Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She is a preternaturally beautiful child, even to the indifferent observer, with clear blue eyes and soft, celestial curls. She fixes her gaze, over her mother’s shoulder as they walk from one side of the room to the other, on her father. Silent tears edge down her cheeks and she grips her mother’s shift in both hands. He looks back at her steadily. He clears his throat. He tells his wife that he has decided to spend the money he has saved, not on a house in London but on some land just outside Stratford. It will bring in good rent, he tells her. He stands, as if to square up to this decision, to this new future.

  In the birthing room, with the tiny twins on his lap, a hand curled around each of their heads, he says to Agnes that he believes her foresight, her prophecy about two children was false. Or, rather, that it was a sense of the twins’ coming. It meant, he says, still gazing at his pair of babies, that she would have twins. Susanna and then twins.

  His wife is silent. When he looks at the bed, he sees she has fallen asleep, as if all she was waiting for was for him to arrive, to take the babies on to his lap, to cradle their heads in his hands.

  Agnes startles awake, her head jerking up, her lips and tongue in the middle of forming a word; she isn’t sure what it would have been. She had been dreaming about wind, a great invisible force whipping her hair from side to side, tugging at the clothes on her body, hurling dust and grit into her face.

  She looks down at herself. She isn’t in bed but seems to be half sitting, half slumped on the edge of a pallet, still in her gown. She has a cloth in one hand. It is damp, creased, warmed in the cradle of her palm. Why is she holding it? Why is she sitting like this, asleep?

  It comes to her in a rush, as if a gust of wind from her dream is crossing the room. Judith, the fever, the night.

  Agnes lurches to her feet. Has she been sleeping? How could she have slept? She shakes her head, once, twice, as if trying to rid herself of slumber, of the dream. The room is profoundly dark: it is the deepest part of the night, the most lethal hour. The fire is almost out, just a rubble of red embers, the candle spent. She feels about her desperately, blindly: there is a limb, under a sheet, a knee, an ankle. Agnes gropes upwards and encounters a wrist and two hands clasped together. The flesh, under her touch, is hot. Which, she tells herself, as she turns and begins scrabbling in the coffer for a candle, is good, very good, because it means that Judith is still alive.

  It is good, she is telling herself, it is good, as she seizes the cool waxy column of a candle and holds its wick to an ember. If there is life, there is hope.

  The candlewick catches, the flame guttering, nearly vanishing, then gathering strength. A circle of light appears around Agnes’s outstretched arm, and widens out, pushing back the darkness.

  There is the fireplace, the mantel. There are Agnes’s slippers and her shawl, fallen to the floor. There is the pallet and there are Judith’s feet, poking up under the sheet; there are her legs, her knees, and there is her face.

  Agnes covers her mouth when she sees it. The skin is so pale as to be almost colourless; the eyelids are half open, with the eyes rolled up under the lids. Her lips, white and cracked, are open and she is taking tiny half-sips of air.

  Still with her hand over her mouth, Agnes looks down upon her daughter. The part of her that has attended the sick, the ailing, the convalescents, the malingerers, the grieving, the mad, thinks: It will not be long. The other part of her, which nursed and tended and cared and petted and fed and clothed and embraced and kissed this child, thinks: This cannot be, this cannot happen, please, not her.

  Agnes bends to touch her forehead, to take her pulse, to try to give her some ease, and as she does so, the candle reveals a sight so peculiar, so unexpected that it takes a moment for Agnes to understand what she is seeing.

  The first thing she registers is that Judith’s hand is not, as she first thought, clasping her other hand. It is entwined with another’s. There is someone on the pallet with Judith, another body, another – as strange as it seems – Judith. There are two Judiths, curled up together, in front of the dying fire.

  She blinks. She shakes herself. It is Hamnet, of course. He has come down in the night and squeezed himself on to the pallet next to his twin. And there he lies, in peaceful, deep sleep, next to her, holding her hand.

  Agnes regards the scene, candle held aloft. She will think back to this moment later, and ask herself when she knew all was not as she’d thought it was. When did she notice? What was it that alerted her?

  There is her daughter, very sick indeed, lying on her back, her face blanched by fever, and there is her son, curled next to her, his arm around her. And yet there is something not right about that arm. Agnes stares at it, mesmerised. It is Hamnet’s arm and yet it is not.

  She switches her gaze to the hand it holds, Judith’s hand, and sees that the fingernails of this one are stained with something black. Almost like ink.

  And when, Agnes asks herself, does Judith use ink?

  A strange, dementing confusion starts up inside her, like the buzz of a hundred bees. She darts forward and, pushing the candle into a stick on the hearth, places her hands on her children.

  Her son, a healthy colour, is next to the fire, and her daughter is on the other side of the pallet. But here, tucked into Hamnet’s neck, her fingers find the long plait belonging to Judith. And here are Hamnet’s wrists, protruding from Judith’s smock, with the crescent-shaped scar he got from a sickle when he was young. It is Hamnet’s shorter hair that is dark with the sweat of Judith’s fever; it is Judith who is sleeping the untroubled sleep of the well.

  Agnes cannot understand what she sees. Can she be dreaming? Is this some nightly apparition? She yanks back the sheet covering them and looks at them, lying there. The feet of the sick child reach further down the mattress. The taller child is the one who is sick.

  It is Hamnet, not Judith.

  At that moment, perhaps feeling the cold air, the eyes of the smaller twin open and fix themselves on her, standing there above them with the sheet in her hands.

  ‘Mamma?’ the child says.

  ‘Judith?’ Agnes whispers, because she still cannot believe what her eyes are telling her.

  ‘Yes,’ the child says.

  * * *

  —

  Hamnet cannot know about the horse hired for his father. He will never know that his father’s friend secured a mare for him, a beast with a temper, a fiery eye, a muscled shoulder and a coat that shone like a conker.

  He has no idea that his father is, even now, making his way as fast as this ill-tempered mare will carry him, stopping only for water and as much food as he can find in the minutes he allows himself. From Tunbridge to Weybridge, then on to Thame. He swaps horses in Banbury. He is thinking only of his daughter, how he must narrow down the miles between them, he must make it home, he must hold her in his arms, he must look upon her once more, before she passes into that other realm, before she breathes her last.

  His son, though, knows nothing of this. None of them does. Not Susanna, who has been sent to her mother’s physick garden at the back of the house to collect roots of gentian and lovage for a poultice. Not Mary, who is scolding the maid in the cookhouse because the girl has been weeping and wailing all afternoon about how she wants to go home, how she needs to see her mother. Not Eliza, who is explaining to a woman who has come to the window hatch that Agnes cannot speak with her today, or tomorrow, but perhaps come back next week. And not Agnes herself, who crouches by the pallet with her back to the window.

  Judith, her child, her daughter, her youngest born, is seated in a chair. Agnes still cannot believe it. Her face is pallid but her eyes are bright and alert. She is thin and weak, but she opens her mouth for broth, she fixes her gaze on her mother.

  Agnes is pulled in two, as she sits beside her son, holding on to his shivering body. Her daughter has been spared; she has been delivered back to the
m, once again. But, in exchange, it seems that Hamnet may be taken.

  She has given him a purgative, she has fed him jelly of rosemary and mint. She has given him all that she gave Judith, and more. She has placed a stone with a hole beneath his pillow. Several hours ago, she called for Mary to bring the toad and she has bound it to his stomach with linen.

  None of it has pulled him back; none of it has restored him. She feels her hope for him begin to leak from her, like water from a punctured bucket. She is a fool, a blind idiot, the worst kind of simpleton. All along, she thought she needed to protect Judith, when it was Hamnet who was destined to be taken. How could Fate be so cruel in setting her such a trap? To make her concentrate on the wrong child so that it could reach out, while she was distracted, and snatch the other?

  She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?

  Her son’s body is in a place of torture, of hell. It writhes, it twists, it buckles and strains. Agnes holds him by the shoulders, by the chest, to keep him still. There is, she is starting to see, nothing more she can do. She can stay beside him, comfort him as best she can, but this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious. It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him. It has a musky, dank, salty smell. It has come to them, Agnes thinks, from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement. It has cut a swingeing path for itself through humans and beasts and insects alike; it feeds on pain and unhappiness and grief. It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, blackest kind of evil.

  Agnes does not leave his side. She swabs his brow, his limbs with the damp cloth. She packs salt in the bed with him. She lays a posy of valerian and swans’ feathers on his chest, for comfort, for solace. Hamnet’s fever climbs and climbs, the buboes swell tighter and tighter. She lifts his hand, which is a grim blue-grey along its side, and presses it to her cheek. She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.

  His body sweats, its humours expressing outwards through the skin, as if emptying itself.

  Hamnet’s mind, however, is in another place. For a long time, he could hear his mother and his sisters, his aunt and his grandmother. He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognise. It is cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on. It piles up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weighs down the branches of trees; it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis. The silence, the cool, the altered silver light of it is something more than soothing to him. He wants only to lie down in this snow, to rest himself; his legs are tired, his arms ache. To lie, to surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him. Something is telling him that he must not lie down, he must not give in to this desire. What could it be? Why shouldn’t he rest?

  Outside his body, Agnes is speaking. She is trying to apply the poultice to the swellings in his neck and armpits but he is trembling so much that the mixture will not stay in place. She is saying his name, over and over again. Eliza is scooping up Judith in her arms and taking her to the opposite end of the room. Judith is letting out a hoarse whistling noise, kicking against the clutches of her aunt. Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

  Susanna watches her brother, convulsing by the hearth, watches her mother fussing around with her useless paste and bandages. She would like to snatch them from her hands and hurl them at the wall and say, Stop, leave him be, let him alone. Can you not see it is too late for that? Susanna presses fierce fists to her eyes. She cannot look any more; she cannot bear it.

  Agnes is whispering, Please, please, Hamnet, please, don’t leave us, don’t go. Near the window, Judith is struggling, asking to be placed next to him on the pallet, saying she needs him, she must speak to him, let her go. Eliza holds her, saying, There, there, to her, but has no idea what she means by that. Mary is kneeling at the end of the pallet, holding on to one of his ankles. Susanna is leaning her forehead into the plaster of the wall, her hands over her ears.

  All at once, he stops shaking and a great soundlessness falls over the room. His body is suddenly motionless, his gaze focused on something far above him.

  Hamnet, in his place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes, to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.

  Eliza rocks Judith, tucking the child’s head under her chin, and mutters a prayer. Susanna’s face is turned towards her brother, her wet cheek to the wall. Mary crosses herself, gripping Agnes’s shoulder. Agnes bends forward to touch her lips to his forehead.

  And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath.

  He draws it in, he lets it out.

  Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.

  II

  I am dead:

  Thou livest;

  …draw thy breath in pain,

  To tell my story

  Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

  A room. Long and thin, with flags fitted together, smoothed to a mirror. A group of people are standing in a cluster near the window, turned towards each other, in hushed conference. Cloths have been draped over the panes, so there is little light, but someone has propped open the window, just a crack. A breeze threads through the room, stirring the air inside it, toying with the wall drapes, the mantel-cloth, carrying with it the scent of the street, dust from the dry road, a hint of a pie baking somewhere nearby, the acrid sweetness of caramelising apple. Every now and again the voices of people passing by outside catapult odd words into the room, severed from sense, small bubbles of sound released into the silence.

  Chairs are tucked into place around the table. Flowers stand upright in a jar, petals turned back, pollen dusting the table beneath. A dog asleep on a cushion wakes with a start, begins to lick its paw, then thinks better of it and subsides back into slumber. There is a pitcher of water on the table, tailed by a cluster of cups. No one drinks. The people by the window continue to murmur to each other; one reaches out and clasps the hand of another; this person inclines their head, the white, starched top of their coif displayed to the rest.

  They glance towards the end of the room, where the fireplace is, again and again, then turn back to each other.

  A door has been lifted from its hinges and placed on two barrels by the fireplace. A woman is sitting beside it. She is motionless, back bent, head lowered. It is not immediately apparent that she even breathes. Her hair is disarrayed and falls in strands around her shoulders. Her body is curved over, her f
eet tucked under, her arms outstretched, the nape of her neck exposed.

  Before her is the body of a child. His bared feet splay outwards, his toes curled. The soles and nails still bear the dirt so recently accrued from life: grit from the road, soil from the garden, mud from the riverbank, where he swam not a week ago with his friends. His arms are by his sides, his head turned slightly towards his mother. His skin is losing the appearance of the living, becoming parchment white, stiff and sunken. He is dressed, still, in his nightshirt. His uncles were the ones to unhinge the door and bring it into the room. They lifted him, gently, gently, with careful hands, with held breath, from the pallet where he died to the hard wooden surface of the door.

  The younger uncle, Edmond, had wept, tears blurring his sight, which was, for him, a relief because he found it too painful to look into the still features of his brother’s dead son. This is a child whom he has known and seen every day of his short life, a child whom he taught to catch a wooden ball, to pick fleas from a dog, to whittle a pipe from a reed. The older uncle, Richard, did not cry: instead his sadness passed over into anger – at the grim task they had been bidden to do, at the world, at Fate, at the fact that a child could fall ill and then be lying there dead. The anger made him snap at Edmond whom he thought wasn’t taking enough of the boy’s weight, not holding the legs as firmly as he should have done, by the knees and not the ankles, fumbling the job, messing it up.

  Both uncles leave soon afterwards, exchanging a few words with the people in the room, then finding excuses of work, of errands to run, of places they must go.