Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  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.

  On 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.

  The baker’s wife stands for a moment before her empty market stall, watching her friend walk away. Agnes pauses momentarily, at the edge of the market, putting one hand up to the wall. The baker’s wife frowns and is just about to call out, but Agnes straightens and continues on her way.

  During the night, Agnes dreamt of her mother, as she does from time to time. Agnes had been standing in the farmyard at Hewlands and her skirts had been dragging in the dirt; there was a heavy feeling around her, as if her gown was waterlogged. When she looked down, there were birds standing and trampling on the hem of her dress: ducks, hens, partridges, doves, tiny wrens. They were struggling and pushing each other, wings unfolded and awkward, trying to remain standing on her skirts. Agnes was trying to shoo them away, trying to free herself, when she became aware of someone approaching. She turned and saw her mother passing by: her hair in a braid down her back, a red shawl knotted over a blue smock. Her mother smiled but didn’t pause, her hips swaying as she walked past.

  Agnes had felt an unravelling deep within her, a profound longing starting up, like the whir of a wheel. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘wait, wait for me.’ She tried to step forward, to follow her mother, but the birds were still stepping on her skirt, their low-slung feathered bellies, their webbed and clawed feet trampling it down. ‘Wait!’ Agnes cried, in the dream, at her mother’s receding back.

  Her mother didn’t stop but turned her head and said, or seemed to say: ‘The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.’ Then she continued to walk towards the forest.

  Agnes called after her again, stumbling forward, tripping over the massed bodies of the insistent, flapping birds, falling to the mud. Just as she hit the ground, she woke, with a start and a gasp, sitting up, and suddenly she was no longer at Hewlands, in the yard, calling to her mother. She was in her house, in bed, her shift slipping off her shoulder, the baby curled inside her skin, her husband next to her, reaching out in sleep to pincer her closer with his arm.

  She had lain down, fitting herself into his form; he had nestled his face into her back. She had found a skein of his hair and smoothed it, twisting and twisting it between her fingers; she had pictured the thoughts in his head drawing upwards, along his hair, into her fingers, as a reed draws water up its hollow stem.

  He was, she could sense, worrying about her, as men will when their wives approach childbirth. His mind circled and circled the thought, Will she survive? Will she come through? His limbs tightened about her, as if he wanted to keep her there, in the safety of their bed. She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things.

  After a while she rose, parting the curtains around the bed, stepping out. She walked to the window, spread her hand to the glass. The branches are so dense, she thought. The branches. You cannot feel the rain.

  She went to the small table by the fireplace, where her husband kept his papers and a quill. She lifted the lid of the ink pot and dipped the quill, its claw-like point holding the ink. She can write, after a fashion, the letters coming out small and cramped, and perhaps not in an order legible to most (unlike her husband, who has been to the grammar school, and oratory after that, and can produce a looping, continuous flow of letters, like a skein of embroidery, from the tip of his quill. He stays up late into the night, writing, at his desk. What, she does not know. He writes so fast and with such concentration that Agnes cannot keep up, cannot make it out). But she knows enough to be able to record an approximation of this sentence: The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.

  Agnes has riddled the fire, thrown on logs to revive it, placed a jug of cream and a loaf of bread upon the table. She has taken up her basket and let herself out of the front door. She has spoken with her friend, the baker’s wife, and now she is taking a path beside a stream, her basket straining her arm.

  It is mid-May. Sunlight brightens the ground in glancing, shifting shapes; Agnes notices, despite everything, because she cannot not notice such things, what is flowering along the verges. Valerian, campion, dog rose, wood sorrel, wild garlic, river flags. Any other time, she would be on her hands and knees, plucking their heads and blooms. Not today.

  Even though it is still early, she skirts the boundary fence of Hewlands. She doesn’t want to risk meeting anyone along the way. Not Joan, not Bartholomew, not any of her brothers and sisters. If they saw her, they would raise the alarm, they would call someone, they would send for her husband, they would force her indoors, into the farmhouse. It is the very last place she would want to be for this. The branches of the forest, her mother had said to her.

  She catches sight, in the distance, as she steps along the bridleway, of her brother Thomas, moving from house to yard, and she hears Bartholomew’s piercing whistle to his dogs. There is the thatch of the hall; there the pig-pen; there the rear of the apple store, the sight of which makes her smile.

  She enters the wood half a mile or so from Hewlands. By this time, the pains are coming regularly. She can just about catch her breath between them, ready herself, steady herself for the next. She has to wait by a huge elm, pressing her palm to its rough, ridged bark as the sensation begins in her lower back, deep between her legs, and surges upwards, seizing her in its grip, shaking her with its force.

  Once she is able, she shoulders her burden and continues. She has reached the part of the forest she was aiming for. Fight through the dense tangle of branches and brambles and juniper bushes. Go over the stream, past a thicket of holly trees, which give the only colour in the winter months. And then there is a clearing, of sorts, where sunlight penetrates, creating a thick fleece of green grass, in circular patterns, the curved fronds of ferns. There is an almost horizontal tree here, an immense fir, felled like a giant in a story, its roots splayed out, its reddish trunk held up in the forked branches of other trees, supported by its lesser neighbours.

  And underneath its end, where it once stood in the earth, is a hollow – dry, sheltered, big enough for several people. Agnes and Bartholomew used to come here when they were children, if Joan had been shouting or if she gave them too many tasks. They would bring a cloth sack of bread and cheese, crawling in under the tree roots and
say to one another that they would stay there for ever, live in the forest like elves; they would never go back.

  Agnes lowers herself to the ground. It is dry, in the lee of the uprooted tree, with a carpet of pine needles. She feels another pain coming, driving towards her, getting closer, like thunder over a landscape. She turns, she crouches, she pants through it, as she knows she must, holding tight to a tree root. Even in the throes of it, when it has her in its clutches, when it drives everything from her mind but the narrow focus of when it might end, she recognises that it is getting stronger. It means business, this pain. It will not leave her be. Soon it will not let her rest or gather herself. It means to force her out of herself, to turn what is inside outside.

  She has seen women go through this. She remembers her mother’s time: she saw it from the doorway; she heard it from outside the house, where she and Bartholomew were sent. She attended Joan at each of her labours, catching her brothers and sisters in her hands as they made their entry into the world, wiping the grease and blood from their mouths and noses. She has seen neighbouring women do it, has heard their cries rise into screams, smelt the rusty coin scent of new birth. She has seen the pig, the cow, the ewes birth their young; she has been the one called on by her father, by Bartholomew, when lambs were stuck. Her female fingers, slender, tapered, were required to enter that narrow, heated, slick canal, and hook out the soft hoofs, the gluey nose, the plastered-back ears. And she knows, in the way she always does, that she will reach the other side of birth, that she and this baby will live.

  Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the relentlessness of it. It is like trying to stand in a gale, like trying to swim against the current of a flooded river, like trying to lift a fallen tree. Never has she been more sensible of her weakness, of her inadequacy. She has always felt herself to be a strong person: she can push a cow into milking position, she can douse and stir a load of laundry, she can lift and carry her small siblings, a bale of skins, a bucket of water, an armful of firewood. Her body is one of resilience, of power: she is all muscle beneath smooth skin. But this is something else. Something other. It laughs at her attempts to master it, to subdue it, to rise above it. It will, Agnes fears, overtake her. It will seize her by the scruff of her neck and plunge her down, under the surface of the water.

  She raises her head and sees, across the clearing, the silvery trunk and delicate leaves of a rowan tree. Despite everything, she smiles. She says the word to herself – rowan, rowan – pulling out the two syllables. Reddened berries in autumn, used for stomach pains, if boiled, and wheezing chests; if planted by the door of a house, it will repel evil spirits from the inhabitants. People say the first woman was made from its branches. It was her mother’s name, although her father never let it past his lips; the shepherd had told her, when she’d asked him. The branches of the forest.

  Agnes plants her hands in front of her, on all fours, like a wolf, and submits to another pain.

  * * *

  —

  In Henley Street, he wakes. He spends a while staring up at the dark red curtain above him. Then he gets up, walks to the window and gazes down into the street, absently scratching at his beard. He has two Latin tutorials this afternoon, at houses in town; he is aware of the stifling boredom of them, as you might be of the stench of a nearby carcass. The drowsing boys, the squeal of slates, the flutter and crease of the primers, the intoning of verbs and conjunctions. This morning he is meant to be helping his father with deliveries and collections. He yawns, leans his head into the wood frame of the window, glares at a man yanking a donkey by its bridle, a woman pulling a wailing child by its jacket, a boy running in the opposite direction with a bundle of firewood under his arm.

  Is it to be, he asks himself, that they remain here, in this town, for ever? Is he never to see any other place, never to live elsewhere? He wants nothing more than to take hold of Agnes and the baby and run with them, as far as they are able to go. When he married, he had thought that a larger, freer life might begin, the life of a man, and yet here he is, a mere wall separating him from his boyhood home, his family, his father, and the vagaries and flashes of his inconstant tempers. He knew, of course, that they had to wait for the baby, that nothing could be achieved until the safe arrival of their child. But now that time is near and he is no further on in his plan to leave. How can he ever get away? Are they to live like this, in a narrow appendage to his parents’ house? Is there to be no escape for them? Agnes says that he must—

  At the thought of Agnes, he straightens up. He looks at her side of the bed, where the straw still holds the indent, the shape of her. He calls her name. Nothing. He calls it again. Still nothing. His mind is traversed, for a moment, by an image of her body in its current astonishing shape, as he saw it last night: limbs, neat ribcage, the spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow, and then this perfectly rounded sphere at the front. Like a woman who had swallowed the moon.

  He lifts his clothes from the chair beside the window and shrugs himself into them. He makes his way across the room in his stockinged feet, shaking his hair out of his collar. Hunger growls in his stomach, low and menacing, like a dog crouched inside his body. Downstairs will be bread and milk, oats and eggs, if the hens have laid. He almost smiles to think this. As he passes his desk in the corner, it seems to him, from the corner of his eye, that something has altered about it. Something has changed. He pauses. The quill rests in the inkwell, point down, fronded feathers up. He frowns. This is something he never does: to leave a quill like that, overnight, in the damp dark of a well. What a waste, what profligacy. It will be quite spoilt.

  He steps forward and lifts it out, giving it a gentle shake, so that the drops don’t fall to the curled pages. He notices, then, that something has been added to what he had been writing the night before.

  It is a string of letters, written in a slanted fashion; the words seem to slide down the page, as if they weigh more at the end of the sentence than at the beginning. He bends to look. There is no punctuation, no indication of the start or finish. He can make out the words ‘branches’ and ‘rain’ (written as ‘rayne’); there is another word beginning with a capital B and another with an F or possibly an S.

  The branches of the something are something something…rayne. He cannot follow it. His fingers hold flat the page. With his other hand, he scuffs the end of the quill against his cheek. The branches, the branches.

  His wife has never done this before, taken up a quill and written something at his desk. Is it a message for him? Is it important that he understand it? What does it mean?

  He lays down the quill. He turns. He calls her name again, with a questioning lilt. He descends the narrow stairs.

  She is not in the downstairs room or outside on the street. Could she have gone to the priest to fly her kestrel, as she does sometimes? But surely she wouldn’t undertake to walk that far, so close to her confinement? He goes through the back door, into the yard, where he finds his mother standing over Eliza, who is dipping cloth in and out of red dye.

  ‘Have you seen Agnes?’

  ‘Not like that,’ his mother is scolding. ‘The way I showed you yesterday, with light fingers. Light, I said.’ She raises her head to look at him. ‘Agnes?’ she repeats.

  * * *

  —

  The baby is alive: Agnes doesn’t realise, despite her intimations, how much she feared that this might not be until she sees it twist its head, scrunch up its features into a yell of outrage. Her daughter’s face is wet, greyish, with an expression of dismay. She holds her fists up on either side of her head and lets out a cry – surprisingly loud and emphatic for so small a creature. Agnes turns her on to her side, as her father always did with lambs, and watches as the water – from that other place where she has been, these long months – leaks out of her mouth. Her lips become tinged with pink and then the colour spreads to her cheeks, her chin, her eyes, h
er forehead. She looks, suddenly and completely, human. No longer aquatic, a mer-child, as she did when she emerged, but a small person, very much herself, with her father’s high forehead, his bottom lip, his swirl of hair at the crown of her head, and Agnes’s sharp cheekbones and wide eyes.

  She reaches out with her spare hand and brings the blanket and scissors out of the basket. She lays the baby on the blanket and works at the cord with the scissors. Who would ever think it could be so thick, so strong, still pulsing like a long, striped heart? The colours of birth assail Agnes: the red, the blue, the white.

  She tugs on her shift, baring her breast, lifting the baby to it, watching in something close to awe as her daughter’s mouth opens wide, as she clamps down and begins to suck. Agnes lets out a laugh. Everything works. The baby knows what to do, better than her.

  * * *

  —

  In the house and, shortly afterwards, in the whole town, there follows an enormous hue and cry, a panic and a lament. Eliza is in tears; Mary is screeching, running up and down the stairs in the narrow apartment, as if Agnes has been hiding in a cupboard. I had it all ready for her, she keeps shouting, the birthing room, everything she needs, right here. John thunders in and out of the workshop, alternately roaring that he can’t possibly work with all this racket, and then, where the devil has she got to?

  Ned, the apprentice, is dispatched to Hewlands, to see if they have any news of her. No one can find Bartholomew, who went out early in the morning, but soon all the sisters and Joan, neighbours and villagers are out, searching for Agnes. Have you seen a woman, greatly with child, carrying a basket? The sisters have been up and down the lane, asking anyone they meet. But no one has seen her, save the wife of the baker, who said she went in the direction of the Shottery path. She wrung her hands, threw her apron over her head, saying, Why did I let her go, why, when I knew something wasn’t right? Gilbert and Richard are sent out into the streets, to apprehend passers-by, to see if anyone has any news at all.