We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village full of sinners or a host of saints. She comes to understand that the Plague is a chance event, and the power to overcome its ravaging effects lies with the villagers, not with God.įor if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. Yet this loss of faith releases her from the constraints of beliefs about wrath, sin and punishment. Her faith eventually unravels and becomes ‘shot-shredded’. The horror and inevitability of it is contrasted with the fragile hopes of those clinging to survival.Īnna is a sensitively drawn character who loves ‘high language’. The pustules, ‘shiny, yellow-purple’ knobs ‘of pulsing flesh’ erupt next. This is followed by a blotched flush beneath the skin resembling the bloom of rose petals. The onset of disease begins with the smell of rotting apples (the sign that the internal organs are collapsing). Brooks uses her journalistic training to scrutinise events as they unfold. Bizarre and superstitious beliefs abound, people are murdered. As the death toll mounts, the novel reveals the best and the worst aspects of humanity. The women pull together doing all that they can, even brewing up herbal remedies and delivering babies. As people start to sicken, Anna joins Mompellion and his wife to tend to the living, dying and the dead, and quell some of the villagers’ rising hysteria. She is taken under the wing of Elinor, Mompellion’s wife and becomes a loyal, fast learning protégée. He was a charismatic man who persuaded the villagers to make the heartbreaking commitment to prevent the infection from spreading by voluntarily quarantining themselves in Eyam.Īnna, a recently widowed mother of two, is a resourceful woman with a strong spirit. The story is seen through the eyes of Anna Frith, a housemaid who works for the minister Mompellion (Mompesson in real life). One woman buried six of her children and her husband in the space of eight days. Whole families were wiped out, or – what seems even crueller – just one or two people from some families were spared. Over the next fourteen months, 260 people, about four-fifths of the population of this small community of hill farmers and lead miners in the heart of Derbyshire’s Peak District, succumbed to the plague. Noticing it was damp, a tailor’s assistant dried it by the hearth, inadvertently releasing the fleas that had come from infected rats. In 1665 contagion was carried to the village of Eyam in a bale of cloth from London. This was to be the last virulent outbreak of the Black Death in Britain.
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