Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She tells this to the apothecary’s widow and these words make the old woman look up. The wheel whirs more slowly, winding down, as the woman stares at the child. Never say this to anyone else, she says to Agnes, in her creaking voice. Never. You’ll bring seven kinds of trouble down on your head, otherwise.

  She grows up watching the mother with the shoes hug and pet her fair, chubby children. She watches her place the freshest breads, the choicest meat on their plates. Agnes must live with a sense of herself as second-tier, deficient in some way, unwanted. She is the one who must sweep the floors, change the babies’ napkins, rock them to sleep, rake out the grate and coax the fire to life. She sees, she recognises, that any accident or misfortune – a dropped platter, a broken jug, some ravelled knitting, unrisen bread – will somehow be her fault. She grows up knowing that she must protect and defend Bartholomew from all of life’s blows, because no one else will. He is of her blood, wholly and completely, in a way that no one else is. She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.

  Agnes will rarely – if ever – be touched. She will grow up craving just that: a hand on hers, on her hair, on her shoulder, the brush of fingers on her arm. A human print of kindness, of fellow feeling. Her stepmother never comes near her. Her siblings paw and claw at her but that doesn’t count.

  She grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible. It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird and all the strength of the grip can be found there, all the power of the grasp. A person’s ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned. All that they have held, kept, and all they long to grip is there in that place. It is possible, she realises, to find out everything you need to know about a person just by pressing it.

  When she is no more than seven or eight, a visitor lets Agnes hold her hand in this way and Agnes says, You will meet your death within the month, and doesn’t it come true, just like that, the visitor being struck down with an ague the very next week? She says that the shepherd will be knocked off his feet and hurt his leg, that her father will be caught in a storm, that the baby will fall ill on its second birthday, that the man offering to buy her father’s sheepskins is a liar, that the pedlar at the back door has intentions towards the kitchen maid.

  Joan and the father worry. It is not Christian, this ability. They beg her to stop, not to touch people’s hands, to hide this odd gift. No good will come of it, her father says, standing over Agnes as she crouches by the fire, no good at all. When she reaches up to take his hand, he snatches it away.

  She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.

  There is just enough of this recollection alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognise it if she meets it again. And if she does, she won’t hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. She won’t listen to the protestations of others, their objections, their reasoning. This will be her chance, her way through the narrow hole at the heart of the stone, and nothing will stand in her way.

  Hamnet climbs the stairs, breathing hard after his run through the town. It seems to drain his strength, putting one leg in front of the other, lifting each foot to each stair. He uses the handrail to haul himself along.

  He is sure, he is certain, that when he reaches the upper floor, he will see his mother. She will be leaning over the bed where Judith is lying, her body curved like a bow. Judith will be tucked into fresh sheets; her face will be pale but awake, alert, trusting. Agnes will be giving her a tincture; Judith will be wincing at its bitterness but swallowing it all the same. His mother’s potions can cure anything – everyone knows that. People come from all over town, all over Warwickshire and beyond, to speak with his mother through the window of the narrow cottage, to describe their symptoms, to tell her what they suffer, what they endure. Some of these people she invites in. They are women, mostly, and she seats them by the fire, in the good chair, while she takes their hands and holds them in her own, while she grinds some roots, some plant leaves, a sprinkling of petals. They leave with a cloth parcel or a tiny bottle, stoppered with paper and beeswax, their faces easier, lightened.

  His mother will be here. She will bring Judith back to health. She can drive away any illness, any malady. She will know what to do.

  Hamnet comes into the top room. There is just his sister, alone, on the bed.

  She has, he sees, as he steps towards her, become paler, weaker, in the time it took him to go for the physician. The skin around her eyes is bluish-grey, as if bruised. Her breaths are shallow and quick, her eyes, beneath their lids, flick back and forth, as if she is seeing something he cannot.

  Hamnet’s legs fold under him. He sits down on the side of the pallet. He can hear the suck and draw of her breath. There is, for him, some comfort in this. He hooks his smallest finger into the corresponding one of hers. A single tear leaks from his eye and drops onto the sheet, then into the rushes beneath.

  Another tear falls. Hamnet has failed. He sees this. He needed to summon someone, a parent, a grandparent, a grown-up, a physician. He has failed on all counts. He shuts his eyes, to keep the tears in, and lets his head fall to his knees.

  * * *

  —

  Half an hour or so later, Susanna comes in through the back door. She dumps her basket on a chair and slumps down at the table. She looks one way, disconsolately, she looks the other. The fire is out; no one is here. Her mother had promised she’d be back and she isn’t. Her mother is never where she says she will be.

  Susanna removes her cap and tosses it to the bench beside her. It slides off and on to the floor. Susanna thinks about bending to retrieve it but doesn’t. Instead, she finds it with her toe and kicks it further away. She sighs. She is nearly fourteen. Everything – the sight of the pots stacked on the table, the herbs and flowers tied to the rafters, her sister’s corn doll on a cushion, the jug set by the hearth – provokes in her a profound and fathomless irritation.

  She gets up. She pushes open a window, to let in a little air, but the street smells of horse, of ordure, of something rank and rotting. She shuts it with a bang. Just for a moment, she believes she hears something from upstairs. Is someone here? She stands for a moment, listening. But no. There is no further sound.

  She sits herself in the good chair, the one her mother’s visitors use, the people who creep in at the door, usually late at night, to whisper about pains, bleeding, lack of bleeding, dreams, portents, aches, difficulties, loves inconvenient, loves importunate, augurs, moon cycles, a hare across their path, a bird inside the house, a loss of feeling in a limb, too much feeling elsewhere, a rash, a cough, a sore, a pain here or there or in the ear or the leg or the lungs or the heart. Their mother bends her head to listen, giving a nod, a sympathetic click of the tongue. Then she takes their hand and, as she does so, she lets her gaze float upwards, to the ceiling, to the air, her eyes unfocused, half closed.

  Some have asked Susanna how her mother does it. They have sidled up to her in the market or out in the streets to demand how Agnes divines what a body needs or lacks or bursts with, how she can tell if a soul is restive or hankering, how she knows what a person or a heart hides.

  It makes Susanna want to sigh and throw something. She can tell now if someone is about to enquire into her mother’s unusual abilities and she tries to head them off, to excuse herself or begin to ask them questions about their family, the weather, the crops. There is, she
has learnt, a certain hesitancy, a particular facial expression – half curiosity, half suspicion – which prefaces these conversations. Why do people not see that there is nothing Susanna is less happy to talk about? How can it not be plain that it is nothing to do with her – the herbs, the weeds, the jars and bottles of powders and roots and petals that make the room stink like a dung heap, the murmuring people, the weeping, the hand-holding? Susanna, when she was younger, used to answer truthfully: that she did not know, that it was like magic, that it was a gift. These days, however, she is curt: I have no idea, she will say, of what you speak, her head held high, her nose tipped up, as if sniffing the air.

  And where is her mother now? Susanna crosses and recrosses her ankles over each other. Traipsing about the countryside, most likely, wading into ponds, gathering weeds, climbing over fences to reach some plant or other, tearing her clothes, muddying her boots. Other mothers of the town will be buttering bread or ladling out stew for their children. But Susanna’s? She will be making a spectacle of herself, as ever, stopping to gaze up into the clouds, to whisper something in the ear of a mule, to gather dandelions in her skirts.

  Susanna is startled by a knock at the window. She sits for a moment, frozen in the chair. There it comes again. She pushes herself to her feet and walks towards the pane. Through the criss-crossing lead and the blurred glass, she can make out the pale arch of a coif, a dark-red bodice: someone of means, then. The woman knocks again, seeing Susanna, with an imperious, commanding gesture.

  Susanna makes no move to open the window. ‘She’s not here,’ she calls instead, drawing herself up. ‘You’ll have to come back later.’

  She turns on her heel and walks away, retreating to the chair. The woman raps twice more on the pane and then Susanna hears her footsteps walk away.

  People, people, always people, coming and going, arriving and departing. Susanna and the twins and her mother might sit down at table to take some broth and before they have lifted their spoons, there will be a knock and up her mother will start, putting aside her broth, as if Susanna hadn’t taken a deal of trouble to make it, from chicken bones and carrots that required washing and more washing, and then peeling, not to mention the hours of stirring and straining in the heat of the cookhouse. Sometimes it seems to Susanna that Agnes isn’t just mother to her – and the twins, of course – but mother to the whole town, the entire county. Will it ever end, this stream of people through their house? Will they ever just leave them in peace to live their lives? Susanna has overheard her grandmother say that she doesn’t know why Agnes carries on with this business because it’s not as if she has need of money, these days. Not, her grandmother added, that it ever brought in a great deal. Her mother had said nothing, not raising her head from her sewing.

  Susanna curls her fingers around the carved ends of the chair arms, which are worn apple-smooth with the touch of a hundred palms. She shuffles her body backwards until her spine meets the chair’s back. It is the chair her father likes to sit in, when he comes home. Twice, three, four, five times a year. Sometimes for a week, sometimes more. During the day, he will carry the chair upstairs, where he leans over a table to work; come the evening, he will carry it back downstairs, to sit by the fire. I come whenever I can, he told her, the last time he was here, touching the tips of his fingers to her cheek. You know this to be true, he had said. He had been packing to leave, again – rolls of paper, close with writing, a spare shirt, a book he had bound with cat gut and a cover of pigskin. Her mother gone, vanished, off to wherever she went, for she hated to see him leave.

  He writes them letters, which their mother reads, painstakingly, her finger moving from word to word, her lips forming the sounds. Their mother can read a little but is only able to write in a rudimentary fashion. Their aunt Eliza used to write their replies for them – she possesses a fine hand – but, these days, Hamnet does it. He goes to school, six days a week, from dawn until dusk; he can write as fast as you can speak, and read Latin and Greek, and make columns of figures. The scratch of the quill is like the sound of hens’ feet in the dirt. Their grandfather says, with pride, that Hamnet will be the one to take over the glove business, when he is gone, that the boy has a fine head on his shoulders, that he is a scholar, a born businessman, the only one of them with any sense. Hamnet leans over his school books, gives no sign of having heard, the top of his head towards them all as they sit by the fire, the parting of his hair meandering like a stream over his scalp.

  The letters from their father speak of contracts, of long days, of crowds who hurl rotten matter if they do not like what they hear, of the great river in London, of a rival playhouse owner who released a bag of rats at the climax of their new play, of memorising lines, lines, more lines, of the loss of costumes, of fire, of rehearsing a scene where the players are lowered to the stage on ropes, of the difficulty of finding food when they are out on the road, of scenery that falls, of props that are mislaid or stolen, of carts losing their wheels and pitching all into the mud, taverns that refuse them beds, of the money he has saved, of what he needs their mother to do, whom she must speak to in the town, about a tract of land he would like to purchase, a house he has heard is for sale, a field they should buy and then lease, of how he misses them, how he sends his love, how he wishes he could kiss their faces, one by one, how he cannot wait until he is home again.

  If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

  The latch of the back door clatters open and into the room comes her grandmother, Mary. She is puffing, red in the face, dark half-circles of sweat under her arms.

  ‘What are you doing, sitting there like that?’ Mary says. There is no more serious affront to her than an idle person.

  Susanna shrugs. She rubs her fingertips against the worn joints of the chair.

  Mary casts her eyes about the room. ‘Where are the twins?’ she demands.

  Susanna raises one shoulder, lets it drop.

  ‘Haven’t you seen them?’ Mary says, mopping her brow with a handkerchief.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I told them,’ Mary mutters, bending to pick up Susanna’s fallen cap, placing it on the table, ‘to chop the kindling and to light the fire in the cookhouse. And have they done it? No, they have not. They are both in for a hiding when they come in.’

  She returns to stand in front of Susanna, hands on hips. ‘And where’s your mother?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Mary sighs. Almost says something. But doesn’t. Susanna sees this, senses the unsaid words rippling out like pennants into the air between them.

  ‘Well, come on, then,’ Mary says instead, flapping her apron at Susanna, ‘stir yourself. The supper won’t cook itself. Come and help us, girl, instead of sitting there like a brood hen.’

  Mary takes Susanna’s arm and hauls her to her feet. They go out of the back door, which slams shut behind them.

  Upstairs, Hamnet wakes with a start.

  There is suddenly nothing so excellent as teaching Latin. On the days he is due at Hewlands, the tutor is up at first call, folding his bedclothes and washing himself vigorously at the pail. He combs his hair and beard with careful strokes. He fills his breakfast plate but leaves the table before he has finished. He helps his brothers find their books and escorts them to the door, as they leave for school, waving them off. He has been known to hum, even to yield a polite nod to his father. His sister eyes him, sideways, as he whistles to himself, fastening his jerkin one way then the other, checking his reflection in the window pane before leaving, tucking and retuck
ing his hair behind his ears, banging the door after him.

  On the days when he is not at Hewlands, he lies in his bed until his father threatens to tan his hide unless he stirs himself. Once upright, he will slope about the house, sighing, not answering if spoken to, chewing absently on a crust of bread, picking things up, putting them down again. He is observed in the workshop, leaning on the counter, turning over pair after pair of ladies’ gloves, as if searching for some meaning hidden in their seams, their inert fingers. He then sighs once more and pushes them all haphazardly back into their box. He stands over Ned, watching as he stitches a falconer’s belt, so closely that the boy is quite put off his work, causing John to roar at the boy about how there’s only the door between him and the street.

  ‘And you,’ John turns on his son, ‘get out of here. Find some useful occupation. If you can.’ John shakes his head, turning his attention back to the cutting of a squirrel skin into useful, narrow strips. ‘All that education,’ he mutters, to himself, to the slippery lengths of pelt, ‘and not an ounce of sense.’

  * * *

  —

  His sister, Eliza, is sent later by her mother to find him. After wandering the ground floor, the yard, she takes the stairs and goes from the boys’ chamber to hers, to her parents’ and back; she calls his name.

  The reply takes a while to come and, when it does, it is flat in tone, annoyed, displeased.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asks wonderingly, turning her head from side to side.

  Again, the long, reluctant pause. Then: ‘Up here.’