Among the many books and individuals I have consulted for help, I would like especially to thank Amy Huberman for her diligent unearthing of seventeenth-century medical texts; Anne Ashley McCaig for advice on lambing and literature; Raymond Rush, for the fascinating farming lore in his Countrywise collection of articles. Amanda Levick and Lara Warner, whose help was invaluable; and Philip Benedict, for insight into the minds and libraries of seventeenth-century clergy. I would also like to thank my agent, the incomparable Kris Dahl. From early readers—Darleen Bungey, Brian Hall, the Horwitz quartet of Elinor, Joshua, Norman and Tony, Bill Powers, Martha Sherrill, and Graham Thorburn—I received invaluable advice on everything from Restoration poetry to Yersinia pestis. For the precision of her blue pencil, I am indebted to Lisa R. Lester. For his insight, and his walking boots, I am grateful to my British editor Clive Priddle. To Susan Petersen Kennedy, who believed in the book, and Molly Stern, who helped shape it, I owe the greatest debt. And to my mother, Gloria, a lifelong one. Thank you all.
A PENGUIN READERS GUIDE TO
YEAR OF WONDERS: A Novel of the Plague
Geraldine Brooks
“God’s Wrath Made Manifest”?
AN INTRODUCTION TO Year of Wonders
The 1600s marked both the dawn of modern medicine and the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment all over Europe. In England, these years also brought the Restoration—a revolution in every aspect of life against Oliver Cromwell’s Puritanism. English physicians charted the circulatory system, and the invention of the compound microscope and identification of bacteria were together about to begin unraveling the mystery of infectious disease. In 1662, King Charles established the Royal Society in order to promote the study of natural science. The world was changing rapidly, and its central focus shifted from God to man.
In 1665, in the remote English village of Eyam—a small and closely knit community of lead miners and shepherds, cobblers and weavers—the bubonic plague (“The Black Death”) has taken the town hostage both literally and figuratively. In a decision brought about by Michael Mompellion, the radical but much-admired town minister, the villagers of Eyam quarantine themselves in their “wide green prison” and vow to suffer the scourge alone. Believing that the plague is God’s judgment on their sinful world, most of the devoutly Christian villagers beg forgiveness and look for ways to assuage God’s ire—the most puritanical take up self-flagellation in an attempt to cleanse themselves. Almost completely cut off from the outside world (save for the ingenious “boundary stone”), and after panic has well and truly set in, the villagers turn on one another. In episodes that illustrate both the best of human nature (ministering to the sick) and the worst (a gravedigger profiteering from the dead), the townspeople grapple with their grief and fear.
It is up to the story’s heroine—a young, widowed housemaid named Anna Frith—to raise the existential questions about the origins of the plague, and she therefore becomes the embodiment of the conflict at of the center of the novel: God versus Nature.
It came to me then that we, all of us, spent a very great deal of time pondering these questions that, in the end, we could not answer. If we balanced the time we spent
contemplating God, and why He afflicted us, with more thought as to how the Plague spread and poisoned our blood, then we might come nearer to saving our lives. While these thoughts were vexing, they brought with them also a chink of light. For if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method. and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village of sinners or a host of saints.
After suffering the death of her suitor and her two children, and despite her own spiritual beliefs and adoration for the rector and his wife, Anna boldly rejects the idea that the pestilence is a call for repentance. And in a time of such turmoil, she shrugs off the social and religious mores that would keep a weaker woman in her place. With the knowledge about herbal remedies that she has gleaned from the village herbalists Mem and Anys Gowdie, and the support and tutelage of her patroness, Elinor Mompellion, Anna emerges more powerful and self-confident than before. At the end of the novel, it is clear she has become stronger than even Michael Mompellion, the town’s figurehead and religious rock. Anna’s questions—and her role as a village healer—will eventually lead her to her true calling.
Caught up in the struggle between science and religion, Anna’s dilemma mirrors that of the world in her time. Ultimately she confesses: “I cannot say that I have faith anymore. Hope, perhaps. We have agreed that it will do for now.”