Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  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.

  ‘You,’ she cries, ‘are banished from this house for ever more.’

  Bartholomew shifts his gaze from Agnes to Joan and back again. He folds his arms and steps forward. ‘This is my house,’ he says, ‘left to me, in my father’s will. And I say that Agnes may stay.’

  Joan stares at him, wordless, the colour rising in her cheeks. ‘But…’ she blusters, trying to rally her thoughts ‘…but…the terms of the will stated that I may stay in the house until such time—’

  ‘You may stay,’ Bartholomew says, ‘but the house is mine.’

  ‘But I was given the running of the house!’ She seizes upon this triumphantly, desperately. ‘And you the care of the farm. So by that fact, I am within my rights to send her away, for this is a matter of the house, not of the farm and—’

  ‘The house is mine,’ Bartholomew repeats softly. ‘And she stays.’

  ‘She cannot stay,’ Joan shrieks, infuriated, powerless. ‘You need to think about – about your brothers and sisters, this family’s reputation, not to mention your own, our standing in—’

  ‘She stays,’ Bartholomew says.

  ‘She has to go, she must.’ Joan tries to think fast, scrabbling about for something to make him change his mind. ‘Think of your father. What would he have said? It would have broken his heart. He would never—’

  ‘She will stay. Unless it comes to pass that—’

  Agnes puts a hand on her brother’s sleeve. They look at each other for a long moment, without speaking. Then Bartholomew spits into the dirt and lifts a hand to her shoulder. Agnes smiles at him crookedly, with her split and bleeding mouth. Bartholomew nods in reply. She sweeps a sleeve up and over her face; she unpicks the knot of the bundle, ties and reties it.

  Bartholomew watches as she shoulders the bundle. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he says, to her, touching her hand. ‘Not to worry.’

  ‘I shan’t,’ Agnes says.

  She walks, only a little unsteadily, across the farmyard. She enters the apple store and, after a few moments, emerges with her kestrel on her glove. The bird is hooded, wings folded, but its head pivots and twitches, as if it is acquainting itself with its new circumstances.

  Agnes shoulders her pack and, without saying goodbye, exits the farmyard, taking the path around the side of the house, and is gone.

  * * *

  —

  He is behind his father’s stall in the market, lounging against the counter. The day is crisp, with the startling metallic cold of early winter. He is watching his breath leave his body in a visible, vanishing stream, half listening to a woman debate squirrel-lined versus rabbit-trimmed gloves, when Eliza materialises beside him.

  She gives him an odd, wide-eyed, teeth-gritted smile.

  ‘You need to go home,’ she says, in a low voice, without letting her fixed expression falter. She then turns to the browsing woman and says, ‘Yes, madam?’

  He pushes himself upright. ‘Why do I need to go home? Father told me I should—’

  ‘Just go,’ she hisses, ‘now,’ and addresses the customer, in a louder tone: ‘I believe the rabbit trim to be the very warmest.’

  He lopes across the market, weaving in and out of the stalls, dodging a cart laden with cabbages, a boy carrying a bundle of thatch. He is in no hurry: it will be some complaint of his father’s about his conduct or his chores or his forgetfulness or his laziness or his inability to remember important things or his reluctance to put in what his father has the temerity to call ‘an honest day’s work’. He will have forgotten to take an order or to pick up skin from the tanners or omitted to chop the wood for his mother. He wends his way up the wide thoroughfare of Henley Street, stopping to pass remarks with various neighbours, to pat a child on the head and, finally, he turns into the door of his house.

  He wipes his boots against the matting, letting the door close behind him, and casts a glance into his father’s workshop. His father’s chair is empty, pushed back, as if in haste. The thin shoulders of the apprentice are bent over something at the workbench. At the sound of the latch hooking into itself, the boy turns his head and looks at him, with round, frightened eyes.

  ‘Hello, Ned,’ he says. ‘How goes it?’

  Ned looks as if he might speak but closes his mouth. He gives a gesture with his head that is halfway between a nod and a shake, then points towards the parlour.

  He smiles at the apprentice, then steps through the door from the passage, across the squared flags of the hall, past the dining table, past the empty grate, and into the parlour.

  The scene that greets him is so unaccountable, so confusing, that it takes him a moment to catch up, to assess what is happening. He stops in his tracks, framed by the doorway. What is immediately clear to him is that his life has taken a new turn.

  Agnes is sitting on a low stool, a ragged bundle at her feet, his mother opposite her, next to the fire; his father is at the window, his back to the room. The kestrel is perched on the topmost rung of a ladderback chair, claws curled around the wood, its jesses and bell hanging down. Part of him wants to turn and run. The other part wants to burst into laughter: the idea of a falcon, of Agnes, in his mother’s parlour, surrounded by the curlicued and painted wall hangings of which she is so proud.

  ‘Ah,’ he says, attempting to gather himself, and all three turn towards him. ‘Now…’

  The words shrivel in his mouth because he catches sight of Agnes’s face. Her left eye is swollen shut, reddened, bruised; the skin under the brow is split and bleeding.

  He steps towards her, closing the gap between them. ‘Good God,’ he says, placing a hand on her shoulder, feeling the flex and pull of her shoulder-blade, as if she might fly, take to the air, like her bird, if only she could. ‘What happened? Who did this to you?’

  There are vivid marks on her cheek, a cut on her lip, the tracks of fingernails, raw patches on her wrist.

  Mary clears her throat. ‘Her mother,’ she says, ‘has banished her from the house.’

  Agnes shakes her head. ‘Stepmother,’ she says.

  ‘Joan,’ he puts in, ‘is Agnes’s stepmother, not—’

  ‘I know that,’ Mary snaps. ‘I used the word merely as a—’

  ‘And she didn’t banish me,’ Agnes says. ‘It isn’t her house. It’s Bartholomew’s. I chose to leave.’

  Mary inhales, shutting her eyes for a moment, as if mustering the final shreds of her patience. ‘Agnes,’ she says, opening her eyes and fixing them on her son, ‘is with child. Says it’s yours.’

  He gives a nod and a shrug, all at the same time, eyeing the broad back of his father, who looms behind his mother, still facing the street. He is, despite himself, despite the fact that he is clutching the hand of the woman he has vowed to marry, despite everything, working out which way he will have to duck to avoid the inevitable fist, to feint, to parry, and to shield Agnes from the blows he knows will come. Such a thing has no precedent in their family. He can only imagine what his father will do, what is fermenting in that balding, lumpen head of his. And then he realises, with a deep undertow of shame, Agnes will see how matters stand between him and his father; she will see the tumult and struggle of it all; she will see him for what he is, a man with his leg caught in the jaws of a trap; she will see and know all, in only a moment.

  ‘Is it?’ his mother says, her face white, stretched.

  ‘Is it what?’ he says, feeling skittish and
a little mad, therefore unable to keep himself from lapsing into verbal sparring.

  ‘Yours.’

  ‘Is what mine?’ he returns, almost gleefully.

  Mary presses her lips together. ‘Did you put it there?’

  ‘Did I put what where?’

  At this point he is aware of Agnes turning her head to look at him – he can imagine her dark eyes on him, assessing, gathering information, like a spool gathers thread – but he still can’t stop. He wants whatever is coming his way to come soon: he wants to goad, to tip his father into action; he wants to have done with it, once and for all. Enough creeping around the matter. Let the truth of who his father is come out. Let Agnes see.

  ‘The child.’ Mary speaks in a slow, loud voice, as if to someone simple-headed. ‘In her belly. Did you put it there?’

  He feels his face curling into a smile. A child. Made by him and Agnes, among the apples in the storehouse. How can they not be married now? Nothing can be done to stop it, in such circumstances. It will be, just as she said it would. They will be married. He will be a husband and a father, and his life will begin and he can leave behind this, all of this, this house, this father, this mother, the workshop, the gloves, this life as their son, the drudgery and tedium of working in the business. What a thought, what a thing. This child, in Agnes’s belly, will change everything for him, will free him from the life he hates, from the father he cannot live with, from the house he can no longer bear. He and Agnes will take flight: to another house, another town, another life.

  ‘I did,’ he says, feeling a smile broaden across his face.

  Several things happen at once. His mother launches herself from her seat, towards him, peppering him with her fists; he feels the blows make contact with his chest and shoulders, like taps on a drum. He hears Agnes’s voice, saying, Enough, stop, and another voice, his own, saying that they are handfasted, that there is no sin in it, they will wed, they must. His mother is shrieking that he is not of age, that he will need their consent and they will never give it, something about how he has been bewitched, what ruination this is, she will send him away, she would rather he went to sea than marry this wench, what a catastrophe. Behind him, he is aware of the bird shifting uneasily on its chair, shrugging its feathers, the flap and flutter of its open wings, the jangling of its bell. And then the dark broad shape of his father is near, and where is Agnes in all this chaos, is she behind him, is she safely out of his father’s reach because, by God, he will kill him, he will, if the man so much as lays a finger on her.

  His father is stretching out an arm and he is ready, muscles tensed, but the meaty hand doesn’t strike him, doesn’t curl into a ball, doesn’t injure him. Instead, it lands on his shoulder. He can feel all five fingertips denting his flesh, through the cloth of his shirt, can catch the familiar whiff of leather, of whittawing – acrid, smarting, uric – off them.

  There is the unfamiliar sensation of his father’s hand pressing him down, into a chair. ‘Sit,’ his father says, his voice even. He gestures to Agnes, who is behind them, soothing her bird. ‘Sit down, lass.’

  After a moment, he complies. Agnes comes to stand beside him, smoothing the feathers on the kestrel’s neck with the back of her fingers. He sees his mother examining her with an expression of disbelief, of naked amazement. It makes him want to laugh, again. Then his father speaks and his attention is pulled back.

  ‘I’m in no doubt,’ his father is saying, ‘we can…come to an arrangement.’

  The expression on his father’s face is an odd one. He stares at it, struck by its peculiarity. John’s lips are pulled back from his teeth, his eyes strangely alight. It takes him several seconds to realise that John is, in fact, smiling.

  ‘But, John,’ his mother is exclaiming, ‘there is no possible way that we can agree to such—’

  ‘Hush, woman,’ John says. ‘The boy said they were handfasted. Did you not hear him? No son of mine will go back on his promises, will shirk his responsibilities. The lad has got this girl with child. He has a responsibility, a—’

  ‘He’s eighteen years of age! He has no trade! How can you think—’

  ‘I told you to hush.’ His father speaks with his accustomed rough fury, just for a moment, before reassuming the odd, almost wheedling tone. ‘My son made you a promise, did he?’ he says, looking at Agnes. ‘Before he took you to the woods?’

  Agnes strokes her bird. She looks at John, with a level gaze. ‘We made a promise to each other.’

  ‘And what does your mother – your, ah, stepmother – say to the match?’

  ‘She…was not in favour. Before. And now,’ she gestures towards her belly, ‘I cannot say.’

  ‘I see.’ His father pauses for a moment, his mind working. And there is, to the son, something familiar in this silence of his father’s, and just as he is staring at him, frowning, wondering, he realises what it is. This is the face his father wears when he is contemplating a business deal, an advantageous one. The expression is the same as when a cheap lot of skins has come his way, or a couple of extra bales of wool, to be hidden in the attic, or an inexperienced merchant has been sent to barter with him. It is the expression he assumes when he is trying not to let on to the other party that he will come out of the deal better off.

  It is covetous. It is gleeful. It is suppressed. It chills the son, right down to the marrow of his bones. It makes him clutch the edges of the chair beneath him with both hands.

  This marriage, the son suddenly sees, with a choking sensation of disbelief, will be beneficial to his father, to whatever dealings he has with the sheep farmer’s widow. His father is about to turn all this – Agnes’s bleeding face, her arrival here, the kestrel, the baby growing in her belly – to his own good.

  He cannot believe it. He cannot. That he and Agnes have, unwittingly, played into his father’s hands. The thought makes him want to run from the room. That what happened between them both at Hewlands, in the forest, the kestrel diving like a needle through the fabric of leaves above them, can be twisted into a rope with which his father will tether him ever more closely to this house, to this place. It is insupportable. It cannot be borne. Will he never get away? Will he never be free of this man, this house, this trade?

  John begins to talk again, in the same honeyed voice, saying how he will go out to Hewlands directly, to talk to the yeoman’s widow, to Agnes’s brother. He is sure, he tells them, he can broker an agreement, can draw up terms beneficial to all. The boy wants to marry the girl, he says to his wife, the girl wants to marry the boy: who are they to forbid this union? The baby must be born in wedlock, cannot be delivered into this world on the wrong side of the sheet. It is their grandchild, is it not? Many weddings are brought about thus. It is nature’s way.

  At this point, he turns to his wife and gives a laugh, reaches out a hand to grab at her hip, and the son must look at the floor, so queasy does he feel.

  John leaps to his feet, his face flushed, all eagerness and fervour. ‘It is settled, then. I will go out to Hewlands, to set out my terms…our terms…to…to seal this most…sudden…and, it must be said, blessed union between our families. The girl will remain here.’ He beckons to his son. ‘A word with you, in private, if you please.’

  Out in the passage, John lets the pretence at geniality drop. He grips his son by the collar, his fingers cold against his skin; he pushes his face right up to his.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says, with low, grizzled menace, ‘there are no more.’

  ‘No more what?’

  ‘Say it. There are no more. Are there?’

  The son feels the wall pressing into his back, his shoulder. The fingers grip his collar with such force that they stop the air in his throat.

  ‘Are there?’ his father hisses into his face. His breath is vaguely fishy, loamy. ‘Will there be other Warwickshire doxies lolloping up to my door to tell me that you swelled their be
llies with a child? Must I be dealing with others? Tell me the truth, now. Because, by God, if there are others and her family hear of it, there’ll be trouble. For you and for all of us. Understand?’

  He gasps, pushes back against his father but there is an elbow pressed into his shoulder, a forearm across his throat. He tries to say, no, never, there is only her, she is no doxy, how dare you say such a thing, but the words cannot make it to his mouth.

  ‘Because if you have ploughed and planted another one – just one – I’ll kill you. And if I don’t, her brother will. Do you hear me? I swear I will part you from your life, with God as my witness. Remember that.’

  His father gives one final shove to his windpipe, then moves off, out of the door, letting it clang shut behind him.

  The son bends over, drawing in air, rubbing at his neck. As he draws himself upright, he sees Ned, the apprentice, looking at him. The two stare at each other for a moment, then Ned turns away, back to the bench, leaning in to examine his work.

  * * *

  —

  John walks directly to Hewlands. He doesn’t stop at his stall to chivvy Eliza, to mete out criticisms and judgements, or to check on the stock. He doesn’t pause to exchange words with a guildsman he meets on Rother Street. He takes the path to Shottery and hurries along it, almost as if the girl might have the baby at any minute and somehow nullify this opportunity. His steps are quick and, he is pleased to think, sprightly, especially for a man of his years. He feels the anticipation of a good deal ahead of him, senses that particular pleasure run through his veins, like a cup of wine. John knows this is the moment, that a deal must be struck without delay, lest things change and the advantage slip away from him, as well it might. He has the upper hand, yes, he does. He has possession of the girl, in his house; he has the boy, who will require a special licence to wed because of his youth, the signed permission of his parents. There is the matter of the old debt between them, but their most pressing issue will be the girl. They need her to be married, in her state, and no marriage can take place unless he, John, agrees to it. It is the perfect position. He holds every card. He allows himself, as he walks the path, to whistle out loud, an old dancing tune from his youth.