Hamnet(73)

She tucks the dried plants into the sheet, nestles them next to his body, where they whisper their comfort to him.

Next is the needle. Agnes threads it with thick twine. She begins at the feet.

The point is sharp; it punctures the weave of the cloth and slides out the other side. She keeps her eyes on her work, the drawing together of the sheet, to make a shroud. She is a sailor, stitching a sail, preparing a boat that will carry her son into the next world.

She has reached the shins when something makes her lift her head. There is a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. Agnes’s heart clenches like a fist, she almost cries out, There you are, have you come back, but then she sees it is, in fact, Judith. The same face, but this one is alive, stricken, trembling.

Mary starts up from her chair, saying, Back to bed, now, come, you must sleep, but Agnes says, No, let her stay.

She puts down the needle, carefully, because it must not prick him, even now, and holds out her arms. Judith leaves the stairs, she steps into the room, she hurls herself against her mother, pressing her face into her apron, saying something about kittens, and something else about sickness, about changing places, about it being her fault, and then sobs tear through her, gale winds through a tree.

Agnes says to her: It is no fault of yours. None at all. The fever came for him and there was nothing we could do. We must bear it the best we can. Then she says: Do you want to see him?

Mary arranges the sheet so that Hamnet’s face is uncovered. Judith comes to stand beside him, looking down, her hands drawn up, clenched into themselves. Her expression melds from disbelief to timidity to pity to grief and back again.

‘Oh,’ she says, drawing in breath. ‘It is really him?’

Agnes, standing next to her, nods.

‘It doesn’t look like him.’

Agnes nods again. ‘Well, he is gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘To . . .’ she inhales a deep, almost steady breath ‘. . . to . . . Heaven. And his body is left behind. We have to take care of it the best we can.’

Judith puts out a hand and touches the cheek of her twin. Tears course down her face, chasing each other. She has always cried such enormous tears, like heavy pearls, quite at odds with the slightness of her frame. She shakes her head, hard, once or twice. Then she says, ‘Will he never come back?’

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

For the first time, the tears come for Agnes. They fill her eyes without warning, blur her vision, pouring forth to run down her face, her neck, soaking her apron, running between her clothes and her skin. They seem to come not just from her eyes but from every pore of her body. Her whole being longs for, grieves for her son, her daughters, her absent husband, for all of them, when she says, ‘No, my love, he will never come again.’

The milky, uncertain light of dawn is reaching into the room. Agnes is making the final stitches in the shroud, tucking it in at his shoulder, neatening the edges near his knees. Mary has emptied the bowls, wrung out the cloths, swept the loose leaves and buds from the floor. Judith has her cheek against the cloth near his shoulder. Susanna has come in from next door and she sits next to her sister, head lowered.

They have made him ready, between them. He is clean and set for burial, parcelled in white cloth.

Agnes finds that her mind rears back, like a horse refusing a ditch, when she thinks of the grave. She can think forward to walking with him to church – Bartholomew and perhaps Gilbert and John will carry him; she can picture the priest blessing the body. But the lowering of him into the ground, into a dark pit, never to be seen again, she cannot think about. She cannot imagine. She cannot possibly permit this to happen to her child.

She is, for the third or fourth time, trying to thread her needle – she needs to stitch the sheet over his face, she must, it needs to be done – but the twine is thicker than she is used to, and frayed, and will not go through the eye of the needle, however many times she aims. She is wetting the end in her mouth when there comes a thudding at the door.

She raises her head. Judith whimpers, looks up. Mary turns from the fireplace.

‘Who could that be?’ she says.

Agnes puts down the needle. All four of them stand. The knocking comes again: a row of sharp raps.

For a wild moment, Agnes believes that something has come to her house, again, to take her other children, to take her boy, before she is ready, before she has him fully prepared. It is too early in the morning for it to be a mourner or a neighbour, come to pay their final respects, or for the town officials to snatch away the body. It must be some spectre, some wraith, come calling at their door. But for whom?

Again, the sound comes: a thudding, a rapping. The door leaps on its hinges.

‘Who’s there?’ Agnes calls out, her voice bolder than she feels.

The latch lifts, the door swings open, and there, suddenly, is her husband, stepping in under the lintel, his clothes and head all wetted and dark with rain, his hair streaked to his cheeks. His face is sleepless, crazed, his skin pale. ‘Am I too late?’ he says.

Then his eye falls upon Judith, who is standing by the candle, and a smile breaks out across his features.

‘You,’ he says, striding across the room, holding out his arms. ‘You are here, you are well. I was worried – I couldn’t rest – I came as soon as I heard but now I see that—’