Mr. Mompellion is so physically exhausted from digging up graves and going to people's deathbeds to give them their last prayer that one day he faints at church. Right before he had fainted he had announced to the villagers that the church was going to be closed to prevent the spread of the contagion. Instead, he says, they will meet on Sundays at Cucklett Delf. He also says that the cemeteries are overcrowded and for that reason people will have to bury the dead on their own property. Many people seem to be against this last statement.
Because Anna is so worried about Mr. Mompellion's physical weakness, she calls upon her father, Josiah Bont, to become the new sexton, or gravedigger. She does this with good intentions: she hopes that it can be a relief to Mr. Mompellion's hard work and at the same time it can help sustain her younger half siblings who are described by Anna as looking "thin and ill fed" because her father and stepmother, Aphra, "both liked better the act that led to the begetting of children than they did the providing for them" (Brooks, 162-163). Ouch. It seems like Anna will never run out of things to call her stepmother and father out on. In a similar manner, this reminds me of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (yes, I know, I keep on using this literary connection. But there are so many parallels that can be drawn with this book...). Like Elizabeth Bennett who rises above the social standings for women during her time period and outsmarts even her own family, Anna rises above the uneducated ignorant people that make up her family.
Meanwhile, there's this orphan -- nine-year-old Merry Wickford -- from a Quaker family that all died from the plague. Her father had discovered the Burning Drake, a mine filled with ore which he claimed. Due to the mining laws of the village, a mine is required to provide a dish of ore every few weeks in order for the owner to keep it. Because Merry was the only one left in her family, the whole town saw that she was going to lose heir to the mine. How could a nine-year-old girl possibly mine a dish of ore? Greedy people, such as David Burton, started to think that the mine belonged to him already. This is when Anna steps up and proposes the insane idea to Elinor that they go mine the ore themselves so that Merry can have her mine saved. Effectively, they go, and Anna, knowing a little bit of the mining technique from her late miner husband Sam, suggests that they use a makeshift explosive to loosen the ore after a failed first attempt to hammer out the ore flakes. Anna proves her bravery once again when she volunteers to go underground in the mine and detonate the blast, knowing that that same technique was what had killed her husband. Elinor's reasoning is that it didn't matter if they were to die that day because of a mining incident because if it wasn't that death, it would be the plague. What can I say? Elinor isn't wrong.
So, Anna detonates the explosive. The ore loosens, and so does the rock surrounding it. Anna is crushed by the rock. She thought that she was going to die: she has a hallucination of her boys. She would have certainly died if Merry and Elinor hadn't gone down and rescued her.
Immediately, the three girls go to the Barmester (the official of the Barmote Court, a court held in the lead mining districts of Derbyshire, England, for the purpose of determining the customs peculiar to the industry). With more than enough ore to save her mine for a long time, the Barmester determines that Merry gets to keep her mine. Even though Anna is bruised all over and experiences great pain from the accident at the mine, that night she still sleeps better "than [she] had since the nights of the poppy dreams" and feels as for the first time during that tough seasons, she had "the satisfaction of having done a thing that had come out right" (Brooks, 187).
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