He says something in a subdued, hoarse voice.
‘What was that?’ she says.
He says it again.
‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I said,’ he says, lifting his head – she sees that his face is scored with tears, ‘that I may run mad with it. Even now, a year on.’
‘A year is nothing,’ she says, picking up a fallen chamomile bloom. ‘It’s an hour or a day. We may never stop looking for him. I don’t think I would want to.’
He reaches out across the space between them and seizes her hand, crushing the flower between their palms. The dusty, pollen-heavy scent fills the air. She tries to pull away but he holds her fast.
‘I am sorry,’ he says.
She pulls at her wrist, trying to wrest it from his grasp. His strength, his insistence surprises her.
He says her name, with a questioning lilt. ‘Did you hear me? I am sorry.’
‘For what?’ she mutters, giving her arm one last, futile tug, before letting it fall limp in his grasp.
‘For everything.’ He sighs unevenly, shakily. ‘Will you never come to live in London?’
Agnes looks at him, this man who has imprisoned her hand, this father of her children, and shakes her head. ‘We cannot. Judith would never survive it. You know that.’
‘She might.’
There is a distant sound of bleating, carried on the wind. Both of them turn their heads towards it.
‘Would you take that risk?’ Agnes says.
He says nothing, but holds her hand between both of his. She twists her hand inside his until it is facing upwards and she grips the muscle between his thumb and forefinger, looking right at him. He gives a faint smile but doesn’t pull away. His eyes are wet, lashes drawn into spikes.
She presses the muscle, presses and presses, as if she might draw juice from it. She senses mostly noise, at first: numerous voices, calling in loud and soft and threatening and entreating tones. His mind is crammed with a cacophony, with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers, and she doesn’t know how he stands it, and there are the other women, she can feel them, their loosened hair, their sweat-marked handprints, and it sickens her but she keeps holding on, despite wanting to let go, to push him away, and there is also fear, a great deal of fear, of a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea, a desire to seek a faraway horizon, to stretch his eyes to it, and beneath all this, behind it all, she finds something, a gap, a vacancy, an abyss, which is dark and whistling with emptiness, and at the bottom of it she finds something she has never felt before: his heart, that great, scarlet muscle, banging away, frantic and urgent in its constancy, inside his chest. It feels so close, so present, it’s almost as if she could reach out and touch it.
He is still looking at her when she releases her grip. Her hand nestles, inactive, inside his.
‘What did you find?’ he says to her.
‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘Your heart.’
‘That’s nothing?’ he says, pretending to be outraged. ‘Nothing? How could you say such a thing?’
She smiles at him, a faint smile, but he snatches her hand to his chest.
‘And it’s your heart,’ he says, ‘not mine.’
* * *
—
He wakes her that night as she is dreaming of an egg, a large egg, at the bottom of a clear stream; she is standing on a bridge, looking down at it, at the currents, which are forced around its contours.
The dream is so vivid that it takes her a minute to come to, to realise what is happening, that her husband is gripping her tightly, his head buried in her hair, his arms wound about her waist, that he is saying he is sorry, over and over again.
She doesn’t reply for a while, doesn’t respond to or return his caresses. He cannot stop. The words flow from him, like water. Like the egg, she lies unmoving in their currents.
Then she brings up a hand to his shoulder. She senses the hollow, the cave, made by her palm as it rests there. He takes the other hand and presses it to his face; she feels the resisting spring of his beard, his insistent and assertive kisses.
He will not be stopped, diverted; he is a man intent on one destination, on one action. He yanks and pulls at her shift, bunching its folds and lengths in his hand, swearing and blaspheming with the effort, until he has parted her from it, until she is laughing at him, then he covers her with himself and will not let her go; she feels herself as a separate being, a body apart, dissolve, until she has no idea, no sense of whose skin is whose, which limb belongs to whom, whose hair it is in her mouth, whose breath leaves and enters whose lips.
‘I have a proposal,’ he says afterwards, when he has shifted himself to lie beside her.
She has a strand of his hair between her fingers and she twists and twists it. The knowledge of the other women had receded during the act, pulled away from her, but now they are back, standing just outside the bed-curtains, jostling for space, brushing their hands and bodies against the fabric, sweeping their skirts on the floor.
‘A marriage proposal?’ she says.
‘It is,’ he says, kissing her neck, her shoulder, her chest, ‘I fear, a little late for that and besides – ow! My hair, woman. Do you mean to separate it from my head?’
‘Perhaps.’ She gives it a further tweak. ‘You would do well to remember your marriage. From time to time.’
He raises his head from her and sighs. ‘I do. I will. I do.’ He smooths the skin of her face with his fingers. ‘Do you wish to hear my proposal or not?’
‘Not,’ she says. She has a perverse desire to thwart whatever it is he is about to say. She will not let him off so easily, will not let him think it is all as meaningless to her as it is to him.
‘Well, stop your ears if you don’t want to hear it because I’m going to speak whether I have your permission or not. Now—’
She begins to move her hands to her ears but he holds them fast, in one of his.
‘Let go,’ she hisses.
‘I shan’t.’
‘Let go, I tell you.’
‘I want you to listen.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
‘I thought,’ he says, releasing her hands and drawing her close to him, ‘that I would buy a house.’
She turns to look at him but they are enclosed in darkness, a thick, absolute, impenetrable dark. ‘A house?’
‘For you. For us.’
‘In London?’
‘No,’ he says impatiently, ‘Stratford, of course. You said you would rather stay here, with the girls.’
‘A house?’ she repeats.
‘Yes.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you money for a house?’
She hears him smile beside her, hears his lips cleaving away from his teeth. He takes her hand and kisses it between each word. ‘I have. And more besides.’
‘What?’ She pulls her hand away. ‘Is this true?’
‘It is.’
‘How can that be?’
‘You know,’ he says, flopping back on the mattress, ‘it is always a pleasure for me to be able to surprise you. An unaccustomed, rare pleasure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’
She shrugs. ‘None of these things I can help. I never—’
‘I have money,’ he interrupts, with a whisper, his lips brushing
her ear. ‘A lot of money.’
‘You have?’ She sits up in amazement. She had grasped that his business was flourishing but this is still news to her. She thinks fleetingly of the costly bracelet, which she has since covered with ashes and bone fragments, wrapped in hide, and buried by the henhouse. ‘How did you come by this money?’
‘Don’t tell my father.’
‘Your father?’ she repeats. ‘I – I won’t, of course, but—’
‘Could you leave this place?’ he asks. His hand comes to rest on her spine. ‘I want to take you and the girls out of here, to lift you all up and to plant you somewhere else. I want you away from all…this…I want you somewhere new. But could you leave here?’
Agnes considers the thought. She turns it this way and that. She pictures herself in a new house, a cottage perhaps, a room or two, somewhere on the edge of town, with her daughters. A patch of land, for a garden; a few windows looking out over it.
‘He is not here,’ she says eventually. This stills the hand on her back. She tries to keep her voice even but the anguish leaks out of the gaps between words. ‘I have looked everywhere. I have waited. I have watched. I don’t know where he is but he isn’t here.’
He pulls her back towards him, gently, carefully, as if she is something he might break, and draws the blankets over her.
‘I will see to it,’ he says.
* * *
—
The person he asks to broker the purchase is Bartholomew. He cannot, he writes in a letter to him, ask any of his brothers as they might bring his father into it. Will Bartholomew help him in this?
Bartholomew considers the letter. He places it on his mantelpiece and glances at it, now and then, as he eats his breakfast.
Joan, agitated by the letter’s appearance at their door, walks back and forth across the room, asking what is in it, is it from ‘that man’, as she refers to Agnes’s husband? She demands to know, it is only right. Does he want to borrow money? Does he? Has he come to a bad end in London? She always knew he would. She had him pegged for a bad sort from the day she first laid eyes on him. It still grieves her that Agnes threw away her chance on a good-for-nothing like him. Is he asking to borrow money from Bartholomew? She hopes Bartholomew isn’t for a minute considering lending him anything at all. He has the farm to think of, and the children, not to mention all his brothers and sisters. He really should listen to her, Joan, on this matter. Is he listening? Is he?
Bartholomew continues to eat his porridge in silence, as if he can’t hear her, his spoon dipping and rising, dipping and rising. His wife becomes nervous and spills the milk, half on the floor and half on the fire, and Joan scolds her, getting down on her hands and knees to mop up the mess. A child starts to cry. The wife tries to fan the fire back to life.
Bartholomew pushes the remainder of his breakfast away from him. He stands, Joan’s voice still twittering away behind him, like a starling’s. He claps his hat to his head and leaves the farmhouse.
He walks over the land to the east of Hewlands, where the ground has become boggy of late. Then he comes back.
His wife, his stepmother and his children gather round him again, asking, Is it bad news from London? Has something happened? Joan has, of course, examined the letter, which has been passed from hand to hand in the farmhouse, but neither she nor Bartholomew’s wife can read. Some of the children can but they cannot decipher the script of their mysterious uncle.
Bartholomew, still ignoring the women’s questions, takes out a sheet of paper and a quill. Painstakingly, he dips into the ink and, with his tongue held firmly between his teeth, he writes back to his brother-in-law and says, yes, he will help.
* * *
—
Several weeks later, he goes to find his sister. He looks for her first at the house, then at the market, and then at a cottage where the baker’s wife directs him – a small dark place on the road out by the mill.
When Bartholomew pushes open the door, she is applying a poultice to the chest of an elderly man lying on a rush mat. The room is dim; he can see his sister’s apron, the white shape of her cap; he can smell the acrid stink of the clay, the damp of the dirt floor and something else – the overripe stench of sickness.
‘Wait outside,’ she says to him softly. ‘I’ll be there in a moment.’
He stands in the street, slapping his gloves against his leg. When she appears at his side, he begins to walk away from the door of the sick man.
Agnes looks at him as they proceed towards the town; he can feel her reading him, assessing his mood. After a moment or two, he reaches across and takes the basket from her arm. A brief glance into it reveals a cloth parcel, with some kind of dried plant sticking out of it, a bottle with a seal, some mushrooms and a half-burnt candle. He suppresses a sigh. ‘You shouldn’t go into places like that,’ he says, as they approach the marketplace.
She straightens her sleeves but says nothing.
‘You shouldn’t,’ he says again, knowing all the while that he is wasting his breath. ‘You need to look to your own health.’
‘He’s dying, Bartholomew,’ she says simply. ‘And he has no one. His wife, his children. All dead.’
‘If he’s dying, why are you trying to cure him?’
‘I’m not.’ Her eyes flash as she looks at him. ‘But I can ease his passage, take away his pain. Isn’t that what we all deserve, in our final hour?’
She puts out a hand and tries to take back her basket but Bartholomew won’t let go.
‘Why are you in such an ill humour today?’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s Joan,’ she says, finally giving up her pointless struggle for the basket and fixing him with a gimlet gaze, ‘is it not?’
Bartholomew inhales, moving the basket to his other hand so it is out of Agnes’s reach, once and for all. He hasn’t come here to talk about Joan but it was foolish of him to think that Agnes wouldn’t notice his gloom. There had been an argument over breakfast with his stepmother. He has been saving money for years to extend the farmhouse, to put on an upper floor and further rooms at the back – he is weary of sleeping in a hall with endless children, a gurning stepmother and various beasts. Joan has been obstructive about the plan from the start. This place was good enough for your father, she cried, as she served the porridge this morning, why isn’t it good enough for you? Why must you raise the thatch, take the roof from over our heads?
‘Do you want my advice?’ Agnes asks.
Bartholomew shrugs, his mouth set.
‘With Joan, you must pretend,’ Agnes says, as they come in sight of the first stalls of the marketplace, ‘that what you want isn’t what you want at all.’
‘Eh?’
Agnes pauses to examine a row of cheeses, to greet a woman in a yellow shawl, before walking on.
‘Let her believe you’ve changed your mind,’ she says, as she weaves ahead of him, in and out of the market crowds. ‘That you don’t want to rebuild the hall. That you think it’s too much bother, too costly.’ Agnes throws him a look from over her shoulder. ‘I promise you, within a week, she will be saying that she thinks the hall has become too crowded, that more rooms are needed, that the only reason you aren’t building them is because you’re too lazy.’
Bartholomew considers this as they reach the far side of the market. ‘You think that will work?’
Agnes allows him to catch up with her, so that they are once again walking side by side. ‘Joan is never content and she cannot rest if others are. The only thing that pleases her is making others as unhappy as she is. She likes company in her perpetual dissatisfaction. So hide what will make you happy. Make her believe you want its opposite. Then all will be as you wish. You’ll see.’
Agnes is just about to turn towards Henley Street, when Bartholomew catches her elbow and tucks her arm into his, easing her down a
different street, towards the Guildhall and the river.
‘Let us walk this way,’ he says.
She hesitates for a moment, giving him a quizzical look, then silently relents.
They pass by the windows of the grammar school. It is possible to hear the pupils chanting a lesson. A mathematical formula, a verb construction, a verse of poetry, Bartholomew cannot tell what it is. The noise is rhythmic, fluting, like the cries of distant marsh birds. When he glances at his sister, he sees her head is bent, her shoulders hunched inwards, as if she is protecting herself from hail. The grip on his arm tells him that she wishes to cross the street, so they do.
‘Your husband,’ Bartholomew says, as they wait for a horse to pass, ‘wrote to me.’
Agnes raises her head. ‘He did? When?’
‘He instructed me to buy a house for him and—’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me before now, before I—’
‘Do you want to see it?’
She presses her lips together. He can tell that she wants to say no, but is simultaneously filled with curiosity.
She opts to shrug, affecting indifference. ‘If you like.’
‘No,’ Bartholomew says, ‘if you like.’
She shrugs again. ‘Perhaps another day, when—’
Bartholomew reaches out with his free hand and points to a building across the road from where they are standing. It is an enormous place, the biggest in the town, with a wide central doorway, three storeys stacked on top of each other, and arranged on a corner, so that the front of it faces them, the side stretching away from them.
Agnes follows the direction of his pointing finger. He watches her look at the house. He watches her glance at either side of it. He watches her frown.
‘Where?’ she says.
‘There.’
‘That place?’
‘Yes.’
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