Hamnet(89)

She shrugs again. ‘Perhaps another day, when—’

Bartholomew reaches out with his free hand and points to a building across the road from where they are standing. It is an enormous place, the biggest in the town, with a wide central doorway, three storeys stacked on top of each other, and arranged on a corner, so that the front of it faces them, the side stretching away from them.

Agnes follows the direction of his pointing finger. He watches her look at the house. He watches her glance at either side of it. He watches her frown.

‘Where?’ she says.

‘There.’

‘That place?’

‘Yes.’

Her face is puckered with confusion. ‘But which part of it? Which rooms?’

Bartholomew puts down the basket he is holding and rocks back on his heels before he says, ‘All of them.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The whole house,’ he says, ‘is yours.’

The new house is a place of sound. It is never quiet. At night Agnes walks the corridors and stairs and chambers and passageways, her feet bare, listening out.

In the new house, the windows shudder in their frames. A breath of wind turns a chimney into a flute, blowing a long, mournful note down into the hall. The click of wooden wainscots settling for the night. Dogs turning and sighing in their baskets. The small, clawed feet of mice skittering unseen in the walls. The thrashing of branches in the long garden at the back.

In the new house, Susanna sleeps at the furthest end of the corridor; she locks her door against her mother’s nocturnal wanderings. Judith has the chamber next to Agnes’s; she skims over the surface of sleep, waking often, never quite reaching the depths. If Agnes opens the door, just the sound of the hinges is enough to make her sit up, say, Who’s there? The cats sleep on her blankets, one on either side of her.

In the new house, Agnes is able to believe that if she were to walk down the street, across the marketplace, up Henley Street and in through the door of the apartment, she would find them all as they were: a woman with two daughters and a son. It would not be inhabited by Eliza and her milliner husband, not at all, but by them, as they ought to be, as they would be now. The son would be older now, taller, broader, his voice deeper and more sure of itself. He would be sitting at the table, his boots on a chair, and he would be talking to her – how he loved to talk – about his day at school, things that the master had said, who was whipped, who was praised. He would be sitting there and his cap would be hanging behind the door and he would say he was hungry and what was there to eat?

Agnes can let this idea suffuse her. She can hold it within herself, like wrapped and hidden treasure, to be taken out and polished and admired when she is alone, when she walks the new, enormous house at night.

She sees the garden as her terrain, her domain; the house is so large an entity, attracting so much comment and admiration and envy, questions about her husband and what he does, how is his business and is it true he is often at court? People are attracted and repelled by the house, all at once. Since her husband bought it, people have been unable to stop talking about it. They express surprise to her face, but behind her back, she knows what is said: how could he have done it, he always was such a useless hare-brain, soft in the head, his gaze up in the clouds, where did such money come from, was he dealing illegally out there in London, no surprise if he was, given what manner of a man his father was, how can money like that have come from working in a playhouse? It’s not possible.

Agnes has heard it all. The new house is a jam pot, pulling flies towards it. She will live in it but it will never be hers.

Outside its back door, though, she can breathe. She plants a row of apple trees along the high brick wall. Two pairs of pear trees on either side of the main path, plums, elder, birch, gooseberry bushes, blush-stemmed rhubarb. She takes a cutting from a dog-rose growing by the river and cultivates it against the warm wall of the malthouse. She puts in a rowan sapling near the back door. She fills the soil with chamomile and marigold, with hyssop and sage, borage and angelica, with wormwort and feverfew. She installs seven skeps at the furthest edge of the garden; on warm July days it is possible to hear the restless rumble of the bees from the house.

She turns the old brewhouse into a room where she dries her plants, where she mixes them, where people come, in through the side gate, to ask for cures. She orders a larger brewhouse, the biggest in town, to be built at the back of the house. She clears the old well in the courtyard. She makes a knot garden, with box hedges in an interlocking grid, their vacancies filled with purple-headed lavender.

The father comes home to the new house twice, sometimes three times a year. He is home for a month in the second year they live in the house. There have been food riots in the city, he tells them, with apprentices marching on Southwark and pillaging shops. It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud.

Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits. She notes that her father loves the new house. He walks around it, with slow, lingering steps, looking up at the chimneys and lintels, shutting and opening each door. If he were a dog, his tail would be constantly wagging. He is to be seen out in the courtyard, early in the morning, where he likes to pull up the first water from the well and take a drink. The water here, he says, is the freshest, most delicious he has ever tasted.

Judith sees, too, that for the first few days her mother will not look at him. She steps aside if he comes close; she leaves the room if he enters.