Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  He finds the brother in a distant field; he must pick his way through the filth to reach him, the brother leaning on his crook, watching him approach, without moving.

  Groups of sheep shift around him, turning their bulging eyes on him, veering from him, as if he is a large and terrifying predator. Gloves, he mutters to them, under his breath, without letting his smile drop, you’ll all be gloves before ye know it. You’ll be worn on the hands of the Warwickshire gentry before the year is out, if I have anything to do with it. It is difficult, as he steps over the field, to prevent the glee from showing on his face.

  The puddles, beneath his town boots, are frozen white clouds, solidified into the ridges and furrows of mud.

  John reaches the sheep-farming brother. He holds out his hand. The brother looks at it for a moment. He is a huge man, with a look of Agnes about the eyes, with black hair tied back from his face. He is dressed in a sheepskin cape, like the father used to wear, and carries a carved cudgel. Another fairer, younger lad, also with a crook, hovers in the background, watchful, and for a moment, John feels a slight qualm. What if these men, these brothers, these people, mean to harm him, to wreak vengeance on him for his wastrel son who has taken the maidenhead of their sister? What if he has misread the situation and it is not, after all, to his advantage, and he has made a grave mistake in coming? He sees, for a fleeting moment, death coming for him, here, in a frosty Shottery field. Sees his corpse, the head stoved in by a shepherd’s crook, his brain spattered and spent, steaming in the frozen earth. His Mary a widow, his young children, little Edmond and Richard, fatherless. All the fault of his errant son.

  The farmer shifts his cudgel to his opposite hand, spits emphatically on the ground, and takes John’s fingers, giving them a painfully strong squeeze. John hears himself give a high, almost girlish cry.

  ‘Well,’ John says, with the deepest, manliest chuckle he can muster, ‘I believe, Bartholomew, we have matters to discuss.’

  The brother looks at him for a long moment. Then he nods, looking past him at something over John’s shoulder.

  ‘That we do,’ he says and, points. ‘Here comes Joan. She will want to have her say, I’ll warrant.’

  Joan comes hurrying over the fields, flanked by daughters, a small boy perched on her hip.

  ‘You,’ she calls, as though he were one of her farm-boys. ‘A word with you, if you please.’

  John waves his hand at her cordially, then turns to include Bartholomew in a smile and a head tilt. It is a knowing, sideways, male nod that John offers him, one that says, Women, eh? Always wanting their way. We men must let them feel included.

  Bartholomew holds his gaze for a moment, his flecked eyes so like his sister’s, but expressionless, cold. Then he drops his gaze and, with an imperceptible gesture, bids his brother to leave, to open the gate for Joan, whistling for the dogs to go with them.

  They stand in the field for a long time, Bartholomew, Joan and John. The other children watch, unseen, hidden behind a wall. After a while, they begin to ask each other, Is it settled, is it done, has Agnes gone to their house, will she be wed, is she never to come back? The smallest brother tires of this game of standing at a wall and whines to be put down. The sisters’ eyes never leave the three figures standing among the sheep. The dogs scuffle and yawn, dropping their heads on to their paws, raising them, every now and again, to check with Thomas, awaiting his orders.

  Their brother is seen to shake his head, to turn sideways, as if to leave the talk. The glover seems to make an entreaty, uncurling first one hand, then the other. He counts something off on the fingers of his right hand. Joan speaks animatedly for a long time, waving her arms, pointing towards the house, gripping her apron. Bartholomew looks long and hard at the sheep, before reaching out to touch the back of one, turning his face to look at the glover, as if proving a point about the animal to the other man. The glover nods vigorously, gives a long speech, then smiles as if in triumph. Bartholomew taps his cudgel against his boot, a sure sign that he is unhappy. The glover steps closer; Joan holds her ground. The glover puts a hand on Bartholomew’s shoulder; the farmer lets it remain.

  Then they shake hands. The glover with Joan, and then with Bartholomew. Oh, says one of the girls. The sons let out their breath. It is done, whispers Caterina.

  Hamnet starts awake, the mattress rustling beneath him. Something has woken him – a noise, a bang, a shout – but he doesn’t know what. He can tell, by the long reaches of the sun into the room, it must be near evening. What is he doing here, asleep on the bed?

  He twists his head and then he remembers everything. A form lies flat, next to him, head twisted to one side. Judith’s face is waxen and still, a sheen of sweat making it glimmer like glass. Her chest rises and falls at uneven intervals.

  Hamnet swallows, his throat closed and tight. His tongue feels furred, ungainly, too large to fit in his mouth. He scrambles upright, the room blurring around him. A pain enters the back of his head and crouches there, snarling, like a cornered rat.

  Downstairs, humming to herself, Agnes comes through the front door. She places upon the table the following items: two bundles of rosemary, her leather bag, the jar of honey, a hunk of beeswax, wrapped in a leaf, her straw hat, a tied posy of comfrey, which she intends to pluck and dry, then steep in warmed oil.

  She walks through the room, straightening the chair by the hearth, moving a cap of Susanna’s from the table to a hook behind the door. She opens the window to the street, in case any customers come for her. She unties her kirtle and shrugs it off. Then she opens the back door and goes down the path towards the cookhouse.

  The heat can be felt from the distance of several paces. Inside, she sees Mary, stirring water in a pot, and beside her Susanna, seated on a stool, rubbing mud from some onions.

  ‘There you are,’ Mary says, turning, her face reddened by heat. ‘You took your time.’

  Agnes gives a noncommittal smile. ‘The bees were swarming in the orchard. I had to coax them back.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Mary says, hurling a handful of meal into the water. She hasn’t the patience for bees. Tricky creatures. ‘And how are all at Hewlands?’

  ‘Well, I believe,’ replies Agnes, touching the hair of her daughter’s head briefly in greeting, taking up a loaf of bread she made that morning and putting it on to the counter. ‘Bartholomew’s leg is still troubling him, I’m afraid, although he will not admit it. I see him limping. He says it aches in damp weather and that is all but I told him he needs—’ Agnes breaks off, bread knife in hand. ‘Where are the twins?’

  Neither Mary nor Susanna looks up from her task.

  ‘Hamnet and Judith,’ Agnes says. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘No idea,’ Mary says, lifting a spoon to her lips to taste, ‘but when I find them, they’re in for a hiding. None of my kindling chopped. The table not laid. The pair of them off, God knows where. It’ll be supper time soon and still no sign of either of them.’

  Agnes guides the serrated edge of the knife down through the loaf of bread, once, twice, the slices falling on to each other. She is about to make an incision in the crust for the third time when she lets the knife slide from her hand.

  ‘I’ll just go and…’ She trails away, moving through the cookhouse door, up the path and into the big house. She checks the workshop, where John is leaning over the bench in a do-not-bother-me posture. She walks through the dining hall and the parlour. She calls their names up the stairs. Nothing. She comes out of the front door, into Henley Street. The heat of the day is passing, the dust of the street settling, people retreating back into their homes to take their supper.

  Agnes goes in at the front door of her own house, for the second time that evening.

  And she sees, standing at the foot of the stair, her son. He is stock still, his face white, his fingers gripping the stair rail. He has a swelling, a cut on his brow that she is sure wa
sn’t there this morning.

  She moves towards him swiftly, covering the room in a few paces.

  ‘What?’ she says, taking him by the shoulders. ‘What is it? What happened to your face?’

  He does not speak. He shakes his head. He points towards the stairs. Agnes takes them, two at a time.

  Eliza says to Agnes that she will make the wedding crown. If, she adds, that is what Agnes would like. It is an offer made shyly, in a tentative voice, early one morning. Eliza is lying back to back with the woman who has come into their house so unexpectedly, so dramatically. It is just after dawn and it is possible to hear the first carts and footfalls out on the street.

  Eliza must, Mary has said, share her bed with Agnes, until such time as the wedding can be arranged. Her mother told her this with tight, rigid lips, not meeting Eliza’s eye, flapping out an extra blanket over the bed. Eliza had looked down at the half of the pallet nearest the window, which has remained empty since her sister Anne died. She had glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.

  Instead, though, Eliza wakes alone in the bed, every day.

  But now here is this woman who will marry her brother: an Agnes instead of an Anne. It has all been a rush and a bother to arrange, with her brother needing a special licence and – Eliza isn’t clear on this point – a protracted discussion (heated) about money. Some friends of Agnes’s brother have put up surety: this much she knows. There is a baby in her belly, Eliza has heard, but only through doors. No one has explicitly told her this. Just as no one has thought to tell her that the wedding will be tomorrow, in the morning: her brother and Agnes will walk to the church in Temple Grafton, where a priest has agreed to marry them. It is not their priest, and it is not the church they attend every Sunday. Agnes says she knows this priest well. He is a particular friend of her family. It was him, in fact, who gave her the kestrel. He reared it himself, from an egg, and he once taught her how to cure lung rot in a falcon; he will marry them, she said airily, as she worked the treadle of Mary’s spinning wheel, because he has known her since she was a child and has always been kind to her. She once traded some jesses for a barrel of ale with him. He is, she explained, gathering wool in her spare hand, an expert in matters of falconry and brewing and bee-keeping, and has shared with her his great knowledge of all three.

  When Agnes made this speech, from her place at the spinning, by the fire in the parlour, Eliza’s mother let her knitting needles fall, as if she could not believe what she was hearing, which had made Eliza’s brother laugh immoderately into his cup, which in turn had made their father angry. Eliza, however, had listened, rapt, to every word. Never had she heard such things said, never had anyone spoken in such a way in their house before, with such unselfconscious flow, such frank cheer.

  Either way, the wedding is set. The hawking, honey-producing, ale-trading priest will marry them early the next day, in a ceremony arranged quickly, furtively, secretively.

  When Eliza gets married, she wants to walk down Henley Street in a crown of flowers, in bright sunshine, so that all may see her. She does not want some ceremony miles from town, in a small church with a strange priest sneaking her and her groom in through the door; she will hold her head high and marry in town. She is sure of it. She will have her banns read loudly at the church door. But her father and Agnes’s brother cooked this up between them so nothing more can be said.

  She would, however, like to make the flower crown for Agnes. Who else will do it? Not Agnes’s stepmother, Eliza is sure, or her sisters: they are keeping themselves to themselves, back in Shottery. They may come to the wedding, Agnes has shrugged, or they may not.

  But Agnes must have a crown. She cannot be married without one, baby or no baby. So Eliza asks her. She clears her throat. She laces her fingers together, as if about to pray.

  ‘May I…’ she begins, speaking into the icy air of the room ‘…I wondered if you would like it if I…made your flower crown? For tomorrow?’

  She feels Agnes behind her, listening. Eliza hears her inhale and she thinks for a moment that she will refuse, she will say no, that Eliza has spoken out of turn.

  The pallet rustles and judders as Agnes turns over to face her.

  ‘A crown?’ Agnes says, and Eliza can hear in her voice that she is smiling. ‘I would like that very much indeed. Thank you.’

  Eliza rolls over and the two of them stare into each other’s faces, sudden conspirators.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eliza says, ‘what flowers we will find, this time of year. Maybe some berries or—’

  ‘Juniper,’ Agnes cuts in. ‘Or holly. Some fern. Or pine.’

  ‘There’s ivy.’

  ‘Or hazel flowers. We could go down to the river, you and I,’ Agnes says, catching hold of Eliza’s hand, ‘later today, and see what we can find.’

  ‘I saw some monkshood there last week. Maybe—’

  ‘Poisonous,’ Agnes says, turning on to her back, keeping hold of Eliza’s hand and placing it square on her belly. ‘Do you want to feel the baby? She moves about in the early morning. She’ll be needing her breakfast.’

  ‘She?’ says Eliza, amazed at this abrupt intimacy, the heat of the woman’s taut, hard skin, the strong grip of her hand.

  ‘I think it will be a girl,’ Agnes says, with a yawn, neat and quick.

  Eliza’s hand is being pressed between Agnes’s fingers. It is the oddest sensation, as if something is being drawn from her, like a splinter in the skin or infection from a wound, at the same time as something else is being poured into her. She cannot work out if she is being made to give or receive something. She wants to withdraw her hand, at the same time as wanting it to remain.

  ‘Your sister,’ Agnes says softly. ‘She was younger than you?’

  Eliza stares at the smooth brow, the white temples and black hair of her soon-to-be sister-in-law. How does she know that Eliza had been thinking of Anne?

  ‘Yes,’ Eliza says. ‘By almost two years.’

  ‘And she was how old when she died?’

  ‘Eight.’

  Agnes clicks her tongue in sympathy. ‘I am sorry,’ she murmurs, ‘for this loss.’

  Eliza doesn’t say that she worries about Anne, all alone, so young, without her, wherever she may be. That for a long time she lay awake at night, whispering her name, just in case she was listening, from wherever she was, in case the sound of Eliza’s voice was a comfort to her. The pain of wondering if Anne was distressed somewhere and that she, Eliza, was unable to hear her, unable to reach her.

  Agnes pats the back of Eliza’s hand and speaks in a rush: ‘She has her other sisters with her, remember. The two who died before you were born. They all look after each other. She doesn’t want you to worry. She wants you…’ Agnes pauses, looks at Eliza, who is shivering with the cold or the shock or both. ‘I mean,’ she says, in a new, careful voice, ‘I expect that she wouldn’t want you to worry. She would want you to rest easy.’

  They are silent for a moment. The clop-clop of a horse’s hoofs passes by the window, heading north up the street.

  ‘How did you know,’ Eliza whispers, ‘about the other two girls who died?’

  Agnes seems to think for a moment. ‘Your brother told me,’ she says, without looking at Eliza.

  ‘One of them,’ Eliza breathes, ‘was called Eliza. The first child. Did you know that?’

  Agnes starts to nod and then shrugs.

  ‘Gilbert says sometimes that…’ Eliza has to cast a look over her shoulder before she speaks ‘…that she might come,
in the middle of the night, to stand at my bed, wanting her name back from me. That she’ll be angry because I took it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Agnes says crisply. ‘Gilbert’s talking nonsense. Don’t you listen to him. Your sister is happy for you to have her name, for you to carry it on. Remember that. If I hear Gilbert saying that to you, again, ever, I’ll put nettles in his breeches.’

  Eliza bursts out laughing. ‘You will not.’

  ‘I most certainly will. And that will teach him not to go about frightening people.’ Agnes releases Eliza’s hand and pushes herself upright. ‘Now then. Time to start the day.’

  Eliza looks down at her hand. There is a dent in her skin, from the press of Agnes’s thumbnail, a rose-red bloom all around it. She rubs at it with her opposite hand, surprised at its heat, as if it has been held near a candle.

  * * *

  —

  The crown Eliza makes is of fern, larch and Michaelmas daisies. She sits at the dining table to do it. She has been given the task of minding her youngest brother, Edmond, as she works, so she gives him some larch leaves and daisy petals. He sits on the floor, legs outstretched, and drops the leaves, one by one, solemnly, into a wooden bowl, where he stirs them with a spoon. She listens to the string of sounds that comes from his mouth breathily, as he stirs: ‘eef’ is in there, for ‘leaf’, and ‘ize’, for ‘Eliza’, and ‘oop’, for ‘soup’. The words exist, if you know how to listen.

  Her fingers – strong, slender, more used to the stitching of leather – weave the stems together in a circlet. Edmond gets to his feet. He toddles to the window, then back, then to the fireplace, admonishing himself as he gets closer: ‘Na-na-na-na-na.’ Eliza smiles and says, ‘Nay, Edmond, not the fire.’ He turns a delighted face towards her, thrilled at being understood. The fire, the heat, no, don’t touch. He knows he is not allowed near it but it fills him with a great and irresistible longing, the bright, leaping colour, the blast of warmth to his face, the array of fascinating implements to stoke and poke and grip.