Hamnet(81)

Nothing. No one.

She cannot understand it. She, who can hear the dead, the unspoken, the unknown, who can touch a person and listen to the creep of disease along the veins, can sense the dark velvet press of a tumour on a lung or a liver, can read a person’s eye and heart like some can read a book. She cannot find, cannot locate the spirit of her own child.

She waits in these places, she keeps her ear tuned, she sifts through the sounds and wants and disgruntlements of other, noisier, beings, but she cannot hear him, the only one she wants to hear. There is nothing. Just silence.

Judith, though, hears him in the swish of a broom against the floor. She sees him in the winged dip of a bird over the wall. She finds him in the shake of a pony’s mane, in the smattering of hail against the pane, in the wind reaching its arm down the chimney, in the rustle of the rushes that make up her den’s roof.

She says nothing, of course. She folds the knowledge into herself. She closes her eyes, allows herself to say silently, inside her mind, I see you, I hear you, where are you?

Susanna finds it hard to be in the apartment. The unused pallet propped against the wall. The clothes kept on the chair, the empty boots beneath. The pots of his stones that no one is allowed to touch. The curl of his hair kept on the mantel.

She moves her comb, her shift, her gown next door. She takes up the bed that was once her aunts’. Nothing is said. She leaves her mother and sister to their grief and moves in above the workshop.

Agnes is not the person she used to be. She is utterly changed. She can recall being someone who felt sure of life and what it would hold for her; she had her children, she had her husband, she had her home. She was able to peer into people and see what would befall them. She knew how to help them. Her feet moved over the earth with confidence and grace.

This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognise it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

Agnes bolts her casement, closes her door. She doesn’t answer the knocks that come in the evening or the early morning.

If people stop her in the street, with questions about sores, gum swellings, deafness, a rash on the legs, heartache, coughs, she shakes her head and walks on.

She lets the herbs grow grey and crisp, no longer waters her physick garden. The pots and jars on her shelf become covered in a layer of pale dust.

It’s Susanna who gets a damp rag and wipes the jars, who takes down the desiccated and useless herbs from the rafters and feeds them into the fire. She doesn’t fetch the water herself but Agnes hears her instructing Judith to carry a pot, once a day, to the small patch of earth, on the other side of the henhouse, where the medicinal plants grow. Ensure all are watered, Susanna calls after Judith’s retreating back. Agnes listens, realising that she’s adopting her grandmother’s voice, the one Mary uses for the serving girls.

Susanna is the one to shred the marigold petals into vinegar, to mash and add honey. She is the one to ensure the mixture is shaken every day.

Judith begins to lift the window latch when people knock. She speaks with the person outside, standing on tiptoe to hear them. Mamma, Judith will say, it is a washerwoman from down by the river. A man from outside town. A child on behalf of his mother. An old woman from the dairy. Will you see them?

Susanna won’t answer the knocks, but watches and listens and gestures to Judith if someone comes to the window.

Agnes refuses for a while. She shakes her head. She waves off her daughters’ entreaties. She turns back to the fire. But when the old woman from the dairy comes for a third time, Agnes nods. The woman comes in, takes up her place in the big wooden chair with the worn arms, and Agnes listens to her tales of aching joints, a phlegmy chest, a mind that skids and slips, forgetting names, days, tasks.

Agnes rises and goes to her worktable. She brings her pestle and mortar out of the cupboard. She does not allow herself to think that last time she used this it was for him; the last time she held this pestle in her fingers, felt its cold weight, was then, just before, and how useless it was, that it did no good. She doesn’t think these things at all, as she breaks up sharp stems of rosemary, for blood to the head, comfrey and hyssop.

She hands the old dairywoman the packet. Three times a day, she tells her: a sprinkling in hot water. Drink when cool.

She will not take the coins the woman tries to give her, fumblingly, hesitatingly, but she pretends not to see the wrapped cheese left on the table, the bowl of thick cream.

Her daughters show the woman out, saying goodbye. Their voices are like bright birds, taking wing, swooping around the room and out into the skies.

How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed? More and more, her own life seems strange and unrecognisable to her.

Sometime past midnight, Agnes stands in the street, a shawl around her. She was woken by footsteps, light, fast ones, with a familiar tittuping rhythm.

She was pulled from sleep by a sense of feet approaching her window, by a definite feeling that someone was outside. And so here she is, alone in the street, waiting.

‘I’m here,’ she says aloud, turning her head first one way, then the other. ‘Are you?’

At that very moment her husband is sitting under the same sky, in a skiff rounding a bend in the river. They are travelling upstream but he can sense that the tide is turning; the river seems confused, almost hesitant, trying to flow in two directions at once.