Year of Wonders. Geraldine Brooks

by the hearth, making towers from the bavins and thus strewing bits of broken kindling everywhere. Mr. Viccars’s sewing corner was as I’d left it that morning, with the threads and patterns piled neat and untouched from the night before. The eggs I’d left for him lay still in their whisket. Tom, seeing me, squirmed in Jane Martin’s arms and opened his wide, gummy mouth like a baby bird. I reached for him and set him to nurse before I enquired about Mr. Viccars.

      ‘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 racked 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 incomprehension, 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, towards 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 Viccars’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 labouring 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