Hamnet(16)

She remembered everything. Everything except where she had gone, why she had left.

At night, Agnes whispered to Bartholomew about the woman who liked to walk with them through the forest, who tied a stone with a hole to herbs, who made them rush babies, who had a garden of plants at the back door. She remembered it all. Almost all.

Then one day she came upon her father behind the pig-pen, his knee on the neck of a lamb, bringing down his knife. The smell, the sight, the colour took her back to a bed soaked red and a room of carnage, of violence, of appalling crimson. She stared at her father, stared and stared, yet did not see him at all. Instead, she saw a bed with a red bloom at its centre and then a narrow box. In it, she knew, was her mother, but not as she had been. This mother was different again. She was waxy and chill and silent, and in her arms was a wrapped bundle with the sad, wizened face of a doll. The priest had had to come at night because it was a secret, and he was a priest Agnes had never seen before. He had long robes and a burning bowl that he swung over the box, muttering strange, song-like words. Agnes must never tell, her father had said, between sobs, never tell the neighbours or anyone that the priest came and spoke magic words over the wax woman and the sad baby. Before he left, the priest had touched Agnes once, lightly, on the head, his thumb pressing into her brow, and he had said, looking straight into her eyes, in language familiar to her, Poor lamb.

Agnes says all this to her father, as he kneels there on this other lamb, red pumping from the line drawn in its neck. She shouts it – she yells it from the base of her lungs, the core of her heart. She says, I remember, I know all that.

Hush, maidy, he says, turning to her. You cannot remember. Hush, now. Don’t say these things. There was no priest in the night. He did not touch your head. Don’t ever let anyone hear you say that. Don’t let your mother hear.

Agnes doesn’t know if he means Joan, the woman in the house, or her own mother, up in Heaven. It feels to her as though the world has cracked open, like an egg. The sky above her could, at any moment, split and rain down fire and ash upon them all. At the edges of her sight seem to hover dark, nebulous shapes. The farmhouse, the pig-pen, her brothers and sisters in the yard, all seem at once far away and unbearably close. She knows there had been a priest. How can her father pretend otherwise? She remembers the cross around his neck that he brought to his lips to kiss, the way his bowl left feather smoke in the air over her mother and the baby, that he spoke her mother’s name, over and over, in the middle of his mysterious prayers: Rowan, Rowan. She remembers. Poor lamb, he had said to her. Her father says, Hush, never say that, so she runs from him, from the lamb, slack and empty of blood now, little more than a sack of gizzard and bone, and into the forest where she screams these things to the trees, to the leaves, to the branches, where no one can hear. She grips the thorned stems of brambles until they pierce her skin and she shouts to the God of the church they walk to every Sunday, in neat formation, carrying the babies on their backs, where there is no smoke, no bowls, no speaking in tongues. She calls on him, she bawls his name. You, she says, you, do you hear me, I am finished with you. After this time, I will go to your church because I must but I shan’t say a word there because there is nothing after you die. There is the soil and there is the body and it all comes to nothing.

She tells this to the apothecary’s widow and these words make the old woman look up. The wheel whirs more slowly, winding down, as the woman stares at the child. Never say this to anyone else, she says to Agnes, in her creaking voice. Never. You’ll bring seven kinds of trouble down on your head, otherwise.

She grows up watching the mother with the shoes hug and pet her fair, chubby children. She watches her place the freshest breads, the choicest meat on their plates. Agnes must live with a sense of herself as second-tier, deficient in some way, unwanted. She is the one who must sweep the floors, change the babies’ napkins, rock them to sleep, rake out the grate and coax the fire to life. She sees, she recognises, that any accident or misfortune – a dropped platter, a broken jug, some ravelled knitting, unrisen bread – will somehow be her fault. She grows up knowing that she must protect and defend Bartholomew from all of life’s blows, because no one else will. He is of her blood, wholly and completely, in a way that no one else is. She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.

Agnes will rarely – if ever – be touched. She will grow up craving just that: a hand on hers, on her hair, on her shoulder, the brush of fingers on her arm. A human print of kindness, of fellow feeling. Her stepmother never comes near her. Her siblings paw and claw at her but that doesn’t count.

She grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible. It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird and all the strength of the grip can be found there, all the power of the grasp. A person’s ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned. All that they have held, kept, and all they long to grip is there in that place. It is possible, she realises, to find out everything you need to know about a person just by pressing it.

When she is no more than seven or eight, a visitor lets Agnes hold her hand in this way and Agnes says, You will meet your death within the month, and doesn’t it come true, just like that, the visitor being struck down with an ague the very next week? She says that the shepherd will be knocked off his feet and hurt his leg, that her father will be caught in a storm, that the baby will fall ill on its second birthday, that the man offering to buy her father’s sheepskins is a liar, that the pedlar at the back door has intentions towards the kitchen maid.