“Your analogy is excellent, sir,” said Mr. Mompellion; his voice had the commanding timbre that he used in the pulpit. “Let us explore it. For I will certainly stand and face the lion if, by running, I would cause the beast to follow me, and thus draw him closer to the dwelling places of innocents who demand my protection.”
At the mention of innocents, Jamie’s little face flashed before me. What if the young Londoner were correct? Jamie had lived in George Viccars’s pocket. All that day before the illness first rose in him, Jamie had been climbing on his back, prancing by his side.
The young man broke into the silence that greeted Mr. Mompellion’s speech. “Well, sir, very bravely stated. But I must tell you that those who know this disease best—and that would be the physicians and the barber-surgeons-have been the fleetest of foot in leaving town. One cannot get cupped for a cough or bled for the gout, no matter if you have a sovereign to give in fee. Which leads me to conclude that the physicians have written us a clear prescription, and that is this: the best physick against the Plague is to run far away from it. And I, for one, intend to follow that prescription religiously.”
“You say ‘religiously,’ but I think your choice of word is poor,” said Mr. Mompellion. “For if one speaks ‘religiously,’ then one must recall that God has the power to keep you safe in peril, or to bring peril to overtake you, no matter how far or fast you run.”
“Indeed, sir. And many who believed that now are rotting corpses passing through the streets in cartloads, on their way to the great pits.” Miss Bradford raised a hand to her brow, ostentatiously feigning a faintness that her avid eyes belied. The young man turned to her, reading her desire for morbid detail, and continued, “I have had it from one whose man had need to go there in fruitless search of a kinsman. He reported that the corpses are tipped in, afforded no more respect than one would give a dead dog. A layer of bodies, a few spades of soil, and then more bodies tumbled in atop. They lie there so, just like yonder dessert.” He pointed at the layered cake, which I had set down upon the table. I saw the Mompellions wince, but the young man smirked at his own wit and then turned pointedly toward the rector.
“And do you know who were the fastest to follow the physicians out of the city, sir? Why, it were the Anglican ministers, just such as yourself. There’s many a London pulpit being filled by a nonconformist on account of it.”
Michael Mompellion looked down then and studied his hands. “If what you say is true, sir, then I am indeed sorry for it. I will say that if it be the case, then my brothers in faith are the lesser men.” He sighed then and looked at his wife. “Perhaps they might believe that God now is preaching to the city, and what needs add their small utterance to the thunder of His voice?”
THERE WAS A FULL MOON that night, which was fortunate, for otherwise I’m sure I would have fallen into a ditch as I stumbled home, almost running despite my exhaustion, as the thistles tore at my ankles and the briars caught at my skirt. I could barely speak to the Martin girl as she roused herself heavily from her fireside slumber. I threw off my cloak and rushed up the stairs. A square of silvery light bathed the two little bodies. Both breathed easily. Jamie had an arm around his brother. I stretched out a hand to his forehead, terrified of what I might feel. My fingers brushed his soft skin. It was blessedly cool.
“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, thank you, God.”
Rat-fall
THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED George Viccars’s death ushered in the loveliest September weather I ever recall. There are some who deem this mountainside bleak country, and I can see how it might seem so: the land all chewed up by the miners, their stowes like scaffolds upon the moors, and their bings like weedy molehills interrupting the pale mauve tide of the heather. This is not a vivid place. Our only strong hue is green, and this we have in every shade: the emerald velvet mosses, the glossy, tangled ivies, and in spring, the gold-greens of tender new grasses. For the rest, we move through a patchwork of grays. The limestone outcropts are a whitish-gray, the millstone grit from which we build our cottages a warmer grayish-yellow. Gray is the sky color here, the dove-breast clouds louring so upon the hilltops that sometimes you feel you could just reach up and bury your hands in their softness.
But those fall weeks were flooded with an unaccustomed surfeit of sunlight. The sky was clear blue almost every day, and the air, instead of hinting frost, remained warm and dry. I was so relieved that Jamie and Tom were not ill, I lived in those days as at a fair. Jamie himself was downcast, having lost his dear friend Mr. Viccars. In truth, the death of his father had been easier for him to bear, because with Sam down the mine for most of Jamie’s waking hours, the two had spent little time in each other’s company. In the few short months he had lived with us, Mr. Viccars had become an indispensable companion. His death left an emptiness that I resolved to fill, taking time to make our simple chores into something of a game so that Jamie would not feel the loss so keenly.
At day’s end I liked to know that the ewes were each with their lambs and none had caught themselves up in briars or burrows. So in the afternoons, when I went to check the flock, I would take Jamie and Tom with me, and we would dawdle along our way, stopping to find what story each clump of stones or hollow tree might yield us. A line of fungus marching up a fallen branch might become, in our tale, the stairway to a faery’s bower, while an acorn cap might be the cup left behind by a party of feasting wood mice.
Our flock is small, just one and twenty ewes. From the time I married Sam, my rule has been to make mutton of any who proves an inept mother, and the result is an easy lambing when the weather is with us. We had had a good lambing back in the spring, so the last thing I was looking for that day was a ewe in labor. But we found her, and fortunate, for she was lying upon her side, panting in the shade of a rowan whose redding leaves also seemed quite out of season in that heat. Her tongue was out, and she was straining. I unslung Tom and laid him on a patch of clover. Jamie stood behind me as I knelt down and ran my hands inside the ewe, trying to stretch her. I could feel the nub of a nose and the hardness of one hoof, but I could barely get all my fingers in to grasp it.
“Mummy, may I help?” said Jamie, and looking at his tiny fingers I said yes, sitting him down in front of me with the ewe’s rear open before us like a big, glistening blossom. He slid his little hands easily up into that slippery wetness and exclaimed as he felt the nobbly knees of her backward baby. I braced against the ewe with my heels and together we tugged, he gripping the knees with his small strength while I strained at the hoofs. Suddenly a bundle of wet wool flew out with a big, sucking slosh, and the two of us fell backward on the grass. It was a fine lamb, small but strong, an unexpected gift. The ewe was a young one that had not lambed before, and I was pleased to see her set straight to work cleaning the caul from her babe’s face; presently the lamb rewarded her with an enormous sneeze. We laughed, Jamie’s eyes round and proud and happy.
We left them, the mother licking the remains of the yellow sac off her baby’s fleece, and wandered from the field and into the copse where the stream runs, to wash the blood and muck from our own hands and clothes. The water bubbled and sang over the layers of shale. Because the day was warm and we were hot from our efforts, I stripped Jamie down to his skin and let him splash naked while I rinsed his smock and my pinafore and flung them over a bush to dry. I had unpinned my whisk, untied my cap, and pulled off my hose. My skirt tucked up, I found a flat rock and sat down to feed Tom, letting the rills run over my toes while Jamie paddled. I stroked the fine, downy hair on Tom’s head and watched Jamie splashing in the cool water. He had lately reached that age when a mother looks at her babe and finds him a babe no longer, but a child full formed. The curves have turned into long, graceful lines: the fat and folded legs stretched out into lithe limbs; the rounded belly slimmed to a straight-standing body. A face, suddenly capable of the full range of expression, has smoothed its way out of all those crinkled chins and plumped-out cheeks. I loved to look at Jamie’
s new self, the smoothness of his skin, the curve of his neck, and the tilt of his golden head, always gazing curiously at some new wonder in his world.
He was springing from stone to stone, waving his arms wildly to keep his footing as he chased the darting, blue-bodied dragon-flies. As I watched, one alit on a branch near my hand. The glassy panes of her wings caught the light in rainbow colors, like the stained windows in our church. I laid a finger softly on the twig and could feel the swift shivering and hear the faint hum from her vibrating wings. Then she took off, swooping down upon a passing wasp. Her legs had seemed flimsy as threads, but they snapped around the wasp like an iron trap. Still in flight, her powerful jaws closed on the insect and devoured it. So it goes, I thought idly. A birth and a death, each unlocked for.
I leaned back against the stream’s bank and closed my eyes. I must have dozed for a moment, or otherwise I surely would have heard the tread of boots coming through the trees. As it was, he was almost upon me when I opened my eyes and met his, lifted from the open book he carried. I jumped up, fumbling and tugging at my bodice. Tom opened his pink mouth and howled indignantly at the interruption to his feeding.
The rector raised a hand and smiled kindly. “He is quite just to protest my intrusion. Do not discompose yourself, Anna. I’m sorry to have startled you, but I was so lost in my book, and in the loveliness of this day, that I was not aware there was anyone else in the copse.”
I was too surprised and mortified by the rector’s sudden appearance to make any civil reply to him. To my further astonishment, he did not walk on then, but sat down upon a neighboring rock and pulled off his own boots so that his feet, too, could dandle in the rills. He reached down into the clear water and cupped his hands, splashing the coolness onto his face and then running his fingers through his long, black hair. He lifted his face up to the dappled sunlight and closed his eyes.
“How easy it is to feel the goodness of God on such a day!” he whispered. “Sometimes I wonder why we shut ourselves up in churches. What can man make, after all, that evokes the Divine as a place such as this?”
I maintained my stupid silence, unable to quiet my mind to think of any answer. Tom continued to cry loudly. Mr. Mompellion looked at him, squirming in my arms, and then reached across to take him from me. Surprised, I gave him over, and then was even more surprised at the practiced way that Mr. Mompellion held him, up against his shoulder, firmly patting him on the back. Tom stopped crying almost at once and let forth a huge, wet belch. The rector laughed. “I learned from caring for my little sisters that one who is neither mother nor wet nurse must hold a babe so, upright, so that it ceases to search for the teat.” I must have looked amazed at this, for Mr. Mompellion glanced at me and laughed again. “You must not think that a minister’s life is lived entirely among lofty words spoken from high pulpits.” He inclined his head to where Jamie, downstream from us, was so engrossed in building his stick dams across the stream that he had barely raised his head to register the rector’s presence. “We all begin as naked children, playing in the mud.”
At that, he handed Tom back to me, rose, and made his way downstream toward Jamie. Halfway there, he set his foot on a moss-slicked stone. His arms fanned in crazy circles as he tried to regain his balance, and Jamie jumped up in the water, laughing with the wild, uncouth mirth of a three-year-old. I frowned and glared at Jamie, but Mr. Mompellion threw back his head and laughed along with him, splashing the few yards left between them with his hands outstretched to grab my squealing little boy and toss him high into the air. The two of them played so for a time, and then Mr. Mompellion turned back toward me and Tom and settled himself once more on the bank near us. He sighed, and closed his eyes again, his lips curved in a slight smile.
“I pity those who live in towns and do not learn to love all this—the sweet scent of wet weeds and the ordinary, daily miracles of creation. It was of these I was reading when I interrupted you. Would you like to hear some words from my text?”
I nodded, and he reached for his book. “These are the writings of Augustine of Hippo, a monk who grew great in his theology long ago on Africa’s Barbary Coast. Here he asks himself what we mean when we talk of miracles.”
I can recall only snatches of what he read. But I do remember how his voice seemed to blend with the cadences of the stream and give the words an enduring music. “Consider changes of day and night ... the fall of leaves and their return to the trees the following spring, the infinite power in seeds ... and then give me a man who sees and experiences these things for the first time, with whom we can still talk—he is amazed and overwhelmed at these miracles.”
I was sorry when he ceased reading, and would have asked him to go on, if I had not been struck silent by awe of him. For though I worked every day in his house, it was only with his wife that I had easy communication. It was not that he was harsh in manner by any means, but he often seemed so lost in large matters that he did not notice the small doings of his household. I tried my best to come and go and do my tasks without distracting him, and I can say with some pride that there were very few times that he had had cause to notice me. And so I sat there, mute and meditating, and he must have taken my distant look for vacancy or boredom, for he stood up all of a sudden and reached for his boots, saying that he had imposed upon me quite enough and must be about his business.
At that, I did find a small voice in which to thank him most sincerely for his consideration in sharing these great thoughts with me. “For it is wonderful to me that a lofty thinker such as this should have so close a communion with the ordinary things of the soil and of the seasons.”
He smiled kindly. “Mrs. Mompellion has spoken to me of your understanding. She believes it is superior, and I see it may be so.” He took his leave then and turned back toward the rectory. I lingered there with the children for a while, thinking that what was true of Augustine was true also of our minister, and what a strange thing it was to have such a man, so open and so kindly, in our pulpit.
At last, I called to Jamie and we, too, set our feet on the path for home. All along the way, Jamie kept darting off like a swallow, swooping down to pluck the blowsy, late-blooming dog roses. When we neared the cottage, he made me wait by the door while he ran on inside. “Close your eyes, Mummy,” he cried excitedly. Obediently, I waited, my face buried in my hands, wondering what game he was devising. I heard him thump up the stairs, scrambling, as he did when he was in a hurry, on all fours like a puppy. A few moments passed, and then I heard the upstairs casement creak open.
“All right, Mummy. Now! Look up!” I tilted my face and opened my eyes to find myself in a velvet rain of rose petals. The soft, sweet-scented shower brushed my cheeks. I pulled off my cap and shook out my long hair and let the petals land in its tangles. Little Tom gurgled with joy, his fat fists batting at the bright cascade of pink and creamy yellow. Jamie leaned out over the sill above me, shaking the last few petals from a corner of sheet.
“This,” I thought, smiling gratefully up at him, “this moment is my miracle.”
AND THUS WE PASSED the wondrous days of our reprieve, and I busied myself in preparation for a winter that was hard to conceive of on those heavy afternoons, when the bees buzzed into hives that brimmed with the heather-scented honey. There were apple ladders poking through the trees and tripods going up all around, waiting for a day cool enough for the hog butchering. Though we had none of our own swine, I always helped my neighbors the Hadfields in return for a portion of bacon and headcheese. Alexander Hadfield was a fastidious man who preferred cutting cloth to hacking at flesh and bone and would not soil even his second-best suit of clothes in any manner of outdoor work. So Mary’s eldest by her first husband would do the slaughter and the butchery. Jonathan Cooper was big lad like his late father and made short work of it, while his little brother Edward ran about with Jamie, finding ways to shirk the small chores we laid on them. Every time we sent them to fetch a bavin to keep the cauldron boiling, the two of them would
disappear behind the woodpile, howling with delight over some new game they’d invented. Finally, Mary left off washing the guts for the sausage casings and went to see what manner of mischief they’d devised themselves. She came back with one hand occupied in holding Edward by the ear and the other extended as far in front of her as possible, dangling something, glossy and black, tied to the end of a string. As she drew closer I could see it was a dead rat, a sorry little corpse, all wet and rheumy-eyed with a smear of bright blood about its muzzle. Behind her, Jamie walked sheepishly, dragging another such. Mary flung the one she carried into the fire, and at her prompting, Jamie reluctantly did the same.
“Can you believe it, Anna, the two of them were playing with these loathsome pests as if they were poppets. The woodpile’s full of them, seemingly. All dead, thanks be for small mercies.” Since we couldn’t halt our work, Mary called Alexander to deal with the rat fall, and the two of us shared a quiet laugh as her man, too nice to give a hand with the hog butchery, dispatched bloody rodent corpses instead. Somehow, the sight of him at his task eased our load a little bit as we toiled on, competing against the fading light to get the fat rendered and the sides salted. It was, as ever, hard and hateful work, but I kept my mind fixed on the smell of the bacon sizzling in my skimmer and thought how Jamie would enjoy it a few weeks hence.
WHEN AT LAST the skies clouded it was almost a relief. The misty rains seemed restful to the eyes, rinsing the landscape. But the damp after the heat brought fleas beyond any infestation I remember. It is an odd thing, how biting pests of all kinds will find one person flavorsome and another not to their liking at all. In my house, the fleas feasted on my tender children, leaving them covered in madding welts. I burned all our bedstraw before I went to see the Gowdies for a balm. I was half hoping to find Anys by herself again, for I longed to talk more with her, to learn how she had come to understand the world as she did. I thought that she could teach me much about how to manage alone as a woman in the world, how to embrace my state and even exalt in it, as she seemed to. She had hinted frankly enough about her many lovers, and I found myself consumed to know how she managed them, and the nature of her own feelings toward them.