Brand Rigney, who used to be the pantry boy for the Bradfords, returns to the village (him and Maggie had set off the Bakewell after the Bradfords had fired them because that is where they were originally from) pulling a near-to-death Maggie in a cart. He explains the story behind their situation: they had a decent uneventful journey to the other town until they reached the larger center of Bakewell. Someone had recognized Maggie and began to exclaim, "A woman from the Plague village! Beware! Beware!" (Brooks, 126), and they began throwing stones at her. Brand stole a cart and hauled Maggie back to the village. Like I stated in my last post, the importance of social class during this time period is nonsensical. So, the Bradfords get an extravagant salute on their way out of the village yet Maggie gets stones thrown at her? This extreme contrast reflects the role and how much people's lives depended on their social standing.
Anna encounters her drunkard father, Josiah Bont, and humiliates him by quoting "'Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying'" when he mocks her spending time with the educated Mompellions (Brooks, 130). Angered, her father abuses her as he had done in the past and it is revealed that he used to abuse Anna's mother as well. When her mother had cursed him in public for his constant drunkenness, Josiah framed her face "in the iron bars" and Anna remembers her mother's "desperate look in her wild eyes, the inhumane sounds that came from her throat as the iron bit pressed hard against her tongue" (Brooks, 130). The device Josiah Bont used on his wife is described in the book as "branks", so I looked it up. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word is defined as "an instrument of punishment for a scolding woman, consisting of an iron framework for the head and a sharp metal gag for restraining the tongue".
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