Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘I see.’ The captain cuts him off by turning away from him, towards his charts, the matter dealt with, as far as he is concerned.

  The second officer clears his throat. ‘We shall, sir,’ he says, ‘arrange a sea burial.’

  The midshipman is wrapped in a sheet and brought up on deck. The sailors nearby cover their noses and mouths with cloth: the corpse is excessively odorous. The captain gives a short reading from the Bible; he, too, is struggling with the dead man’s smell, despite twenty-five years at sea and more watery funerals than he can recall.

  ‘In the name of the Father,’ the captain enunciates, raising his voice above the sounds of discreet retching at the back, ‘the Son and the Holy Ghost we commend this body unto the waves.

  ‘You,’ he gestures at the two sailors nearest him, ‘take the…do the…ah…yes…overboard.’

  They dart forward and, with green faces, lift the corpse up and over the side.

  The choppy, pleated surface of the Mediterranean folds over the body of the midshipman.

  By the time they reach Constantinople, with an order to collect a consignment of furs from the north, the cats are all dead and the rat population is becoming a problem. They are eating through the crates and getting at the dried-meat rations, the second officer tells the captain. There were fifteen or sixteen of them in the cook’s quarters this morning. The men are demoralised, he says, keeping his eyes on the line of horizon out of the window, and several more have fallen ill overnight.

  Two more men die, then a third, and a fourth. All with the same Afric fever that swells the neck and turns the skin red and blistered and black in places. The captain is forced to make an unscheduled stop in Ragusa, to take on more sailors, for whom he has no references or recommendations, which is the kind of hasty, slipshod seamanship he likes to avoid.

  These new sailors are shifty-eyed, snaggle-toothed; they keep to themselves and speak very little, and only in some kind of Polack language. The Manx crew distrusts them on sight and will not communicate with them, or willingly share quarters.

  The Polacks, however, are skilled at killing rats. They approach it as a sport, baiting a string with food, then lying in wait with an enormous shovel. When the creature appears – sleek, with drooping belly, gorged as it is on the sailors’ rations – the Polacks leap on it, shouting, singing, and beat it to death, rat brains and entrails sprayed on the walls and ceilings. They then cut off the tails and string them to their belts, passing around a clear liquid in a bottle, from which they all drink.

  Turns your stomach, one of the Manx sailors says to the cabin boy, watching from across the cabin. Doesn’t it? Then he swats at his neck, his shoulder; the place is overrun with fleas. Damned rats, he growls to himself and turns over in his hammock.

  At Venice, they don’t plan to dock for long – the captain is keen to get his cargo back to England, to recoup his fee, to get this hellish voyage over with – but while the unloading and loading take place, he gives an order to the cabin boy to find some cats for the ship. The cabin boy leaps eagerly down to the dockside; he is more than keen to leave the ship, its cramped, low ceilings and stink of rat and fever and death. Today two more men are confined to their quarters with fever, one a Manxman, like himself, the other one of the Polacks, his rat-tail adorned belt hung up beside him.

  The boy has been in Venice once before, on his first voyage, and it is as he remembers it: a strange, hybrid place, half of sea, half of land, where the steps of houses are lapped by jade-green waters, and windows are lit by the guttering flares of candles, where there are no streets but narrow alleyways, leading off each other in a dizzying labyrinth, and arch-backed bridges. A place where you might very easily lose your way among the fog and the angled squares and the high buildings and tolling church bells.

  For a moment he watches the crew, who are hauling crates and sacks between them, shouting in a mixture of Manx and Polack and English. A Venetian man pushes a cart towards them, loaded with boxes; he too starts shouting, in Venetian. He is gesturing to the sailors, to his boxes, while gripping his cart, and the boy sees that the first two fingers of his hand are missing and the rest of the hand is of a strange, puckered texture, like melted candlewax. He is calling to the sailors, gesturing at the ship with his good hand, at his boxes, and the boy can see that the cart is about to lurch sideways, that the boxes will soon be spilt all over the dockside.

  He leaps forward, rights the cart, grins at the surprised face of the man with the mangled hand, then darts away because he has seen, underneath a stall selling fish, the whiskered, triangular faces of several cats.

  Unbeknown to them both, the flea that came from the Alexandrian monkey – which has, for the last week or so, been living on a rat, and before that the cook, who died near Aleppo – leaps from the boy to the sleeve of the master glassmaker, whereupon it makes its way up to his left ear, and it bites him there, behind the lobe. He doesn’t feel it as the cool air of the misty canal has rendered his extremities sensationless, and he is intent only on getting these boxes of beads aboard the ship, receiving his payment, then returning to Murano, where he has many orders to fulfil and the fire stokers are sure to be fighting again, during his brief absence.

  By the time the ship is rounding the heel of Sicily, the second officer has fallen ill with the Afric fever, his fingers purple and black, his body so hot that the sweat drips through the knots of his hammock to the floor below. They bury him at sea, along with two Polacks, outside Naples.

  The Venetian cats, when not killing rats, stay true to their origins, choosing to sleep in the hold, on the boxes of beads from Murano. There is something about their wooden surfaces, their knotted ties, their chalked markings in Venetian on the side that evidently appeals to them.

  Because not many people go into the hold during a voyage, when the cats die – and they do, in succession, one by one – their bodies remain unfound, on top of these boxes. The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).

  At Barcelona, the remaining Polacks jump ship, disappearing into the melee of the port. The captain sets his teeth and tells the men they will carry on, depleted as they are. They will deliver their crates of cloves and fabric and coffee and they will set sail.

  The men do as they are told. The ship docks at Cádiz, then Porto, then La Rochelle, with more men lost along the way, then north, finally, to Cornwall. When they sail into London, they are down to a crew of five.

  The cabin boy goes off to find a ship heading to the Isle of Man, the once-red scarf still tied around his neck, the sole surviving female Venetian cat tucked under his arm; the other three men head to a tavern at the furthest end of London Bridge; the captain orders a horse to take him home to his wife and family.

  The cargo, unloaded and stacked in Custom House, is gradually distributed throughout London: the cloves and spices and textiles and coffee to merchants, to be sold on, the silks to the Palace, the glassware to a dealer in Bermondsey, the textile bales to clothworkers and haberdashers in Aldgate.

  The boxes of glass beads, crafted by the glassmaker on the island of Murano, just before he injured his hand, lie on the shelf in a warehouse for almost a month. Then one is dispatched to a dressmaker in Shrewsbury, another in York, a jeweller in Oxford. The final box, the smallest of the lot, still wrapped in rags from the floor of the Venetian glassworks, is sent by messenger to an inn at the north edge of the city, where it remains for a week. It is then carried outside by the innkeeper and, along with a parcel of letters and a packet of lace, is given to a man heading into Warwickshire on horseback.

  Hi
s leather saddlebag gives off a rhythmic click-click-click as he rides, the beads jostling together with the movement of the horse, turning their six colours around and around, rubbing against each other. For the two days of the journey, he idly wonders to himself what could be in the wrapped box: what could give off such a minute, clean sound?

  Two of the beads break, crushed by the weight of their replicas. Five are scratched irreparably on their surfaces. The heavier ones work their way gradually, with each jolt of the horse, to the bottom.

  The fleas in the rags crawl out, hungry and depleted by their hostless stay in the wharfhouse. Soon, however, they are recovered, rejuvenated, springing from horse to man and back again, then out on to the various people the rider encounters on the way – a woman who gives him a quart of milk, a child who comes to pat his horse, a young man at a roadside tavern.

  By the time the rider reaches Stratford, the fleas have laid eggs: in the seams of his doublet, in the mane of the horse, in the stitching of the saddle, in the filigree and weave of the lace, in the rags surrounding the beads. These eggs are the great-grandchildren of the monkey flea.

  He delivers the letters, the packet of lace and the box of beads into the hands of an innkeeper on the outskirts of the town. The letters are delivered, one by one, to their recipients, by a boy, in return for a penny (one, incidentally, arrives at Henley Street, for the husband in London has written to his family, telling them how he has sprained his wrist by falling down some steps, about a dog owned by his landlord, the play they are about to take on tour, all the way into Kent). The packet of lace is collected, after a day or two, by a woman from Evesham.

  The rider turns his horse back towards London, noticing that the movement causes him some discomfort: there seems to be some painful, tender spot in his armpit. But he ignores it and continues on his way.

  The box of beads is taken, by the same delivery boy, to a seamstress in Ely Street. She has an order for a new gown for the wife of a guildsman, who will wear it at the harvest fair. It is said that the wife has visited London and also Bath, in her time, so has refined ideas about dress. She told the seamstress that she must have a bodice decorated with Venetian beads, or else the dress will be worth nothing to her. Nothing.

  And so the seamstress sent to London, who in turn sent to Venice, and they waited and they waited, and the wife of the guildsman fretted that the beads might not arrive in time, and they sent a second letter to London, and heard nothing back, but here they are.

  The seamstress reaches through the hatch and takes the box from the boy. She is about to open it, when her neighbour’s child, Judith, who helps with the stitching and the tidying of coloured twists and the cutting of cloth, comes through the door.

  The seamstress holds aloft the box. ‘Look,’ she says to the girl, who is small for her age, and fair as an angel, with a nature to match.

  The girl clasps her hands together. ‘The beads from Venice? Are they here?’

  The seamstress laughs. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Can I look? Can I see? I cannot wait.’

  The seamstress puts the box on her counter. ‘You may do more than that. You may be the one to open them. You’ll need to cut away all these nasty old rags. Take up the scissors there.’

  She hands the girl the box of millefiori beads and Judith takes it, her hands eager and quick, her face lit with a smile.

  On an afternoon in the summer of Susanna’s first year, Agnes notices a new smell in the house.

  She is spooning meal into the waiting mouth of Susanna, saying, Here’s one for you, here’s another, the spoon going in laden with meal and coming out streaked and shining. Susanna is seated at the corner of the table on a chair piled high with cushions. Agnes has fastened her in place on this throne with a knotted shawl. The child is rapt, miniature hands scrolled into themselves, like the shells of snails, eyes fixed on the spoon as it travels from bowl to mouth and back again.

  ‘Dat,’ shouts Susanna, her mouth pitted with four blue-white teeth, in a row, on her lower gum.

  Agnes repeats the sound back to her. She finds herself frequently unable to look away from her child, to remove her gaze from her daughter’s face. Why would she ever want to behold anything else, when she could be taking in the sight of Susanna’s ears, like the pale folds of roses, the winglike sweep of her tiny eyebrows, the dark hair, which clings to her crown as if painted there with a brush? There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever.

  ‘Deet,’ Susanna exclaims, and, with a deft and determined lunge, grabs at the spoon, causing meal to be splattered to the table, to her front, to her face, to Agnes’s gown.

  Agnes is finding a cloth, wiping the table, the chairs, Susanna’s disbelieving face, trying to quell the outraged roaring, when she raises her head and sniffs the air.

  It is a damp, heavy, acrid scent, like food gone off or unaired linen. She has never smelt it before. If it had a colour, it would be greyish green.

  Cloth still in hand, she turns to look at her daughter. Susanna is gripping the spoon, banging it rhythmically on the table, blinking with each impact, her lips pursed together, as if this percussion is an act that requires the fullest concentration.

  Agnes sniffs the cloth; she sniffs the air. She presses her nose to her sleeve, then to Susanna’s smock. She walks about the room. What is it? It smells like dying flowers, like plants left too long in water, like a stagnant pond, like wet lichen. Is there something damp and rotting in the house?

  She checks under the table, in case one of Gilbert’s dogs has dragged in something. She kneels down to peer under the coffer. She puts her hands on her hips, standing in the middle of the room, and draws in a deep breath.

  Suddenly she knows two things. She doesn’t know how she knows them: she just does. Agnes never questions these moments of insight, the way information arrives in her head. She accepts them as a person might an unexpected gift, with a gracious smile and a feeling of benign surprise.

  She is with child, she feels. There will be another baby in the house by the end of winter. Agnes has always known how many children she will have. She has foreknowledge of this: she knows there will be two children of hers standing at the bed where she dies. And here is the second child now, its first sign, its very beginning.

  She also knows that this smell, this rotten scent, is not a physical thing. It means something. It is a sign of something – something bad, something amiss, something out of kilter in her house. She can feel it somewhere, growing, burgeoning, like the black mould that creeps out of the plaster in winter.

  The opposing natures of these two sensations perplex her. She feels herself stretching in two directions: the baby, good; the smell, bad.

  Agnes walks back to the table. Her first and only thought is her daughter. Is this scent of sadness, of dark matter, coming from her? Agnes buries her face in the child’s warm neck and inhales. Is it her? Is her child, her girl, under threat from some dark, gathering force?

  Susanna squeals, surprised at this attention, saying, Mamma, Mamma, fastening her arms around Agnes’s neck. Her arms, Agnes can feel, are not long enough to go right around her, so they grip with their fierce fingers to Agnes’s shoulders.

  Agnes sniffs her as a dog follows a trail, with both nostrils, as if sucking up her daughter’s essence. She smells the pear-blossom hint of Susanna’s skin, the warm hair, the scent of bedclothes and meal. Nothing else.

  She lifts her daughter’s diminutive round form, saying, will they find a slice of bread, a cup of milk, and she is thinking about the new baby, curled small as a nut inside her, and how Susanna will love it, how they will play together, how it will be a Bartholomew for her, a friend and companion and ally, always. Will it be a boy or a girl? Agnes asks herself and, strangely, can locate no sense of the answer.

  With Susanna at her feet,
she cuts a slice of bread and slathers it with honey. Susanna sits on her lap now, at the table, because Agnes wants her close, wants her right there, in case this smell, this darkness, should try to come near. And Agnes talks, to keep her daughter distracted, to keep her safe from the world. The child is listening to the stream of talk coming from Agnes’s mouth, hooking out the words she knows, to shout them loud: bread, cup, foot, eye.

  They are singing a song together, about birds nesting and bees humming, when Susanna’s father comes down the stairs, into the room. Agnes is aware of him lifting a cup, filling it with water from the pitcher, of him drinking it, then another and another. He walks around them and slumps into a chair opposite.

  Agnes looks at him. She feels herself breathe in, then out, in, out, like a tree filling with wind. The sour, damp smell is back. It is stronger. It is right here before them. It drifts off him, like smoke, collecting above his head in a grey-green cloud. He pulls it with him, this odour, as if he is enveloped in its mist. It seems to exude from his skin.

  Agnes examines her husband. He looks the same. Or does he? His face, under his beard, is sallow, parchment pale. His eyes seem hooded and have purplish shadows under them. He stares out of the window, and yet doesn’t. He seems not to see anything before him. His other hand, resting on the table between them, is filled with empty air. He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night.

  How can this have happened, right under her nose? How can he have fallen into this state, without warning, without her seeing the signs? Were there signs? She tries to think. He has been sleeping more than usual, it is true, and spending more time out in the evenings, at taverns with his friends. It has been a long time since he read to her, at night, by candlelight, in their bed – she cannot remember the last time he did this. Have they been speaking together, as they used to, beside the fire at night? She thinks they have, perhaps less than usual. But she is busy, with the child, with the house, with her garden, with callers at the window, and he has been carrying on with his afternoons of tutoring and mornings of running errands for his father. Life has been sweeping them all along together, in step, she had thought. And now this.