Hamnet(97)

He shivers, despite the heat and closeness of the room. He moves his hands through his hair, tugs on the hoops through his ears.

Tonight, he decides, out of nowhere, he will return to his room, straight away. He will not go drinking with his friends. He will go directly to his lodgings. He will light a candle, he will sharpen a quill. He will refuse to go to a tavern with the rest of the company. He will be firm. He will remove their hands from his arms, if they try to drag him. He will cross over the river, go back to Bishopsgate and write to his wife, as he has been trying to, for a long time. He will not avoid the matter in hand. He will tell her about this play. He will tell her all. Tonight. He is certain of it.

Halfway across the bridge, Agnes thinks she cannot go on. She isn’t sure what she expected – a simple arch, perhaps, of wood, over some water – but it wasn’t this. London Bridge is like a town in itself, and a noxious, oppressive one at that. There are houses and shops on either side, some jutting out over the river; these buildings overhang the passage so that, at times, it is completely dark, as if they have been plunged into night. The river appears to them in flashes, between the buildings, and it is wider, deeper, more dangerous than she had ever imagined. It flows beneath their feet, beneath the horses’ hoofs, even now, as they make their way through this crowd.

From every doorway and shop, vendors call and yell at them, running up with fabric or bread or beads or roasted pigs’ trotters. Bartholomew pulls his bridle away from them, with a curt gesture. His face, when Agnes looks at it, is as expressionless as ever, but she can tell he is as disquieted by all this as she is.

‘Perhaps,’ she mutters to him, as they pass what appears to be a heap of excrement, ‘we should have taken a boat.’

Bartholomew grunts. ‘Maybe, but then we might have—’ He breaks off, the words disappearing before he can speak them. ‘Don’t look,’ he says, glancing upwards, then back at her.

Agnes widens her eyes, keeping them on his face. ‘What is it?’ she whispers. ‘Is it him? Have you seen him? Is he with someone?’

‘No,’ Bartholomew says, stealing another glance at whatever it is. ‘It’s . . . Never mind. Just don’t look.’

Agnes cannot help herself. She turns in her saddle and sees: drooping grey clouds pierced by long poles, shuddering in the breeze, topped by things that look, for a moment, like stones or turnips. She squints at them. They are blackened, ragged, oddly lumpish. They give off, to her, a thin, soundless wail, like trapped animals. Whatever can they be? Then she sees that the one nearest her seems to have a row of teeth set into it. They have mouths, she realises, and nostrils, and pitted sockets where eyes once were.

She lets out a cry, turns back to her brother, her hand over her mouth.

Bartholomew shrugs. ‘I told you not to look.’

When they reach the other side of the river, Agnes leans into her saddlebag and pulls out the playbill Joan gave her.

There, again, is the name of her son and the black letters, arranged in their sequence, shocking as it was the first time she saw it.

She turns it away from her, gripping it tightly in her hand, and waves it at the next person who comes near the flank of her horse. The person – a man with a pointed brushed beard and cape thrown back from his shoulders – indicates a side-street. Go that way, he says, then left, then left again, and you shall see it.

She recognises the playhouse from her husband’s description: a round wooden place next to the river. She slides from her horse’s back, and Bartholomew takes the reins, and her legs feel as if they have lost their bones somewhere along the way. The scene around her – the street, the riverbank, the horses, the playhouse – seems to waver and swing, coming in and out of focus. Bartholomew is speaking. He will, he says to her, wait for her here; he will not move from this spot until she comes back. Does she understand? His face is pushed up very close to hers. He appears to be waiting for some response, so Agnes nods. She steps away from him, in through the large doors, paying her penny.

As she comes through the high doorway, she is greeted by the sight of row upon row of faces, hundreds of them, all talking and shouting. She is in a tall-sided enclosure, which is filling with people. There is a stage jutting out into the gathering crowd, and above them all, a ceiling of sky, a circle containing fast-moving clouds, the shapes of birds, darting from one edge to the next.

Agnes slides between shoulders and bodies, men and women, someone holding a chicken beneath their arm, a woman with a baby at her breast, half-hidden by a shawl, a man selling pies from a tray. She turns herself sideways, steps between people, until she gets herself as close as she can to the stage.

On all sides, bodies and elbows and arms press in. More and more people are pouring through the doors. Some on the ground are gesturing and shouting to others in the higher balconies. The crowd thickens and heaves, first one way, then the next; Agnes is pushed backwards and forward but she keeps her footing; the trick seems to be to move with the current, rather than resist it. It is, she thinks, like standing in a river: you have to bend yourself to its flow, not fight it. A group in the highest tier of seats is making much of the lowering of a length of rope. There is shouting and hooting and laughter. The pie-man ties to its end a laden basket and the people above begin to haul it up towards them. Several members of the crowd leap to snatch it, in a playful or perhaps hungry fashion; the pie-man deals each of them a swift, cracking blow. A coin is thrown down by the people above and the pie-man lunges to catch it. One of the men he has just hit gets to it first and the pie-man grabs him around the throat; the man lands a punch on the pie-man’s chin. They go down, hard, swallowed by the crowd, amid much cheering and noise.