Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonders

‘Mr. Viccars told me to burn his work for fear of spreading his contagion,’ I said, swallowing hard to ease the tightness in my throat.

‘You shall do no such thing!’ she exclaimed, and I foresaw in her dismay the difficulty I would have with all his clients. If Anys Gowdie, familiar as she was with the face of illness, felt so on the matter, it was unlikely any others would be persuadable. Few of us here live in ample circumstances, and none loves waste. Anyone who had placed a deposit on work from Mr. Viccars would want whatever of that work he had accomplished, and notwithstanding Mr. Mompellion’s injunction, I had no right to withhold it from them. Anys Gowdie left with her harlot’s gown folded under her arm, and as the day wore on and the news of Mr. Viccars’s death spread, as news does here, I was interrupted again and again by his clients claiming pieces of his work. All I could do was to pass on what he had said in his delirium. Not a one of them consented to having his or her garment – even were it only a pile of cut-out fabric pieces – consigned to the fire. In the end, I burned only his own clothes. And then, finally, as the coals fell and galled themselves, I at last found the will to toss the dress he had made for me into the grate, golden-green gashed by flames of bright vermillion.

It was a long walk, and all uphill, to Bradford Hall, and I was as tired as I’ve ever been as I set out that afternoon for my employment there. And yet I did not go direct, but rather headed east, towards the Gowdie cottage. I could not get Anys’s ‘George,’ or her scarlet gown, out of my mind. Generally, I am not a gossip. I care not who tumbles whom in what warm boose. And now that Mr. Viccars was dead, it hardly mattered, to me or any person, where he might have put his prick. And yet, even so, I had a month’s mind to know how matters had stood between him and Anys Gowdie, if only to take the measure of his true regard for me.

The Gowdies’ cottage was set off at the eastern edge of town, after the smithy, a lonely dwelling at the edge of the big Riley farm. It was a tiny place, just one room propped upon another, so ill-built that the thatch sat rakishly atop the whole like a cap pulled crooked across a brow. The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes astringent, the scents of herbal brews and cordials wafted powerfully from the precincts of the little home. Inside, the tiny room had a low-beamed ceiling. The light was always dim, to protect the virtue of the drying plants. At this time of year, when the Gowdies were cutting their summer herbs, the bunches hung from the beams in such profusion that you had to bend almost double when you entered the door. Always when I visited, I wondered that tall Anys contrived to live in such a place, for surely she could not stand upright. The Gowdies always had a fire going for the making of their draughts, and since the flue of the ancient chimney drew poorly, the air was smoky and the walls black with soot. Still, at least the smoke was sweet-scented, for the Gowdies always burned rosemary, which they said purified the air of any sickness that ailing villagers might unwittingly carry when coming there for help.

There was no answer when I knocked upon the door, so I walked round to the stone wall that sheltered the Gowdies’ physick garden. The garden had been part of our village for as long as I could remember. I had always assumed that Mem planted it, but once, when I had said something about that to Anys, she had mocked me for my 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.’