Hamnet(74)

He stops, pulled up short. He has seen the board, the shroud, the bundled figure.

He looks around at them, one by one. His face is fearful, confused. Agnes can see him ticking them off. His wife, his mother, his elder daughter, his younger daughter.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not . . .? Is it . . .?’

Agnes looks at him and he looks back at her. She wants, more than anything, to stretch this moment, to expand the time before he knows, to shield him from what has happened for as long as she can. Then she gives a swift, single, downward nod.

The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Agnes will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.

He moves quickly across the room and pulls back the cloth. And there is his son’s face before him, a blue-white lily-flower, eyes sealed shut, lips pursed, as if the boy is displeased, unimpressed by what has taken place.

The father cups a hand to the son’s chill cheek. His fingers hover, trembling, over the bruise on his brow. He says, No, no, no. He says, God in Heaven. And, then, crouching low, over the boy, he whispers: How did this happen to you?

His women gather round, putting their arms around him, pulling him close.

So it is the father who carries Hamnet for burial. He hoists the board aloft, balanced on his outstretched arms, his son held before him, wrapped in a white shroud, with flowers and blooms around his body.

Behind him is Agnes, holding Susanna’s hand on one side, and Judith’s on the other. Judith is carried by Bartholomew; she tucks her face into his neck and her tears run down to soak his shirt. Mary and John, Eliza and the brothers follow after, along with Joan, Agnes’s siblings, and the baker and his wife.

The father bears him, unaided, along Henley Street, tears and sweat streaming down his face. Towards the crossroads, Edmond breaks free of the mourners and goes to his brother’s side. Together, they take the board between them, the father the head and Edmond the feet.

The neighbours, the townsfolk, the people on the streets step aside when they see the silent procession. They put down their tools, their bundles, their baskets. They edge backwards, to the sides of the streets, clearing the way. They take off their hats. If they are holding children, they clutch them a little closer, when they see the glover’s son walk by with his dead and shrouded boy. They cross themselves. They call out words of comfort, of sorrow. They send up a prayer – for the boy, for the family, for themselves. Some of them weep. Some exchange whispers about the family, the glover, the airs his wife puts on, how everyone thought the glover’s son would amount to nothing, what a wastrel he had always seemed, and now look at him – a man of consequence in London, it is said, and there he goes, with his richly embroidered sleeves and shining leather boots. Who would have thought it? Is it really true that he makes all that money from the playhouse? How can that be? All of them, though, look with sadness at the covered body, at the stricken face of the mother, walking between her daughters.

For Agnes, the walk to the graveyard is both too slow and too fast. She cannot bear the rows and rows of peering eyes, raking over them, sealing an image of her son’s shrouded body inside their lids, thieving that essence of him. These are people who saw him every day, passing by their doors, below their windows. They exchanged words with him, ruffled his hair, exhorted him to hurry if he was late for the school bell. He played with their children, darted in and out of their houses and shops. He carried messages for them, petted their dogs, stroked the backs of their cats as they slept on sunny windowsills. And now their lives are carrying on, unchanged, their dogs still yawning by the fireplaces, their children still whining for supper, while he is no more.

So she cannot bear their gaze, cannot meet their eyes. She doesn’t want their sympathy and their prayers and their murmured words. She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.

Too soon, too quickly, they are nearing the graveyard, they are through the gate, they are walking between the lines of yew trees, studded with their soft, scarlet berries.

The grave is a shock. A deep, dark rip in the earth, as if made by the careless slash of a giant claw. It is over at the far side of the graveyard. Just beyond it, the river is taking a slow, wide bend, turning its waters in another direction. Its surface is opaque today, braided like a rope, rushing always onwards.

How Hamnet would have loved this patch of ground. She observes herself forming this thought. If he could have chosen, if he were here, next to her, if she could turn to him and ask him, she is sure he would have pointed at this very spot: next to the river. He was ever one for water. She has always had a terrible time keeping him from weed-filled banks, from the dank mouths of wells, from stinking drains, from sheep-soiled puddles. And, now, here he will be, sealed in the earth for eternity, by the river.

His father is lowering him in. How can he do that, how is it possible? She knows that it has to be, that he is only doing what he must, but Agnes feels she could not perform this task. She would never, could never, send his body into the earth like that, alone, cold, to be covered over. Agnes cannot watch, she cannot, her husband’s arms straining, his face twisted and clenched and gleaming, Bartholomew and Edmond stepping forward to help. Someone is sobbing somewhere. Is it Eliza? Is it Bartholomew’s wife, who lost a baby herself not so long ago? Judith is whimpering, Susanna clutching her by the hand, so Agnes misses the moment, she misses seeing her son, the shroud she sewed for him, disappearing from view, entering the dark black river-sodden earth. It was there one moment, then she dipped her head to look at Judith, and then it was gone. Never to be seen again.