This fascinating historical novel is based on a true story. It takes place in the mid seventeenth century in a small British village that succumbs to the plague. It's told through the eyes of a young widow, Anna Frith, whose two sons die from the plague in as sorrowful a recounting as I would ever wish to read. The author effectively, with rigorous attention to detail, captures what it must have been like. Anna works as a maid for Vicar Michael Mompellion and his gentle, selfless wife, Elinor, who has taught her to read.The rector proclaims the plague to be a scourge sent by God, and the village voluntarily agrees to seal itself off from the rest of the world. The deaths begin to mount, and superstition and mob psychology seek vengeance on those they have decided are witches or guilty of devil worship. There is a horrifying scene, worthy of an Ashcroft creation, when the drunken townfolk decide that a local herbalist is a witch and they put her to trial by ordeal. They throw her into a deep well, bound hand and foot, only to be terrified that that might have murdered her when they watch her sink (in the classic water trial by ordeal, if the accused sank and drowned, he/she was considered innocent, i.e., accepted by God; if one floated, the accused was adjudged guilty, i.e. rejected by God, and then hanged or burned. It was the classic no-win situation for the accused.)
Anna suffers from a twentieth-century kind of existential angst, but the reader remains riveted to the story, haunted by the flawed and despairing humans trying to deal with a terrifying and inexplicable disease.
