Year of Wonders. Geraldine Brooks

wife will be like a fruitful vine

      Within your house; Your children will be like olive shoots Around your table…’

      He raised his eyes and glared at me. Then slowly, deliberately, he opened his hand. The book slipped from his fingers. Instinctively, I leapt forward to catch it, but he grabbed my arm, and the Bible hit the floor with a dull thump.

      We stood there, face-to-face, his hand tightening on my forearm until I thought he might break it. ‘Rector,’ I said, struggling to control my voice. At that, he dropped my arm as if it were a burning brand and raked his hand through his hair. The pressure of his grip had left a welt, throbbing. I could feel the tears welling in my eyes, and I turned away so that he would not see them. I did not ask his leave to go.

Spring, 1665

       Ring of Roses

      The winter that followed Sam’s death in the mine was the hardest season I had ever known. So, in the following spring, when George Viccars came banging on my door looking for lodging, I thought God had sent him. Later, there were those who would say it had been the Devil.

      Little Jamie came running to tell me, all flushed and excited, tripping over his feet and his words. ‘There a man, mummy. There a man at the door.’

      George Viccars swept his hat from his head as I came from the garth, and he kept his gaze down on the floor, respectfully. Different from all those men who look you over like a beef at saleyard. When you’re a widow at eighteen, you grow used to those looks and hard towards the men who give them.

      ‘If you please, Mistress Frith, they told me at the rectory you might have a room to let.’

      He was a journeyman tailor, he said, and his own good, plain clothes told that he was a competent one. He was clean and neat even though he’d been on the road all the long way from Canterbury, and I suppose that impressed me. He had just secured a post with my neighbour, Alexander Hadfield, who presently had a surfeit of orders to fill. He seemed a modest man, and quiet-spoken, although when he told me he was prepared to pay sixpence a week for the attic space in my eaves, I’d have taken him if he was loud as a drunkard and muddy as a sow. I sorely missed the income from Sam’s mine, for I was still nursing Tom, and my small earnings from the flock were only a little augmented by my mornings’ work at the rectory and occasional service at the Hall, when they needed extra hands. Mr. Viccars’s sixpence would mean a lot in our cottage. But by the end of the week, it was me who was ready to pay him. George Viccars brought laughter back into the house. And later, when I could think at all, I was glad that I could think about those days in the spring and the summer when Jamie was laughing.

      The young Martin girl minded the baby and Jamie for me while I worked. She was a decent girl and watchful with the children but Puritan in her ways, thinking that laughter and fun are ungodly. Jamie misliked her sternness and was always so glad when he’d see me coming home that he’d rush to the door and grab me around the knees. But the day after Mr. Viccars arrived, Jamie wasn’t at the door. I could hear his high little laugh coming from the hearth, and I remember wondering what had come over Jane Martin that she’d actually brought herself to play with him. When I got to the door, Jane was stirring the soup with her usual thin-lipped glare. It was Mr. Viccars who was on the floor, on all fours, with Jamie on his back, riding around the room, squealing with delight.

      ‘Jamie! Get off poor Mr. Viccars!’ I exclaimed. But Mr. Viccars just laughed, threw back his blond head, and neighed. ‘I’m his horse, Mrs. Frith, if you’ve no objection. He’s a very fine rider, and he rarely beats me with the whip.’ The day after that, I came home and found Jamie decked out like a Harlequin in all the fabric scraps from Mr. Viccars’s whisket. And the day after, the two of them were at work slinging oat sacks from the chairs to make a hiding house.

      I tried to let George Viccars know how much I valued his kindness, but he brushed my thanks away. ‘Ah, he’s a fine little boy. His father must have been more than proud of him.’ So I tried to repay him by making a better table than we might otherwise have had, and his praise for my cooking was generous. The neighbour towns at that time had no tailor, so Mr. Hadfield had work to spare for his new assistant. Mr. Viccars would sew long into the evening, burning down a whole rushlight as he sat late by the fire plying his needle. Sometimes, when I was not too tired, I would set myself some chore near the hearth to keep him company awhile, and he would reward me with many tales of the places he’d sojourned. He had seen much for a young man, and his powers of description were good. Like most in this village, I had no occasion to travel farther than the market town seven miles distant. Our closest city, Chesterfield, lies twice as far, and I never had cause to journey there. Mr. Viccars knew the great cities of London and York, the bustling port life of Plymouth, and the everchanging pilgrim trade at Canterbury. I was pleased to hear his stories of these places and the manner of life of the people biding there.

      These were a kind of evening I’d never had with Sam, who looked to me for all his information of the tiny world for which he cared. He liked to hear only of the villagers he’d known since childhood, the small doings that defined their days. And so I gave him such news as the arrival of Martin Highfield’s new bull calf and the expectation of Widow Hamilton for her wool-clip. He was content just to sit, exhausted, his big frame spilling from the chair that seemed so small when he was in it. I would prattle of what I’d heard of the villagers and the children’s doings and he would let the words wash over him, gazing at me with a half smile no matter what I said. When I ran out of talk, his smile would widen and he’d reach for me. His hands were big, cracked things with broken, blackened nails, and his idea of lovemaking was a swift and sweaty tumble, a spasm and then sleep. Afterward, I would lie awake under the weight of his arm and try to imagine the dim recesses of his mind. Sam’s world was a dark, damp maze of rakes and scrins thirty feet under the ground. He knew how to crack limestone with water and with fire; he knew the going rate for a dish of lead; he knew whose seams were likely to be Old Man before the year turned, and who had nicked whose claim up along the Edge. Inasmuch as he knew what love meant, he knew he loved me, and all the more so when I gave him the boys. His whole life was confined by these things.

      Mr. Viccars seemed never to have been confined at all. When he entered our cottage, he brought the wide world with him. He had been born a Peakrill lad in a village near to Kinder Scout but had been sent off to Plymouth to take up tailoring, and in that port town had seen silk traders who traversed the Orient and had befriended lace makers even from among our enemies the Dutch. He could tell such tales: of Barbary seamen who wrapped their copper-coloured faces in turbans of rich indigo; of a Musalman merchant who kept four wives all veiled so that each moved about with just one eye peeking from her shroud. He had gone to London at the end of his apprenticeship, for the return and restoration of King Charles II had created prosperity among all manner of trades. There, he had enjoyed much work sewing liveries for courtiers’ servants. But the city had tired him.

      ‘London is for the very young and the very rich,’ he said. ‘Others cannot long thrive there.’ I smiled and said that since he had yet to pass his middle twenties he seemed young enough to me to be able to dodge footpads and withstand late nights in alehouses.

      ‘Maybe so, Mistress,’ he replied. ‘But I grew tired of seeing no farther than the blackened wall at the opposite side of the street and hearing nothing but the racket of carriage wheels. I longed for space and for good air. You cannot believe that what men breathe in London really is air at all, for the coal fires send soot and sulphur everywhere, fouling the water and turning even the palaces into grimy, black hulks. The city is like a corpulent man trying to fit himself into the jerkin he wore as a boy. So many have moved there looking for work that souls are heaped up to live ten and twelve to a room no larger than the one we sit in. Poor souls have tried to add on to their dwellings and garner space as they can, so that misshapen parts of buildings lean out across the alleyways and teeter high atop decaying roofs that you wonder can hold the weight. The gutters and spouts are fixed on any how, so that even long after