Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Her face is puckered with confusion. ‘But which part of it? Which rooms?’

  Bartholomew puts down the basket he is holding and rocks back on his heels before he says, ‘All of them.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘The whole house,’ he says, ‘is yours.’

  * * *

  —

  The new house is a place of sound. It is never quiet. At night Agnes walks the corridors and stairs and chambers and passageways, her feet bare, listening out.

  In the new house, the windows shudder in their frames. A breath of wind turns a chimney into a flute, blowing a long, mournful note down into the hall. The click of wooden wainscots settling for the night. Dogs turning and sighing in their baskets. The small, clawed feet of mice skittering unseen in the walls. The thrashing of branches in the long garden at the back.

  In the new house, Susanna sleeps at the furthest end of the corridor; she locks her door against her mother’s nocturnal wanderings. Judith has the chamber next to Agnes’s; she skims over the surface of sleep, waking often, never quite reaching the depths. If Agnes opens the door, just the sound of the hinges is enough to make her sit up, say, Who’s there? The cats sleep on her blankets, one on either side of her.

  In the new house, Agnes is able to believe that if she were to walk down the street, across the marketplace, up Henley Street and in through the door of the apartment, she would find them all as they were: a woman with two daughters and a son. It would not be inhabited by Eliza and her milliner husband, not at all, but by them, as they ought to be, as they would be now. The son would be older now, taller, broader, his voice deeper and more sure of itself. He would be sitting at the table, his boots on a chair, and he would be talking to her – how he loved to talk – about his day at school, things that the master had said, who was whipped, who was praised. He would be sitting there and his cap would be hanging behind the door and he would say he was hungry and what was there to eat?

  Agnes can let this idea suffuse her. She can hold it within herself, like wrapped and hidden treasure, to be taken out and polished and admired when she is alone, when she walks the new, enormous house at night.

  * * *

  —

  She sees the garden as her terrain, her domain; the house is so large an entity, attracting so much comment and admiration and envy, questions about her husband and what he does, how is his business and is it true he is often at court? People are attracted and repelled by the house, all at once. Since her husband bought it, people have been unable to stop talking about it. They express surprise to her face, but behind her back, she knows what is said: how could he have done it, he always was such a useless hare-brain, soft in the head, his gaze up in the clouds, where did such money come from, was he dealing illegally out there in London, no surprise if he was, given what manner of a man his father was, how can money like that have come from working in a playhouse? It’s not possible.

  Agnes has heard it all. The new house is a jam pot, pulling flies towards it. She will live in it but it will never be hers.

  Outside its back door, though, she can breathe. She plants a row of apple trees along the high brick wall. Two pairs of pear trees on either side of the main path, plums, elder, birch, gooseberry bushes, blush-stemmed rhubarb. She takes a cutting from a dog-rose growing by the river and cultivates it against the warm wall of the malthouse. She puts in a rowan sapling near the back door. She fills the soil with chamomile and marigold, with hyssop and sage, borage and angelica, with wormwort and feverfew. She installs seven skeps at the furthest edge of the garden; on warm July days it is possible to hear the restless rumble of the bees from the house.

  She turns the old brewhouse into a room where she dries her plants, where she mixes them, where people come, in through the side gate, to ask for cures. She orders a larger brewhouse, the biggest in town, to be built at the back of the house. She clears the old well in the courtyard. She makes a knot garden, with box hedges in an interlocking grid, their vacancies filled with purple-headed lavender.

  * * *

  —

  The father comes home to the new house twice, sometimes three times a year. He is home for a month in the second year they live in the house. There have been food riots in the city, he tells them, with apprentices marching on Southwark and pillaging shops. It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud.

  Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits. She notes that her father loves the new house. He walks around it, with slow, lingering steps, looking up at the chimneys and lintels, shutting and opening each door. If he were a dog, his tail would be constantly wagging. He is to be seen out in the courtyard, early in the morning, where he likes to pull up the first water from the well and take a drink. The water here, he says, is the freshest, most delicious he has ever tasted.

  Judith sees, too, that for the first few days her mother will not look at him. She steps aside if he comes close; she leaves the room if he enters.

  He trails her, though, when he is not shut inside his chamber, working. Into the brewhouse, around the garden. He hooks a finger into her cuff. He comes to stand next to her in the outhouse while she works, ducking his head to see under her cap. Judith, crouching in the chamomile path, on the pretext of weeding, sees him pick a basket of apples and offer them, with a smile, to her mother. Agnes takes it without a word and puts it aside.

  After a few days, however, there will be a kind of thawing. Her mother will permit his hand to drop to her shoulder as he passes her chair. She will humour him, in the garden, answering his constant enquiries as to what is this flower, and this, and what is it used for? She listens as, holding an ancient-looking book, he compares her names for the plants to those in Latin. She will prepare a sage elixir for him, a tea of lovage and broom. She will carry it up the stairs, into the room where he is bent over his desk, shutting the door after her. She will take his arm when they walk together out in the street. Judith will hear laughter and talk from the outhouses.

  It’s as if her mother needs London, and all that he does there, to rub off him before she can accept him back.

  * * *

  —

  Gardens don’t stand still: they are always in flux. The apple trees stretch out their limbs until their crowns reach higher than the wall. The pear trees fruit the first year, but not the second, then again the third. The marigolds unfold their bright petals, unfailingly, every year, and the bees leave their skeps to skim over the carpet of blooms, dipping into and out of the petals. The lavender bushes in the knot garden grow leggy and woody, but Agnes will not pull them up; she cuts them back, saving the stems, her hands heavy with fragrance.

  Judith’s cats have kittens and, in time, those kittens have kittens. The cook tries to seize them for drowning but Judith will have none of it. Some are taken to live at Hewlands, others at Henley Street, and others throughout the town, but even so, the garden is filled with cats of various sizes and ages, all with a long, slender tail, a white ruff and leaf-green eyes, all lithe and sinewy and strong.

  The house has no mice. Even the cook has to admit that there are advantages to living alongside a dynasty of cats.

  Susanna grows taller than her mother. She assumes charge of the house keys; she wears them on a hook at her waist. She keeps the account book, pays the servants, oversees what goes in and out of her mother’s cure trade and the burgeoning brewing and malt business. If people fail to pay, she sends one of her uncles round to their door. She corresponds with her father about income, investment, rent accruing from his properties, which tenants have not paid up and which are late with payment. She advises him on how much money to send and how much to keep in London; she lets him know if she hears of a field or a house or a plot of land for sale. She takes it upon herself, at her father’s bidding, to buy furniture for the new house: chairs, pallets, linen chests, wall hang
ings, a new bed. Her mother, however, refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.

  Judith stays close to her mother, keeping in her orbit, as if proximity to her guarantees something. Susanna doesn’t know what. Safety? Survival? Purpose?

  Judith weeds the garden, runs errands, tidies her mother’s workbench. If her mother asks her to run and fetch three leaves of bay or a head of marjoram, Judith will know exactly where they are. All plants look the same to Susanna. Judith spends hours with her cats, grooming them, communicating with them in a language of crooning, high-pitched entreaties. Every spring she has kittens to sell; they are, she tells people, excellent mousers. She has the kind of face, Susanna thinks, that people believe: those wide-set eyes, the sweet, quick smile, the alert yet guileless gaze.

  All this activity in the garden sets Susanna’s teeth on edge; she keeps mostly to the house. The plants that require endless weeding and tending and watering, the infernal bees that drone and sting and zoom into your face; the callers who arrive and depart all day, through the side gate: it drives her to distraction.

  She makes an effort, once a day, to teach Judith her letters. She has promised her father that she will do this. Dutifully, she calls her sister in from the back and makes her sit in the parlour, with an old slate in front of them. It is a thankless task. Judith squirms in her seat, stares out of the window, refuses to use her right hand, saying it feels all wrong, picks at a loose thread in her hem, doesn’t listen to what Susanna is saying and, when she does, becomes distracted halfway through by a man shouting about cakes in the street. Judith refuses to grasp the letters, to see how they merge together into sense, wonders if there could be a trace of something Hamnet wrote on this slate, cannot remember from day to day which is an a and which a c, and how is she to tell the difference between a d and a b, for they look entirely the same to her, and how dull it all is, how impossible. She draws eyes and mouths in all the gaps in the letters, making them into different creatures, some sad, some happy, some winsome. It takes a year for Judith to reliably produce a signature: it is a squiggled initial, but upside down and curled like a pig’s tail. Eventually, Susanna gives up.

  When she complains to their mother, about how Judith will not learn to write, will not help with the accounts, will not take some responsibility for the running of the house, Agnes gives a slight smile and says, Judith’s skills are different from yours but they are skills just the same.

  Why, Susanna thinks, stamping back inside the house, does no one see how difficult life is for her? Her father away and never here, her brother dead, the whole house to see to, the servants to watch. And she must take all this on while living with two…Susanna hesitates at the word ‘half-wits’. Her mother is not a half-wit, just not like other people. Old-fashioned. A countrywoman. Set in her ways. She lives in this place as if it were the house she was born in, a single hall surrounded by sheep; she behaves, still, like the daughter of a farmer, traipsing about the lanes and fields, gathering weeds in a basket, her skirts wet and filthy, her cheeks flushed and sunburnt.

  Nobody ever considers her, Susanna thinks, as she climbs the stairs to her chamber. Nobody ever sees her trials and tribulations. Her mother out in the garden, up to her elbows in leaf mulch, her father in London, acting out plays that people say are extremely bawdy, and her sister somewhere in the house, singing a winding song of her own devising in her breathy, fluty voice. Who will come to court her, she demands of the air, as she flings open the door and lets it slam behind her, with a family like this? How will she ever escape this house? Who would want to be associated with any of them?

  * * *

  —

  Agnes watches the child drop from her younger daughter, as a cloak from a shoulder. She is taller, slender as a willow strip, her figure filling out her gowns. She loses the urge to skip, to move quickly, deftly, to skitter across a room or a yard; she acquires the freighted tread of womanhood. Her features become more defined, the cheekbones rising, the nose sharpening, the mouth turning into the mouth it needs to be.

  Agnes looks at this face; she looks and looks. She tries to see Judith for who she is, for who she will be, but there are moments when all she is asking herself is: Is this the face he would have had, how would this face have been different on a boy, how would it look with a beard, with a male jaw, on a strapping lad?

  * * *

  —

  Night-time in the town. A deep, black silence lies over the streets, broken only by the hollow lilt of an owl, calling for its mate. A breeze slips invisibly, insistently through the streets, like a burglar seeking an entrance. It plays with the tops of the trees, tipping them one way, then the other. It shivers inside the church bell, making the brass vibrate with a single low note. It ruffles the feathers of the lonely owl, sitting on a rooftop near the church. It trembles a loose casement a few doors along, making the people inside turn over in their beds, their dreams intruded upon by images of shaking bones, of nearing footsteps, of drumming hoofs.

  A fox darts out from behind an empty cart, moving sideways along the dark and deserted street. It pauses for a moment, one foot held off the ground, outside the Guildhall, near the school where Hamnet studied, and his father before him, as if it has heard something. Then it trots on, before swerving left and vanishing into a gap between two houses.

  The land here was once a marsh – damp, watery, half river and half earth. To build houses, the people had first to drain the land, then lay down a bed of rushes and branches to buoy up the buildings, like ships on a sea. In wet weather, the houses remember. They creak downwards, pulled by ancient recall; wainscots crack, chimney breasts fracture, doorways loosen and rupture. Nothing goes away.

  The town is quiet, its breath held. In an hour or so, the dark will begin to weaken, light will rise and people will wake in their beds, ready – or not – to face another day. Now, though, the townspeople are asleep.

  Except for Judith. She is coming along the street, wrapped in a cloak, the hood covering her head. She goes past the school, where the fox was until a moment ago; she doesn’t see it but it sees her, from its hiding place in an alleyway. It watches her with widened pupils, alarmed by this unexpected creature sharing its nocturnal world, taking in her mantle, her quick-stepping feet, the hurry in her gait.

  She crosses the market square quickly, keeping close to the buildings, and turns into Henley Street.

  A woman had come to see her mother in the autumn, seeking something for her swollen knuckles and painful wrists. She was, she told Judith when she opened the side gate to her, the midwife. Her mother seemed to know the woman; she gave her a long look, then a smile. She had taken the woman’s hands in her own, turning them gently over. Her knuckles were lumpen, purple, disfigured. Agnes had wrapped comfrey leaves around them, binding them with cloth, then left the room, saying she would fetch some ointment.

  The woman had placed her bandaged hands on her lap. She stared at them for a moment, then spoke, without looking up.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she had said, apparently to her hands, ‘I have to walk through the town late at night. Babies come when they come, you see.’

  Judith nodded politely.

  The woman smiled at her. ‘I remember when you came. We all thought you wouldn’t live. But here you are.’

  ‘Here I am,’ Judith murmured.

  ‘Many a time,’ she continued, ‘I’ve been coming along Henley Street, past the house where you were born, and I’ve seen something.’

  Judith stared at her for a moment. She wanted to ask what, but also dreaded the answer. ‘What have you seen?’ she blurted out.

  ‘Something, or perhaps I should say someone.’

  ‘Who?’ Judith asked, but she knew, she knew already.

  ‘Running, he is.’

  ‘Running?’

  T
he old midwife nodded. ‘From the door of the big house to the door of that dear little narrow one. As clear as anything. A figure, it is, running like the wind, as if the devil himself is at its back.’

  Judith felt her heart speed up, as if she were the one condemned to run for eternity along Henley Street, not him.

  ‘Always at night,’ the woman was saying, passing one hand over the other. ‘Never during the day.’

  And so Judith has come, every night since, slipping out of the house in the dark hours, to stand here, waiting, watching. She has said nothing of this to her mother or Susanna. The midwife chose to tell her, and her only. It is her secret, her connection, her twin. There are mornings when she can feel her mother looking at her, observing her tired, drawn face, and she wonders if she knows. It wouldn’t surprise her. But she doesn’t want to speak to anyone else about it, in case it never comes true, in case she can’t find him, in case he doesn’t appear to her.

  In the narrow house, these days, in the room where Hamnet died, shaking and convulsing all over, the fever’s poison coursing through him, there are many millinery heads, all facing the door, a crowd of silent, wooden, featureless observers. Judith watches this door; she stares and stares at it.

  Please, is what she is thinking. Please come. Just once. Don’t leave me here like this, alone, please. I know you took my place, but I am only half a person without you. Let me see you, even if only for the last time.

  She cannot imagine how it might be, to see him again. He would be a child and she is now grown, almost a woman. What would he think? Would he recognise her now, if he were to pass her in the street, this boy who will for ever remain a boy?

  Several streets away, the owl leaves its perch, surrendering itself to a cool draught, its wings silently breasting the air, its eyes alert. To it, the town appears as a series of rooftops, with gullies of streets in between, a place to be navigated. The massed leaves of trees present themselves as it flies, the stray wisps of smoke from idle fires. It sees the progress of the fox, which is now crossing the street; it sees a rodent, possibly a rat, traversing a yard and disappearing down into a pit; it sees a man, sleeping in the doorway of a tavern, scratching at a fleabite on his shin; it sees coneys in a cage at the back of someone’s house; horses standing in a paddock near the inn; and it sees Judith, stepping into the street.