Hamnet(22)

Eliza feels her head nodding and nodding. She is amazed at the detail in this speech, honoured at being its recipient. ‘She sounds . . .’ she gropes for the right word, recalling one he taught her himself, a few weeks ago ‘. . . peerless.’

He smiles and she knows he remembers teaching it to her. ‘That’s exactly what she is, Eliza. Peerless.’

‘It also sounds,’ she begins carefully, ever so carefully, so as not to alarm him, not to make him retreat into silence again – she cannot believe he has already said as much as he has, ‘as though you are . . . decided. That you are fixed. On her.’

He doesn’t say anything, just stretches out to tap his palm against the wool bale next to him. For a moment, she believes she has gone too far, that he will refuse to be drawn any further, that he will get up and leave, with no more confidences.

‘Have you spoken to her family?’ she ventures.

He shakes his head and shrugs.

‘Are you going to speak to them?’

‘I would,’ he mutters, head lowered, ‘but I am in no doubt that my case would be refused. They would not view me as a good prospect for her.’

‘Perhaps if you – waited,’ Eliza says, faltering, laying a hand on his sleeve, ‘a year or so. Then you’d be of age. And more established in your position. Maybe Father’s business will have seen some improvement and he might regain some of his standing in the town, and perhaps he could be persuaded to stop this wool—’

He jerks his arm away, pulling himself upright. ‘And when,’ he demands, ‘have you ever known him to listen to persuasion, to sense? When has he ever changed his mind, even when he was wrong?’

Eliza stands up from the bale. ‘I just think—’

‘When,’ continues her brother, ‘has he ever exerted himself to give me something I want or need? When have you known him to act in my favour? When have you known him not to go deliberately out of his way to thwart me?’

Eliza clears her throat. ‘Perhaps if you waited, then—’

‘The problem is,’ her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, ‘that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.’

He turns, steps on to the ladder and disappears from view. She watches the two points of the ladder judder with his every step, then fall still.

The lines and lines of apples are moving, jolting, rocking on their shelves. Each apple is centred in a special groove, carved into the wooden racks that run around the walls of this small storeroom.

Rock, rock, jolt, jolt.

The fruit has been placed with care, just so: the woody stem down and the star of the calyx up. The skin mustn’t touch that of its neighbour. They must sit like this, lightly held by the wooden groove, a finger width from each other, over the winter or they will spoil. If they touch each other, they will brown and sag and moulder and rot. They must be preserved in rows, like this, separate, stems down, in airy isolation.

The children of the house were given this duty: to pluck the apples from the twisted branches of the trees, to stack them together in baskets, then bring them here, to the apple store, and line them up on these racks, spaced evenly and carefully, to air, to preserve, to last the winter and spring, until the trees bring forth fruit again.

Except that something is moving the apples. Again and again and again, over and over, with a shunting, nudging, insistent motion.

The kestrel, on her perch, is hooded but alert, always alert. Her head rotates within its ruff of flecked feathers, to ascertain the source of this repetitive, distracting noise. Her ears, tuned so acutely that they can, if required, discern the heartbeat of a mouse a hundred feet away, a stoat’s footfall across the forest, the wingbeat of a wren over a field, pick up on the following: twenty score apples being nudged, jostled, bothered in their cradles. The breathing of mammals, of a size too large to elicit the interest of her appetite, increasing in pace. The hollow of a palm landing lightly on muscle and bone. The click and slither of a tongue against teeth. Two planes of fabric, of differing texture, moving over each other in obverse direction.

The apples are turning on their heads; stalks are appearing from undersides, calyxes are facing sideways, then back, then upwards, then down. The pace of the knocking varies: it pauses; it slows; it builds; it pulls back again.

Agnes’s knees are raised, splayed open like butterfly wings. Her feet, still in their boots, rest on the opposite shelf; her hands brace against the whitewashed wall. Her back straightens and bows, seemingly of its own accord, and low, near-growls are being pulled out of her throat. This takes her by surprise: her body asserting itself in this way. How it knows what to do, how to react, how to be, where to put itself, her legs white and folded in the dim light, her rear resting on the shelf edge, her fingers gripping the stones of the wall.

In the narrow space between her and the opposite shelf is the Latin tutor. He stands in the pale V of her legs. His eyes are shut; his fingers grip the curve of her back. It was his hands that undid the bows at her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light – and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another; their pink-brown eyes stared back in shock. It was her hands, however, that lifted her skirts, that pushed herself back on to this shelf, that drew the body of the Latin tutor towards her. You, the hands said to him, I choose you.