* * *
—
The milky, uncertain light of dawn is reaching into the room. Agnes is making the final stitches in the shroud, tucking it in at his shoulder, neatening the edges near his knees. Mary has emptied the bowls, wrung out the cloths, swept the loose leaves and buds from the floor. Judith has her cheek against the cloth near his shoulder. Susanna has come in from next door and she sits next to her sister, head lowered.
They have made him ready, between them. He is clean and set for burial, parcelled in white cloth.
Agnes finds that her mind rears back, like a horse refusing a ditch, when she thinks of the grave. She can think forward to walking with him to church – Bartholomew and perhaps Gilbert and John will carry him; she can picture the priest blessing the body. But the lowering of him into the ground, into a dark pit, never to be seen again, she cannot think about. She cannot imagine. She cannot possibly permit this to happen to her child.
She is, for the third or fourth time, trying to thread her needle – she needs to stitch the sheet over his face, she must, it needs to be done – but the twine is thicker than she is used to, and frayed, and will not go through the eye of the needle, however many times she aims. She is wetting the end in her mouth when there comes a thudding at the door.
She raises her head. Judith whimpers, looks up. Mary turns from the fireplace.
‘Who could that be?’ she says.
Agnes puts down the needle. All four of them stand. The knocking comes again: a row of sharp raps.
For a wild moment, Agnes believes that something has come to her house, again, to take her other children, to take her boy, before she is ready, before she has him fully prepared. It is too early in the morning for it to be a mourner or a neighbour, come to pay their final respects, or for the town officials to snatch away the body. It must be some spectre, some wraith, come calling at their door. But for whom?
Again, the sound comes: a thudding, a rapping. The door leaps on its hinges.
‘Who’s there?’ Agnes calls out, her voice bolder than she feels.
The latch lifts, the door swings open, and there, suddenly, is her husband, stepping in under the lintel, his clothes and head all wetted and dark with rain, his hair streaked to his cheeks. His face is sleepless, crazed, his skin pale. ‘Am I too late?’ he says.
Then his eye falls upon Judith, who is standing by the candle, and a smile breaks out across his features.
‘You,’ he says, striding across the room, holding out his arms. ‘You are here, you are well. I was worried – I couldn’t rest – I came as soon as I heard but now I see that—’
He stops, pulled up short. He has seen the board, the shroud, the bundled figure.
He looks around at them, one by one. His face is fearful, confused. Agnes can see him ticking them off. His wife, his mother, his elder daughter, his younger daughter.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Not…? Is it…?’
Agnes looks at him and he looks back at her. She wants, more than anything, to stretch this moment, to expand the time before he knows, to shield him from what has happened for as long as she can. Then she gives a swift, single, downward nod.
The sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief, of anguish. Agnes will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre.
He moves quickly across the room and pulls back the cloth. And there is his son’s face before him, a blue-white lily-flower, eyes sealed shut, lips pursed, as if the boy is displeased, unimpressed by what has taken place.
The father cups a hand to the son’s chill cheek. His fingers hover, trembling, over the bruise on his brow. He says, No, no, no. He says, God in Heaven. And, then, crouching low, over the boy, he whispers: How did this happen to you?
His women gather round, putting their arms around him, pulling him close.
* * *
—
So it is the father who carries Hamnet for burial. He hoists the board aloft, balanced on his outstretched arms, his son held before him, wrapped in a white shroud, with flowers and blooms around his body.
Behind him is Agnes, holding Susanna’s hand on one side, and Judith’s on the other. Judith is carried by Bartholomew; she tucks her face into his neck and her tears run down to soak his shirt. Mary and John, Eliza and the brothers follow after, along with Joan, Agnes’s siblings, and the baker and his wife.
The father bears him, unaided, along Henley Street, tears and sweat streaming down his face. Towards the crossroads, Edmond breaks free of the mourners and goes to his brother’s side. Together, they take the board between them, the father the head and Edmond the feet.
The neighbours, the townsfolk, the people on the streets step aside when they see the silent procession. They put down their tools, their bundles, their baskets. They edge backwards, to the sides of the streets, clearing the way. They take off their hats. If they are holding children, they clutch them a little closer, when they see the glover’s son walk by with his dead and shrouded boy. They cross themselves. They call out words of comfort, of sorrow. They send up a prayer – for the boy, for the family, for themselves. Some of them weep. Some exchange whispers about the family, the glover, the airs his wife puts on, how everyone thought the glover’s son would amount to nothing, what a wastrel he had always seemed, and now look at him – a man of consequence in London, it is said, and there he goes, with his richly embroidered sleeves and shining leather boots. Who would have thought it? Is it really true that he makes all that money from the playhouse? How can that be? All of them, though, look with sadness at the covered body, at the stricken face of the mother, walking between her daughters.
For Agnes, the walk to the graveyard is both too slow and too fast. She cannot bear the rows and rows of peering eyes, raking over them, sealing an image of her son’s shrouded body inside their lids, thieving that essence of him. These are people who saw him every day, passing by their doors, below their windows. They exchanged words with him, ruffled his hair, exhorted him to hurry if he was late for the school bell. He played with their children, darted in and out of their houses and shops. He carried messages for them, petted their dogs, stroked the backs of their cats as they slept on sunny windowsills. And now their lives are carrying on, unchanged, their dogs still yawning by the fireplaces, their children still whining for supper, while he is no more.
So she cannot bear their gaze, cannot meet their eyes. She doesn’t want their sympathy and their prayers and their murmured words. She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.
Too soon, too quickly, they are nearing the graveyard, they are through the gate, they are walking between the lines of yew trees, studded with their soft, scarlet berries.
The grave is a shock. A deep, dark rip in the earth, as if made by the careless slash of a giant claw. It is over at the far side of the graveyard. Just beyond it, the river is taking a slow, wide bend, turning its waters in another direction. Its surface is opaque today, braided like a rope, rushing always onwards.
How Hamnet would have loved this patch of ground. She observes herself forming this thought. If he could have chosen, if he were here, next to her, if she could turn to him and ask him, she is sure he would have pointed at this very spot: next to the river. He was ever one for water. She has always had a terrible time keeping him from weed-filled banks, from the dank mouths of wells, from stinking drains, from sheep-soiled puddles. And, now, here he will be, sealed in the earth for eternity, by the river.
His father is lowering him
in. How can he do that, how is it possible? She knows that it has to be, that he is only doing what he must, but Agnes feels she could not perform this task. She would never, could never, send his body into the earth like that, alone, cold, to be covered over. Agnes cannot watch, she cannot, her husband’s arms straining, his face twisted and clenched and gleaming, Bartholomew and Edmond stepping forward to help. Someone is sobbing somewhere. Is it Eliza? Is it Bartholomew’s wife, who lost a baby herself not so long ago? Judith is whimpering, Susanna clutching her by the hand, so Agnes misses the moment, she misses seeing her son, the shroud she sewed for him, disappearing from view, entering the dark black river-sodden earth. It was there one moment, then she dipped her head to look at Judith, and then it was gone. Never to be seen again.
It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here. She has to clutch her hem to her, fold her hands inwards. A strangely difficult idea, too, that she entered this place with three children and she leaves it with two. She is, she tells herself, meant to be leaving one behind here, but how can she? In this place of wailing spirits and dripping yew trees and cold, pawing hands?
Her husband takes her arm as they reach the gate; she turns to look at him and it is as if she has never seen him before, so odd and distorted and old do his features seem. Is it their long separation, is it grief, is it all the tears? she wonders, as she regards him. Who is this person next to her, claiming her arm, holding it to him? She can see, in his face, the cheekbones of her dead son, the set of his brow, but nothing else. Just life, just blood, just evidence of a pumping, resilient heart, an eye that is bright with tears, a cheek flushed with feeling.
She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She cannot leave him here.
She gets hold of the wooden gatepost and grips it with both hands. Everything is shattered but holding on to this post feels like the best course of action, the only thing to do. If she can stay here, at the gate, with her daughters on one side of her and her son on the other, she can hold everything together.
It takes her husband, her brother and both of her daughters to unpeel her hands, to pull her away.
* * *
—
Agnes is a woman broken into pieces, crumbled and scattered around. She would not be surprised to look down, one of these days, and see a foot over in the corner, an arm left on the ground, a hand dropped to the floor. Her daughters are the same. Susanna’s face is set, her brows lowered in something like anger. Judith just cries, on and on, silently; the tears leak from her and will, it seems, never stop.
* * *
—
How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?
* * *
—
The husband, the father, paces the room downstairs, that first night, and the one after. Agnes hears him from the bedroom upstairs. There is no other sound. No crying, no sobbing, no sighing. Just the scuff-thud, scuff-thud of his restless feet, walking, walking, like someone trying to find their way back to a place for which they have lost the map.
* * *
—
‘I did not see it,’ she whispers, into the dark space between them.
He turns his head; she cannot see him do this, but she can hear the rustle and crackle of the sheets. The bed-curtains are drawn around them, in spite of the relentless summer heat.
‘No one did,’ he says.
‘But I did not,’ she whispers. ‘And I should have. I should have known. I should have seen it. I should have understood that it was a terrible trick, making me fear for Judith, when all along—’
‘Ssh,’ he says, turning over, laying an arm over her. ‘You did everything you could. There is nothing anyone could have done to save him. You tried your best and—’
‘Of course I did,’ she hisses, suddenly furious, sitting up, wrenching herself from his touch. ‘I would have cut out my heart and given it to him, if it would have made any difference, I would have—’
‘I know.’
‘You don’t know,’ she says, thumping her fist into the mattress. ‘You weren’t here. Judith,’ she whispers, and tears are slipping from her eyes, now, down her cheeks, dripping through her hair, ‘Judith was so ill. I…I…was so intent on her that I wasn’t thinking…I should have paid more attention to him…I never saw what was coming…I always thought she was the one who would be taken. I cannot believe that I was so blind, so stupid to—’
‘Agnes, you did everything, you tried everything,’ he repeats, trying to ease her back into the bed. ‘The sickness was too strong.’
She resists him, curling into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘You weren’t here,’ she says again.
* * *
—
He goes out into the town, two days after they buried him. He must speak to a man who leases fields from him, must remind him of the debt.
He steps out from the front door and finds that the street is full of sunlight, full of children. Walking along, calling to each other, holding their parents’ hands, laughing, crying, sleeping on a shoulder, having their mantles buttoned.
It is a sight past bearing. Their skin, their skulls, their ribs, their clear, wide eyes: how frail they are. Don’t you see that? he wants to shout to their mothers, their fathers. How can you let them out of your houses?
He gets as far as the market, and then he stops. He turns on his heels, ignoring the greeting, the outstretched hand of a cousin, and goes back.
* * *
—
At the house, his Judith is sitting by the back door. She has been set the task of peeling a basket of apples. He sits down beside her. After a moment, he reaches into the basket and hands her the next apple. She has a paring knife in her left hand – always her left – and she peels the skin from it. It drips from the blade in long, green curls, like the hair of a mermaid.
* * *
—
When the twins were very small, perhaps around their first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch.
Agnes had lifted her head from her workbench.
He pushed two slivers of apple across the table to them. At exactly the same moment, Hamnet reached out with his right hand and gripped the apple and Judith reached out with her left.
In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left.
They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right.
It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle.
Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.
* * *
—
He meets his father, John, in the passageway, just as his father is stepping out of the workshop.
The two men pause, each staring at the other.
His father puts up a hand to rub at the bristles on his chin. His Adam’s apple bobs uncomfortably up and down as he swallows. Then he gives something halfway between a grunt and a cough, sidesteps his son, and retreats back into the workshop.
* * *
—
Everywhere he looks: Hamnet. Aged two, gripping the edges of the window ledge, straining to see out into the street, his finger outstretched, pointing to a horse passing by. As a baby, tucked with Judith into a cradle, neat as two loaves. Pushing open the front door with too much force as he ret
urns from school, leaving a mark on the plaster that makes Mary exclaim and scold. Catching a ball in its hoop, over and over again, just outside the window. Lifting his face from his schoolwork to his father to ask about a tense in Greek, his cheek stained with a smear of chalk in the shape of a comma, a pause. The sound of his voice, calling from the back yard, asking, Will someone come and look because a bird has landed on the back of the pig.
And his wife so still and silent and pale, his elder daughter so furious with the world, lashing and lashing at them with an angry tongue. And his younger girl just cries; she puts her head down on the table or stands in a doorway or lies in bed and weeps and weeps, until he or her mother, putting their arms about her, beg her to leave off or she will make herself sick.
And the smell of leather, of whittawing, of hides, of singed fur: he cannot get away from it. How did he spend all those years in this house? He finds he cannot breathe the sour air here, now. The knock at the window, the demands of people wanting to buy gloves, to look at them, to try them on their hands, to endlessly discuss beading and buttons and lace. The ceaseless conversation, back and forth, over this merchant and that, this whittawer, that farmer, that nobleman, the price of silk, the cost of wool, who is at the guild meetings and who isn’t, who will be alderman next year.
It is intolerable. All of it. He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns. Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London. His company will descend into chaos and disorder without him; they will lose all their money and disband; they might find another to take his place; they won’t prepare a new play for the coming season, or they will and it will be better than anything he could ever write, and that person’s name will be across the playbills and not his, and then he will be kicked out, replaced, not wanted any more. He might lose his hold on all that he has built there. It is so tenuous, so fragile, the life of the playhouses. He often thinks that, more than anything, it is like the embroidery on his father’s gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat. He needs to be there, all the time, to ensure that what is underneath happens, that all goes to plan. And he longs, it is true, for the four close walls of his lodging, where no one else ever comes, where no one looks for him or asks for him or speaks to him or bothers him, where there is just a bed, a coffer, a desk. Nowhere else can he escape the noise and life and people around him; nowhere else is he able to let the world recede, the sense of himself dissolve, so that he is just a hand, holding an ink-dipped feather, and he may watch as words unfurl from its tip. And as these words come, one after another, it is possible for him to slip away from himself and find a peace so absorbing, so soothing, so private, so joyous that nothing else will do.
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