The year is 1665, and in the lead-mining district northwest of London, Anna Frith is widowed at 18 by a cave-in in her husband’s lead mine. Income from a small flock of sheep and a part-time job at the village rectory barely enable her to care for her two small children,. so she gladly rents her attic room to the journeyman tailor who has come from London to work next door.
Soon, however, her renter becomes ill and dies a terrible death. Apparently plague has come in the fabrics he has brought with him. The illness gradually spreads through the village, taking even the lives of Anna’s children. The rector gives spiritual counsel, while his wife, along with Anna, and the local herbalist, suspected by some of being a witch, nurses the sick. As plague ravages the town, the rector convinces the people to quarantine themselves to protect the spread to other towns. Thus the “year of wonders.”
With the village isolated and the population being decimated, an unlikely friendship grows between Anna and the gentleborn wife of the rector. Together they visit the sick, brew medicines from herbs left in the “witch’s” cottage after her untimely death, share secrets of their hearts, and even mine lead together to keep a surviving child’s mine from being “nicked”—and lost.
As the plague finally abates with the coming of spring, the fears, tensions and suspicions of the townspeople reach a climax, with results almost more devastating than the plague.
Brooks’ first novel—she was already an acclaimed non-fiction writer—grows from a real 17th century village that quarantined itself, and introduces us to the inconceivable poverty, the rigid class barriers, the superstitious prejudices that framed those lives.
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