Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  So much to mull over in this letter. It has taken Agnes days to absorb all the detail; she has run the words over and over inside her head, she has traced them with a finger, and now she has them down to memory. Jewels and beads. Scenes in court. The hands of young stage boys. And soft gloves for ladies. There is something in the way he has written all this, in such lingering detail, in the long passage about these gloves for the players that alerts Agnes to something. She is not yet sure what. Some kind of change in him, some alteration or turning. Never has he written so much about so little: a glove contract. It is just a contract, like many others, so why, then, does she feel like a small animal, hearing something far off?

  She is leaning over to pick up the chickweed tincture and is about to add it to the honey, drop by slow drop, when she feels an odd yet familiar tensing in her lower abdomen. A drawing down, a clenching: insistent, particular. She pauses. It cannot be that. It is too soon. There is still at least another moon to reach fullness before the baby will be born. It must be a false pain, one of those that warns the body of what is to come. She straightens up, using the fireplace for support. Her belly is so big – so much bigger than last time – that she is in danger of toppling into the flames.

  She grips the mantel, watching with an unaccustomed detachment as her knuckles turn white. What is happening? She had meant to ask Eliza – today or tomorrow – to write to him, to ask him to return to them. She would like him here for the birth, she has decided. She would like to lay eyes on him again, to take his hand, before this child makes it into the world. She wants to look into his face, to find out what is happening in his life, to ask him about these gloves for kings and queens and players. She wants, she realises, as she stands at the fire, to check that he is the same as he ever was, whether London has altered him unrecognisably.

  She pulls in a breath: the sweet, floral scent of the honey, the acrid valerian, the sour musk of chickweed. The pain, instead of easing off, intensifies. She is aware of her centre tightening, as if an iron band is being placed around her. No false pain, this. It will squeeze her and squeeze her, until her body yields up this baby. It may be hours, it may be days: she finds she cannot get a sense of how long. Agnes lets out her breath, slowly, slowly, one hand on the fireplace. She was not expecting this. There was no sign.

  She’d thought she had time to get word to him. But now there is no time. This is too soon. She knows this. Yet she also knows that a pain like this cannot be argued with, cannot be got around.

  Agnes turns to face the room. Everything around her looks suddenly different, as if she has never seen it before, as if she doesn’t daily wipe and polish this table, those chairs, sweep these flagstones, beat the dust from that wall hanging and the rug. Who lives here, in this narrow room, with leaded windows at the end and long shelves of pots and powders? Who put those wands of hazel into a jug, so that their tight buds would yield up early their bright, creased leaves?

  Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was. She’d thought she had more time; she’d thought this baby would come much later, but it seems not. She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?

  Agnes touches her stomach, as if to communicate with the child inside. Very well, she wants to say to it, what must be shall be. You shall be heard. I will get ready for you.

  She has to hurry. She has to get out of this house as quickly as she can. She will not birth this baby here, under this roof. Mary has her eye on her, she knows. She will need to be quick, quiet, wily. She will need to leave now.

  Beside her, Susanna is crouching on the floor, holding her doll by its leg, exclaiming to herself.

  ‘Come,’ Agnes says to her, aiming for a tone of brisk cheer. She holds out her hand. ‘Let’s go and find Eliza, shall we?’

  Susanna, lost in her game with the upside-down doll, is astonished to see the hand of an adult drop down from above. One moment, there was a doll and the doll was a person who could fly, except her wings could not be seen, and she, Susanna, could also fly and she and the doll were taking to the skies, among the birds, up above the trees. And now there is this: a hand.

  She tips back her face and sees her mother looming over her, all stomach, with a faraway face, saying something about Eliza, about going.

  Susanna’s face pulls in and she frowns. ‘No,’ she says, curling both hands around the leg of her doll.

  ‘Please,’ says her mother, and her voice doesn’t sound as it usually does. It is pinched and tight, like an outgrown smock.

  ‘No,’ Susanna says again, angry now, because her sense of the game is evaporating, drifting away, with all this talking from above. ‘No-no-no!’

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes is saying, and Susanna is astonished to feel herself lifted off her feet, the hearthrug falling away from her, the fire whisking past her, as she is carried, without ceremony, out of the room, away from her doll, which has fallen to the floor, through the door and down the path to the washhouse, where the maid is standing, scrubbing at something in a bowl.

  ‘Here,’ Agnes says, thrusting the roaring child into her arms. ‘Can you take her to Eliza?’ She leans in and kisses Susanna on the cheek, then the forehead, then the cheek again. ‘Sorry, my darling. I’ll be back. Very soon.’

  Agnes goes quickly, very quickly, up the path, reaching her hearth just as the next pain comes. There is no question, now, of what is happening. She remembers it all from last time, except somehow this feels different. It is fast, it is early, it is insistent. She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone. She is still here, in the town, in the apartment. There is not a moment to lose. Ah-ah-ah, she hears herself pant. She grips the back of a chair until it passes. Then she makes her way across the room to the table, where she has left her bag.

  She hooks her fingers around the strap and is at her front door in seconds, manoeuvring herself through, stepping out. Just before she shuts it, she listens for a moment, then nods, satisfied: Susanna’s wails have stopped, which means she must be in the presence of her aunt.

  She is setting out across the street, pausing to let a horse pass by, when someone falls into step beside her. She turns to see Gilbert, her brother-in-law, next to her, grinning.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ he says, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘No,’ Agnes says, panic beating, like a pulse, against her brow. She has to get to the forest, she must. If she is made to stay here, she doesn’t know what will happen. It won’t bode well. Something will go wrong. She is so certain of this fact, while unable to explain why. ‘I mean, yes. To . . .’ She tries to focus on Gilbert but his face, his beard, looks blurry and indistinct. She is struck, once again, by how unlike his brother he is. ‘To . . .’ she casts around for a plausible place ‘. . . the bakery.’

  He clamps his hand around her elbow. ‘Come,’ he says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back to the house.’

  ‘No,’ she says, pulling her elbow away. ‘I won’t. I’m going to the bakery and you – you must let me go. You mustn’t stop me.’

  ‘Yes, I must.’

  ‘No, you must not.’

  At this point, Mary comes hurrying up, out of breath. ‘Agnes,’ she says, taking her other arm, ‘you are to come back to the house. We have everything ready. You needn’t worry.’ And then, out of the corner of her mouth, to Gilbert: ‘Go for the midwife.’

  ‘No,’ Agnes is shouting now, ‘let me go.’ How can she explain to these people that she cannot remain here, she cannot birth the child in this way? How can she make them understand the dread that has been filling her, ever since she heard the words of that letter?

  Agnes is taken, half carried, half dragged, not to her own narrow slip of a house, but to theirs, through their wide door, down the passage and up the narrow stairs. A door is pushed open, and through she sail
s, her ankles held together, like a criminal, like a lunatic.

  She can hear a voice saying, No, no, no; she can sense a pain coming for her, the way it’s possible to feel a raincloud approaching before seeing it. She wants to stand, to crouch, so that she is ready for it, prepared, able to face it down, but someone is pressing her shoulders back to a bed. Another person is gripping her forehead. The midwife is there, lifting her skirts, saying she must look, that the men must leave, that only the women may stay.

  All Agnes wants is the green of a forest. She craves the dappled, animate pattern of light on ground, the merciful shade of a leaf-canopy, the not-quite-quiet, the repeating seclusion of trunks, disappearing into the distance. She will not make it to the forest. There is not enough time now. The doors of this house are too many, she knows this.

  If only he had been here. He would have been able to hold them off. He would have listened to her pleas, in that way he has, of leaning towards someone, as if drinking in their words. He would have made sure she reached the forest, that she wasn’t forced to come in here. What has she done? Why did she send him away? What will become of them, separated in this way, with him dealing and bargaining for theatre silver, making gloves for the hands of lads to give the illusion of ladies, with her locked and barred in this room, so far away, with no one to take her part? What has she done?

  Agnes pushes them off her, climbs out of bed. She walks, instead of a stitched, lapsing path through trees, from wall to wall, and back again. It is hard to order and command her thoughts. She would like a moment to herself, alone, without pain, so that she can think clearly about everything. She wrings her hands. She can hear herself, or someone, wailing, Why did I do it? She doesn’t know what ‘it’ refers to. This room, she knows, is where her husband was born – and his brothers and sisters, even those little dead ones. He took his first breath here, within these drapes, near this window.

  It is to him she speaks, in her disordered mind, not the trees, not the magic cross, not the patterns and markings of lichen, not even to her mother, who died while trying to give birth to a child. Please, she says to him, inside the chamber of her skull, please come back. I need you. Please. I should never have schemed to send you away. Make sure this child has safe passage; make sure it lives; make sure I survive to care for it. Let us both come through this. Please. Let me not die. Let me not end up cold and stiff in a bloodied bed.

  Something is wrong, off, out of place. She doesn’t know what. It is like listening to an instrument with one untuned string: the grating sense that all is not as it should be. It is all too fast, too soon. She had no sense of this coming. She is in the wrong place. He is in the wrong place. She may not make it, she may not. Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.

  The midwife and Mary have their hands on her now: they are guiding her to a stool, except it’s not a proper stool. It is blackened oiled wood, three-legged, splay-footed, with a basin beneath and an empty seat – just a gaping hole. Agnes doesn’t like it, doesn’t take to that absent seat, that vacancy, so she rears back, she wrenches her arms from their grasp. She will not sit on the black stool.

  That letter. What was different about that letter? It wasn’t the detail, it wasn’t the list of gloves needed. Was it the mention of long gloves for ladies? Is she bothered, hooked by the mention of ladies? She doesn’t think so. It was the feeling that came off the page. The glee that rose up, like steam, between the words he had written. It feels wrong that the two of them are so far away from each other, so separated. While he is deciding what length of glove, what manner of beading, what embroidery would best suit a player king, she is clenched by agony and about to die.

  She will die, she thinks. What other reason can there be for her having no sign that any of this would happen? That she is about to die, to pass on, to leave this world. She will never see him, never see Susanna again.

  Agnes takes to the floor, felled by this presentiment. Never again. She braces herself with her palms flat to the boards, her legs folded either side of her, crouched. If death is to come, let it be quick, she prays. Let the child within her live. Let him come back and be with his children. Let him think kindly of her, always.

  The midwife is plucking at her sleeve, but Mary seems to have given up trying to entice her to the stool. Agnes will not be led; she feels that Mary knows this by now. Mary sits down on the hateful stool and holds out a muslin cloth, ready to catch the baby.

  The theatre, he had written, was in a place called Shoreditch; Eliza had had to sound out the word, letter by letter, to get the sense of it. ‘Shore’, she had said, and then ‘ditch’. Shore-ditch? Agnes had repeated. She pictured the bank of a river, silted, reed-frilled, a place where yellow flags might grow, and birds would nest, and then a ditch, a treacherously slippery sloped hole, with muddy water in the bottom. ‘Shore’ and then ‘ditch’. The first part of the word a nice-sounding sort of place, the latter part horrible. How can there be a ditch at a shore? She had started to ask Eliza, but Eliza was reading on, describing a play he had watched there, while waiting for the man with the glove contract, about an envious duke and his faithless sons.

  The midwife is huffing, getting down on the floor, fussing with her skirts and apron, saying she will need extra pay, that her knees aren’t up to this. She near-flattens herself to the rug and peers upwards.

  ‘It’ll soon be over,’ is her verdict. ‘Bear down,’ she says, a touch brusquely.

  Mary puts a hand to Agnes’s shoulder, the other to her arm. ‘There now,’ she mutters. ‘Soon be over.’

  Agnes hears their words from a great distance. Her thoughts are brief now, snipped short, pared back to the bone. Husband, she thinks. Gloves. Players. Beads. Theatre. Envious duke. Death. Think kindly. She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. Back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned.

  She watches, with a kind of detached fascination, as something domed appears between her legs. She curls her head under, into herself, to see it. The crown of a head easing from her, turning, twisting, slick, like a water creature, a shoulder, a long back, beaded with spine. The midwife and Mary catch it between them, Mary saying, a boy, a boy, and Agnes sees her husband’s chin, his mouth in a pout; she sees her father’s fair hair, once again, growing in a peak on this brow; she sees the long, delicate fingers of her mother; she sees her son.

  Agnes and the boy are on the bed, the child feeding, his tiny fist curled possessively at his mother’s breast. She would feed him before anything, before washing herself, she said. She has insisted that the cord and caul be wrapped and bound in cloth; she raised her head to watch, as Mary and the midwife carried out this task. She will, she tells them, bury it under a tree when the child has passed his first month. The midwife is collecting her tools, packing her sack, folding a sheet, emptying a bowl from the window. Mary is sitting on the bed, saying to Agnes that she must let her swaddle the baby, it is the right thing to do, that all her babies were swaddled and look how they turned out, great strong lads, all of them, and Eliza too, and Agnes is shaking her head. No swaddle, thank you, she is saying, and the midwife is smiling to herself in the corner, because she attended Mary in her last three births and found her a great deal more pleased with herself than she ought to be.

  The midwife, swirling a cloth around a bowl, has to bow her head because this daughter-in-law, a strange girl by all accounts, is a match for Mary. She can see that. She would be prepared to bet all her pennies (hidden in an earthen jar behind the daub of her cottage, which no living person knows) that this baby will wear no swaddling clothes.

  Something makes her turn, wet cloth in hand. When she is telling the story, to a dozen or so townspeople later, she will say that she doesn’t know why she turned: she just did. Midwife’s intuition, she will say later, tapping her finger to her nose.

  Agnes is upright in bed, one hand pressed to h
er middle; with the other, she still holds the baby to her breast.

  ‘What is it?’ Mary says, rising from the bed.

  Agnes shakes her head, then doubles up again, with a low moan.

  ‘Give me the boy,’ Mary says, holding out her arms. Her face is alarmed, but tender. She wants that child, the midwife sees, despite everything, despite her own eight children, despite her age. She wants that baby, wants to feel it up against her, to hold its parcelled, dense warmth.

  ‘No,’ Agnes says, through clenched teeth, her body curled into itself. Her expression is bewildered, stretched, frightened. ‘What is happening?’ she whispers, in the hoarse, fearful voice of a child.

  The midwife steps forward. She puts a hand to the girl’s belly and presses down. She feels the skin tightening, pulling into itself. She lifts the skirts and peers upwards. There it is: the wet curve of a second head. It is unmistakable.

  ‘It’s starting again,’ she says.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mary asks, with her slightly imperious air.

  ‘She’s starting again,’ the midwife repeats. ‘There’s another one coming.’ She pats Agnes’s leg. ‘You’re having twins, my girl.’

  Agnes takes this news in silence. She lies back in the bed, clutching her son, exhausted, grey-faced, her limbs slack, her head bowed. The only sign of the pains is a whitening of her face, a pursing of her lips. She allows them to take the baby and to tuck it into the cradle by the fire.

  Mary and the midwife stand on either side of the bed. Agnes stares up at them, her eyes wide and glassy, her face ghastly white. She raises a finger and points, first at Mary, then at the midwife.

  ‘Two of you,’ she rasps out.

  ‘What did she say?’ the midwife says to Mary.

  Mary shakes her head. ‘I’m not sure.’ Then she addresses the girl: ‘Agnes, come to the stool. It is ready. It is here. We shall help you. The time has come.’

  Agnes is gripped by a pain, her body twisting first one way, then the next. Her fingers snatch at the sheet, pulling it from the mattress, and she presses it to her mouth. The cry that escapes her is ragged and muffled.