Year of Wonders

In the haste of their departure, the Bradfords fire all their servants, who are now left without a home. The cook, Maggie, begs Anna for help packing her belongings. Mr. Mompellion arrives on his horse Anteros and implores Colonel Bradford to reconsider. Bradford is unmoved and claims that his family's health is more important than the well-being of the villagers. The men argue vehemently. Mr. Mompellion proclaims that God will harshly judge him for his lack of care for his fellow man.

Anna helps all their servants find lodging, and Maggie and Brand, another servant, are the last to flee the village to return to their hometown of Bakewell, hoping their families will take them in. Anna thinks the quarantine will be an easy adjustment since she rarely leaves the town, but she feels an eerie sense of confinement as she walks to the Boundary Stone. Mr. Mompellion oversees the creation of the cart that will deliver their supplies, and they watch as the first delivery comes and then the empty cart departs.

Elinor tells Anna that Randoll Daniel’s wife is in labor, and since Mem and Anys are gone, they must help her with the birth. Anna suggests Mrs. Hancock help since she has birthed seven children, but Elinor reminds her that her sons are ill and they can’t risk spreading the plague to the Daniels. Anna has traumatic memories of her mother dying in childbirth with her baby sister after a barber-surgeon tried to deliver the crosswise baby with a thatcher’s hook. Elinor implores Anna to use her successful birth knowledge to help Mary Daniel. Elinor brings poppy to ease Mary’s pain, but Anna tells her that she must remain alert during labor. Anna examines Mary and finds that the baby is crosswise.

After unsuccessfully trying to turn the baby by encouraging Mary to walk, Anna realizes she must deliver it as it is. As she works, Anna hears Mem’s words, and along with her intuition and knowledge she learned from Mem, she successfully delivers the baby. The birth temporarily fills Anna with joy, but once she realizes she must return to her empty home, she steals the poppy Elinor brought for Mary.

Brand returns to Eyam pushing Maggie Cantwell in a cart. When the people of the neighboring town realized that she was from Eyam, they threw rotten fruit at her until Brand came to her rescue. Maggie collapsed, having lost the use of her legs, and Brand stole a cart to ferry her out of the town to safety. Anna examines Maggie’s face, which is drooping—a sign of a stroke. Brand worries that he did wrong by stealing the cart, but Mr. Mompellion hails him as the first hero of the pandemic. Jakob Merrill agrees to house Brand until he can find other lodgings, and Anna offers to keep Maggie at her cottage, cursing the Bradfords for causing this pain.

Anna goes to the local tavern to borrow their cart to transport Maggie to her cottage. Her father is there and drunkenly says that the rector should know that beer is better for the soul than prayer and reading the scriptures. Anna responds with a Bible verse. Angered by what he perceives as Anna’s flaunting of her education to humiliate him, Joss forces her to kneel in front of him and asks for “branks” or a muzzle, which prevents speech. This triggers a flashback in Anna’s memory of when her father forced her mother into branks, and the torturous device cut her tongue so severely that she couldn’t speak for days.

Anna’s father abused her, but Aphra never stood up for her and only implored Joss not to beat her in the face so as not to ruin her chances at marriage. When Anna told Sam about her father’s abuse, he walked to their home and punched Joss in the face. Bowing before her father, Anna says, “Fear had made my body betray me, just as when I was a child” (132), and she loses control of her bladder. She apologizes to her father and races home in shame to clean herself. By the time Anna returns to Maggie’s bedside, she has suffered another stroke and dies that night. Anna wonders why God allows evil beings like her father to live while taking the life of someone as kind and talented as Maggie.

Anna first experienced the power of poppy when Sam injured his ankle in the mine, and Mem dosed him heavily before setting the broken bones. Sam reported having blissful dreams under its influence. Anna now weighs the cost of sampling the drug herself and compares it to the Fall of humanity. Anna takes a small dose of the poppy and drifts off into a blissful sleep, where she has pleasant, hallucinogenic dreams about her children.

The next day, the effect of the dram quickly diminishes as Anna moves about the village, helping the newest victims of the plague. Sally Maston is dead, and her young daughter, infant, and husband are now ill. Anna prepares Sally’s body for burial, and when the sexton comes, he is so exhausted from his unending work that she bids him rest until Sally’s husband expires, so he must only make one trip to that house for the day. Anna tenderly cares for the Maston children until Mrs. Mompellion relieves her so she can visit Lib, who is near death. Anna hopes to repair the rift in their friendship wrought on the night of Anys’s death, but when she arrives, Lib is too far gone even to speak. A fierce snowstorm blows outside, and the Maston children both die before the end of the day. Anna returns to her cottage and takes more opium to blunt her sadness.

Anna awakens the following day after another night of blissful rest and beautiful dreams, but realizing she is now out of poppy, she journeys to the Gowdies’ cottage, hoping to find more. On the way, she notices that the forge fires are dead and finds Kate Talbot, the pregnant wife of the blacksmith Richard, struggling to tend to her husband. He burned his plague sore with a hot iron, hoping to burn out the infection, but now the sore is infected. Kate purchases a charm from a charlatan and claims that the ghost of Mem left it for her, but Anna admonishes her not to place her hope in such foolishness. Anna helps tend to the household chores while Kate rests and then moves on to the Gowdies’.

When Anna enters the cottage, she first thinks she sees the ghost of Anys, but instead, Elinor Mompellion is taking inventory of the herbs and plants in hopes of finding something to help them battle the plague. Elinor knows Anna stole the poppy and confides that she once had an addiction to it. She reminds Anna that they learned about poppy when they read about it in their Greek studies. Elinor says, “The Greeks called them the Poppies of Lethe […] Lethe—the Greeks’ river of forgetfulness” (146). Elinor empathizes with Anna’s desire to forget her pain, but she reminds her that the poppy will make her forget everything, and she doesn’t want her to forget her children. Elinor asks Anna to join her as her equal in caring for the people of Eyam, but first, she says she must tell Anna the truth about her past.

Elinor was the only daughter of a wealthy man from Derbyshire who spoiled her but failed to teach her about the world's ways. When she was 14, Elinor fell in love with her 20-year-old neighbor Charles, who wooed her with presents and false promises. Her father deemed him ill-suited as a match for Elinor, but with her nurse's aid, Elinor ran away to London with Charles to elope. The two became lovers, and Elinor confesses that though he did pressure her to have sex before marriage, she was blinded by her lust. Two weeks after arriving in London, Charles abandoned Elinor, and she returned home in shame. She realized that she was pregnant and gave herself an abortion with a fire iron. Her father summoned a doctor to save her life, but he couldn’t save her mangled womb.

Elinor became addicted to the poppy the doctor gave her for her pain, and she says that she might have succumbed to it had she not met Michael Mompellion. Michael was the son of a lower-class family, and his father was killed in the English Civil War fighting for the Parliamentarians. Michael came to work at Elinor’s estate to support his family and quickly became close with Elinor’s father, who gave him the run of the farm and paid for him to attend Cambridge. After Michael returned from college, he often took Elinor on visits to the farm tenants, and the pair became close friends. He did not judge her for her past sin but instructed her on God’s grace and mercy. Elinor explains that despite her high-born status, it was Michael who lowered himself in marrying her since she was considered a “ruined” woman and couldn’t give him children.

Elinor’s story moves Anna, and she agrees to be her partner in helping the townsfolk. They spend the remainder of the day researching and cataloging potential treatments for the plague. One text by a Muslim doctor named Avicenna proves most helpful, and they land on using nettle to strengthen the blood, saltwort for healthy lungs, and silverweed to ease a fever along with cress, worts of blow-ball, bat-weed, and vervain for other symptoms.

Elinor has created a detailed map showing how the illness spread and listing the victims. She has noticed that the plague takes the young people and that most elder townsfolk haven’t gotten ill. Elinor believes that their best defense is to bolster the health of the youth so they might be more robust in fighting the disease. Anna finds more poppy seeds but burns them in the fire, pledging to give her all to fight the plague. However, she knows where the Gowdies planted the poppy and can harvest more in spring if needed.

Attending to the sick and dying causes Michael Mompellion to decline physically and emotionally. The sexton dies from a heart attack, and Michael takes over digging all the graves for the victims. Anna and Michael visit Jakob Merrill on his deathbed, and Jakob confesses to Michael that he fears death because he was unkind to his wife, Maudie, before she died in childbirth. He also fears what will happen to his children now that both their parents are gone. Michael prays with him and assures him that Maudie gained many rewards in paradise for her suffering on earth, and he encourages Jakob to give all his land and possessions to the children and Brand, who will care for them like an older brother. As Michael draws up the will, Anna notices that he makes several mistakes in his exhausted state.

Anna visits her father and Aphra and notices their children appear underfed. She strikes a deal with her father to give him two of her lambs if he will help dig the graves in the rectory. Anna hopes her plan will aid Michael and provide food for her younger stepsiblings. The Earl of Chatsworth from the neighboring village honors his commitment and sends the daily ration of goods to the Boundary Stone they now call “Mompellion’s Well” (164). However, the Bradfords have sent no financial support or even words of sympathy.

Christmas comes, but no one in the village notices, and Anna barely sleeps for months between attending to the sick and midwifery. The rest of her time is spent with Elinor making teas, tinctures, and salves from the medicinal plants. Anna is hopeful they will see an improvement in the death toll, but she sees many empty pews in church on Sunday.

Mr. Stanley and other Puritans now attend church regularly, and Anna wonders at the solidarity from people they once saw as outsiders. Mr. Mompellion delivers a somber message telling the parishioners that the onset of warmer weather may worsen the plague before it diminishes. He sadly declares that they must forgo meeting inside and instead meet safely in Cucklett Delf to distance themselves from one another. Additionally, he decrees that each household must bury their dead, since the churchyard is full. People shout in dispute since they harbor superstitions that if a family member isn’t buried in the churchyard, they can’t be reunited with their loved ones in eternity.

Mr. Mompellion collapses in exhaustion, and as Brand and others attend to him, Mr. Stanley addresses the church, rebuking their disdain and reminding them that God can find people no matter where they are buried. He leads them in reciting Psalm 88, a plea to God to help in times of desperate trouble. Mr. Mompellion repeats with them as they carry him out of the room: “I am reckoned among those that go down to the Pit…” (169) before he falls asleep.

Anna and Elinor turn their attention to an orphaned Quaker child named Merry Wickford. Before dying of the plague, Merry’s father, George, found a profitable mine near their home. The law and tradition of the town state that a man can stake a claim on a seam only if he can continue to prove its salability by regularly bringing out a “dish” of ore. Anna is familiar with the tradition because they lost their claim on his mine after Sam's death. David Burton has laid claim to Wickford’s seam, and Anna and Elinor feel it is unfair that Merry will lose her livelihood because the plague robbed her of all her family. They explain to Merry that they intend to help her extract the required dish of ore to solidify her claim. With Merry guiding them and Anna carrying Sam’s old tools, they descend into the cramped mine. Anna feels a rising dread as she remembers how Sam met his end.

After hours of exhausting work, they realize they will never make their deadline. Anna suggests using “fire-setting” to loosen the stones by setting a fire in the cracks and pouring water on them. It’s a dangerous tactic and one that caused the mine collapse that killed Sam, but Elinor says they must try. Anna sets the fire, forcing Elinor to stay above in case of a collapse. The tactic is successful, and the ore comes raining down. Still, it pins Anna to the ground, and she resolves that she will die, just like Sam. Elinor and Merry pull Anna from the rubble and march directly to the Miner’s tavern to present the dish to the Barmester David Burton. At first, the men stare at the women strangely, but seeing what they have accomplished, Burton declares, “A cheer for the new miners!” (186).

Mr. Mompellion arrives, sees Elinor covered in soot and mud, and embraces her. Anna relates that of all the horrors of the plague, her success in the mine is one of her most significant accomplishments.