Hamnet(34)

She steps into the church, conscious of the three things she is holding. The ring on her finger, the spray of rowan berries, curled into her palm, the hand of her husband. They walk down the aisle together, a surge of people behind them, their feet clattering on the stone, taking their places in the pews. Agnes kneels at the altar, at the left side of her husband, to hear Mass. They bow their heads in unison and the priest places linen over them, to protect them from demons, from the devil, from all that is bad and undesirable in the world.





gnes moves across the upstairs room, through the converging shafts of light, where dust motes swarm and drift. Her daughter is lying on the rush pallet, still in her dress, her shoes shed beside her.

She is breathing, Agnes is telling herself, telling her fluttering heart, her thumping pulse, as she gets nearer, and that is good, is it not? There is her chest, going up and going down and, look, her cheeks are flushed, her hands resting beside her, fingers curled. All is not so bad. Surely. She is here and Hamnet is here.

Agnes reaches the bed and crouches down, her skirts inflating around her.

‘Judith?’ she says, and puts a hand to the girl’s forehead, then to her wrist, then back to the cheek.

Aware that Hamnet is in the room, just behind her, Agnes bows her head while she thinks. Fever, she tells herself, in a silent voice that sounds so calm, so cool. Then she corrects herself: a high fever, the skin damp and fire-hot. Breathing rapid and shallow. Pulse weak, erratic and fast.

‘How long has she been like this?’ She speaks aloud, without turning.

‘Since I returned from school,’ says Hamnet, his voice pitched high. ‘We were playing with the kittens and Jude said . . . that is, Grandmamma had asked us to chop the wood and we were about to start, on the wood, but we were having a game with the kittens and a bit of ribbon. The wood was there and I—’

‘Never mind the wood,’ she says, with control. ‘It matters not. Tell me about Judith.’

‘She said her throat was hurting her but we played a bit longer and then I said that I would chop the wood and she said that she was feeling ever so tired, so she came up here and lay down on the bed. So I did some of the wood – not all of it – and then I came up to see her and she wasn’t at all well. And then I looked for you and Grandmamma and everybody,’ his voice is rising now, ‘but there was no one here. I went all over, looking for you and calling for you. And I ran for the physician but he wasn’t there either and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to . . . I didn’t know . . .’

Agnes straightens, comes towards her son. ‘There now,’ she says, reaching out for him. She tucks his smooth, fair head to her shoulder, feels the shake of his body, the shudder of his breaths. ‘You did well. Very well. None of this is your—’

He wrenches away from her, his face stricken and wet. ‘Where were you?’ he yells, fear becoming anger, his voice wavering, as it has begun to do, of late, deepening on the second word, then rising again for the third. ‘I looked everywhere!’

She gazes at him steadily, then back at Judith. ‘I was out at Hewlands. Bartholomew sent for me because the bees were swarming. I was longer than I’d planned. I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’ She reaches out again for him, but he ducks away from her hand and moves towards the bed.

Together, they kneel next to the girl. Agnes takes her hand.

‘She’s got . . . it,’ Hamnet says, in a hoarse whisper. ‘Hasn’t she?’

Agnes doesn’t look at him. His is a mind so quick, so attuned to others that she knows he can read her thoughts, like words written on a page. So she must keep them to herself, her head bowed. She is checking each fingertip for a change in colour, for a creeping tide of grey or black. Nothing. Each finger is rosy pink, each nail pale, with an emerging crescent moon. Agnes examines the feet, each toe, the round and vulnerable bones of the ankle.

‘She’s got . . . the pestilence,’ Hamnet whispers. ‘Hasn’t she? Mamma? Hasn’t she? That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

She is gripping Judith’s wrist; the pulse is fluttering, inconstant, surging up and down, fading then galloping. Agnes’s eye falls on the swelling at Judith’s neck. The size of a hen’s egg, newly laid. She reaches out and touches it gently, with the tip of her finger. It feels damp and watery, like marshy ground. She loosens the tie of Judith’s shift and eases it down. There are other eggs, forming in her armpits, some small, some large and hideous, bulbous, straining at the skin.

She has seen these before; there are few in the town, or even the county, who haven’t at some time or other in their lives. They are what people most dread, what everyone hopes they will never find, on their own bodies or on those of the people they love. They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.

And yet here they are. Round swellings, pushing up from under her daughter’s skin.

Agnes seems to split in two. Part of her gasps at the sight of the buboes. The other part hears the gasp, observes it, notes it: a gasp, very well. Tears spring into the eyes of the first Agnes, and her heart gives a great thud in her chest, an animal hurling itself against its cage of bones. The other Agnes is ticking off the signs: buboes, fever, deep sleep. The first Agnes is kissing her daughter, on the forehead, on the cheeks, at the place where hair meets skin on her temple; the other is thinking, a poultice of crumbed bread and roasted onion and boiled milk and mutton fat, a cordial of hips and powdered rue, borage and woodbine.