Hamnet(87)

‘For you. For us.’

‘In London?’

‘No,’ he says impatiently, ‘Stratford, of course. You said you would rather stay here, with the girls.’

‘A house?’ she repeats.

‘Yes.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you money for a house?’

She hears him smile beside her, hears his lips cleaving away from his teeth. He takes her hand and kisses it between each word. ‘I have. And more besides.’

‘What?’ She pulls her hand away. ‘Is this true?’

‘It is.’

‘How can that be?’

‘You know,’ he says, flopping back on the mattress, ‘it is always a pleasure for me to be able to surprise you. An unaccustomed, rare pleasure.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’

She shrugs. ‘None of these things I can help. I never—’

‘I have money,’ he interrupts, with a whisper, his lips brushing her ear. ‘A lot of money.’

‘You have?’ She sits up in amazement. She had grasped that his business was flourishing but this is still news to her. She thinks fleetingly of the costly bracelet, which she has since covered with ashes and bone fragments, wrapped in hide, and buried by the henhouse. ‘How did you come by this money?’

‘Don’t tell my father.’

‘Your father?’ she repeats. ‘I – I won’t, of course, but—’

‘Could you leave this place?’ he asks. His hand comes to rest on her spine. ‘I want to take you and the girls out of here, to lift you all up and to plant you somewhere else. I want you away from all . . . this . . . I want you somewhere new. But could you leave here?’

Agnes considers the thought. She turns it this way and that. She pictures herself in a new house, a cottage perhaps, a room or two, somewhere on the edge of town, with her daughters. A patch of land, for a garden; a few windows looking out over it.

‘He is not here,’ she says eventually. This stills the hand on her back. She tries to keep her voice even but the anguish leaks out of the gaps between words. ‘I have looked everywhere. I have waited. I have watched. I don’t know where he is but he isn’t here.’

He pulls her back towards him, gently, carefully, as if she is something he might break, and draws the blankets over her.

‘I will see to it,’ he says.

The person he asks to broker the purchase is Bartholomew. He cannot, he writes in a letter to him, ask any of his brothers as they might bring his father into it. Will Bartholomew help him in this?

Bartholomew considers the letter. He places it on his mantelpiece and glances at it, now and then, as he eats his breakfast.

Joan, agitated by the letter’s appearance at their door, walks back and forth across the room, asking what is in it, is it from ‘that man’, as she refers to Agnes’s husband? She demands to know, it is only right. Does he want to borrow money? Does he? Has he come to a bad end in London? She always knew he would. She had him pegged for a bad sort from the day she first laid eyes on him. It still grieves her that Agnes threw away her chance on a good-for-nothing like him. Is he asking to borrow money from Bartholomew? She hopes Bartholomew isn’t for a minute considering lending him anything at all. He has the farm to think of, and the children, not to mention all his brothers and sisters. He really should listen to her, Joan, on this matter. Is he listening? Is he?

Bartholomew continues to eat his porridge in silence, as if he can’t hear her, his spoon dipping and rising, dipping and rising. His wife becomes nervous and spills the milk, half on the floor and half on the fire, and Joan scolds her, getting down on her hands and knees to mop up the mess. A child starts to cry. The wife tries to fan the fire back to life.

Bartholomew pushes the remainder of his breakfast away from him. He stands, Joan’s voice still twittering away behind him, like a starling’s. He claps his hat to his head and leaves the farmhouse.

He walks over the land to the east of Hewlands, where the ground has become boggy of late. Then he comes back.

His wife, his stepmother and his children gather round him again, asking, Is it bad news from London? Has something happened? Joan has, of course, examined the letter, which has been passed from hand to hand in the farmhouse, but neither she nor Bartholomew’s wife can read. Some of the children can but they cannot decipher the script of their mysterious uncle.

Bartholomew, still ignoring the women’s questions, takes out a sheet of paper and a quill. Painstakingly, he dips into the ink and, with his tongue held firmly between his teeth, he writes back to his brother-in-law and says, yes, he will help.

Several weeks later, he goes to find his sister. He looks for her first at the house, then at the market, and then at a cottage where the baker’s wife directs him – a small dark place on the road out by the mill.