Year of Wonders. Geraldine Brooks

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.’

      We entered the cottage, and she set the bunch of roots upon a crowded workbench and washed her hands in a bucket. ‘Be kind enough to sit, Anna Frith,’ she said, ‘for I must needs sit, too, or crick my neck standing here.’ She shooed a grey gib-cat off a rickety chair and pulled up a stool for herself. I was grateful to have found Anys alone. I would have been pressed to account for my visit had it been old Mem working solitary in the garden, and I would have been ill-set to raise the matter on my mind if her aunt were sitting at our elbow. As it was, I hardly knew how to begin upon such a delicate subject. Although we were of an age, Anys and I had not grown up together. She had been raised in a village closer to the Dark Peak, and had been sent to her aunt when her mother died untimely. She had been about ten years old. I remember the day she arrived, sitting straight and tall in an open cart while all the village came out to peer at her. I remember it so vividly because she returned every stare and never flinched from the pointed fingers. I was a shy child then, and I remember thinking that if I had been her, I would have been hiding under the burlaps, wailing my heart out.

      She handed me a glass of strong-smelling brew and poured herself one, also. I inspected the contents of my cup. It was an unappealing shade of pale green, with an even paler froth atop it. ‘Nettle beer. It will strengthen your blood,’ Anys said. ‘All women should drink it daily.’

      As I lifted the cup, I remembered, with embarrassment, how as a child I had joined with others to mock Anys Gowdie, who would stop by the path or in the midst of a field and pluck fresh leaves, then eat them where she stood. It shamed me to recall how we had taunted her, crying out, ‘Cow! Cow! Grass-eater!’ Anys had only laughed and looked us over, one by one. ‘At least my nose isn’t stuffed with snot, like yours, Meg Bailey. And my skin isn’t bubbling with blebs, like yours, Geoffry Bain.’ And she listed all our defects to us, standing there taller than any other child her age and glowing with good health, all the way from the top of her glossy head to the tips of her fine, strong fingernails. Not so very much later, when I was first with child, I had gone to her, humbled, and asked her to guide me in what greens I could gather and eat to strengthen myself and the babe I carried. It had been an odd thing, at first, the taste of such stuff, but I had soon felt the benefit of it.

      The nettle beer, however, was new to me. The flavour, as I sipped, was mild and not unpleasant, while the effect on my tired body was refreshing. I held the cup to my lips longer than I needed, so as to postpone launching myself upon my awkward subject. I need not have troubled. ‘And so I suppose you need to know whether I lay with George,’ Anys declared, in the same uninflected tone that might have said, ‘And so I suppose you need some yarrow leaves.’ The cup trembled in my hand, and the green stuff sloshed onto the swept-earth floor. Anys gave a short laugh. ‘Of course I did. He was too young and handsome to have to slake his fires with his fist.’ I hardly know how I looked at that, but Anys’s eyes as she regarded me were lit with amusement. ‘Drink up. You’ll feel better. It was naught more to either of us than a meal to a hungry traveller.’

      She leaned forwards to stir some leaves steeping in a big black kettle near the fire. ‘His intentions to you were otherwise. If that’s what’s worrying you, set your mind easy. He wanted you to wife, Anna Frith, and I told him he’d do well with you, if he could talk you round to it. For I see that you’ve changed somewhat since Sam Frith passed. I think you like to go and come without a man’s say-so. I told him your boys were his best chance to win you. For, unlike me, you have them to look to, so you can never live just for yourself.’

      I tried to imagine the two of them lying together discussing such things. ‘But why,’ I blurted, ‘if you were on such terms, did you not marry him yourself?’

      ‘Oh, Anna, Anna!’ She shook her head at me and smiled as one does at a slow-witted child. I felt my colour rise. I was confounded as to what I had said that had amused her so. She must have sensed my vexation, for she stopped smiling, took the cup from my hand, and looked at me with seriousness.

      ‘Why would I marry? I’m not made to be any man’s chattel. I have my work, which I love. I have my home – it is not much, I grant, yet sufficient for my shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it. And besides,’ she said, shooting me a sly sideways glance from under her long lashes, ‘sometimes a woman needs a draught of nettle beer to wake her up, and sometimes she needs a dish of valerian tea to calm her down. Why cultivate a garden with only one plant in it?’

      I smiled hesitantly, as if to show that I could see the jest, for it fell into my heart that I wanted her good opinion and would not have her think me a dim and simple girl. She rose then to be about her work, and so I left her, more confused than when I’d arrived. She was a rare creature, Anys Gowdie, and I had to own that I admired her for listening to her own heart rather than having her life ruled by others’ conventions. I, meanwhile, was on my way to be ruled for the afternoon by people I loathed. I trudged on towards Bradford Hall, passing through the edge of the Riley woods. The sun was bright that day, and strong shadows from the trees fell in bands across the path. Dark and light, dark and light, dark and light. That was how I had been taught to view the world. The Puritans who had ministered to us here had held that all actions and thoughts could be only one of two natures: godly and right, or Satanic and evil. But Anys Gowdie confounded such thinking. There was no doubt that she did good: in many ways, the well-being of our village rested more on her works, and those of her aunt, than on the works of the rectory’s occupant. And yet her fornication and her blasphemy branded her a sinner in the reckoning of our religion.

      I was still puzzling over this as I reached the wood’s abrupt edge and began skirting the golden fields of the Riley farm. They had been all day scything there – twenty men for twenty acres. The Hancocks, who farmed the Riley land, had six strong sons of their own and so needed far less help than others at their harvest. Mrs. Hancock and her daughters-in-law wearily followed behind their husbands, tying up the last of the loose stalks into sheaves burnished by the sunlight. I saw them that afternoon through Anys’s eyes: shackled to their menfolk as surely as the plough-horse to the shares.

      Lib Hancock, the eldest brother’s wife, had been a friend to me since childhood, and as she straightened for a moment to ease her back, she raised a hand to shade her eyes and perceived that it was I, walking at the field’s edge. She waved to me, then turned for a word to her mother-in-law before leaving her work and crossing the field towards me.

      ‘Sit with me for a short while, Anna!’ she called. ‘For I am in need of a rest.’

      I was in no hurry to get to the Bradfords’, so I walked