Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

“I have been thinking,” she begins, “that it might interest John to set up elsewhere. In London.” Bartholomew raises his head, narrows his eyes. “London,” he repeats, rolling the word over his tongue. “To extend his business there.” Her brother pauses, rubs at his chin. “I see,” he says. “You mean that John might send someone to the city, for a while. Someone he trusts. A son perhaps.”

Send him to london to heal

“I don’t think John would listen to a woman in this matter. If an associate were to put the idea in his head—someone with an interest in his business, with a stake—so as to make it look like John’s idea in the first place, then…”

The girl will die. Mary knows this. It may be tonight, in the deepest dark, because that is the most dangerous time for the sick. It may be tomorrow or even the day after. But come it will.

Judith

There is nothing they can do now. Just as three of her own daughters were taken, two when they were just babies, Judith will go from them. They will not have her any more.

Mary feels tears gathering in her eyes, feels her throat closing over. The sight of Judith’s hair, still plaited, the line of her jaw and neck. How can it be that she will no longer exist? That, before too long, she and Agnes will be washing this body, combing out that plait, readying her for burial? Mary turns briskly, taking up a pitcher, a cloth, a plate, anything, moving them to the table and back again.

He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him.

Ducks and swans drift alongside her, seemingly serene and unruffled, but Susanna knows that their webbed feet are working, working beneath the water. No one but she can see these animals. Not her mother, who stands at the window, her back to the room, scattering seed on the sill. Not her grandmother, who sits at the table, her workbox open in front of her. Not her father, who is a pair of legs, encased in dark stockings, pacing from one wall to another. The soles of his shoes scuff and thud on the surface of Susanna’s river. He walks past a duck, through a swan, across a bank of reeds. Susanna wants to tell him to be careful, to check if he can swim.

She tries to keep her head, tries to remain calm, but her son is saying that he has no doubt this plan will work, that he will be able to expand John’s business in London.

What she desires is for him to stay at her side, for his hand to remain in hers. For him to be there, in the house, when she brings this baby into the world. For them to be together. What she desires, though, does not matter. He is going. She is, however secretly, sending him away.

“Is it by the river?” she hears herself say, even though she knows the answer: he has told her all this before. It seems important that they keep talking, about nothing of great significance. The people of Stratford are all around them. Watching, observing, listening. It is important, for him, for her, for the family, for the business, that they appear harmonious, in step, in accord. That their very bearing refute the rumours going around: they cannot live together; John’s business is failing; he is leaving for London because of some kind of disgrace.

with boiling lead. “Good God,” he roars, his voice stretching at the wooden struts, the skin of plaster on the walls. He knows how to throw his voice, how to expand it so it becomes the sound of a giant. The actors freeze, mouths agape. “We have only a few hours before this hall will be filled with the good people of Kent. Are you meaning to give them a circus? Do we intend to make them laugh or are we putting on a tragedy? Look to it or we won’t be eating tomorrow.” He cracks the page he is holding against the air, stares at them a moment longer, for effect. It seems to have worked. The young lad looks to be on the verge of tears, twisting his fingers into his costume. He turns, to hide his smile, then glances down at the letter.

Verie sick, he thinks, not manie hours left. He wants to tear down the sky, he wants to rip every blossom from that tree, he wishes to take a burning branch and drive that pink-clad girl and her nag over a cliff, just to be rid of them, to clear them all out of his way. So many miles, so much road stands between him and his child, and so few hours left.

For someone else to read those words might make them true, make them come to pass. He is shrugging the men off, both of them, all of them, because here are more of them, his players, crowding round him, but somehow he feels the gritted ground under his knees and the voice of his friend, Heminge, is reading the words of the letter aloud.

She is thinking about the letter that arrived from her husband earlier in the week. She has asked Eliza to read it to her twice and she wants to ask her to read it again today, as soon as she can find her. In it, he told Agnes that he has obtained a contract to make gloves for players at a theatre: Agnes had to ask Eliza to go back and read these words again, so that she was sure she understood, to point them out on the paper, so she could recognise them again, later. Players. Theatre. Gloves. Such gloves they need, Eliza had read haltingly, a frown on her face, as she made out the unfamiliar words. Long gauntlets for fighting, fine gloves with jewels and beads for kings and queens and scenes in court, soft gloves for ladies but the size must necessarily be bigger on these for they are to fit the hands of young stage boys.

Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was. She’d thought she had more time; she’d thought this baby would come much later, but it seems not. She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?

That letter. What was different about that letter? It wasn’t the detail, it wasn’t the list of gloves needed. Was it the mention of long gloves for ladies? Is she bothered, hooked by the mention of ladies? She doesn’t think so. It was the feeling that came off the page. The glee that rose up, like steam, between the words he had written.

Agnes hears their words from a great distance. Her thoughts are brief now, snipped short, pared back to the bone. Husband, she thinks. Gloves. Players. Beads. Theatre. Envious duke. Death. Think kindly. She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. Back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned.

The midwife, swirling a cloth around a bowl, has to bow her head because this daughter-in-law, a strange girl by all accounts, is a match for Mary. She can see that. She would be prepared to bet all her pennies (hidden in an earthen jar behind the daub of her cottage, which no living person knows) that this baby will wear no swaddling clothes.

“Two of you,” she mutters again. “Always thought it would be my children, standing at the bed, but it turns out that it was you.”

“I should never have sent him…to…to London…It was wrong…I should—” “It wasn’t you,” Mary says soothingly. “It was John.” Agnes’s head, lolling on its neck, snaps round to face her. “It was me,” she mutters, teeth clenched. “It was John,” Mary insists. Agnes shakes her head. “I shan’t make it through,” she gasps. She grips Mary by the hand, her fingers pressing painful spots into the flesh. “Will you take care of them? You and Eliza. Will you?”

What has she seen? What does she know? Mary is chilled, discomforted, her skin crawling with horror. She refuses, for the main part, to believe what people say about Agnes, that she can see people’s futures, she can read their palms, or whatever it is she does. But now, for the first time, she has a sense of what people mean. Agnes is of another world. She does not quite belong here. The thought, however, of Agnes dying, in front of her, fills her with despair. She cannot let that happen. What would she say to her son?

“Mistress, I need to say that—” The midwife is squaring up to her, but she never finishes her sentence because from behind them comes a thin, spiralling cry. They both turn, in unison. The child in Agnes’s arms, the girl, is wailing, arms rigid with outrage, her minute form rinsing itself pink as she draws in air.

The boy, Hamnet, is strong. This she has known since the moment she first saw him. He latches on with a definite and sure force, sucking with great concentration. The girl, Judith, needs to be encouraged on to the breast. Sometimes, when her mouth is opened for her and the breast placed inside it, she looks confused, as if unsure what she is meant to do. Agnes must stroke her cheek, tap her chin, run a finger along her jaw, to remind her to suck, to sup, to live.

The idea that this tiny child might have to live out there, on the cold and misted moor, without her, is unthinkable. She will not let her pass over. It is always the smaller twin who is taken: everybody knows this. Everyone, she can tell, is waiting, breath held, for this to happen. She knows that for the girl child, the door leading out of the room of the living is ajar; she can feel the chill of the draught, scent that icy air. She knows that she is meant to have only two children but she will not accept this. She tells herself this, in the darkest hours of the night. She will not let it happen; not tonight, not tomorrow, not any day. She will find that door and slam it shut.

He pictures a kitchen with two cradles, his wife bending over the fire, a yard at the back where they might keep hens or rabbits. It will just be the five of them, perhaps more in time: he permits himself this thought. No one else. No family next door. No brothers or parents or in-laws bursting into the place at odd hours. Nobody at all. Just them, this kitchen, these cradles.

Judith is two, her mother staying awake with her each night, steaming bowls of pine and clove inside the bed-curtains, so that she may breathe, so that the blue fades from her lips, and she might sleep, before it is apparent to everyone that the move to London will never take place. The child’s health is too fragile. She would never survive the city.

Agnes regards the scene, candle held aloft. She will think back to this moment later, and ask herself when she knew all was not as she’d thought it was. When did she notice? What was it that alerted her? There is her daughter, very sick indeed, lying on her back, her face blanched by fever, and there is her son, curled next to her, his arm around her. And yet there is something not right about that arm. Agnes stares at it, mesmerised. It is Hamnet’s arm and yet it is not.

daughter is on the other side of the pallet. But here, tucked into Hamnet’s neck, her fingers find the long plait belonging to Judith. And here are Hamnet’s wrists, protruding from Judith’s smock, with the crescent-shaped scar he got from a sickle when he was young. It is Hamnet’s shorter hair that is dark with the sweat of Judith’s fever; it is Judith who is sleeping the untroubled sleep of the well. Agnes cannot understand what she sees. Can she be dreaming? Is this some nightly apparition? She yanks back the sheet covering them and looks at them, lying there. The feet of the sick child reach further down the mattress. The taller child is the one who is sick. It is Hamnet, not Judith.

The switch worked

is thinking only of his daughter, how he must narrow down the miles between them, he must make it home, he must hold her in his arms, he must look upon her once more, before she passes into that other realm, before she breathes her last.

Agnes is pulled in two, as she sits beside her son, holding on to his shivering body. Her daughter has been spared; she has been delivered back to them, once again. But, in exchange, it seems that Hamnet may be taken.

None of it has pulled him back; none of it has restored him. She feels her hope for him begin to leak from her, like water from a punctured bucket. She is a fool, a blind idiot, the worst kind of simpleton. All along, she thought she needed to protect Judith, when it was Hamnet who was destined to be taken. How could Fate be so cruel in setting her such a trap? To make her concentrate on the wrong child so that it could reach out, while she was distracted, and snatch the other?

To lie, to surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him. Something is telling him that he must not lie down, he must not give in to this desire. What could it be? Why shouldn’t he rest?

To die

And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.

The younger uncle, Edmond, had wept, tears blurring his sight, which was, for him, a relief because he found it too painful to look into the still features of his brother’s dead son. This is a child whom he has known and seen every day of his short life, a child whom he taught to catch a wooden ball, to pick fleas from a dog, to whittle a pipe from a reed. The older uncle, Richard, did not cry: instead his sadness passed over into anger—at the grim task they had been bidden to do, at the world, at Fate, at the fact that a child could fall ill and then be lying there dead. The anger made him snap at Edmond whom he thought wasn’t taking enough of the boy’s weight, not holding the legs as firmly as he should have done, by the knees and not the ankles, fumbling the job, messing it up.

Her fingers press into the muscle between Hamnet’s thumb and forefinger. She kneads the muscle there, gently, in a circular motion, and waits, listens, concentrates. She is like her old kestrel, reading the air, listening out, waiting for a signal, a sound. Nothing comes. Nothing at all. Never has she felt this before. There is always something, even with the most mysterious and private of people; with her own children, she found always a clamour of images, noise, secrets, information.

“It is possible that word may not have reached him. He would come, if he knew. I know he would. But he would not find it amiss if we were to go ahead. He would understand the necessity of it. What we must do is send another letter and in the meantime—” “We will wait,” she gets out. “Until tomorrow. You may tell the town that. And I will lay him out. No one else.”

— A task to be done, and she will do it alone. She waits until evening, until everyone has left, until most people are in bed. She will have the water at her right hand and she will sprinkle a few drops of oil into it. The oil will resist, refuse to mix with the water, and will instead resolve itself into golden circles on the surface. She will dip and rinse the cloth.

Agnes nods towards a chair. Mary was with her when Hamnet came into the world; she may stay to see him out of

Agnes looks at her son. The birdcage ribs, the interlaced fingers, the round bones of the knees, the still face, the corn-coloured hair, which has dried now, standing up from his brow, as it always does. His physical presence has always been so strong, so definite, unlike Judith’s. Agnes has always known if he enters a room, or leaves it: that unmistakable clatter of feet, that passage of air, the heavy thud as he sits down on a chair. And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.

Judith leaves the stairs, she steps into the room, she hurls herself against her mother, pressing her face into her apron, saying something about kittens, and something else about sickness, about changing places, about it being her fault, and then sobs tear through her, gale winds through a tree.

Guilt

“No, my love, he will never come again.” —

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

“Agnes,” he says, with full-blown irritation now. “The world does not stand still. There are people waiting for me. The season is about to begin and my company will return from Kent any day now and I must—” “How can you think of leaving?” she says, puzzled. What must she say to make him understand? “Hamnet,” she says, feeling the roundness of the word, his name, inside her mouth, the shape of a ripe pear. “Hamnet died.”

“It is no matter,” she pants, as they struggle there, beside the guzzling swine. “I know. You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish.” “What place? You mean London?” “No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,” she says to him, as he binds her wrists together with one of his hands, reaching down for the bag at his feet with the other. “Don’t think I don’t.”

Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again. Cooking food seems similarly pointless. She cooks it, they eat it and then, later on, they eat more. — The girls go next door for their meals; agnes doesn’t stop them.

you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am? I don’t know, her mother says. Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below. Maybe there isn’t one, she suggests. Maybe not, says her mother.