Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  In the country, people are too taken up with their livestock and crops to make calls but in this house people come at all hours of the day, expecting to find company: Mary’s relatives, John’s business associates. The former are to be brought to the parlour; the latter are to be shown first into the workshop, where John will decide to which room they will be taken. Mary is mostly in the house, keeping her eye on the servants and the apprentice or sitting at her needlework, unless out on calls. John is often nowhere to be seen. The younger boys are at school. Agnes’s husband is sometimes in, sometimes out: he teaches, he goes out to taverns in the evenings, he is sometimes sent on errands for his father. The remainder of the time, he skulks upstairs in their apartment, reading or staring out of the window.

  Customers come at all hours to the workshop window, to peruse the gloves, to ask questions; sometimes John lets them in and they can look around the whole workshop and perhaps order a special pair to be made.

  Agnes watches it all for three or four days. On the fifth day, she is up before the serving girls and out of the apartment’s back door, which leads into the shared yard. By the time they appear, she has fired the oven in the cookhouse and coaxed the dough into rounds, adding a handful of ground herbs from the kitchen garden. The serving girls exchange worried looks.

  At the breakfast table, the family seize the bread rolls, which seem softer, flatter, with a burnished glaze. The butter is arranged in a swirl. When broken, the bread gives off the hot fragrance of thyme, of marjoram. It brings, to the mind of John, a recollection of his grandmother, a woman who kept a posy of herbs tied to her belt. It makes Mary think of the squared, walled kitchen garden at the door of the farm where she grew up, of the time her mother had had to shoo away the geese with a broom because they had broken in and eaten the thyme bushes. She smiles at the recollection, at the memory of her mother’s skirts, wet with dew and mud, at the offended honking of the geese, and takes another slice, dipping the knife into the butter.

  Agnes glances at the face of her father-in-law and that of her mother-in-law and then her husband. He catches her eye and gives a barely perceptible nod towards the bread, raising his eyebrows.

  It takes Mary a week or so to notice that the house is different. The candlewicks are trimmed, without Mary having to remind the maids. The table linens are changed, again without asking, the wall drapes free of dust. The plateware is spotless and shining. She sees these things individually, without adding them up. It’s only when she smells the distinct, pollen-heavy scent of beeswax in the parlour one day when she is entertaining a neighbour that she begins to wonder.

  After the neighbour has taken her leave, she walks through her house. There are holly branches in a jar in the hall. Cloves studded into sweetmeats in the cookhouse, a pot of fragrant leaves that Mary doesn’t recognise. There are gnarled and soil-heavy roots drying in the eaves of the brewhouse, and berries in a tray. A pile of starched and pressed collars lies waiting on the landing. The pigs in their pen look suspiciously scrubbed and pink, the hens’ trough is clean and filled with water.

  At the sound of voices, Mary goes along the path towards the washhouse.

  ‘Yes, like that,’ she hears Agnes’s low voice say, ‘as if you were rubbing salt between your palms. Gently. Just the smallest movement. That way the flowerheads will be preserved.’

  There is another voice – inaudible to Mary – and then a burst of laughter.

  She pushes at the door: Agnes, Eliza and the two maids are all crammed into the washhouse, aprons tied around them, the air hot and filled with the acrid, stinging smell of lye. Edmond has been placed in a tub on the floor, with a number of pebbles.

  ‘Ma,’ he exclaims at the sight of her, ‘Ma-ma-ma!’

  ‘Oh,’ says Eliza, turning, her face flushed with heat and laughter, ‘we were . . . well, we were . . .’ She dissolves into laughter again, brushing a hair from her face with her forearm. ‘Agnes was showing us how to mix lavender into the soap and then she . . . then we . . .’ Eliza begins to laugh again, setting off one of the maids into giggles most inappropriate for her station.

  ‘You’re making soap?’ Mary asks.

  Agnes glides forward. She is poised, unruffled, not at all flushed. She looks as if she has just raised herself from a parlour chair, not melted and stirred a batch of soap in a sweltering, moist washhouse. The front of her apron is dented outwards with the swell of her stomach. Mary looks, and looks away. Not for the first time, it strikes her that she will never feel that again, that it is an experience now closed to her, at her age, at her stage in life. The loss of that possibility sears her sometimes: it is hard for a woman to let go of; harder still if another woman in your household is just entering that state. The sight of this girl’s stomach, every time, makes Mary think of the emptiness, the quiet of her own.

  ‘We are,’ Agnes says, revealing her small, sharpish teeth as she smiles. ‘With lavender. I thought it might be a nice change. I hope that’s agreeable to you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Mary snaps. She bends down and snatches Edmond out of the tub. He is so startled that he starts to sob. ‘Agreeable indeed,’ she says, and goes out, clutching her inconsolable son, letting the door slam behind her.

  In the early weeks of her marriage, Agnes collects impressions as a wool-gatherer hoards wool: a tuft from here, a scrap from there, a few strands from a fence, a bit from a branch, until, until, until you have a whole armful, enough to spin into yarn.

  She sees that John loves Gilbert the best of the boys – because he is strong and likes to set people against each other for sport – but that Mary favours Richard. Her head jerks up if he speaks; she shushes the others in order to hear him. Agnes sees that Mary harbours a deep love for Edmond but is resigned to the fact that most of his care falls to Eliza. Agnes sees that Edmond watches her husband, his eldest brother, all the time. His eyes follow him wherever he goes in the room; he reaches up for him when he passes. Edmond will, Agnes sees, grow up sanguine and happy; he will follow his eldest brother, inevitably, unasked, largely unnoticed. He won’t live long but will live well: women will like him; he will father numerous children during his short life. The last person he will think of, just before he dies, will be Eliza. Agnes’s husband will pay for his funeral and will weep at his graveside. Agnes sees this but doesn’t say it.

  She sees, too, that all six children flinch if John gets suddenly to his feet, like animals sensing the approach of a predator. She sees Mary blink slowly, as if closing her eyes to what might occur.

  There is a dinner when Edmond is tired, fractious, hungry but somehow unable to eat, unable to see the connection between the food on the plate and the nameless discomfort in his belly. He grizzles and moans, thrashing his head from side to side. Agnes sits beside him, slipping morsels into his mouth. His gums are red and sore, the peaks of new teeth poking through, his cheeks livid and hot. He fusses, he squeezes pie between his fingers, he tips over his cup, he leans on Agnes’s shoulder, he grabs at her napkin and drops it to the floor. Agnes’s husband, on the other side of her, puts on a mock-rueful face and asks, Not happy today, eh? Their father, however, looks blacker and blacker, muttering, What ails the child, can’t you take him away? When Edmond, losing patience with the meal, hurls a piecrust across the table, hitting John on the sleeve, leaving a brown stain, there is a long, stretched moment of silence. Mary bows her head, as if interested by something in her lap, Eliza’s eyes begin to fill with tears, and John lurches from his stool, yelling, By God, that boy, I will—

  Agnes’s husband springs to his feet and is around the table before Agnes realises what is happening. He is putting himself between his father and the boy, who is wailing now, mouth wide, as if sensing the change in atmosphere. There is a scuffle, her husband holding back his father, some oaths, a shove of chest against chest, a restraining hand on an arm. Agnes can’t quite see because she is lifting the child away from the table, easing his feet out of the bench, holding him to her as she runs with him from
the room.

  After a while, her husband comes and finds her. She has Edmond in the yard, her shawl wrapped twice around his short frame, and he is restored to good humour, feeding grain to the chickens. She holds the grain bowl for him, saying just a little, just enough, the hens dart-darting at the ground. Her husband comes to stand next to her, watching. Then he leans his head against hers, sliding his arms about her. She thinks, as she holds the grain, of that landscape of caverns and hollows she sensed within him. She thinks of the seams of a glove, running up and down and over each finger, keeping close the skin that does not belong to the wearer. How a glove covers and fits and restrains the hand. She thinks of the skins in the storeroom, pulled and stretched almost – but not quite – to tearing or breaking point. She thinks of the tools in the workshop, for cutting and shaping, pinning and piercing. She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove. She thinks that if she took his hand now and pressed her fingers to it, she might see the landscape she found before but she would also see a dark and looming presence there, with tools to eviscerate and flay and thieve the essence of a creature. She thinks, as Edmond scatters food for the hens, that they will perhaps not live long in this apartment: soon it will be necessary for them to leave, to take flight, to find a different place.

  Eliza comes out into the yard, signalling that the dinner is at an end. Her face is set, her eyes damp. She picks up Edmond and takes him back into the house. Agnes and her husband look at each other, then walk towards the back door of their apartment.

  It is evident to Agnes now, as they enter the kitchen, as he stirs the fire and throws on a log, that her husband is split in two. He is one man in their house and quite another in that of his parents. In the apartment, he is the person she knows and recognises, the one she married.

  Take him next door, to the big house, and he is sullen, sallow of face, irritable, tetchy. He is all tinder and flint, sending out sparks to ignite and kindle. Why? he challenges his mother. Whatever for? he snaps. I don’t want to, he retorts to his father. She had never understood why this was so but the coiled fury she witnessed in John, as he raised himself from his stool, told her everything she needs to know.

  In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

  hree heavy knocks to the door of the apartment: boom, boom, boom.

  Hamnet is closest so he goes to answer it. As it swings open, he cringes and yelps: on the doorstep is a terrifying sight, a creature from a nightmare, from Hell, from the devil. It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird.

  ‘No,’ Hamnet cries, ‘get away.’ He tries to shut the door but the creature puts out a hand and presses it back, with horrible, preternatural strength. ‘Get away,’ Hamnet screams again, kicking out.

  Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient.

  The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.

  Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, who is going to the window and opening her hatch to the street. She leans out to examine this person.

  Hamnet darts to her side and, for the first time in years, takes her hand. His mother squeezes his fingers, without looking at him. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.’

  ‘The . . .?’ Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?’ Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose.

  ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,’ she says.

  ‘From the pestilence?’

  His mother nods.

  ‘And will it?’

  His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. Not coming into the house, however, refusing to see or examine the patient, might,’ she mutters.

  Hamnet places his other hand inside the strong, long fingers of his mother, as if her touch might keep him safe. He sees the physician reach into a bag and hand his grandmother a wrapped parcel.

  ‘Tie it to the stomach of the girl with linen,’ he is intoning, accepting some coins from Mary in his pale hand, ‘and leave it there for three days. Then you may take an onion and soak it in—’

  ‘What is that?’ his mother interrupts, leaning out of her hatch.

  The physician turns to look at her, his horrible pointed beak swinging towards them. Hamnet shrinks into her side. He doesn’t want this man to look at him; he doesn’t want to fall into his sights. He is seized with the notion that to be seen by his eye, to be noted or recorded by him would be a terrible omen, that some dreadful fate will befall them all. He wants to run, to drag his mother away, to seal shut the doors and windows so that the man will not get in, so that his gaze will not fall on any of them.

  But his mother is not in the least frightened. The physician and Hamnet’s mother regard each other for a moment, through the hatch, from which his mother sells cures. Hamnet realises, he sees, with the cutting clarity of a child poised to enter manhood, that this man doesn’t like his mother. He resents her: she sells cures, she grows her own medicines, she collects leaves and petals, bark and juices and knows how to help people. This man, Hamnet suddenly sees, wishes his mother ill. She takes his patients, trespasses on his revenue, his work. How baffling the adult world seems to Hamnet at that moment, how complex, how slippery. How can he ever navigate his way in it? How will he manage?

  The physician inclines his beak, once, then turns back to Hamnet’s grandmother, as if his mother hadn’t spoken.

  ‘Is it a dried toad?’ Agnes says, in a clear, carrying voice. ‘Because if it is, we don’t want it.’

  Hamnet fastens his arms around his mother’s waist; he wishes to communicate to her the urgency, the necessity of ending this conversation, of getting away from this person. She doesn’t move but brings a hand down to his wrist, as if to say, I acknowledge you, I am here.

  ‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these. If your daughter is suffering from the pestilence, I regret to say that there is very little that may—’

  The rest of the speech is cut off, curtailed, lost because Agnes has banged the hatch shut. Hamnet watches as her fingers fumble to lock it. Her face is furious, desperate, flushed. She is muttering something under her breath: he catches the word ‘man’, and ‘dare’ and ‘fool’.

  He unfastens his arms and watches as she walks across the room, agitatedly straightening a chair, picking up and putting down a bowl, then coming to crouch by the pallet where Judith has been placed, next to the fire.

  ‘A toad, indeed,’ his mother is murmuring, as she dabs Judith’s brow with a wet cloth.

  Across the room, his grandmother closes the front door and slides the bolt into place. Hamnet sees her place the parcel with the dried toad on a high shelf.

  She mouths something incomprehensible to Hamnet, with a nod.

  n a morning in the spring of 1583, if they had risen early enough, the residents of Henley Street
would have seen the new daughter-in-law of John and Mary exit the door of the little narrow cottage where the newlywed couple live. They would have seen her shoulder a basket, straighten her kirtle, and set off in a north-westerly direction.

  Upstairs, her young husband turns over in bed. He sleeps deeply, and always has. He does not notice that her side of the bed is vacant and rapidly cooling. His head presses further into the pillow, an arm is tucked about the coverlet, his hair fallen over most of his face. He is in the profound, untroubled slumber of the young; if undisturbed, he could sleep on for hours. His mouth opens slightly, drawing in air, and he begins, softly, to snore.

  Agnes continues on her way across Rother Market, where stallholders are beginning to arrive. A man selling bundles of lavender; a woman with a cart of willow strips. Agnes pauses to speak to her friend, the baker’s wife. They exchange words about the fairness of the day, the threat of rain, the heat of the ovens in the bakery, the progress of Agnes’s pregnancy and how low the baby feels in her bones. The baker’s wife tries to press a bun into Agnes’s hand. Agnes refuses. The baker’s wife insists, lifting the covering on Agnes’s basket and pushing it inside. She catches sight of cloths, clean and neatly folded, a pair of scissors, a stoppered jar, but thinks nothing of it. Agnes nods to her, smiles, says she needs to go.