Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  And now there is this – this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?

  The apples, stretching away from her one way and the other, rotate and jostle in their grooves.

  The Latin tutor opens his eyes for a moment, the black of his pupils wide, almost unseeing. He smiles, places his hands on either side of her face, murmurs something, she isn’t sure what, but it doesn’t matter at this particular moment. Their foreheads touch. Strange, she thinks, to have another at such proximity: the overwhelming scale of lash, of folded eyelid, of the hairs of the brow, all facing the same way. She doesn’t take his hand, not even out of habit: she doesn’t need to.

  When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt – what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all – it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.

  She watches an apple turn its red-stained flesh towards her, then away, a pitted tree-mark appearing, then the flash of the navel-like end.

  Last time he came to the farm, they had walked together after his lesson, up to the furthest field, as dusk settled on the land, dimming the trees to black, as the furrows of the new-cut hayfields seemed to deepen into valleys, and come upon Joan, stepping between the springy flanks of their flocks. She liked to check on Bartholomew’s work, or liked Bartholomew to know she was checking. One of the two. She had seen them coming, Agnes knew. She had seen Joan’s head turn towards them, take a long look at them, as they walked up the path together. She would have realised why they were coming, would have seen their joined hands. Agnes had sensed the anxiety of the tutor: all at once, his fingers were cold and she could feel them tremble. She pressed his hand once, twice, before releasing it and letting him go ahead of her, through the gate.

  Never, was what Joan had said. You? Then she laughed, a harsh trill that startled the sheep around her, making them lift their blunt heads and shift their cloven feet. Never, she said again. What age are you? She didn’t wait for a reply but answered herself: Not old enough. I know your family, Joan had said, screwing up her face into a contemptuous pout, pointing at the tutor. Everyone knows them. Your father and his shady dealings, his disgrace. He was bailiff, she said, spitting out the word ‘was’. How he loved to lord it over us all, swanning about in his red robes. But not any more. Have you any idea how much your father owes around the town? How much he owes us? You could tutor my sons until they are all grown men and it wouldn’t come close to clearing his debt here. So, no, she said, looking round him at her, you cannot marry her. Agnes will marry a farmer, by and by – someone with prospects, someone to provide for her. She’s been brought up for that life. Her father left her a dowry in his will – I’m sure you know that, don’t you? She’ll not marry a feckless, tradeless boy like you.

  And she had turned away, as if that had been an end to it. But I don’t want to marry a farmer, Agnes had cried. Joan had laughed again. Is that so? You want to marry him? Yes, she said. I do. Very much. And Joan had laughed again, shaking her head.

  But we are handfasted, the tutor said. I asked her and she answered and so we are bound.

  No, you are not, said Joan. Not unless I say so.

  The tutor had left the field, marched down the path and off through the woods, his face dark and thunderous, and Agnes was left with her stepmother, who told her to stop standing there like a simpleton, go back to the hall and mind the children. The next time he came to the farm, Agnes beckoned to him. I know a way, she said. I have an answer. We can, she said, take matters into our own hands. Come. Come with me.

  Each apple, to her, at this moment, seems toweringly different, distinct, unique, each one streaked with variations of crimson, gold and green. All of them turning their single eye upon her, then away, then back. It is too much, all too much, it is overwhelming, how many of them there are, the noise they are all making, the tapping, rhythmic, rocking sound, on and on it goes, faster and faster. It steals her breath, makes her heart trip and race in her chest, she cannot take it much more, she cannot, she cannot. Some apples rock right out of their places, on to the floor, and perhaps the tutor has trodden on them because the air is filled with a sweetish, acrid smell and she grips his shoulders. She knows, she feels, that all will be well, that everything will go their way. He holds her to him and she can feel the breath leave him, enter him, leave him again.

  Joan is not an idle woman. She has six children (eight, if you count the half-mad step-girl and the idiot brother she was forced to take on when she married). She is a widow, as of last year. The farmer left the farm to Bartholomew, of course, but the terms of the will allow her, Joan, to remain living here to oversee matters. And oversee she will. She doesn’t trust that Bartholomew to look further than his nose. She has told him she will continue to run the kitchen, the yard and the orchard, with the help of the girls. Bartholomew will see to the flocks and the fields, with the help of the boys, and she will walk the land with him, once a week, to make sure all is as it should be. So Joan has the chickens and pigs to see to, the cows to milk, food for the men, the farmhand and the shepherd to prepare, day in, day out. Two younger boys to educate as best she can – and Lord knows they will need an education as the farm will not be coming down to them, more’s the pity. She has three daughters (four, if you count the other, which Joan usually doesn’t) to keep under her eye. She has bread to bake, cattle to milk, berries to bottle, beer to brew, clothes to mend, stockings to darn, floors to scrub, dishes to wash, beds to air, carpets to beat, windows to polish, tables to scour, hair to brush, passages to sweep, steps to scrub.

  Forgive her, then, if it is almost three months before she notices that a number of monthly cloths are missing from the wash.

  At first, she believes she has made a mistake. The washing is done once a fortnight, early on a Monday morning, which allows time for airing and pressing. There is always a day with a small number of the monthly cloths; she and her daughters bleed at the same time; the other one keeps to her own time, of course, as she does with everything else. She and the girls all know the rhythm: there is the fortnight’s wash with her and her daughters’ cloths, heaps of them, dried to rust, and there is the wash with the smaller number of Agnes’s. Joan tends to toss them into the pot with wooden tongs, holding her breath, covering them with salt.

  On a morning in late October, Joan is sifting through the mounds of laundry in the washhouse. A pile of shifts and cuffs and caps, ready for a dousing in scalding water and salt; a pile of stockings, for a cooler tub; breeches, caked with filth and mud, a spattered kirtle, a cloak that had borne the brunt of a puddle. The pile Joan thinks of as ‘the dirties’ is smaller than usual.

  Joan lifts a piece of soiled cloth, one hand over her nose, a bedsheet with the tang of urine (her youngest son, William, is still not wholly reliable in that respect, despite threats and cajolings, though he is only three, bless him). A shirt smeared with some manner of dung is stuck to a cap. Joan frowns, looks about her. She stands for a moment, considering.

  She goes outside, where her daughters, Caterina, Joanie and Margaret, are twisting a sheet between them. Caterina has tied a rope around William’s middle, the end of which is lo
oped around her waist. He strains and tugs at the end, grumbling in a low murmur, holding fistfuls of grass. He is trying to get to the pig-pen but Joan has heard too many stories about swine trampling children or eating them or crushing them. She will not let her young ones wander at will.

  ‘Where are the monthlies?’ she says, standing in the doorway.

  They turn to look at her, her daughters, separated and linked by the tortured sheet, which is dripping water to the ground. They shrug, their faces blank and innocent.

  Joan goes back into the washhouse. She must have made a mistake. They must be here somewhere. She lifts pile after pile from the floor. She sifts through shifts and caps and stockings. She marches out, past her daughters, into the house and straight to the cupboard. There, she counts the thick cloths, folded and laundered, on the upper shelf. She knows how many there are in this house and that exact number is right there in front of her.

  Joan stamps down the passage, out through the door and slams it behind her. She stands for a moment on the step, her breath streaming in and out of her nostrils. The air is cool, with the crisp edge that denotes the tipping of autumn into winter. A chicken struts up the ladder into the henhouse; the goat, at the end of its rope, chews ruminatively on a mouthful of grass, eyeing her. Joan’s mind is clear, tolling with one single thought: which one, which one, which one?

  Perhaps she already knows but, still, she marches down the steps, across the farmyard and up to the washhouse where her girls are still twisting wet sheets, giggling together about something. She seizes Caterina, first, by the arm and presses her hand to the girl’s belly, looking into her eyes, ignoring her cries. The sheet falls to the wet, leafy ground, trodden on by her and the frightened girl. Joan feels: a flat stomach, the nudge of a hipbone, an empty pod. She lets Caterina go and gets hold of Joanie who is young, still a girl, for pity’s sake, and if it is her, if someone has done this to her, Joan will, she will, do something terrible, something bad and fearful and vengeful, and that man will rue the day he ever set foot in Hewlands, ever took her daughter wherever it was he took her and she will—

  Joan lets her hand drop. Joanie’s belly is flat, almost hollow. Perhaps, she finds herself thinking, she should feed up these girls of hers a bit more, encourage them to take a larger share of meat. Is she underfeeding them? Is she? Is she allowing the boys to take more than their due?

  She shakes her head to banish that line of thought. Margaret, she thinks, surveying her youngest daughter’s smooth and anxious face. No. It cannot be. She is still a child.

  ‘Where is Agnes?’ she says.

  Joanie is staring at her, aghast, glancing down at the muddied sheet beneath their feet; Caterina, Joan notes, looks away, looks sideways, as if she understands what this means.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Caterina, stooping to pick up the sheet. ‘She may have—’

  ‘She’s milking the cow,’ blurts out Margaret.

  Joan is screeching even before she reaches the byre. The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets, words she didn’t even know she knew, words that dart and crackle and maim, words that twist and mangle her tongue.

  ‘You,’ she is yelling, as she comes into the warmth of the byre, ‘where are you?’

  Agnes’s head is pressed against the smooth flank of the cow as she milks. Joan hears the psht-psht-u-psht of milk jetting into the pail. At the sound of Joan’s cry, the cow shifts and Agnes lifts her cheek and turns to look at her stepmother, a wary expression on her face. Here it comes now, she seems to be thinking.

  Joan grabs her by the arm, yanks her off the milking stool, and pushes her up against the stall partition. Too late, she sees her son James standing in the next stall: he must have been helping Agnes with the milking. Joan has to fumble through the girl’s kirtle, the fastenings of her gown, and the girl is struggling, pushing her fingers away, trying to break free, but Joan gets her hand through, just for a moment, and feels – what? A swelling, hard in texture, and hot. A quickening mound, risen like a loaf.

  ‘Whore,’ Joan spits, as Agnes pushes her away. ‘Slut.’

  Joan is propelled backwards, towards the cow, which is tossing its head now, uneasy at this change in atmosphere, at this unexplained hiatus in the milking. She falls against the cow’s rump and stumbles slightly and Agnes is off, away, running through the byre, past the dozing ewes, through the door, and Joan is not going to let her get away. She rights herself, goes after her stepdaughter, and her fury propels her to a new speed because she catches up with her easily.

  Her hand reaches out, closes over a lock of Agnes’s hair. So simple to yank it, to pull the girl to a stop, to feel her head jerked back by her grip, as if pulled up by a bridle. The ease of it astonishes and fuels her: Agnes drops to the ground, falling awkwardly on her back and Joan can keep her there by winding the hair round and round her fist.

  In this way, the two of them by the fence to the farmyard, Joan can get Agnes to listen to anything she says.

  ‘Who,’ she screams at the girl, ‘did this? Who put that child in your belly?’

  Joan is running through the not inconsiderable number of suitors who have sought Agnes’s hand, ever since the details of the dowry in her father’s will became known. Could it have been one of them? There was the wheelwright, the farmer from the other side of Shottery, that blacksmith’s apprentice. But the girl hadn’t seemed to take to any of them. Who else? Agnes is reaching round, trying to prise Joan’s fingers off her hair. Her face – that haughty, high-cheekboned pale face of hers of which she is so proud – is contorted by pain, by thwarted anger. There are tears streaking down her cheeks, pooling in her eye sockets.

  ‘Tell me,’ Joan says, into this face, which she has had to see, every day, looking back at her with indifference, with insolence, since the day she came here. This face, which Joan knows resembles that of the first wife, the beloved wife, the woman her husband would never speak of, whose hair he had kept pressed in a kerchief in a shirt pocket, next to his heart – she had discovered this as she was laying him out for burial. It must have been there all along, all the years she had washed and cleaned for him, fed him, borne his children, and there it was, the hair of the first wife. She, Joan, will never get over the smart and sting of that insult.

  ‘Was it the shepherd?’ Joan says and she sees that, despite everything, this suggestion makes Agnes grin.

  ‘No,’ Agnes gets out, ‘not the shepherd.’

  ‘Who, then?’ Joan demands and is just about to name the son at the neighbouring farm when Agnes twists around and lands a kick on her shin, a kick of such force that Joan staggers backwards, her hands springing open.

  Agnes is up, off, away, scrambling to her feet, gathering her skirts. Joan gets up unsteadily, and goes after her. They are in the farmyard when Joan catches up with her. She grabs her by the wrist, swings her round, lands a slap on the girl’s face.

  ‘You will tell me who—’ she begins, but never finishes the sentence because there is a noise at the left side of her head: a deafening explosion, like a clap of thunder. For a moment, she cannot comprehend what has happened, what the noise means. Then she feels the pain, the smart of skin, the deeper ache of bone, and she realises that Agnes has struck her.

  Joan puts a hand to her face, aghast. ‘How dare you?’ she shrieks. ‘How dare you hit me? A girl raising a hand to her mother, someone who—’

  Agnes’s lip is swollen, bleeding, so her words are slurred, indistinct, but Joan still manages to hear her say: ‘You are not my mother.’

  Enraged, Joan slaps her again. Agnes, unbelievably and without hesitation, slaps her back. Joan lifts her hand again but it is seized from behind. Someone has her around the waist – it is that great brute Bartholomew and he is lifting her up and away, forcing down her hands and holding them fast with the effortless grip of his fingers. Her son, Thomas, is there too, standing now between her and Agnes, holding up a sheep crook, and Bartholomew is telling her to stop, to calm herself. Her other children stand b
y the henhouse, open-mouthed, amazed. Caterina has her arms around Joanie, who is crying. Margaret holds little William, who is burying his face in her neck.

  Joan feels herself carried to the other side of the yard and Bartholomew is restraining her, asking what is amiss, what has brought this on, and she is telling him, pointing a finger at Agnes, now being helped to her feet by Thomas.

  Bartholomew’s face falls as he listens. He closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out. He rubs a hand over the bristles of his beard and examines his feet for a moment.

  ‘The Latin tutor,’ he says, and looks across at Agnes.

  Agnes doesn’t reply but lifts her chin a notch.

  Joan looks from stepson to stepdaughter, to sons, to daughters. All of them, save the stepdaughter, drop their gaze and she realises that they all, every one of them, saw what she did not. ‘The Latin tutor?’ she repeats. She pictures him suddenly, standing at a gate in the furthest field, asking her for Agnes’s hand, in a faltering voice. She had almost forgotten. ‘Him? That – that boy? That wastrel? That wageless, useless, beardless—’ She breaks off to laugh, a harsh, mirthless sound that leaves her chest feeling emptied and hot. She remembers it all, now, the lad standing there as she told him no; she remembers feeling a brief stab of pity for him, that young lad, his face so crestfallen, and with such a father, too. But Joan had dismissed the thought of him, as soon as he had left her sight.

  Joan shakes off Bartholomew’s hand. She becomes focused, ruthless. She marches into the house, past Agnes, past her children, past the chickens. She bangs open the door and, once inside, is fast and thorough. She moves through the room, collecting anything that belongs to her stepdaughter. A pair of shifts, a spare cap, an apron. A wooden comb, a stone with a hole, a belt.

  The family is still gathered in the farmyard when Joan comes out of the house and hurls a bundle at Agnes’s feet.