Hamnet(30)

Then they shake hands. The glover with Joan, and then with Bartholomew. Oh, says one of the girls. The sons let out their breath. It is done, whispers Caterina.





amnet starts awake, the mattress rustling beneath him. Something has woken him – a noise, a bang, a shout – but he doesn’t know what. He can tell, by the long reaches of the sun into the room, it must be near evening. What is he doing here, asleep on the bed?

He twists his head and then he remembers everything. A form lies flat, next to him, head twisted to one side. Judith’s face is waxen and still, a sheen of sweat making it glimmer like glass. Her chest rises and falls at uneven intervals.

Hamnet swallows, his throat closed and tight. His tongue feels furred, ungainly, too large to fit in his mouth. He scrambles upright, the room blurring around him. A pain enters the back of his head and crouches there, snarling, like a cornered rat.

Downstairs, humming to herself, Agnes comes through the front door. She places upon the table the following items: two bundles of rosemary, her leather bag, the jar of honey, a hunk of beeswax, wrapped in a leaf, her straw hat, a tied posy of comfrey, which she intends to pluck and dry, then steep in warmed oil.

She walks through the room, straightening the chair by the hearth, moving a cap of Susanna’s from the table to a hook behind the door. She opens the window to the street, in case any customers come for her. She unties her kirtle and shrugs it off. Then she opens the back door and goes down the path towards the cookhouse.

The heat can be felt from the distance of several paces. Inside, she sees Mary, stirring water in a pot, and beside her Susanna, seated on a stool, rubbing mud from some onions.

‘There you are,’ Mary says, turning, her face reddened by heat. ‘You took your time.’

Agnes gives a noncommittal smile. ‘The bees were swarming in the orchard. I had to coax them back.’

‘Hmm,’ Mary says, hurling a handful of meal into the water. She hasn’t the patience for bees. Tricky creatures. ‘And how are all at Hewlands?’

‘Well, I believe,’ replies Agnes, touching the hair of her daughter’s head briefly in greeting, taking up a loaf of bread she made that morning and putting it on to the counter. ‘Bartholomew’s leg is still troubling him, I’m afraid, although he will not admit it. I see him limping. He says it aches in damp weather and that is all but I told him he needs—’ Agnes breaks off, bread knife in hand. ‘Where are the twins?’

Neither Mary nor Susanna looks up from her task.

‘Hamnet and Judith,’ Agnes says. ‘Where are they?’

‘No idea,’ Mary says, lifting a spoon to her lips to taste, ‘but when I find them, they’re in for a hiding. None of my kindling chopped. The table not laid. The pair of them off, God knows where. It’ll be supper time soon and still no sign of either of them.’

Agnes guides the serrated edge of the knife down through the loaf of bread, once, twice, the slices falling on to each other. She is about to make an incision in the crust for the third time when she lets the knife slide from her hand.

‘I’ll just go and . . .’ She trails away, moving through the cookhouse door, up the path and into the big house. She checks the workshop, where John is leaning over the bench in a do-not-bother-me posture. She walks through the dining hall and the parlour. She calls their names up the stairs. Nothing. She comes out of the front door, into Henley Street. The heat of the day is passing, the dust of the street settling, people retreating back into their homes to take their supper.

Agnes goes in at the front door of her own house, for the second time that evening.

And she sees, standing at the foot of the stair, her son. He is stock still, his face white, his fingers gripping the stair rail. He has a swelling, a cut on his brow that she is sure wasn’t there this morning.

She moves towards him swiftly, covering the room in a few paces.

‘What?’ she says, taking him by the shoulders. ‘What is it? What happened to your face?’

He does not speak. He shakes his head. He points towards the stairs. Agnes takes them, two at a time.





liza says to Agnes that she will make the wedding crown. If, she adds, that is what Agnes would like.

It is an offer made shyly, in a tentative voice, early one morning. Eliza is lying back to back with the woman who has come into their house so unexpectedly, so dramatically. It is just after dawn and it is possible to hear the first carts and footfalls out on the street.

Eliza must, Mary has said, share her bed with Agnes, until such time as the wedding can be arranged. Her mother told her this with tight, rigid lips, not meeting Eliza’s eye, flapping out an extra blanket over the bed. Eliza had looked down at the half of the pallet nearest the window, which has remained empty since her sister Anne died. She had glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.

Instead, though, Eliza wakes alone in the bed, every day.

But now here is this woman who will marry her brother: an Agnes instead of an Anne. It has all been a rush and a bother to arrange, with her brother needing a special licence and – Eliza isn’t clear on this point – a protracted discussion (heated) about money. Some friends of Agnes’s brother have put up surety: this much she knows. There is a baby in her belly, Eliza has heard, but only through doors. No one has explicitly told her this. Just as no one has thought to tell her that the wedding will be tomorrow, in the morning: her brother and Agnes will walk to the church in Temple Grafton, where a priest has agreed to marry them. It is not their priest, and it is not the church they attend every Sunday. Agnes says she knows this priest well. He is a particular friend of her family. It was him, in fact, who gave her the kestrel. He reared it himself, from an egg, and he once taught her how to cure lung rot in a falcon; he will marry them, she said airily, as she worked the treadle of Mary’s spinning wheel, because he has known her since she was a child and has always been kind to her. She once traded some jesses for a barrel of ale with him. He is, she explained, gathering wool in her spare hand, an expert in matters of falconry and brewing and bee-keeping, and has shared with her his great knowledge of all three.