Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  He wants to tear down the sky, he wants to rip every blossom from that tree, he wishes to take a burning branch and drive that pink-clad girl and her nag over a cliff, just to be rid of them, to clear them all out of his way. So many miles, so much road stands between him and his child, and so few hours left.

  He is conscious of a hand on his shoulder, a face near his, another hand gripping his arm. Two of his friends are there, saying, What, what is the matter, what has happened? One of them, Heminge, is trying to take the letter from his hand, peeling back his fingers, and he will not let it go, he will not. For someone else to read those words might make them true, make them come to pass. He is shrugging the men off, both of them, all of them, because here are more of them, his players, crowding round him, but somehow he feels the gritted ground under his knees and the voice of his friend, Heminge, is reading the words of the letter aloud. Hands are patting his shoulders now; he is being assisted to his feet. Someone is telling someone else to run for a horse, any horse, that they must get him to Stratford as soon as possible. Go, Heminge is urging the young boy who was, not so long ago, nervous of the drop at the edge of the stage, go and fetch a horse. The young boy takes off down the road, dirt flying up from his heels, his costume – a ridiculous thing of brocade and velvet, made to cast the illusion of a woman on the form of a lad – flapping about him.

  He watches him go, peering through the thicket of legs surrounding him.

  Towards the end of Agnes’s second pregnancy, Mary is watchful. She doesn’t let Agnes alone for long. She has noticed her daughter-in-law’s middle getting larger and larger, rounder than seems possible. She has seen Agnes secreting certain items in a sack under the table: cloths, scissors, twine, packets of herbs and dried rinds. Her appearance is astonishing, as if she is smuggling pumpkins inside her gown. I don’t know how she’s still walking, John mumbled one night, as they lay, curtained tight inside their bed. How does she stay standing?

  Mary keeps an eye on her, and instructs Eliza and the servants to do the same. She will not permit this grandchild – a boy, they are all hoping – to be born in a bush, like poor Susanna. But that, she consoles herself, was before they fully understood the extent of Agnes’s eccentricities and ways.

  ‘The minute she asks you to take care of Susanna, the minute you see her reaching for that sack, let me know,’ Mary hisses to the serving girl. ‘The very minute. Do you hear me?’

  The girl nods, eyes wide.

  * * *

  —

  Agnes is warming honey over the fire, into which she plans to stir extract of valerian and tincture of chickweed. She dips a spoon into it and pushes it one way, then the other, watching it slide over and around the wooden tip. It is beginning to surrender to the heat, losing its stiffness, easing and loosening into liquid, changing one form for another. She is thinking about the letter that arrived from her husband earlier in the week. She has asked Eliza to read it to her twice and she wants to ask her to read it again today, as soon as she can find her. In it, he told Agnes that he has obtained a contract to make gloves for players at a theatre: Agnes had to ask Eliza to go back and read these words again, so that she was sure she understood, to point them out on the paper, so she could recognise them again, later. Players. Theatre. Gloves. Such gloves they need, Eliza had read haltingly, a frown on her face, as she made out the unfamiliar words. Long gauntlets for fighting, fine gloves with jewels and beads for kings and queens and scenes in court, soft gloves for ladies but the size must necessarily be bigger on these for they are to fit the hands of young stage boys.

  So much to mull over in this letter. It has taken Agnes days to absorb all the detail; she has run the words over and over inside her head, she has traced them with a finger, and now she has them down to memory. Jewels and beads. Scenes in court. The hands of young stage boys. And soft gloves for ladies. There is something in the way he has written all this, in such lingering detail, in the long passage about these gloves for the players that alerts Agnes to something. She is not yet sure what. Some kind of change in him, some alteration or turning. Never has he written so much about so little: a glove contract. It is just a contract, like many others, so why, then, does she feel like a small animal, hearing something far off?

  She is leaning over to pick up the chickweed tincture and is about to add it to the honey, drop by slow drop, when she feels an odd yet familiar tensing in her lower abdomen. A drawing down, a clenching: insistent, particular. She pauses. It cannot be that. It is too soon. There is still at least another moon to reach fullness before the baby will be born. It must be a false pain, one of those that warns the body of what is to come. She straightens up, using the fireplace for support. Her belly is so big – so much bigger than last time – that she is in danger of toppling into the flames.

  She grips the mantel, watching with an unaccustomed detachment as her knuckles turn white. What is happening? She had meant to ask Eliza – today or tomorrow – to write to him, to ask him to return to them. She would like him here for the birth, she has decided. She would like to lay eyes on him again, to take his hand, before this child makes it into the world. She wants to look into his face, to find out what is happening in his life, to ask him about these gloves for kings and queens and players. She wants, she realises, as she stands at the fire, to check that he is the same as he ever was, whether London has altered him unrecognisably.

  She pulls in a breath: the sweet, floral scent of the honey, the acrid valerian, the sour musk of chickweed. The pain, instead of easing off, intensifies. She is aware of her centre tightening, as if an iron band is being placed around her. No false pain, this. It will squeeze her and squeeze her, until her body yields up this baby. It may be hours, it may be days: she finds she cannot get a sense of how long. Agnes lets out her breath, slowly, slowly, one hand on the fireplace. She was not expecting this. There was no sign.

  She’d thought she had time to get word to him. But now there is no time. This is too soon. She knows this. Yet she also knows that a pain like this cannot be argued with, cannot be got around.

  Agnes turns to face the room. Everything around her looks suddenly different, as if she has never seen it before, as if she doesn’t daily wipe and polish this table, those chairs, sweep these flagstones, beat the dust from that wall hanging and the rug. Who lives here, in this narrow room, with leaded windows at the end and long shelves of pots and powders? Who put those wands of hazel into a jug, so that their tight buds would yield up early their bright, creased leaves?

  Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was. She’d thought she had more time; she’d thought this baby would come much later, but it seems not. She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?

  Agnes touches her stomach, as if to communicate with the child inside. Very well, she wants to say to it, what must be shall be. You shall be heard. I will get ready for you.

  She has to hurry. She has to get out of this house as quickly as she can. She will not birth this baby here, under this roof. Mary has her eye on her, she knows. She will need to be quick, quiet, wily. She will need to leave now.

  Beside her, Susanna is crouching on the floor, holding her doll by its leg, exclaiming to herself.

  ‘Come,’ Agnes says to her, aiming for a tone of brisk cheer. She holds out her hand. ‘Let’s go and find Eliza, shall we?’

  Susanna, lost in her game with the upside-down doll, is astonished to see the hand of an adult drop down from above. One moment, there was a doll and the doll was a person who could fly, except her wings could not be seen, and she, Susanna, could also fly and she and the doll were taking to the skies, among the birds, up above the trees. And now there is this: a hand.

  She tips back her face and sees her mother looming over her, all stomach, with a faraway
face, saying something about Eliza, about going.

  Susanna’s face pulls in and she frowns. ‘No,’ she says, curling both hands around the leg of her doll.

  ‘Please,’ says her mother, and her voice doesn’t sound as it usually does. It is pinched and tight, like an outgrown smock.

  ‘No,’ Susanna says again, angry now, because her sense of the game is evaporating, drifting away, with all this talking from above. ‘No-no-no!’

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes is saying, and Susanna is astonished to feel herself lifted off her feet, the hearthrug falling away from her, the fire whisking past her, as she is carried, without ceremony, out of the room, away from her doll, which has fallen to the floor, through the door and down the path to the washhouse, where the maid is standing, scrubbing at something in a bowl.

  ‘Here,’ Agnes says, thrusting the roaring child into her arms. ‘Can you take her to Eliza?’ She leans in and kisses Susanna on the cheek, then the forehead, then the cheek again. ‘Sorry, my darling. I’ll be back. Very soon.’

  Agnes goes quickly, very quickly, up the path, reaching her hearth just as the next pain comes. There is no question, now, of what is happening. She remembers it all from last time, except somehow this feels different. It is fast, it is early, it is insistent. She is not yet where she needs to be, in the forest, alone, with the trees over her head. She is not alone. She is still here, in the town, in the apartment. There is not a moment to lose. Ah-ah-ah, she hears herself pant. She grips the back of a chair until it passes. Then she makes her way across the room to the table, where she has left her bag.

  She hooks her fingers around the strap and is at her front door in seconds, manoeuvring herself through, stepping out. Just before she shuts it, she listens for a moment, then nods, satisfied: Susanna’s wails have stopped, which means she must be in the presence of her aunt.

  She is setting out across the street, pausing to let a horse pass by, when someone falls into step beside her. She turns to see Gilbert, her brother-in-law, next to her, grinning.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ he says, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘No,’ Agnes says, panic beating, like a pulse, against her brow. She has to get to the forest, she must. If she is made to stay here, she doesn’t know what will happen. It won’t bode well. Something will go wrong. She is so certain of this fact, while unable to explain why. ‘I mean, yes. To…’ She tries to focus on Gilbert but his face, his beard, looks blurry and indistinct. She is struck, once again, by how unlike his brother he is. ‘To…’ she casts around for a plausible place ‘…the bakery.’

  He clamps his hand around her elbow. ‘Come,’ he says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back to the house.’

  ‘No,’ she says, pulling her elbow away. ‘I won’t. I’m going to the bakery and you – you must let me go. You mustn’t stop me.’

  ‘Yes, I must.’

  ‘No, you must not.’

  At this point, Mary comes hurrying up, out of breath. ‘Agnes,’ she says, taking her other arm, ‘you are to come back to the house. We have everything ready. You needn’t worry.’ And then, out of the corner of her mouth, to Gilbert: ‘Go for the midwife.’

  ‘No,’ Agnes is shouting now, ‘let me go.’ How can she explain to these people that she cannot remain here, she cannot birth the child in this way? How can she make them understand the dread that has been filling her, ever since she heard the words of that letter?

  Agnes is taken, half carried, half dragged, not to her own narrow slip of a house, but to theirs, through their wide door, down the passage and up the narrow stairs. A door is pushed open, and through she sails, her ankles held together, like a criminal, like a lunatic.

  She can hear a voice saying, No, no, no; she can sense a pain coming for her, the way it’s possible to feel a raincloud approaching before seeing it. She wants to stand, to crouch, so that she is ready for it, prepared, able to face it down, but someone is pressing her shoulders back to a bed. Another person is gripping her forehead. The midwife is there, lifting her skirts, saying she must look, that the men must leave, that only the women may stay.

  All Agnes wants is the green of a forest. She craves the dappled, animate pattern of light on ground, the merciful shade of a leaf-canopy, the not-quite-quiet, the repeating seclusion of trunks, disappearing into the distance. She will not make it to the forest. There is not enough time now. The doors of this house are too many, she knows this.

  If only he had been here. He would have been able to hold them off. He would have listened to her pleas, in that way he has, of leaning towards someone, as if drinking in their words. He would have made sure she reached the forest, that she wasn’t forced to come in here. What has she done? Why did she send him away? What will become of them, separated in this way, with him dealing and bargaining for theatre silver, making gloves for the hands of lads to give the illusion of ladies, with her locked and barred in this room, so far away, with no one to take her part? What has she done?

  Agnes pushes them off her, climbs out of bed. She walks, instead of a stitched, lapsing path through trees, from wall to wall, and back again. It is hard to order and command her thoughts. She would like a moment to herself, alone, without pain, so that she can think clearly about everything. She wrings her hands. She can hear herself, or someone, wailing, Why did I do it? She doesn’t know what ‘it’ refers to. This room, she knows, is where her husband was born – and his brothers and sisters, even those little dead ones. He took his first breath here, within these drapes, near this window.

  It is to him she speaks, in her disordered mind, not the trees, not the magic cross, not the patterns and markings of lichen, not even to her mother, who died while trying to give birth to a child. Please, she says to him, inside the chamber of her skull, please come back. I need you. Please. I should never have schemed to send you away. Make sure this child has safe passage; make sure it lives; make sure I survive to care for it. Let us both come through this. Please. Let me not die. Let me not end up cold and stiff in a bloodied bed.

  Something is wrong, off, out of place. She doesn’t know what. It is like listening to an instrument with one untuned string: the grating sense that all is not as it should be. It is all too fast, too soon. She had no sense of this coming. She is in the wrong place. He is in the wrong place. She may not make it, she may not. Her mother may, this very moment, be calling her to that place from which people never return.

  The midwife and Mary have their hands on her now: they are guiding her to a stool, except it’s not a proper stool. It is blackened oiled wood, three-legged, splay-footed, with a basin beneath and an empty seat – just a gaping hole. Agnes doesn’t like it, doesn’t take to that absent seat, that vacancy, so she rears back, she wrenches her arms from their grasp. She will not sit on the black stool.

  That letter. What was different about that letter? It wasn’t the detail, it wasn’t the list of gloves needed. Was it the mention of long gloves for ladies? Is she bothered, hooked by the mention of ladies? She doesn’t think so. It was the feeling that came off the page. The glee that rose up, like steam, between the words he had written. It feels wrong that the two of them are so far away from each other, so separated. While he is deciding what length of glove, what manner of beading, what embroidery would best suit a player king, she is clenched by agony and about to die.

  She will die, she thinks. What other reason can there be for her having no sign that any of this would happen? That she is about to die, to pass on, to leave this world. She will never see him, never see Susanna again.

  Agnes takes to the floor, felled by this presentiment. Never again. She braces herself with her palms flat to the boards, her legs folded either side of her, crouched. If death is to come, let it be quick, she prays. Let the child within her live. Let him come back and be with his children. Let him think kindly of her, always.

  The midwife is plucking at her sleeve,
but Mary seems to have given up trying to entice her to the stool. Agnes will not be led; she feels that Mary knows this by now. Mary sits down on the hateful stool and holds out a muslin cloth, ready to catch the baby.

  The theatre, he had written, was in a place called Shoreditch; Eliza had had to sound out the word, letter by letter, to get the sense of it. ‘Shore’, she had said, and then ‘ditch’. Shore-ditch? Agnes had repeated. She pictured the bank of a river, silted, reed-frilled, a place where yellow flags might grow, and birds would nest, and then a ditch, a treacherously slippery sloped hole, with muddy water in the bottom. ‘Shore’ and then ‘ditch’. The first part of the word a nice-sounding sort of place, the latter part horrible. How can there be a ditch at a shore? She had started to ask Eliza, but Eliza was reading on, describing a play he had watched there, while waiting for the man with the glove contract, about an envious duke and his faithless sons.

  The midwife is huffing, getting down on the floor, fussing with her skirts and apron, saying she will need extra pay, that her knees aren’t up to this. She near-flattens herself to the rug and peers upwards.

  ‘It’ll soon be over,’ is her verdict. ‘Bear down,’ she says, a touch brusquely.

  Mary puts a hand to Agnes’s shoulder, the other to her arm. ‘There now,’ she mutters. ‘Soon be over.’

  Agnes hears their words from a great distance. Her thoughts are brief now, snipped short, pared back to the bone. Husband, she thinks. Gloves. Players. Beads. Theatre. Envious duke. Death. Think kindly. She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. Back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned.

  She watches, with a kind of detached fascination, as something domed appears between her legs. She curls her head under, into herself, to see it. The crown of a head easing from her, turning, twisting, slick, like a water creature, a shoulder, a long back, beaded with spine. The midwife and Mary catch it between them, Mary saying, a boy, a boy, and Agnes sees her husband’s chin, his mouth in a pout; she sees her father’s fair hair, once again, growing in a peak on this brow; she sees the long, delicate fingers of her mother; she sees her son.