Hamnet(20)

She lets her hand drop and, still holding the candle, sits herself down on one of the wool bales that are crammed into the space between floor and roof. They have been up here for several years. Once, last winter, in the yard, as they were wrapping gloves in linen, to be placed finger to wrist, finger to wrist, in baskets on a cart, her brother spoke up and asked why the attic was filled with wool bales, and what was their intended purpose? Their father leant across the cart and seized a fistful of his son’s jerkin. There are no wool bales in this house, he said, giving his son a shake with each word. Is that clear? Eliza’s brother had stared steadily back into his father’s eyes, without blinking. Clear enough, he had replied, eventually. Their father had held on, fist clenched around his son’s clothing, as if considering whether or not he was being insolent, then released him. Don’t speak of what doesn’t concern you, he had muttered, as he returned to his wrapping, and everyone in the yard let out the breath they had been holding.

Eliza allows herself to bounce up and down on the wool bale, the existence of which they are bound always to deny. Her brother watches her for a moment but says nothing. He tips his head back and stares at the rafters.

She wonders if he is recalling that this attic was always their space – hers and his, and also Anne’s, before she died. The three of them would retreat here in the afternoons, when he got back from school, pulling the ladder up after them, despite the wails and entreaties of their younger siblings. It was mostly empty then, save for a few spoilt hides that their father was saving for some unspecified reason. Nobody could reach them there; it was just her and him and Anne, until they were called by their mother to perform some task or to take over the care of one of the younger children.

Eliza hadn’t realised her brother still came up here; she hadn’t known he still sought this place as a refuge from the household. She hasn’t climbed the ladder since Anne died. She lets her gaze rove over the room: slanted ceilings, the undersides of the roof tiles, the bales and bales of wool, which are to be kept here, out of sight. She sees old candle stubs, a folding knife, a bottle of ink. There are, scattered over the floor, several curls of paper with words scrawled on them, crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again, then crumpled and tossed aside. Her brother’s thumb and finger, the rims of his nails, she sees, are stained black. What can he be studying up here, in secret?

‘What is the matter?’ she says.

‘Nothing,’ he answers, without looking at her. ‘Not a thing.’

‘What is ailing you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then what are you doing up here?’

‘Nothing.’

She looks at the curls of paper. She sees the words ‘never’ and ‘fire’, and something that might be ‘fly’ or ‘try’. When she raises her eyes again, she sees that he is looking at her, eyebrows raised. She gives an involuntary quick smile. He is the only person in this house – indeed, this whole town – who knows that she has her letters, that she can read. And how does he know this? Because he is the one who taught her and Anne. Every afternoon, here, after he returned from school. He would trace a letter in the dust, on the floor, and say, Look, Eliza, look, Anne, this is a d, this is an o, and if you put a g at the end, it says ‘dog’. Do you see that? You need to blend the sounds, run them together, until the sense of the word arrives in your head.

‘Is “nothing” the only thing you’re willing to say?’ she says.

She sees his mouth twitch and knows that he is drawing on all his lessons in rhetoric and argument to find a way to answer this question with that very word.

‘You can’t do it,’ she says, with glee. ‘You can’t find a way to reply “nothing”, can you, however hard you try? You can’t do it. Admit it.’

‘I admit nothing,’ he says triumphantly.

They sit for a moment, eyeing each other. Eliza balances the heel of one shoe on the toe of the other.

‘People are saying,’ she says carefully, ‘that you’ve been seen with the girl from Hewlands.’

She doesn’t say some of the coarser or more defamatory things she has heard against her brother, who is penniless and tradeless, not to mention rather young to be courting such a woman, who is of age and would come with a large dowry. What a way out it would be for the boy, she heard a woman at the market whisper, behind her back. You can see why he’d want to marry into money and get away from that father.

She tells herself to refrain from mentioning what people say of this girl. That she is fierce and savage, that she puts curses on people, that she can cure anything but also cause anything. Those wens on the stepmother’s cheeks, she overheard someone say the other day, she gave her those when the stepmother took away her falcon. She can sour the milk just by touching it with her fingers.

When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.