Hamnet(83)

Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can’t avoid? The thought falls into her head from nowhere, like a drop of wine into water, colouring her mind with its dark, spreading stain.

She shifts in her seat, clears her throat, bends closer over her needle.

‘Are you quite well?’ her grandmother asks.

‘Yes, thank you,’ Susanna says, without looking up. She wonders how much longer they will be hemming cloths: they have been at it since midday and there seems to be no end in sight. Her mother was here, for a while, and Judith, too, but her mother disappeared next door with a customer who wanted a cure for ulcers, and Judith had drifted off to do whatever it is she does. Talk to stones. Draw indecipherable shapes with her left hand, in chalk, on the floors. Collect the feathers fallen from the dovecote and weave them together with string.

Agnes steps into the room behind them.

‘Did you give him a cure?’ Mary asks her.

‘I did.’

‘And did he pay you?’

Without moving her head, Susanna sees, from the corner of her eye, her mother shrug and turn towards the window. Mary sighs and stabs her needle through the cloth she is holding.

Agnes remains at the window, one hand on her hip. The gown she is wearing is loose on her this spring, her wrists narrow, her fingernails bitten down.

Mary, Susanna knows, is of the opinion that grief is all very well in moderation, but there comes a time when it is necessary to make an effort. She is of the opinion that some people make too much of things. That life goes on.

Susanna sews. She sews and sews. Her grandmother asks her mother, Where is Judith, how are the serving girls getting along with the washing, is it raining, doesn’t it seem that the days are getting longer, was it not kind of their neighbour to return that runaway fowl?

Agnes says nothing, just keeps on looking out of the window.

Mary talks on, of the letter they received from Susanna’s father, how he is about to take the company on tour again, that he had a chest cold – caught from river fumes – but is now recovered.

Agnes gives a sharp intake of breath, turning to them, her face alert, strained.

‘Oh,’ Mary says, putting her hand to her cheek, ‘you frightened me. Whatever is—’

‘Do you hear that?’ Agnes says.

All three pause, listen, their heads cocked.

‘Hear what?’ Mary asks, her brows beginning to knit.

‘That . . .’ Agnes holds up a finger ‘. . . There! Do you hear it?’

‘I hear nothing,’ Mary snaps.

‘A tapping.’ Agnes strides to the fireplace, presses a hand to the chimney breast. ‘A rustling.’ She leaves the fireplace and moves to the settle, looking up. ‘A definite noise. Can’t you hear it?’

Mary allows a long pause. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s likely nothing more than a jackdaw come down the chimney.’

Agnes leaves the room.

Susanna grips the cloth in one hand, the needle in the other. If she just keeps on making stitches, over and over, of equal size, perhaps all this will pass.

Judith is in the street. She has Edmond’s dog with her; it lies in the sun, one paw raised up, while she weaves green ribbon into the long hair of its neck. It looks up at her trustingly, patiently.

The sun is hot on her skin, the light in her eyes, which is perhaps why she doesn’t notice the figure coming down Henley Street: a man, walking towards her, hat in his hand, a sack slung on his back.

He calls her name. She lifts her head. He waves. She is running towards him before she even says his name to herself, and the dog is leaping along beside her, thinking that this is much more fun that the ribbon game, and the man has caught her in his arms and swung her off the ground, saying, My little maid, my little Jude, and she cannot catch her breath for laughing, and then she thinks she has not seen him since—

‘Where have you been?’ she is saying to him, suddenly furious, pushing him away from her, and somehow she is crying now. ‘You’ve been gone such a long time.’

If he sees her anger, he doesn’t show it. He is lifting his sack from the ground, scratching the dog behind his ears, taking her by the hand and pulling her towards the house.

‘Where is everyone?’ he booms, in his biggest, loudest voice.

A dinner. His brothers, his parents, Eliza and her husband, Agnes and the girls all squeezed together around the table. Mary has beheaded one of the geese, in his honour – the honking and shrieking were terrible to hear – and now its carcass lies, dismantled and torn, between them all.

He is telling a story involving an innkeeper, a horse and a millpond. His brothers are laughing, his father is pounding the table with his fist; Edmond is tickling Judith, making her squeal; Mary is remonstrating with Eliza about something; the dog is leaping for scraps thrown to it by Richard, barking in between. The story reaches a climax – something to do with a gate left open, Agnes isn’t sure what – and everybody roars. And Agnes is looking at her husband, across the table.

There is something about him, something different. She cannot put her finger on what. His hair is longer, but that’s not it. He has a second earring in his other ear, but that’s not it. His skin shows signs of the sun and he is wearing a shirt she hasn’t seen before, with long, trailing cuffs. But it is none of these things.