Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.

Eliza is shocked by this revelation. She is not dissimilar to the woman of whom people say such terrible things? Only the other day, at church, she had an opportunity to observe the complexion of the mistress of Hewlands—those boils and blotches and wens—and the idea that a person might be able to do that to another is deeply disturbing to her.

And now there is this—this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?

When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt—what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.

Shakespeares hand

Never, was what Joan had said. You? Then she laughed, a harsh trill that startled the sheep around her, making them lift their blunt heads and shift their cloven feet. Never, she said again. What age are you? She didn’t wait for a reply but answered herself: Not old enough.

and Agnes was left with her stepmother, who told her to stop standing there like a simpleton, go back to the hall and mind the children. The next time he came to the farm, Agnes beckoned to him. I know a way, she said. I have an answer. We can, she said, take matters into our own hands. Come. Come with me.

She knows, she feels, that all will be well, that everything will go their way. He holds her to him and she can feel the breath leave him, enter him, leave him again.

Get pregnant

Forgive her, then, if it is almost three months before she notices that a number of monthly cloths are missing from the wash.

The pile Joan thinks of as “the dirties” is smaller than usual. Joan lifts a piece of soiled cloth, one hand over her nose, a bedsheet with the tang of urine (her youngest son, William, is still not wholly reliable in that respect, despite threats and cajolings, though he is only three, bless him). A shirt smeared with some manner of dung is stuck to a cap. Joan frowns, looks about her. She stands for a moment, considering.

Joan looks from stepson to stepdaughter, to sons, to daughters. All of them, save the stepdaughter, drop their gaze and she realises that they all, every one of them, saw what she did not. “The Latin tutor?” she repeats. She pictures him suddenly, standing at a gate in the furthest field, asking her for Agnes’s hand, in a faltering voice. She had almost forgotten. “Him? That—that boy? That wastrel? That wageless, useless, beardless—”

He is, despite himself, despite the fact that he is clutching the hand of the woman he has vowed to marry, despite everything, working out which way he will have to duck to avoid the inevitable fist, to feint, to parry, and to shield Agnes from the blows he knows will come. Such a thing has no precedent in their family. He can only imagine what his father will do, what is fermenting in that balding, lumpen head of his. And then he realises, with a deep undertow of shame, Agnes will see how matters stand between him and his father; she will see the tumult and struggle of it all; she will see him for what he is, a man with his leg caught in the jaws of a trap; she will see and know all, in only a moment. “Is it?” his mother says, her face white, stretched.

the kestrel, the baby growing in her belly—to his own good. He cannot believe it. He cannot. That he and Agnes have, unwittingly, played into his father’s hands. The thought makes him want to run from the room. That what happened between them both at Hewlands, in the forest, the kestrel diving like a needle through the fabric of leaves above them, can be twisted into a rope with which his father will tether him ever more closely to this house, to this place. It is insupportable. It cannot be borne. Will he never get away? Will he never be free of this man, this house, this trade?

They stand in the field for a long time, Bartholomew, Joan and John. The other children watch, unseen, hidden behind a wall. After a while, they begin to ask each other, Is it settled, is it done, has Agnes gone to their house, will she be wed, is she never to come back?

“Hmm,” Mary says, hurling a handful of meal into the water. She hasn’t the patience for bees. Tricky creatures. “And how are all at Hewlands?” “Well, I believe,” replies Agnes, touching the hair of her daughter’s head briefly in greeting, taking up a loaf of bread she made that morning and putting it onto the counter.

Eliza must, Mary has said, share her bed with Agnes, until such time as the wedding can be arranged. Her mother told her this with tight, rigid lips, not meeting Eliza’s eye, flapping out an extra blanket over the bed.

Agnes says she knows this priest well. He is a particular friend of her family. It was him, in fact, who gave her the kestrel. He reared it himself, from an egg, and he once taught her how to cure lung rot in a falcon; he will marry them, she said airily, as she worked the treadle of Mary’s spinning wheel, because he has known her since she was a child and has always been kind to her. She once traded some jesses for a barrel of ale with him. He is, she explained, gathering wool in her spare hand, an expert in matters of falconry and brewing and bee-keeping, and has shared with her his great knowledge of all three.

Eliza’s hand is being pressed between Agnes’s fingers. It is the oddest sensation, as if something is being drawn from her, like a splinter in the skin or infection from a wound, at the same time as something else is being poured into her. She cannot work out if she is being made to give or receive something. She wants to withdraw her hand, at the same time as wanting it to remain. “Your sister,” Agnes says softly. “She was younger than you?” Eliza stares at the smooth brow, the white temples and black hair of her soon-to-be sister-in-law. How does she know that Eliza had been thinking of Anne? “Yes,” Eliza says. “By almost two years.”

Agnes pats the back of Eliza’s hand and speaks in a rush: “She has her other sisters with her, remember. The two who died before you were born. They all look after each other. She doesn’t want you to worry. She wants you…” Agnes pauses, looks at Eliza, who is shivering with the cold or the shock or both. “I mean,” she says, in a new, careful voice, “I expect that she wouldn’t want you to worry. She would want you to rest easy.”

Your sister is happy for you to have her name, for you to carry it on. Remember that. If I hear Gilbert saying that to you, again, ever, I’ll put nettles in his breeches.”

Frost has descended overnight. Each leaf, each blade, each twig on the road to the church has encased itself, replicated itself, in frost.

Agnes sees this, sees Eliza’s sadness gather about her, like fog. She sees everything.

Foreshadow?

She sees that Caterina has the gift or ability to make her life happy, and Margaret, to a lesser degree, but that Joanie does not.

He closes his eyes and speaks: “I declare the banns for this marriage between this man and this woman.” A stillness falls over all of them, even the children. But Agnes is making an internal plea of her own: If you are here, she thinks, show me now, make yourself known, now, please, I am waiting for you, I am here. “If any of ye know of any cause or just impediment why these persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it. This is for the first time of asking.”

There is a ripple of laughter throughout the group, a release of tension, and Agnes sees a flash to her right, in the corner of her eyes, a burst of colour, like the fall of a hair across her face, like the motion of a bird in flight. Something is dropping from a tree above them. It lands on Agnes’s shoulder, on the yellow stuff of her gown, and then on her chest, to the gentle swell of her stomach. She catches it neatly, cupping it against her body. It is a spray of rowan berries, fire-red, still with several narrow silver-backed leaves attached.

The pestilence has reached her house. It has made its mark around her child’s neck.

“You frightened me! Whatever are you doing, boy? You look like a ghost, standing there like that.” Mary will tell herself, in the days and weeks to come, that she never said these words. She couldn’t have done. She would never have said “ghost” to him, would never have told him that there was anything frightening, anything amiss about his appearance. He had looked entirely well. She never said such a thing.

The two women look at one another and Agnes sees that Mary is thinking of her daughter, Anne, who died of the pestilence, aged eight, covered with swellings and hot with fever, her fingers black and odorous and rotting off her

How frail, to Agnes, is the veil between their world and hers. For her, the worlds are indistinct from each other, rubbing up against each other, allowing passage between them. She will not let Judith cross over.

Whatever differences Agnes and Mary have—and there are many, of course, living at such close quarters, with so much to do, so many children, so many mouths, the meals to cook and the clothes to wash and mend, the men to watch and assess, soothe and guide—dissolve in the face of tasks. The two of them can gripe and prickle and rub each other up the wrong way; they can argue and bicker and sigh; they can throw into the pig-pen food the other has cooked because it is too salted or not milled finely enough or too spiced; they can raise an eyebrow at each other’s darning or stitching or embroidery. In a time such as this, however, they can operate like two hands of the same person.

Different but together

This apartment, now her home, has been built on to the side of the family’s house. It has two storeys: downstairs there is the fireplace and the settle, the table and the plate, up here the bed. John had been using it for storage—for what exactly has never been mentioned but Agnes, sniffing the air, the first time they came in here, caught the unmistakable scent of fleece, of baled wool, rolled up and left for several years. Whatever it was it has been removed and taken elsewhere.

He has taken his arm from around her and is holding the book in both hands, parting the pages. “And you’ve had it since you were young?” he is saying, his eyes raking the closely printed words. “It’s in Latin,” he says, frowning. “It’s about plants. Their uses. How to recognise them. How they heal certain illnesses and distempers.” Agnes looks over his shoulder. She sees the picture of a plant with tear-shaped petals and a long, dark tangle of roots, an illustration of a bough with heavy berries. “I know that,” she says. “I have looked through it often enough, although I cannot read it, of course. Will you read it to me?” she asks.

There are no animals to feed, early in the morning, and no kestrel either: her bird has gone to live with the priest who conducted the wedding.

“Agnes was showing us how to mix lavender into the soap and then she…then we…” Eliza begins to laugh again, setting off one of the maids into giggles most inappropriate for her station. “You’re making soap?” Mary asks.

Edmond watches her husband, his eldest brother, all the time. His eyes follow him wherever he goes in the room; he reaches up for him when he passes. Edmond will, Agnes sees, grow up sanguine and happy; he will follow his eldest brother, inevitably, unasked, largely unnoticed. He won’t live long but will live well: women will like him; he will father numerous children during his short life. The last person he will think of, just before he dies, will be Eliza. Agnes’s husband will pay for his funeral and will weep at his graveside. Agnes sees this but doesn’t say

She thinks, as Edmond scatters food for the hens, that they will perhaps not live long in this apartment: soon it will be necessary for them to leave, to take flight, to find a different place.

Hamnet is closest so he goes to answer it. As it swings open, he cringes and yelps: on the doorstep is a terrifying sight, a creature from a nightmare, from Hell, from the devil. It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird.

Plague masks

The baker’s wife insists, lifting the covering on Agnes’s basket and pushing it inside. She catches sight of cloths, clean and neatly folded, a pair of scissors, a stoppered jar, but thinks nothing of it. Agnes nods to her, smiles, says she needs to go.

She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things.

In the house and, shortly afterwards, in the whole town, there follows an enormous hue and cry, a panic and a lament. Eliza is in tears; Mary is screeching, running up and down the stairs in the narrow apartment, as if Agnes has been hiding in a cupboard.

What the boy doesn’t know—can’t know—was that the monkey leaves part of itself behind. In the scuffle, it has shed three of its fleas. One of these fleas falls, unseen, to the ground, where the boy will unwittingly crush it with the sole of his foot. The second stays for a while in the sandy hair of the boy, making its way to the front of his crown. When he is paying for a flagon of the local brew in the tavern, it will make a leap—an agile, arching spring—from his forehead to the shoulder of the innkeeper. The third of the monkey’s fleas will remain where it fell, in the fold of the red cloth tied around the boy’s neck, given to him by his sweetheart at home.

“An Afric fever would be,” the physician slurs, “my opinion. He’s turned all black, you see, in patches, around the limbs and also in other places I will refrain from mentioning here, in this salubrious place, and so it is necessary for me to conclude that he must have taken ill and—”

There were fifteen or sixteen of them in the cook’s quarters this morning. The men are demoralised, he says, keeping his eyes on the line of horizon out of the window, and several more have fallen ill overnight. Two more men die, then a third, and a fourth. All with the same Afric fever that swells the neck and turns the skin red and blistered and black in places.

He delivers the letters, the packet of lace and the box of beads into the hands of an innkeeper on the outskirts of the town. The letters are delivered, one by one, to their recipients, by a boy, in return for a penny (one, incidentally, arrives at Henley Street, for the husband in London has written to his family, telling them how he has sprained his wrist by falling down some steps, about a dog owned by his landlord, the play they are about to take on tour, all the way into Kent). The packet of lace is collected, after a day or two, by a woman from Evesham.

Back to shakespeare family

The seamstress puts the box on her counter. “You may do more than that. You may be the one to open them. You’ll need to cut away all these nasty old rags. Take up the scissors there.” She hands the girl the box of millefiori beads and Judith takes it, her hands eager and quick, her face lit with a smile.

How judith got the plague

Suddenly she knows two things. She doesn’t know how she knows them: she just does. Agnes never questions these moments of insight, the way information arrives in her head. She accepts them as a person might an unexpected gift, with a gracious smile and a feeling of benign surprise. She is with child, she feels. There will be another baby in the house by the end of winter. Agnes has always known how many children she will have. She has foreknowledge of this: she knows there will be two children of hers standing at the bed where she dies. And here is the second child now, its first sign, its very beginning.

His other hand, resting on the table between them, is filled with empty air. He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night.

“Is it…” she begins, “…are you…do you wish we had not…wed? Is that it?” He turns to her, for what feels like the first time in many days, and his face is pained, aghast. He presses his hand down on top of hers. “No,” he says. “Never. How could you say such a thing? You and Susanna are all I live for. Nothing else matters.”

So real

She sees the cloud above him grow darker, gather its horrible rank strength. She wants to reach across the table then, to lay her hand on his arm. She wants to say, I am here. But what if her words are not enough? What if she is not enough of a salve for his nameless pain? For the first time in her life, she finds she does not know how to help someone. She does not know what to do.

There is so much to do in a family of this size, so much to see to, so many people needing so many different things. How easy is it, Agnes thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until—what?

“It would be hard,” he says, without looking at her, “for a man to live in the shadow of a brute like that. Even if it was in the house next door. Hard to draw breath. Hard to find your path in life.” Agnes nods, unable to speak. “I had not,” she whispers, “realised how bad it was.”