Hamnet(50)

The seamstress puts the box on her counter. ‘You may do more than that. You may be the one to open them. You’ll need to cut away all these nasty old rags. Take up the scissors there.’

She hands the girl the box of millefiori beads and Judith takes it, her hands eager and quick, her face lit with a smile.





n an afternoon in the summer of Susanna’s first year, Agnes notices a new smell in the house.

She is spooning meal into the waiting mouth of Susanna, saying, Here’s one for you, here’s another, the spoon going in laden with meal and coming out streaked and shining. Susanna is seated at the corner of the table on a chair piled high with cushions. Agnes has fastened her in place on this throne with a knotted shawl. The child is rapt, miniature hands scrolled into themselves, like the shells of snails, eyes fixed on the spoon as it travels from bowl to mouth and back again.

‘Dat,’ shouts Susanna, her mouth pitted with four blue-white teeth, in a row, on her lower gum.

Agnes repeats the sound back to her. She finds herself frequently unable to look away from her child, to remove her gaze from her daughter’s face. Why would she ever want to behold anything else, when she could be taking in the sight of Susanna’s ears, like the pale folds of roses, the winglike sweep of her tiny eyebrows, the dark hair, which clings to her crown as if painted there with a brush? There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever.

‘Deet,’ Susanna exclaims, and, with a deft and determined lunge, grabs at the spoon, causing meal to be splattered to the table, to her front, to her face, to Agnes’s gown.

Agnes is finding a cloth, wiping the table, the chairs, Susanna’s disbelieving face, trying to quell the outraged roaring, when she raises her head and sniffs the air.

It is a damp, heavy, acrid scent, like food gone off or unaired linen. She has never smelt it before. If it had a colour, it would be greyish green.

Cloth still in hand, she turns to look at her daughter. Susanna is gripping the spoon, banging it rhythmically on the table, blinking with each impact, her lips pursed together, as if this percussion is an act that requires the fullest concentration.

Agnes sniffs the cloth; she sniffs the air. She presses her nose to her sleeve, then to Susanna’s smock. She walks about the room. What is it? It smells like dying flowers, like plants left too long in water, like a stagnant pond, like wet lichen. Is there something damp and rotting in the house?

She checks under the table, in case one of Gilbert’s dogs has dragged in something. She kneels down to peer under the coffer. She puts her hands on her hips, standing in the middle of the room, and draws in a deep breath.

Suddenly she knows two things. She doesn’t know how she knows them: she just does. Agnes never questions these moments of insight, the way information arrives in her head. She accepts them as a person might an unexpected gift, with a gracious smile and a feeling of benign surprise.

She is with child, she feels. There will be another baby in the house by the end of winter. Agnes has always known how many children she will have. She has foreknowledge of this: she knows there will be two children of hers standing at the bed where she dies. And here is the second child now, its first sign, its very beginning.

She also knows that this smell, this rotten scent, is not a physical thing. It means something. It is a sign of something – something bad, something amiss, something out of kilter in her house. She can feel it somewhere, growing, burgeoning, like the black mould that creeps out of the plaster in winter.

The opposing natures of these two sensations perplex her. She feels herself stretching in two directions: the baby, good; the smell, bad.

Agnes walks back to the table. Her first and only thought is her daughter. Is this scent of sadness, of dark matter, coming from her? Agnes buries her face in the child’s warm neck and inhales. Is it her? Is her child, her girl, under threat from some dark, gathering force?

Susanna squeals, surprised at this attention, saying, Mamma, Mamma, fastening her arms around Agnes’s neck. Her arms, Agnes can feel, are not long enough to go right around her, so they grip with their fierce fingers to Agnes’s shoulders.

Agnes sniffs her as a dog follows a trail, with both nostrils, as if sucking up her daughter’s essence. She smells the pear-blossom hint of Susanna’s skin, the warm hair, the scent of bedclothes and meal. Nothing else.

She lifts her daughter’s diminutive round form, saying, will they find a slice of bread, a cup of milk, and she is thinking about the new baby, curled small as a nut inside her, and how Susanna will love it, how they will play together, how it will be a Bartholomew for her, a friend and companion and ally, always. Will it be a boy or a girl? Agnes asks herself and, strangely, can locate no sense of the answer.

With Susanna at her feet, she cuts a slice of bread and slathers it with honey. Susanna sits on her lap now, at the table, because Agnes wants her close, wants her right there, in case this smell, this darkness, should try to come near. And Agnes talks, to keep her daughter distracted, to keep her safe from the world. The child is listening to the stream of talk coming from Agnes’s mouth, hooking out the words she knows, to shout them loud: bread, cup, foot, eye.

They are singing a song together, about birds nesting and bees humming, when Susanna’s father comes down the stairs, into the room. Agnes is aware of him lifting a cup, filling it with water from the pitcher, of him drinking it, then another and another. He walks around them and slumps into a chair opposite.