Hamnet(42)
The baker’s wife stands for a moment before her empty market stall, watching her friend walk away. Agnes pauses momentarily, at the edge of the market, putting one hand up to the wall. The baker’s wife frowns and is just about to call out, but Agnes straightens and continues on her way.
During the night, Agnes dreamt of her mother, as she does from time to time. Agnes had been standing in the farmyard at Hewlands and her skirts had been dragging in the dirt; there was a heavy feeling around her, as if her gown was waterlogged. When she looked down, there were birds standing and trampling on the hem of her dress: ducks, hens, partridges, doves, tiny wrens. They were struggling and pushing each other, wings unfolded and awkward, trying to remain standing on her skirts. Agnes was trying to shoo them away, trying to free herself, when she became aware of someone approaching. She turned and saw her mother passing by: her hair in a braid down her back, a red shawl knotted over a blue smock. Her mother smiled but didn’t pause, her hips swaying as she walked past.
Agnes had felt an unravelling deep within her, a profound longing starting up, like the whir of a wheel. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘wait, wait for me.’ She tried to step forward, to follow her mother, but the birds were still stepping on her skirt, their low-slung feathered bellies, their webbed and clawed feet trampling it down. ‘Wait!’ Agnes cried, in the dream, at her mother’s receding back.
Her mother didn’t stop but turned her head and said, or seemed to say: ‘The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.’ Then she continued to walk towards the forest.
Agnes called after her again, stumbling forward, tripping over the massed bodies of the insistent, flapping birds, falling to the mud. Just as she hit the ground, she woke, with a start and a gasp, sitting up, and suddenly she was no longer at Hewlands, in the yard, calling to her mother. She was in her house, in bed, her shift slipping off her shoulder, the baby curled inside her skin, her husband next to her, reaching out in sleep to pincer her closer with his arm.
She had lain down, fitting herself into his form; he had nestled his face into her back. She had found a skein of his hair and smoothed it, twisting and twisting it between her fingers; she had pictured the thoughts in his head drawing upwards, along his hair, into her fingers, as a reed draws water up its hollow stem.
He was, she could sense, worrying about her, as men will when their wives approach childbirth. His mind circled and circled the thought, Will she survive? Will she come through? His limbs tightened about her, as if he wanted to keep her there, in the safety of their bed. She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things.
After a while she rose, parting the curtains around the bed, stepping out. She walked to the window, spread her hand to the glass. The branches are so dense, she thought. The branches. You cannot feel the rain.
She went to the small table by the fireplace, where her husband kept his papers and a quill. She lifted the lid of the ink pot and dipped the quill, its claw-like point holding the ink. She can write, after a fashion, the letters coming out small and cramped, and perhaps not in an order legible to most (unlike her husband, who has been to the grammar school, and oratory after that, and can produce a looping, continuous flow of letters, like a skein of embroidery, from the tip of his quill. He stays up late into the night, writing, at his desk. What, she does not know. He writes so fast and with such concentration that Agnes cannot keep up, cannot make it out). But she knows enough to be able to record an approximation of this sentence: The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.
Agnes has riddled the fire, thrown on logs to revive it, placed a jug of cream and a loaf of bread upon the table. She has taken up her basket and let herself out of the front door. She has spoken with her friend, the baker’s wife, and now she is taking a path beside a stream, her basket straining her arm.
It is mid-May. Sunlight brightens the ground in glancing, shifting shapes; Agnes notices, despite everything, because she cannot not notice such things, what is flowering along the verges. Valerian, campion, dog rose, wood sorrel, wild garlic, river flags. Any other time, she would be on her hands and knees, plucking their heads and blooms. Not today.
Even though it is still early, she skirts the boundary fence of Hewlands. She doesn’t want to risk meeting anyone along the way. Not Joan, not Bartholomew, not any of her brothers and sisters. If they saw her, they would raise the alarm, they would call someone, they would send for her husband, they would force her indoors, into the farmhouse. It is the very last place she would want to be for this. The branches of the forest, her mother had said to her.
She catches sight, in the distance, as she steps along the bridleway, of her brother Thomas, moving from house to yard, and she hears Bartholomew’s piercing whistle to his dogs. There is the thatch of the hall; there the pig-pen; there the rear of the apple store, the sight of which makes her smile.
She enters the wood half a mile or so from Hewlands. By this time, the pains are coming regularly. She can just about catch her breath between them, ready herself, steady herself for the next. She has to wait by a huge elm, pressing her palm to its rough, ridged bark as the sensation begins in her lower back, deep between her legs, and surges upwards, seizing her in its grip, shaking her with its force.
Once she is able, she shoulders her burden and continues. She has reached the part of the forest she was aiming for. Fight through the dense tangle of branches and brambles and juniper bushes. Go over the stream, past a thicket of holly trees, which give the only colour in the winter months. And then there is a clearing, of sorts, where sunlight penetrates, creating a thick fleece of green grass, in circular patterns, the curved fronds of ferns. There is an almost horizontal tree here, an immense fir, felled like a giant in a story, its roots splayed out, its reddish trunk held up in the forked branches of other trees, supported by its lesser neighbours.