Hamnet(6)

She doesn’t, however. She dabs at the sweat on her brow, her neck, tells herself not to be foolish. She places a lid on the full pot, she wraps up the honeycomb in a leaf, she presses her hands to the next skep, to read it, to understand it. She leans against it, feeling its rumbling, vibrating interior; she senses its power, its potency, like an incoming storm.

The boy, Hamnet, is trotting along the street, around a corner, dodging a horse that stands, patient, between the shafts of a cart, around a group of men gathered outside the guildhall, leaning towards each other with serious faces. He passes a woman with a baby in her arms, imploring an older child to walk faster, to keep up, a man hitting the haunches of a donkey, a dog that glances up from whatever it is eating to watch Hamnet as he runs. The dog barks once, in sharp admonishment, then returns to its gnawing.

Hamnet arrives at the house of the physician – he has asked directions from the woman with the baby – and he bangs on the door. He registers, momentarily, the shape of his fingers, his nails, and looking at them brings Judith’s to mind; he bangs harder. He thuds, he thunders, he shouts.

The door is swung open and the narrow, vexed face of a woman appears around it. ‘Whatever are you doing?’ she cries, shaking a cloth at him, as if to waft him away, like an insect. ‘That’s a racket loud enough to wake the dead. Be off with you.’

She goes to shut the door but Hamnet leaps forward. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Please. I’m sorry, madam. I need the physician. We need him. My sister – she is unwell. Can he come to us? Can he come now?’

The woman holds the door firm in her reddened hand but looks at Hamnet with care, with attention, as if reading the seriousness of the problem in his features. ‘He’s not here,’ she says eventually. ‘He’s with a patient.’

Hamnet has to swallow, hard. ‘When will he be back, if you please?’

The pressure on the door is lessening. He steps one foot into the house, leaving the other behind him.

‘I couldn’t say.’ She looks him up and down, at the encroaching foot in her hallway. ‘What ails your sister?’

‘I don’t know.’ He tries to think back to Judith, the way she looked as she lay on the blankets, her eyes closed, her skin flushed and yet pale. ‘She has a fever. She has taken to her bed.’

The woman frowns. ‘A fever? Has she buboes?’

‘Buboes?’

‘Lumps. Under the skin. On her neck, under her arms.’

Hamnet stares at her, at the small pleat of skin between her brows, at the rim of her cap, how it has rubbed a raw patch beside her ear, at the wiry coils of hair escaping at the back. He thinks of the word ‘buboes’, its vaguely vegetal overtones, how its bulging sound mimics the thing it describes. A cold fear rinses down through his chest, encasing his heart in an instant, crackling frost.

The woman’s frown deepens. She places her hand in the centre of Hamnet’s chest and propels him back, out of her house.

‘Go,’ she says, her face pinched. ‘Go home. Now. Leave.’ She goes to close the door but then, through the narrowest crack, says, not unkindly, ‘I will ask the physician to call. I know who you are. You’re the glover’s boy, aren’t you? The grandson. From Henley Street. I will ask him to come by your house, when he returns. Go now. Don’t stop on the way back.’ As an afterthought, she adds, ‘God speed to you.’

He runs back. The world seems more glaring, the people louder, the streets longer, the colour of the sky an invasive, glancing blue. The horse still stands at its cart; the dog is now curled up on a doorstep. Buboes, he thinks again. He has heard the word before. He knows what it means, what it denotes.

Surely not, he is thinking, as he turns into his street. It cannot be. It cannot. That – he will not name it, he will not allow the word to form, even inside his head – hasn’t been known in this town for years.

Someone will be home, he knows, by the time he gets to the front door. By the time he opens it. By the time he crosses the threshold. By the time he calls out, to someone, anyone. There will be an answer. Someone will be there.

Unbeknown to him, he passed the maid, both his grandparents and his older sister on his trip to the physician’s house.

His grandmother, Mary, had been coming along an alleyway, down near the river, making deliveries, her stick held out to ward off the advances of a particularly peevish cockerel, Susanna behind her. Susanna had been brought along to carry Mary’s basket of gloves – deerskin, kidskin, squirrel-lined, wool-lined, embroidered, plain. ‘I don’t for the life of me know why,’ Mary had been saying, as Hamnet flashed unseen past the end of the alley, ‘you cannot at the very least look people in the eye when they greet you. These are some of your grandfather’s highest paying customers and a shred of courtesy wouldn’t go amiss. Now I do really believe that . . .’ Susanna had trailed in her wake, rolling her eyes, lugging the basket filled with gloves. Like severed hands, she was thinking, as she let her grandmother’s voice be blotted out by the sound of her own sigh, by the sight of a slice of sky cutting through the building tops.

John, Hamnet’s grandfather, had been among the men outside the guildhall. He had left the parlour and his calculations while Hamnet had been upstairs with Judith, and had been standing with his back to Hamnet as the boy ran for the physician. If the boy had turned his head as he passed, he would have seen his grandfather pushing his way into this group, leaning towards the other men, gripping their reluctant arms, urging them, teasing them, exhorting them to come with him to a tavern.