Hamnet(17)
Joan and the father worry. It is not Christian, this ability. They beg her to stop, not to touch people’s hands, to hide this odd gift. No good will come of it, her father says, standing over Agnes as she crouches by the fire, no good at all. When she reaches up to take his hand, he snatches it away.
She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.
There is just enough of this recollection alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognise it if she meets it again. And if she does, she won’t hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. She won’t listen to the protestations of others, their objections, their reasoning. This will be her chance, her way through the narrow hole at the heart of the stone, and nothing will stand in her way.
amnet climbs the stairs, breathing hard after his run through the town. It seems to drain his strength, putting one leg in front of the other, lifting each foot to each stair. He uses the handrail to haul himself along.
He is sure, he is certain, that when he reaches the upper floor, he will see his mother. She will be leaning over the bed where Judith is lying, her body curved like a bow. Judith will be tucked into fresh sheets; her face will be pale but awake, alert, trusting. Agnes will be giving her a tincture; Judith will be wincing at its bitterness but swallowing it all the same. His mother’s potions can cure anything – everyone knows that. People come from all over town, all over Warwickshire and beyond, to speak with his mother through the window of the narrow cottage, to describe their symptoms, to tell her what they suffer, what they endure. Some of these people she invites in. They are women, mostly, and she seats them by the fire, in the good chair, while she takes their hands and holds them in her own, while she grinds some roots, some plant leaves, a sprinkling of petals. They leave with a cloth parcel or a tiny bottle, stoppered with paper and beeswax, their faces easier, lightened.
His mother will be here. She will bring Judith back to health. She can drive away any illness, any malady. She will know what to do.
Hamnet comes into the top room. There is just his sister, alone, on the bed.
She has, he sees, as he steps towards her, become paler, weaker, in the time it took him to go for the physician. The skin around her eyes is bluish-grey, as if bruised. Her breaths are shallow and quick, her eyes, beneath their lids, flick back and forth, as if she is seeing something he cannot.
Hamnet’s legs fold under him. He sits down on the side of the pallet. He can hear the suck and draw of her breath. There is, for him, some comfort in this. He hooks his smallest finger into the corresponding one of hers. A single tear leaks from his eye and drops onto the sheet, then into the rushes beneath.
Another tear falls. Hamnet has failed. He sees this. He needed to summon someone, a parent, a grandparent, a grown-up, a physician. He has failed on all counts. He shuts his eyes, to keep the tears in, and lets his head fall to his knees.
Half an hour or so later, Susanna comes in through the back door. She dumps her basket on a chair and slumps down at the table. She looks one way, disconsolately, she looks the other. The fire is out; no one is here. Her mother had promised she’d be back and she isn’t. Her mother is never where she says she will be.
Susanna removes her cap and tosses it to the bench beside her. It slides off and on to the floor. Susanna thinks about bending to retrieve it but doesn’t. Instead, she finds it with her toe and kicks it further away. She sighs. She is nearly fourteen. Everything – the sight of the pots stacked on the table, the herbs and flowers tied to the rafters, her sister’s corn doll on a cushion, the jug set by the hearth – provokes in her a profound and fathomless irritation.
She gets up. She pushes open a window, to let in a little air, but the street smells of horse, of ordure, of something rank and rotting. She shuts it with a bang. Just for a moment, she believes she hears something from upstairs. Is someone here? She stands for a moment, listening. But no. There is no further sound.
She sits herself in the good chair, the one her mother’s visitors use, the people who creep in at the door, usually late at night, to whisper about pains, bleeding, lack of bleeding, dreams, portents, aches, difficulties, loves inconvenient, loves importunate, augurs, moon cycles, a hare across their path, a bird inside the house, a loss of feeling in a limb, too much feeling elsewhere, a rash, a cough, a sore, a pain here or there or in the ear or the leg or the lungs or the heart. Their mother bends her head to listen, giving a nod, a sympathetic click of the tongue. Then she takes their hand and, as she does so, she lets her gaze float upwards, to the ceiling, to the air, her eyes unfocused, half closed.
Some have asked Susanna how her mother does it. They have sidled up to her in the market or out in the streets to demand how Agnes divines what a body needs or lacks or bursts with, how she can tell if a soul is restive or hankering, how she knows what a person or a heart hides.
It makes Susanna want to sigh and throw something. She can tell now if someone is about to enquire into her mother’s unusual abilities and she tries to head them off, to excuse herself or begin to ask them questions about their family, the weather, the crops. There is, she has learnt, a certain hesitancy, a particular facial expression – half curiosity, half suspicion – which prefaces these conversations. Why do people not see that there is nothing Susanna is less happy to talk about? How can it not be plain that it is nothing to do with her – the herbs, the weeds, the jars and bottles of powders and roots and petals that make the room stink like a dung heap, the murmuring people, the weeping, the hand-holding? Susanna, when she was younger, used to answer truthfully: that she did not know, that it was like magic, that it was a gift. These days, however, she is curt: I have no idea, she will say, of what you speak, her head held high, her nose tipped up, as if sniffing the air.