Hamnet(61)
He watches him go, peering through the thicket of legs surrounding him.
owards the end of Agnes’s second pregnancy, Mary is watchful. She doesn’t let Agnes alone for long. She has noticed her daughter-in-law’s middle getting larger and larger, rounder than seems possible. She has seen Agnes secreting certain items in a sack under the table: cloths, scissors, twine, packets of herbs and dried rinds. Her appearance is astonishing, as if she is smuggling pumpkins inside her gown. I don’t know how she’s still walking, John mumbled one night, as they lay, curtained tight inside their bed. How does she stay standing?
Mary keeps an eye on her, and instructs Eliza and the servants to do the same. She will not permit this grandchild – a boy, they are all hoping – to be born in a bush, like poor Susanna. But that, she consoles herself, was before they fully understood the extent of Agnes’s eccentricities and ways.
‘The minute she asks you to take care of Susanna, the minute you see her reaching for that sack, let me know,’ Mary hisses to the serving girl. ‘The very minute. Do you hear me?’
The girl nods, eyes wide.
Agnes is warming honey over the fire, into which she plans to stir extract of valerian and tincture of chickweed. She dips a spoon into it and pushes it one way, then the other, watching it slide over and around the wooden tip. It is beginning to surrender to the heat, losing its stiffness, easing and loosening into liquid, changing one form for another. She is thinking about the letter that arrived from her husband earlier in the week. She has asked Eliza to read it to her twice and she wants to ask her to read it again today, as soon as she can find her. In it, he told Agnes that he has obtained a contract to make gloves for players at a theatre: Agnes had to ask Eliza to go back and read these words again, so that she was sure she understood, to point them out on the paper, so she could recognise them again, later. Players. Theatre. Gloves. Such gloves they need, Eliza had read haltingly, a frown on her face, as she made out the unfamiliar words. Long gauntlets for fighting, fine gloves with jewels and beads for kings and queens and scenes in court, soft gloves for ladies but the size must necessarily be bigger on these for they are to fit the hands of young stage boys.
So much to mull over in this letter. It has taken Agnes days to absorb all the detail; she has run the words over and over inside her head, she has traced them with a finger, and now she has them down to memory. Jewels and beads. Scenes in court. The hands of young stage boys. And soft gloves for ladies. There is something in the way he has written all this, in such lingering detail, in the long passage about these gloves for the players that alerts Agnes to something. She is not yet sure what. Some kind of change in him, some alteration or turning. Never has he written so much about so little: a glove contract. It is just a contract, like many others, so why, then, does she feel like a small animal, hearing something far off?
She is leaning over to pick up the chickweed tincture and is about to add it to the honey, drop by slow drop, when she feels an odd yet familiar tensing in her lower abdomen. A drawing down, a clenching: insistent, particular. She pauses. It cannot be that. It is too soon. There is still at least another moon to reach fullness before the baby will be born. It must be a false pain, one of those that warns the body of what is to come. She straightens up, using the fireplace for support. Her belly is so big – so much bigger than last time – that she is in danger of toppling into the flames.
She grips the mantel, watching with an unaccustomed detachment as her knuckles turn white. What is happening? She had meant to ask Eliza – today or tomorrow – to write to him, to ask him to return to them. She would like him here for the birth, she has decided. She would like to lay eyes on him again, to take his hand, before this child makes it into the world. She wants to look into his face, to find out what is happening in his life, to ask him about these gloves for kings and queens and players. She wants, she realises, as she stands at the fire, to check that he is the same as he ever was, whether London has altered him unrecognisably.
She pulls in a breath: the sweet, floral scent of the honey, the acrid valerian, the sour musk of chickweed. The pain, instead of easing off, intensifies. She is aware of her centre tightening, as if an iron band is being placed around her. No false pain, this. It will squeeze her and squeeze her, until her body yields up this baby. It may be hours, it may be days: she finds she cannot get a sense of how long. Agnes lets out her breath, slowly, slowly, one hand on the fireplace. She was not expecting this. There was no sign.
She’d thought she had time to get word to him. But now there is no time. This is too soon. She knows this. Yet she also knows that a pain like this cannot be argued with, cannot be got around.
Agnes turns to face the room. Everything around her looks suddenly different, as if she has never seen it before, as if she doesn’t daily wipe and polish this table, those chairs, sweep these flagstones, beat the dust from that wall hanging and the rug. Who lives here, in this narrow room, with leaded windows at the end and long shelves of pots and powders? Who put those wands of hazel into a jug, so that their tight buds would yield up early their bright, creased leaves?
Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was. She’d thought she had more time; she’d thought this baby would come much later, but it seems not. She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?