Hamnet(11)

He does not, even for one moment, entertain the idea that the woman he saw is in fact the eldest daughter of the house.

She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad. He has heard that she wanders the back roads and forest at will, unaccompanied, collecting plants to make dubious potions. It is wise not to cross her for people say she learnt her crafts from an old crone who used to make medicines and spin, and could kill a baby with a single glance. It is said that the stepmother lives in terror of the girl putting hexes on her, especially now the yeoman is dead. Her father must have loved her, though, because he left her a sizeable dowry in his will. Not that anyone, of course, would want to wed her. She is said to be too wild for any man. Her mother, God rest her soul, had been a gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite: the tutor has heard many of these fanciful tales about her. His own mother shakes her head and tuts when this girl comes up in conversation.

The tutor has never seen her but he pictures a half-woman, half-animal: thick-browed, hobbling, hair streaked with grey, clothing clotted with mud and foliage. The daughter of a dead forest witch. She will walk with a limp, muttering to herself as she fumbles in her bag of curses and cures.

He casts a glance around him, at the shadow in the lee of the pig-pen, at the bare branches of apple trees bending over the fence at the perimeter of the farmyard. He wouldn’t want to come across this daughter unawares. He goes through a gate in the fence and out along a track. He glances over his shoulder at the windows of the house, into the doors of the barn, where cattle chew and nod in their stalls. Where might she be?

He is distracted from thinking about the mad, witchy sister by a movement to his left: a door opening, the swirl of skirts, the squeal of a hinge. It is the girl with the bird! The very same. Emerging from some roughly built outhouse, closing the door behind her. Right here, in front of him, as if he had summoned her presence by thought alone.

He coughs into his fist.

‘Good day to you,’ he says.

She turns. She looks at him for a moment, raises her eyebrows, very slightly, as if she has seen the spool of his thoughts, as if his head is transparent as water. She looks all the way down to his boots and back again.

‘Sir,’ she replies, after a while, with the merest hint of a curtsy. ‘What brings you to Hewlands?’

Her voice is clear, modulated, articulate. It has an instant effect upon him: a quickening of his pulse, a heat in his chest.

‘I am tutoring the boys here,’ he says. ‘In Latin.’

He expects her to be impressed, to nod deferentially. A learned man is he; a man of letters, of education. No rustic stands before you, madam, he wishes he could say, no mere peasant.

But the girl’s expression is unchanged. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘The Latin tutor. Of course.’

He is puzzled by the flatness of her reply. She is an altogether confusing person: her age is hard to guess, as is her standing in the household. She is perhaps a little older than him. She is dressed like a servant, in coarse and dirty clothes, but speaks like a lady. She is erect in stature, almost of a height with him, her hair dark as his own. She meets his eye as a man would, but her figure and form fill out that jerkin in a manner that is distinctly female.

The tutor decides that boldness is the best course of action here. ‘May I see your . . . your bird?’

She frowns. ‘My bird?’

‘I saw you earlier, emerging from the forest, did I not? With a bird on your arm? A hawk. A most intriguing—’

For the first time, her face betrays an emotion: concern, worry, an element of fear. ‘You won’t tell them,’ she gestures towards the farm, ‘will you? I was forbidden to take her out today, you see, but she was so restless, so hungry, I couldn’t bear to shut her up all afternoon. You won’t say, will you, that you saw me? That I was out?’

The tutor smiles. He steps towards her. ‘I shall never speak of it,’ he is able to say, grandly, consolingly. He puts his hand on her arm. ‘Do not concern yourself.’

She flicks her gaze up to meet his. They regard each other at close quarters. He sees eyes almost gold in colour, with a deep amber ring around their centres. Flecks of green. Long dark lashes. Pale skin with freckles over the nose and along the cheekbones. She does a strange thing: she puts her hand to his, where it is resting on her forearm. She takes hold of the skin and muscle between his thumb and forefinger and presses. The grip is firm, insistent, oddly intimate, on the edge of painful. It makes him draw in his breath. It makes his head swim. The certainty of it. He doesn’t think anyone has ever touched him there, in that way, before. He could not take his hand away without a sharp tug, even if he wanted to. Her strength is surprising and, he finds, peculiarly arousing.

‘I . . .’ he begins, without any idea where that sentence will go, what he wants to say. ‘Do you . . .’

All at once, she drops his hand; she moves her arm away from him. His hand, where she gripped him, feels hot and very naked. He rubs at his forehead with it, as if to make it right again.

‘You wanted to see my bird,’ she said, all business and competence now, taking a key from a chain hidden in her skirts, unlocking the door and pushing it open. She steps inside and, dazed, he follows.

It is a small, dim, narrow space, with a desiccated and familiar smell to it. He inhales: the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous. Also a chalky, musky undertone. And the woman beside him: he can smell her hair and skin, one of which carries the faint scent of rosemary. He is just about to reach out for her again – her shoulder, her waist are tantalisingly close to him, and why else would she bring him in here, really, if she didn’t also have in mind—