Hamnet(79)

She says nothing. She takes her daughters’ arms and walks away.

She has a dream that she is in the fields at Hewlands. It is dusk and the earth is bare and dug into deep furrows. Ahead of her is her mother, bending to the soil and straightening up. When Agnes gets closer she sees that her mother is sowing tiny pearl-white teeth in the ground. Her mother doesn’t turn or pause as Agnes approaches, just smiles at her, then carries on dropping milk teeth into the ground, one after another.

Summer is an assault. The long evenings, the warm air wafting through the windows, the slow progress of the river through the town, the shouts of children playing late in the street, the horses flicking flies from their flanks, the hedgerows heavy with flowers and berries.

Agnes would like to tear it all down, rip it up, hurl it to the wind.

Autumn, when it comes, is terrible too. The sharpness on the air, early in the morning. The mist gathering in the yard. The hens fussing and murmuring in their pen, refusing to come out. The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

Letters come, from London. Susanna reads them aloud. They are briefer, Agnes notices, when she examines them later, not quite covering one page, his script looser, as if written in haste. They don’t speak of the playhouse, of the audiences, of the performances, of the plays he writes. None of this. Instead, he tells them of the rain in London and how it soaked his stockings last week, how his landlord’s horse is lame, how he met a lace-seller and bought them all a handkerchief, each with a different edging.

She knows better than to look out of the window at the hour school begins and ends. She keeps herself busy, head averted. She will not go out at this time.

Every golden-haired child in the street puts on his gait, his aspect, his character, making her heart leap, like a deer. Some days, the streets are full of Hamnets. They walk about. They jump and run. They jostle each other. They walk towards her, they walk away from her, they disappear around corners.

Some days she doesn’t go out at all.

The lock of his hair is kept in a small earthenware jar above the fire. Judith has sewn a silk pouch for it. She drags a chair to the mantel when she thinks no one is looking and gets it down.

The hair is the same colour as her own; it might have been cut from her own head; it slips like water through her fingers.

What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

Her mother, dipping a folded, doubled wick into heated tallow, pauses but doesn’t turn around.

If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?

I don’t know, her mother says.

Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below.

Maybe there isn’t one, she suggests.

Maybe not, says her mother.

Agnes is upstairs. She is sitting at the desk where Hamnet kept his collection of pebbles in four pots. He liked to tip them out periodically and sort them in different ways. She is peering into each pot, observing that the last time he arranged them, he did so by colour, not size and—

She looks up to see her daughters standing before her. Susanna has a basket in one hand, a knife in the other. Judith stands behind her, holding a second basket. They are both wearing a rather severe expression.

‘It is time,’ Susanna says, ‘to gather rosehips.’

It is something they do every year, at this time, just as summer tips towards autumn, scouring the hedgerows, filling their baskets with the hips that swell and grow in the wake of the petals. She has taught them, these daughters of hers, how to find the best ones, to split them with a knife, to boil them up, to make a syrup for coughs and chest colds, to see them all through the winter.

This year, though, the hips’ ripeness and their brazen colour are an insult, as are the blackberries turning purple, the elder tree’s darkening berries.

Agnes’s hands, curled around the pebble pots, feel enfeebled, useless. She doesn’t think she is able to grip the knife, to grasp the thorned stems, to pluck the waxy-skinned hips. The idea of harvesting them, bringing them home, stripping off their leaves and stems, then boiling them over a fire: she doesn’t think she can do that at all. She would rather lie down in her bed and pull the blankets over her head.

‘Come,’ says Susanna.

‘Please, Mamma,’ says Judith.

Her daughters press their hands to her face, to her arms; they haul her to her feet; they lead her down the stairs, out into the street, talking all the while of the place they have seen, filled with rosehips, they tell her, simply filled. She must come with them, they say; they will show her the way.

The hedgerows are constellations, studded with fire-red hips.

When they were first married, he took her out one night into the street and it was passing strange, to be there, the place so quiet, so black, so empty.

Look up, he had said to her, standing behind her and putting his arms around her, his hands coming to rest on the curve of her stomach. She leant back her head so that it lay propped on his shoulder.

Balanced on the tops of the houses was a sky scattered with jewels, pierced with silver holes. He had whispered into her ear names and stories, his finger outstretched, pulling shapes and people and animals and families out of the stars.

Constellations, he had said. That was the word.