Hamnet(15)

This is the story, the myth of Agnes’s childhood. She herself might tell a different story.

Outside were the sheep and they must be fed, watered, cared for, no matter what. They must be brought in and out and from one field to another.

Inside was the fire and it must never be left to go out. It must be fed and fed and tended and poked, and sometimes her mother must blow on it, with pursed lips.

And the mother herself was a slippery thing, because there had been a mother, and she’d had slender, strong ankles above bare feet. Those feet had blackened soles and walked one way then the other over the patterns of the flagstones, and sometimes they walked out of the house and past the sheep and into the forest, where they stepped through leaves and twigs and mosses. There was a hand, too, that held Agnes’s, to stop her falling, and it was warm and firm. If Agnes was lifted from the forest floor to that mother’s back, she could nestle under the cloak of hair. The trees appeared then, to her, through the dark skeins, like a lantern show. Look, the mother said, a squirrel, and a reddish flourish of tail disappeared up a trunk, as if she herself had conjured it from the bark. Look, a kingfisher: a jewel-backed arrow piercing the silver skin of a brook. Look, hazelnuts: the mother clambering into the boughs, shaking them with her strong arms and down came clusters of dun-jacketed pearls.

Her brother, Bartholomew, with the wide, surprised eyes and fingers that opened into white stars, rode on their mother’s front and the two of them could stare into each other’s faces as they went along, interlace their fingers over the round bones of their mother’s shoulders. Their mother cut green rushes for them, which she dried, then wove into dolls. The dolls were identical, and Agnes and Bartholomew tucked them side by side into a box, their blank green faces gazing trustingly up at the roof.

Then this mother was gone and another was there in her place beside the fire, stoking it with wood, blowing at the flames, hauling the pot from hearthstone to grating, saying, Don’t touch, mind, hot. This second mother was wider, her hair pale, screwed up in a knot, hidden under a coif grimed by sweat. She smelt of mutton and oil. She had reddened skin covered with freckles, as if splashed by a cart going through mud. She had a name, ‘Joan’, that made Agnes think of a howling dog. She took a knife and lopped off Agnes’s hair, saying she hadn’t the time to be attending to that every day. She picked up the rush babies, declared them devilish poppets, and fed them to the fire. When Agnes burnt her fingers trying to pull out their scorched forms, she laughed and said Agnes had got what she deserved. She had shoes tied over her feet. Those feet never went from farm to forest. If Agnes went alone, without asking, this mother removed one of the shoes and lifted Agnes’s skirt and brought the shoe down on the back of her legs, whack, crack, and the pain was so surprising, so unfamiliar that Agnes forgot to cry out. She stared instead at the beams, high above, where the other mother had tied a bundle of herbs to a stone with a hole at its centre. To keep away bad luck, she had said. Agnes remembered her doing this. She bit her lip. She ordered herself not to cry. She looked at the black eye of the stone. She wondered when this mother would come back. She did not weep.

This new mother would also remove her shoe if Agnes said, You are not my mother, or if Bartholomew trod on the dog’s tail, or if Agnes spilt the soup, or let the geese out into the road, or didn’t lift the pig-pail all the way to the slop trough. Agnes learnt to be agile, quick. She learnt the advantages of invisibility, how to pass through a room without drawing notice. She learnt that what is hidden within a person may be brought forth if, say, a sprinkling of bladderwort were to find its way into that person’s cup. She learnt that creepers disentangled from an oak trunk, brushed against bed linen, will ensure no sleep for whoever lies there. She learnt that if she took her father by the hand and led him to the back door, where Joan had uprooted all the forest plants, her father would go silent, and then Joan would wail and tell him she hadn’t meant any harm, she’d taken them for weeds. And she learnt that, afterwards, Joan would reach under the table and pinch her, leaving purple blotches on her skin.

It was a time of confusion, of the seasons following hard upon each other. Of rooms dim with smoke. Of the constant bleat and groan of sheep. Of her father away from the hearth for most of the day, tending the animals. Of trying to stop the mud of the outside reaching the clean inside. Of keeping Bartholomew away from the fire, away from Joan, away from the millpond and the carts in the road and the trampling hoofs of horses and the stream and the swinge of the scythe. Ailing lambs were put in a basket by the fire, fed from milk-soaked rags, their reedy cries sawing through the room. Her father in the yard, ewes gripped between his knees, their eyes rolling heavenwards in terror, him guiding the shears through their wool. The fleeces fell like storm clouds to the ground and out of each rose quite a different creature – thin, milk-skinned, gaunt.

Everyone told Agnes that there had been no other mother. Whatever are you talking about? they cried. When she insisted, they changed tack. You won’t remember your real mother – you couldn’t possibly remember. She told them this wasn’t true; she stamped her foot; she banged her fists against the table; she screeched at them like a fowl. What did it mean? Why did they persist with these lies, these falsehoods? She remembered. She remembered everything. She said this to the apothecary’s widow who lived at the edge of the village, a woman who took in wool for spinning; she continued to work her treadle, as if Agnes hadn’t spoken, but then had nodded. Your mother, she said, was pure of heart. There was more kindness in her little finger – and she held up her own gnarled hand – than in the whole of any of those others.