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.
‘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