Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonders

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 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 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 labour, 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 Colours – 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 travelling under the soft fabric, skilled hands on fragrant skin, upward and slowly upward…Within seconds, I was flushed as scarlet as that damnable dress.