Hamnet(39)

Customers come at all hours to the workshop window, to peruse the gloves, to ask questions; sometimes John lets them in and they can look around the whole workshop and perhaps order a special pair to be made.

Agnes watches it all for three or four days. On the fifth day, she is up before the serving girls and out of the apartment’s back door, which leads into the shared yard. By the time they appear, she has fired the oven in the cookhouse and coaxed the dough into rounds, adding a handful of ground herbs from the kitchen garden. The serving girls exchange worried looks.

At the breakfast table, the family seize the bread rolls, which seem softer, flatter, with a burnished glaze. The butter is arranged in a swirl. When broken, the bread gives off the hot fragrance of thyme, of marjoram. It brings, to the mind of John, a recollection of his grandmother, a woman who kept a posy of herbs tied to her belt. It makes Mary think of the squared, walled kitchen garden at the door of the farm where she grew up, of the time her mother had had to shoo away the geese with a broom because they had broken in and eaten the thyme bushes. She smiles at the recollection, at the memory of her mother’s skirts, wet with dew and mud, at the offended honking of the geese, and takes another slice, dipping the knife into the butter.

Agnes glances at the face of her father-in-law and that of her mother-in-law and then her husband. He catches her eye and gives a barely perceptible nod towards the bread, raising his eyebrows.

It takes Mary a week or so to notice that the house is different. The candlewicks are trimmed, without Mary having to remind the maids. The table linens are changed, again without asking, the wall drapes free of dust. The plateware is spotless and shining. She sees these things individually, without adding them up. It’s only when she smells the distinct, pollen-heavy scent of beeswax in the parlour one day when she is entertaining a neighbour that she begins to wonder.

After the neighbour has taken her leave, she walks through her house. There are holly branches in a jar in the hall. Cloves studded into sweetmeats in the cookhouse, a pot of fragrant leaves that Mary doesn’t recognise. There are gnarled and soil-heavy roots drying in the eaves of the brewhouse, and berries in a tray. A pile of starched and pressed collars lies waiting on the landing. The pigs in their pen look suspiciously scrubbed and pink, the hens’ trough is clean and filled with water.

At the sound of voices, Mary goes along the path towards the washhouse.

‘Yes, like that,’ she hears Agnes’s low voice say, ‘as if you were rubbing salt between your palms. Gently. Just the smallest movement. That way the flowerheads will be preserved.’

There is another voice – inaudible to Mary – and then a burst of laughter.

She pushes at the door: Agnes, Eliza and the two maids are all crammed into the washhouse, aprons tied around them, the air hot and filled with the acrid, stinging smell of lye. Edmond has been placed in a tub on the floor, with a number of pebbles.

‘Ma,’ he exclaims at the sight of her, ‘Ma-ma-ma!’

‘Oh,’ says Eliza, turning, her face flushed with heat and laughter, ‘we were . . . well, we were . . .’ She dissolves into laughter again, brushing a hair from her face with her forearm. ‘Agnes was showing us how to mix lavender into the soap and then she . . . then we . . .’ Eliza begins to laugh again, setting off one of the maids into giggles most inappropriate for her station.

‘You’re making soap?’ Mary asks.

Agnes glides forward. She is poised, unruffled, not at all flushed. She looks as if she has just raised herself from a parlour chair, not melted and stirred a batch of soap in a sweltering, moist washhouse. The front of her apron is dented outwards with the swell of her stomach. Mary looks, and looks away. Not for the first time, it strikes her that she will never feel that again, that it is an experience now closed to her, at her age, at her stage in life. The loss of that possibility sears her sometimes: it is hard for a woman to let go of; harder still if another woman in your household is just entering that state. The sight of this girl’s stomach, every time, makes Mary think of the emptiness, the quiet of her own.

‘We are,’ Agnes says, revealing her small, sharpish teeth as she smiles. ‘With lavender. I thought it might be a nice change. I hope that’s agreeable to you?’

‘Of course,’ Mary snaps. She bends down and snatches Edmond out of the tub. He is so startled that he starts to sob. ‘Agreeable indeed,’ she says, and goes out, clutching her inconsolable son, letting the door slam behind her.

In the early weeks of her marriage, Agnes collects impressions as a wool-gatherer hoards wool: a tuft from here, a scrap from there, a few strands from a fence, a bit from a branch, until, until, until you have a whole armful, enough to spin into yarn.

She sees that John loves Gilbert the best of the boys – because he is strong and likes to set people against each other for sport – but that Mary favours Richard. Her head jerks up if he speaks; she shushes the others in order to hear him. Agnes sees that Mary harbours a deep love for Edmond but is resigned to the fact that most of his care falls to Eliza. Agnes sees that Edmond watches her husband, his eldest brother, all the time. His eyes follow him wherever he goes in the room; he reaches up for him when he passes. Edmond will, Agnes sees, grow up sanguine and happy; he will follow his eldest brother, inevitably, unasked, largely unnoticed. He won’t live long but will live well: women will like him; he will father numerous children during his short life. The last person he will think of, just before he dies, will be Eliza. Agnes’s husband will pay for his funeral and will weep at his graveside. Agnes sees this but doesn’t say it.