Year of Wonders: Part 2: The Poppies of Lethe Summary & Analysis

Anna reflects on the prospect of slipping into sin, saying that the famous “Fall” of Adam and Eve must have begun with one wrong step, like falling down a hill. She is worried about her own actions; after stealing the vial of poppy oil, she felt remorse and meant to return it, but instead succumbed to the temptation to try a dose and forget her griefs. She has pleasant, hallucinatory dreams in which she sees her children playing, and when she wakes up her mind feels numb and serene.

Leaving her house for the day, Anna sees a neighbor’s child, Sally Maston, standing in the doorway and obviously stricken with the plague. When Anna enters the house, she finds that Sally’s mother is long dead and her father is delirious. It turns out that many whole families have become sick in one day, and Anna and Elinor travel between houses nursing them,  while Mompellion performs rites over the dead. One of the afflicted is Anna’s friend Lib, to whom she hasn’t spoken since Lib was involved in Anys’ murder. Anna hurries to her house, hoping to reconcile, but Lib dies before she arrives. By nightfall, Sally Maston, her parents, and her baby sister have all died.

That night, instead of doing her chores or making dinner, Anna drinks the rest of the poppy oil and spends the night in blissful oblivion. When she wakes up, she feels unusually well-rested, but she realizes she has no more poppy left and no means of securing more. She decides to visit the Gowdies’ abandoned cottage to see if she can find some poppy herb.

On her way, Anna passes untended farm fields whose owners have fallen to the plague. All the village harvest customs have been disrupted by the plague – the church bells are supposed to ring for three weeks before farmers bring the harvest in, but now the bells only ring to announce deaths. Anna notices that the blacksmith’s forge, which should be pouring out smoke, is cold and silent; when she goes into the blacksmith’s cottage, which smells of rotten apples, she finds Kate Talbot, heavily pregnant, nursing her husband, Richard. Richard has demanded that she cauterize his plague sores with a burning iron, but now the wound has become infected, and Anna sees immediately that he will die of “rot” if not of the plague.

Anna begins to clean the cottage and haul wood for a fire. She discovers that Kate has laid a strange charm, a piece of paper reading “Abracadabra,” over Richard’s wound. She scolds Kate for believing in such “follies,” which were seen as signs of witchcraft and consorting with demonic forces. Kate says that since prayers to God are of no avail, she had no choice but to appeal to the Devil. She reveals that she has bought the charm from a mysterious entity she believes to be the ghost of Anys Gowdie. Anna is unconvinced, telling Kate that it’s probably a hoax perpetrated by some greedy villager.

Anna proceeds through snow drifts to the Gowdie cottage. She sees the silhouette of a person by the fire and, notwithstanding her disdain of superstition, instantly believes it’s the ghost of Anys Gowdie, until the figure lights a match and reveals herself as Elinor. Anna wonders how she will justify her visit to the cottage, but Elinor assumes that they both had the same idea, to search the cottage for any clues as to what herbs and remedies might be helpful in fighting the plague. She eagerly enlists Anna’s help in sorting and naming the plants, and Anna feels ashamed for seeking out drugs for herself while Elinor is so committed to tending to others.

Elinor insists that, since they are working together as equals, Anna call her by her Christian name, rather than addressing her formally as Mrs. Mompellion. Moreover, she knows why Anna came to the cottage, having noticed that the poppy was missing. She doesn’t scold Anna but points out that while opiates like poppy give the relief of numbness, they will eventually make Anna forget the memories of her children which are now all she has left of them.

Elinor goes on to confess that she herself was once addicted to poppy. She began using the poppy during a painful episode during her adolescence, when she became pregnant out of wedlock. She says that while she hates to relive those memories, because she and Anna are undertaking an important and dangerous role of doctors, she wants Anna to truly “know” her.

Elinor grew up the beloved child of a rich widower in Derbyshire, sheltered from any knowledge of the world by her protective father and older brother. When she was fourteen, her twenty-year-old neighbor, Charles, began courting her, and although her father disapproved of the man’s character and believed Elinor too young for romance, Elinor continued the relationship clandestinely and eventually eloped with her suitor.

The lovers went to London, where it was possible to marry without parental consent. However, Charles kept putting off the wedding and even convinced Elinor to sleep with him, although premarital sex was a grave sin, especially for women. Eventually, Elinor realized that he never planned to marry her at all; but she was so infatuated she didn’t care, until one day he abandoned her.

Elinor’s father and brother loved her despite her transgressions and rescued her as soon as she wrote to him. But when she arrived home, she found she was with child and, in desperation to hide her shame and put an end to an episode that had been so painful, she performed an abortion with a fire iron that almost killed her. Thanks to the care of a good physician, she survived, but her womb is “a mass of scars” and she will never be able to have children.

The doctors medicated Elinor with poppy, first to relieve her pain and then to numb her emotional distress. Elinor was entranced by the “empty dreams” of the poppy and says she might be addicted today if she hadn’t met Michael Mompellion.

Elinor goes on to explain Mompellion’s backstory, which is also much different than Anna imagined it. Rather than being the son of a well-off family of clergy, Mompellion was the son of a lowly curate who became involved in the English Civil War, fighting on behalf of the Parliamentarians. During the second phase of the war, when the Cavaliers were winning, he was killed. Even though he was still a child, to support his family Michael began working for the steward at Elinor’s family estate. He grew up learning to farm, care for horses, and run a large aristocratic estate. Due to his intelligence, Elinor’s father took an interest in him and sent him to school and eventually to Cambridge.

When Mompellion returned from Cambridge he befriended the fragile Elinor, recovering from her encounter with unrequited love and her disastrous pregnancy. He took her to visit her tenants’ cottages, teaching her about the struggles and complexities of common life. He also instructed her spiritually, teaching her that it’s useless to regret the sins of the past and that God allows even the greatest sinners to atone for their deeds. When Mompellion became a priest, they married. It was an unusually unequal match, given Elinor’s higher social and economic position. However, given the stains on her sexual purity and her inability to have children, Elinor believes it is Mompellion who has “stooped” to marry her.

Anna reflects on how little she knew about Elinor and Mompellion before this. Although she thought she had insight into their characters, many of her judgments were based on assumptions about their class and social status. Now, she understands the origins of Mompellion’s egalitarianism and Elinor’s refusal to judge others.

Elinor explains her ideas about how best to combat the plague. On a map of Eyam, she marks out the names and dwellings of everyone who has died of the plague. The map makes it clear that contagion spread like a “starburst” from Anna’s cottage, where the infected cloth was stored, outward to surrounding houses. Elinor points out that the plague affects children more than adults or old people, and surmises that old people survive because they are “veterans…in the war against disease” – in other words, they have developed immunity over a lifetime of exposure to illness. Accordingly, instead of trying to cure the sick, which as proved impossible (only one person, Margaret Blackwell, has survived), they must try to strengthen the children enough to prevent them from catching the plague.

Anna and Elinor spend the day sorting through the Gowdies’ herbs, trying to match them to descriptions in medical books from the rectory. They rely on a text by Avicenna, a famous Muslim doctor and philosopher. They assemble an arsenal of herbs: nettle for strong blood, starwort to help longs, silverweed to cool a fever.

Before leaving the cottage, Elinor hands Anna the small supply of poppy herbs and asks what should be done with them. Anna argues weakly that they might be useful to soothe pain in the dying, but Elinor points  out that they only have enough for a few doses, and would have to decide who “deserves” the pain relief most. Anna knows that if they keep the poppy, she will end up using it herself; in fact, she can barely restrain herself from licking the sap as it drips onto her hand. However, she also knows that if she succumbs to “selfish oblivion” she won’t be of any use fighting the plague. She throws the poppy onto the fire.

As the walk home, Anna resolves to work towards becoming “the woman that Elinor wished me to be.” However, in the back of her mind she notes that if all else fails, she knows where to look in the Gowdie garden for new poppy shoots in the spring.