“Indeed, I have not seen him. I believed him to be gone out early to the Hadfields’,” she said.
“But his breakfast is uneaten,” I replied. Jane Martin shrugged. She had made it plain by her manner that she misliked the presence of a male lodger in the house, although since Rector Mompellion had sent us Mr. Viccars she had had to hold her peace about it.
“He a bed, Mummy,” said Jamie forlornly. “I goed up to find him but he yelled me, ‘Go ’way.’ ”
Mr. Viccars must be ill indeed, I reasoned. Anxious as I was to attend to him, I had to complete Tom’s feeding first. Once he was satisfied, I drew a pitcher of fresh water, cut a slice of bread, and climbed to Mr. Viccars’s garret. I could hear the moans as soon as I set a foot on the attic ladder. Alarmed, I failed to knock, simply opening the hatch into the low-ceilinged space.
I almost dropped the pitcher in my shock. The fair young face of the evening before was gone from the pallet in front of me. George Viccars lay with his head pushed to the side by a lump the size of a newborn piglet, a great, shiny, yellow-purple knob of pulsing flesh. His face, half turned away from me because of the excrescence, was flushed scarlet, or rather, blotched, with shapes like rings of rose petals blooming under his skin. His blond hair was a dark, wet mess upon his head, and his pillow was drenched with sweat. There was a sweet, pungent smell in the garret. A smell like rotting apples.
“Please, water,” he whispered. I held the cup to his parched mouth, and he drank greedily, his face distorted from the grief of the effort. He paused from his drinking only as a spasm of shivering and sneezing wracked his body. I poured, and poured again until the pitcher was drained. “Thank you,” he gasped. “And now I pray you be gone from here lest this foul contagion touch you.”
“Nay,” I said, “I must see you comfortable.”
“Mistress, none may do that now except the priest. Pray fetch Mompellion, if he will dare to come to me.”
“Say not so!” I scolded him. “This fever will break, and you will be well enough presently.”
“Nay, Mistress, I know the signs of this wretched illness. Just get you gone from here, for the love of your babes.”
I did go at that, but only to my own room to fetch my blanket and pillow—the one to warm his shivers and the other to replace the drenched thing beneath his horrible head. He moaned as I reentered the garret. As I attempted to lift him to place the pillow, he cried out piteously, for the pain from that massive boil was intense. Then the purple thing burst all of a sudden open, slitting like a pea pod and issuing forth creamy pus all spotted through with shreds of dead flesh. The sickly sweet smell of apples was gone, replaced by a stench of week-old fish. I gagged as I made haste to swab the mess from the poor man’s face and shoulder and stanch his seeping wound.
“For the love of God, Anna”—he was straining his hoarse throat, his voice breaking like a boy, summoning I don’t know what strength to speak above a whisper—“Get thee gone from here! Thou can’t help me! Look to thyself!”
I feared that this agitation would kill him in his weakened state, and so I picked up the ruined bedding and left him. Downstairs, two horrified faces greeted me, Jamie’s wide-eyed with in-comprehension, and Jane’s pale with knowing dread. She had already shed her pinafore in preparation to leave us for the day, and her hand was upon the door bar as I appeared. “I pray you, stay with the children while I fetch the rector, for I fear Mr. Viccars’s state is grave,” I said. At that, she wrung her hands, and I could see that her girlish heart was at war with her Puritan spine. I didn’t wait to see who would win the battle but simply swept by her, dumping the bedding in the dooryard as I went.
I was running, my eyes down and fixed on the path, so I did not see the rector astride Anteros, on his way from an errand in nearby Hathersage. But he saw me, turned and wheeled that great horse, and cantered to my side.
“Good heavens, Anna, whatever is amiss?” he cried, sliding from the saddle and offering a hand to steady me as I gasped to , catch my breath. Through ragged gulps, I conveyed the gravity of Mr. Viccars’s condition. “Indeed, I am sorry for it,” the rector said, his face clouded with concern. Without wasting any more words, he handed me up onto the horse and remounted.
It is so vivid to me, the man he was that day. I can recall how naturally he took charge, calming me and then poor Mr. Viccars; how he stayed tirelessly at his bedside all through that afternoon and then again the next, fighting first for the man’s body and then, when that cause was clearly lost, for his soul. Mr. Viccars muttered and raved, ranted, cursed, and cried out in pain. Much of what he said was incomprehensible. But from time to time he would cease tossing on the pallet and open his eyes wide, rasping “Burn it all! Burn it all! For the love of God, burn it!” By the second night, he had ceased his thrashing and simply lay staring, locked in a kind of silent struggle. His mouth was all crusted with sordes, and hourly I would dribble a little water on his lips and wipe them; he would look at me, his brow creasing with effort as he tried to express his thanks. As the night wore on, it was clear that he was failing, and Mr. Mompellion would not leave him, even when, toward morning, Mr. Viccars passed into a fitful kind of sleep, his breath shallow and uneven. The light through the attic window was violet and the larks were singing. I like to think that, somewhere through his delirium, the sweet sound might have brought him some small measure of relief.
He died clutching the bedsheet. Gently, I untangled each hand, straightening his long, limp fingers. They were beautiful hands, soft save for the one callused place toughened by a lifetime of needle pricks. Remembering the deft way they’d moved in the fire glow, the tears spilled from my eyes. I told myself I was crying for the waste of it; that those fingers that had acquired so much skill would never fashion another lovely thing. In truth, I think I was crying for a different kind of waste; wondering why I had waited until so near this death to feel the touch of those hands.
I folded them on George Viccar’s breast, and Mr. Mompellion laid his own hand atop them, offering a final prayer. I remember being struck then by how much larger the rector’s hand was—the hard hand of a laboring man rather than the limp, white paw of a priest. I could not think why it should be so, for he came, as I gathered, from a family of clergy and had but recently been at his books in Cambridge. There was not much between Mr. Mompellion and Mr. Viccars in age, for the reverend was but eight and twenty. And yet his young man’s face, if you looked at it closely, was scored with furrows at the brow and starbursts of crows’ feet beside the eyes—the marks of a mobile face that has frowned much in contemplation and laughed much in company. I have said that it could seem a plain face, but I think that what I mean to say is that it was his voice, and not his face, that you noticed. Once he began to speak, the sound of it was so compelling that you focused all your thoughts upon the words, and not upon the man who uttered them. It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.
He turned his eyes on me then, and spoke to me in a silken whisper that seemed to fall upon my grief like a comforting shawl. He thanked me for my assistance through the night. I had done what I could; bringing cold and hot compresses to ease the fevers and the shivering; making infusions to purify the air in that small, ill-smelling sickroom; carrying away the pans of bile and piss and sweat-drenched rags.
“It is a hard thing,” I said, “for a man to die amongst strangers, with no family to mourn him.”
“Death is always hard, wheresoever it finds a man. And untimely death harder than most.” He began to chant, slowly, as if he were groping in his memory for the words:“My wounds stink and are corrupt,
My loins are filled with a loathsome disease and there is no
soundness in my flesh.
My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore,
My kinsmen stand far off ...”
“Do you know that Psalm, Anna?” I shook my
head. “No; it is unlovely and not much sung. But you did not stand aloof from Mr. Viccars; you did not stand far off. I think that George Viccars passed his last weeks happily in your family. You should console yourself in the joy that you and your sons were able to give to him, and the mercy that you, especially, have shown.”
He said he would carry the body downstairs where the sexton, who was elderly, might more easily retrieve it. George Viccars was a tall man and must have weighed near to fourteen stone, but Mr. Mompellion lifted that dead weight as if it were nothing and descended the loft ladder with the limp body slung across his shoulder. Downstairs, he laid George Viccars gently upon a sheet as tenderly as a father setting down a sleeping babe.
The Thunder of His Voice
THE SEXTON CAME EARLY for George Viccars’s body. Since there were no kin, his funeral rites would be simple and swift. “Sooner the better, eh, Mistress,” the old man said as he hauled the corpse to his cart. “He’s nowt to linger ’ere for. Too late to stitch hissef a shroud.”
Because of the long night’s labor, Mr. Mompellion had bidden me not to come to the rectory that morning. “Rest instead,” he said, pausing at the doorway in the early light. Anteros had been tethered all night in the garth and had trod the soil there into grassless craters. I nodded, but anticipated little rest. I had been commanded to serve at dinner at the Hall that afternoon, and before that I would have to scour the house from bottom to top and then figure on the disposition of Mr. Viccars’s effects. As if he’d caught my thought, the rector paused as he raised his foot to the stirrup, patted the horse, and turned back to me, coming close and dropping his voice. “You would do well to follow Mr. Viccars’s instructions as to his things,” he said. I must have looked baffled, for I wasn’t sure for the moment to what he was referring. “He said to burn everything, and that may be good advice.”
I was still on my hands and knees in the attic, scrubbing the worn floorboards, when the first of Mr. Viccars’s customers came rapping on the door. Before I opened it, I knew the caller was Anys Gowdie. Anys was so skilled with plants and balms that she knew how to extract their fragrant oils, and these she wore on her person so that a light, pleasant scent, like summer fruits and flowers, always preceded her. Despite the common opinion of her in the village, I had always had admiration for Anys. She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult has passed. No matter how freely they might besmear her character, and no matter how many charms they might dangle about themselves in her presence, there were few women who would do without her in the birthing room. She brought a calm kindness with her there, very different from her sharp manner in the streets. And she had a deft-handedness in difficult deliveries that her aunt had come to rely upon. I liked her, too, because it takes a kind of courage to care so little for what people whisper, especially in a place as small as this.
She had come looking for Mr. Viccars, to collect a dress he had made for her. When I told her what had befallen him, her face clouded with sorrow. And then, typically, she upbraided me. “Why did you not call on my aunt and me, instead of Mompellion? A good infusion would have served George better than the empty mutterings of a priest.”
I was used to being shocked by Anys, but this time she had managed to outdo even herself, delivering two scandalizing thoughts in a single utterance. The first shock was her frank blasphemy. The second was the familiarity with which she referred to Mr. Viccars, whom I had never yet called by his first name. On what terms of intimacy had they been, that she should call him so? My suspicions were only heightened when, after rummaging through the whisket in which he kept his work, we found the dress that he had made for her. For all the years of my childhood, when the Puritans held sway here, we wore for our outer garments only what they called the Sadd Colors—black for preference, or the dark brown called Dying Leaf. Since the return of the king, brighter hues had crept back to most wardrobes, but long habit still constrained the choices of most of us. Not Anys. She had bespoke a gown of a scarlet so vivid it almost hurt my eyes. I had never seen Mr. Viccars at work on it, and I wondered if he had contrived to keep it from me, in case I remarked upon it. The gown was finished all but for the hem, which Anys said she had come that morning to have him adjust for her at a final fitting. When she held the dress up, I saw that the neckline was cut low as a doxy’s, and I could not discipline my thoughts. I imagined her, tall and splendid, her honey-gold hair tumbling loose, her amber eyes half closed, and Mr. Viccars kneeling at her feet, letting his long fingers drift from the hem to caress her ankle and then traveling under the soft fabric, skilled hands on fragrant skin, upward and slowly upward ... Within seconds, I was flushed as scarlet as that damnable dress.
“Mr. Viccars told me to burn his work for fear of spreading his contagion,” I said, swallowing hard to ease the tightness in my throat.
“You shall do no such thing!” she exclaimed, and I foresaw in her dismay the difficulty I would have with all his clients. If Anys Gowdie, familiar as she was with the face of illness, felt so on the matter, it was unlikely any others would be persuadable. Few of us here live in ample circumstances, and none loves waste. Anyone who had placed a deposit on work from Mr. Viccars would want whatever of that work he had accomplished, and notwithstanding Mr. Mompellion’s injunction, I had no right to withhold it from them. Anys Gowdie left with her harlot’s gown folded under her arm, and as the day wore on and the news of Mr. Viccars’s death spread, as news does here, I was interrupted again and again by his clients claiming pieces of his work. All I could do was to pass on what he had said in his delirium. Not a one of them consented to having his or her garment—even were it only a pile of cut-out fabric pieces—consigned to the fire. In the end, I burned only his own clothes. And then, finally, as the coals fell and galled themselves, I at last found the will to toss the dress he had made for me into the grate, golden-green gashed by flames of bright vermillion.
IT WAS A LONG WALK, and all uphill, to Bradford Hall, and I was as tired as I’ve ever been as I set out that afternoon for my employment there. And yet. I did not go direct, but rather headed east, toward the Gowdie cottage. I could not get, Anys’s “George,” or her scarlet gown, out of my mind. Generally, I am not a gossip. I care not who tumbles whom in what warm boose. And now that Mr. Viccars was dead, it hardly mattered, to me or any person, where he might have put his prick. And yet, even so, I had a month’s mind to know how matters had stood between him and Anys Gowdie, if only to take the measure of his true regard for me.
The Gowdies’ cottage was set off at the eastern edge of town, after the smithy, a lonely dwelling at the edge of the big Riley farm. It was a tiny place, just one room propped upon another, so ill-built that the thatch sat rakishly atop the whole like a cap pulled crooked across a brow. The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home. Inside, the tiny room had a low-beamed ceiling. The light was always dim, to protect the virtue of the drying plants. At this time of year, when the Gowdies were cutting their summer herbs, the bunches hung from the beams in such profusion that you had to bend almost double when you entered the door. Always when I visited, I wondered that tall Anys contrived to live in such a place, for surely she could not stand upright. The Gowdies always had a fire going for the making of their draughts, and since the flue of the ancient chimney drew poorly, the air was smoky and the walls black with soot. Still, at least the smoke was sweet-scented, for the Gowdies always burned rosemary, which they said purified the air of any sickness that ailing villagers might unwittingly carry when coming there for help.
There was no answer when I knocked upon the door, so I walked around to the stone wall that sheltered the Gowdi
es’ physick garden. The garden had been part of our village for as long as I could remember. I had always assumed that Mem planted it, but once, when I had said something about that to Anys, she had mocked me for my ignorance.
“This garden, as any fool could see, was old before Mem Gowdie was even thought of.” She had run her hand along the bough of an espaliered plum, and I saw that, of course, the tree, with its gnarled and knotty trunk, was ancient. “We do not even know the name of the wise woman who first laid out these beds, but the garden thrived here long before we came to tend it, and it will go on long after we depart. My aunt and I are just the latest in a long line of women who have been charged with its care.”
The stone walls sheltered a profusion of plants. I knew by name less than a tenth part of what grew there. Many of the herbs had already been harvested, revealing the careful regularity of the stone-edged beds, sown to a plan that only Anys and her aunt understood. Anys knelt now amidst a clump of glossy green stems. Each tall stalk held a cluster of buds opening into blooms of midnight-blue. She was digging at the roots and rose as I came down the straw-strewn path, dusting the soil from her hands.
“It is a handsome plant,” I said.
“Handsome—and potent,” she replied. “They call it wolf’s bane, but it is bane to more than those poor creatures. Eat a small piece of this root and you will be dead by nightfall.”
“Why do you have it here, then?” I must have looked stricken, for she laughed at me.
“Not to serve you for your supper! The wort, ground and mixed with oils, makes a very good rub for aching joints, and we will have many of those in this village as the winter hardens. But I do not think you came here to admire my blue flowers,” she said. “Come inside and take a drink with me.”