Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The noise of barrows, horses, vendors, people calling to each other, a man hurling a sack from an upper window doesn’t reach him. He wanders along the front of the house and into the neighbouring doorway. The smell of his grandparents’ home is always the same: a mix of woodsmoke, polish, leather, wool.

It is similar yet indefinably different from the adjoining two-roomed apartment, built by his grandfather in a narrow gap next to the larger house, where he lives with his mother and sisters. Sometimes he cannot understand why this might be. The two dwellings are, after all, separated by only a thin wattled wall but the air in each place is of a different ilk, a different scent, a different temperature.

His grandmother. The maid. His uncles. His aunt. The apprentice. His grandfather. The boy tries them all, one after another.

He moves along the passageway. At the door to the workshop, he stops. He throws a quick glance over his shoulder, to make sure nobody is there, then steps inside. His grandfather’s glove workshop is a place he is rarely allowed to enter. Even to pause in the doorway is forbidden.

Hamnet learns quickly, can recite by rote, but he will not keep his mind on his work.

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.

Hamnet has lost track of what he is meant to be doing. He has momentarily slipped free of his moorings, of the fact that Judith is unwell and needs someone to care for her, that he is meant to be finding their mother or grandmother or anyone else who might know what to do.

Within seconds, Hamnet has darted out, along the passageway and into the yard. His task returns to him. What is he doing, fiddling in the workshop? His sister is unwell: he is meant to be finding someone to help.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.

It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

“Crying are you? Like a little maid? You’re as bad as your father,” his grandfather says, with disgust, releasing him. Hamnet springs backwards, thwacking his shin on the side of the parlour bed. “Always crying and whining and complaining,” his grandfather mutters. “No backbone. No sense. That was always his problem. Couldn’t stick at anything.”

The eyes that fixed so briefly on his face are the same colour—a warm amber, flecked with gold—the same set as his own. There is a reason for this: they share a birthday, just as they shared their mother’s womb. The boy and the girl are twins, born within minutes of each other. They are as alike as if they had been born in the same caul.

Twins

There is, the boy sees, a swelling at the base of her throat. And another where her shoulder meets her neck. He stares at them. A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch. One at her neck, one at her shoulder.

Plague?

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next.

John, Hamnet’s grandfather, had been among the men outside the guildhall. He had left the parlour and his calculations while Hamnet had been upstairs with Judith, and had been standing with his back to Hamnet as the boy ran for the physician. If the boy had turned his head as he passed, he would have seen his grandfather pushing his way into this group, leaning towards the other men, gripping their reluctant arms, urging them, teasing them, exhorting them to come with him to a tavern.

Drunk

wants nothing more than to reinstate himself as a man of consequence and influence, to regain the status he once had. He can do it, he knows he can.

He used to be someone. And now he is reduced to living on whatever coin his eldest can send back from London (and what an infuriating youth he had been, hanging about the market square, squandering his time; who would have thought he would amount to anything?).

pretence of civility and will walk past without acknowledging them. Susanna sees how her grandmother plants herself in the woman’s way, so that she cannot get past, cannot avoid talking to them. She sees all of this. The knowledge of it burns the inside of her head, leaving black scorch marks.

One moment, she and Hamnet were pulling bits of thread for the cat’s new kittens—keeping an eye open for their grandmother, because Judith had been told to chop the kindling and polish the table while Hamnet did his schoolwork—and then she had suddenly felt a weakness in her arms, an ache in her back, a prickling in her throat. I don’t feel well, she’d said to her brother, and he had looked up from the kittens, at her, and his eyes had travelled all over her face. Now she is on this bed and she has no idea how she got here or where Hamnet has gone or when her mother is coming back or why no one is there.

On a morning in early spring, fifteen years or so before Hamnet runs to the house of the physician, a Latin tutor is standing in this place at the window, absently tugging on the hoop through his left ear.

the sharply blue spring sky and the new-leaf green of the forest. The colours seem to fight, vying for supremacy, vibrancy: the green versus the blue, one against the other.

The tutor is forced to come here twice a week by his father, the glover, who is in some manner of debt to Hewlands, after the souring of an agreement or deal with the yeoman who used to own the farm.

Shakespeare

It appears, however, that the widow or son has done just that and this arrangement (the tutor has gleaned, from listening in to conversations going on behind the door of his parents’ chamber) is something to do with what his father did with a consignment of the yeoman’s sheepskins.

They had, all six of them, from time to time, received the blows and grips and slaps that resulted from the father’s temper, but with nothing like the regularity and brutality of this eldest son.

The shock of a slap landing, sudden and sharp, from above; the flensing sting of a wooden instrument on the back of the legs. How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones.

Wow

He does not, even for one moment, entertain the idea that the woman he saw is in fact the eldest daughter of the house.

He puts his hand on her arm. “Do not concern yourself.”

First touch

She does a strange thing: she puts her hand to his, where it is resting on her forearm. She takes hold of the skin and muscle between his thumb and forefinger and presses. The grip is firm, insistent, oddly intimate, on the edge of painful. It makes him draw in his breath. It makes his head swim. The certainty of it.

“My falcon,” she says, and steps forward, and the tutor sees, at the far end of the outhouse, a tall wooden stake on which perches a bird of prey.

Isn’t it said that the household’s eldest daughter keeps a hawk?

There were creatures in there who resembled humans—wood-dwellers, they were called—who walked and talked, but had never set foot outside the forest, had lived all their lives in its leafish light, its encircling branches, its wet and tangled interior.

Word spread, of course, about the girl’s unusual abilities. People came under cover of darkness. The girl, as she grew older, found a way for her path to coincide with those of the people who needed her. It was known, in the area, that she walked the perimeter of the forest, the fringes of the trees, in late afternoon, in early evening, her falcon swooping into the branches and back to land on her leather gauntlet. She took out this bird at dusk so, if you were of a mind, you could arrange to be walking in the area.

This is the story, the myth of Agnes’s childhood. She herself might tell a different story.

dun-jacketed pearls. Her brother, Bartholomew, with the wide, surprised eyes and fingers that opened into white stars, rode on their mother’s front and the two of them could stare into each other’s faces as they went along, interlace their fingers over the round bones of their mother’s shoulders.

She had a name, “Joan,” that made Agnes think of a howling dog. She took a knife and lopped off Agnes’s hair, saying she hadn’t the time to be attending to that every day. She picked up the rush babies, declared them devilish poppets, and fed them to the fire.

Everyone told Agnes that there had been no other mother. Whatever are you talking about? they cried. When she insisted, they changed tack. You won’t remember your real mother—you couldn’t possibly remember. She told them this wasn’t true; she stamped her foot; she banged her fists against the table; she screeched at them like a fowl. What did it mean? Why did they persist with these lies, these falsehoods? She remembered. She remembered everything. She said this to the apothecary’s widow who lived at the edge of the village, a woman who took in wool for spinning; she continued to work her treadle, as if Agnes hadn’t spoken, but then had nodded. Your mother, she said, was pure of heart. There was more kindness in her little finger—and she held up her own gnarled hand—than in the whole of any of those others.

You cannot remember. Hush, now. Don’t say these things. There was no priest in the night. He did not touch your head. Don’t ever let anyone hear you say that. Don’t let your mother hear.

She grips the thorned stems of brambles until they pierce her skin and she shouts to the God of the church they walk to every Sunday, in neat formation, carrying the babies on their backs, where there is no smoke, no bowls, no speaking in tongues. She calls on him, she bawls his name. You, she says, you, do you hear me, I am finished with you. After this time, I will go to your church because I must but I shan’t say a word there because there is nothing after you die. There is the soil and there is the body and it all comes to nothing.

Agnes must live with a sense of herself as second-tier, deficient in some way, unwanted. She is the one who must sweep the floors, change the babies’ napkins, rock them to sleep, rake out the grate and coax the fire to life.

Agnes will rarely—if ever—be touched. She will grow up craving just that: a hand on hers, on her hair, on her shoulder, the brush of fingers on her arm. A human print of kindness, of fellow feeling. Her stepmother never comes near her. Her siblings paw and claw at her but that doesn’t count.

When she is no more than seven or eight, a visitor lets Agnes hold her hand in this way and Agnes says, You will meet your death within the month, and doesn’t it come true, just like that, the visitor being struck down with an ague the very next week? She says that the shepherd will be knocked off his feet and hurt his leg, that her father will be caught in a storm, that the baby will fall ill on its second birthday, that the man offering to buy her father’s sheepskins is a liar, that the pedlar at the back door has intentions towards the kitchen maid.

Abilities

Agnes will be giving her a tincture; Judith will be wincing at its bitterness but swallowing it all the same. His mother’s potions can cure anything—everyone knows that.

Hamnet = Agnes and Williams son?

And where is her mother now? Susanna crosses and recrosses her ankles over each other. Traipsing about the countryside, most likely, wading into ponds, gathering weeds, climbing over fences to reach some plant or other, tearing her clothes, muddying her boots.

Susanna and the twins and her mother might sit down at table to take some broth and before they have lifted their spoons, there will be a knock and up her mother will start, putting aside her broth, as if Susanna hadn’t taken a deal of trouble to make it, from chicken bones and carrots that required washing and more washing, and then peeling, not to mention the hours of stirring and straining in the heat of the cookhouse.

Their aunt Eliza used to write their replies for them—she possesses a fine hand—but, these days, Hamnet does it. He goes to school, six days a week, from dawn until dusk; he can write as fast as you can speak, and read Latin and Greek, and make columns of figures. The scratch of the quill is like the sound of hens’ feet in the dirt.

Literacy

The letters from their father speak of contracts, of long days, of crowds who hurl rotten matter if they do not like what they hear, of the great river in London, of a rival playhouse owner who released a bag of rats at the climax of their new play, of memorising lines, lines, more lines, of the loss of costumes, of fire, of rehearsing a scene where the players are lowered to the stage on ropes, of the difficulty of finding food when they are out on the road, of scenery that falls, of props that are mislaid or stolen, of carts losing their wheels and pitching all into the mud, taverns that refuse them beds, of the money he has saved, of what he needs their mother to do, whom she must speak to in the town, about a tract of land he would like to purchase, a house he has heard is for sale, a field they should buy and then lease, of how he misses them, how he sends his love, how he wishes he could kiss their faces, one by one, how he cannot wait until he is home again.

is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

Irony

When she raises her eyes again, she sees that he is looking at her, eyebrows raised. She gives an involuntary quick smile. He is the only person in this house—indeed, this whole town—who knows that she has her letters, that she can read. And how does he know this? Because he is the one who taught her and Anne.

She doesn’t say some of the coarser or more defamatory things she has heard against her brother, who is penniless and tradeless, not to mention rather young to be courting such a woman, who is of age and would come with a large dowry.