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For a moment, it crosses his mind to call his father’s name, to shout for him, but his father is miles and hours and days away, in London, where the boy has never been.
He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.
when he finally re-enters the world, when he comes to, when he glances around to find that he is back, in his house, at his table, surrounded by his family, his mother eyeing him, half smiling, as if she knows exactly where he’s been.
He leans against the cookhouse wall and kicks at a nutshell, sending it skittering across the yard. He is utterly confounded to be so alone.
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. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.
There will be someone here now who will know what to do, someone to assume charge of this, someone who will tell him that all is well.
The Latin verbs roll on and on, around him, like a fenland fog, through his feet, up and over his shoulders, past his ears, to seep out of the cracks in the window lead.
He could push this man, this leviathan, this monster of his childhood, back against the wall with very little effort.
She is said to be too wild for any man.
She meets his eye as a man would, but her figure and form fill out that jerkin in a manner that is distinctly female.
The falconer girl takes advantage of his momentary confusion to push him away from her; he topples into the shelves that run around the walls.
Good do better
She took a knife and lopped off Agnes’s hair, saying she hadn’t the time to be attending to that every day.
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.
She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.
She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.
Her mother had promised she’d be back and she isn’t. Her mother is never where she says she will be.
She is nearly fourteen. Everything—the sight of the pots stacked on the table, the herbs and flowers tied to the rafters, her sister’s corn doll on a cushion, the jug set by the hearth—provokes in her a profound and fathomless irritation.
And that’s all being 14 is, really
“She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.”
What is immediately clear to him is that his life has taken a new turn.
“He’s eighteen years of age!
Is 18 fr not of age for them
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.
Eliza doesn’t say that she worries about Anne, all alone, so young, without her, wherever she may be.
She listens to the string of sounds that comes from his mouth breathily, as he stirs: “eef” is in there, for “leaf,” and “ize,” for “Eliza,” and “oop,” for “soup.” The words exist, if you know how to listen.
She is leaving one life; she is beginning another. Anything may happen.
She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, an inconvenience, an unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.
she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.
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.
(unlike her husband, who has been to the grammar school, and oratory after that, and can produce a looping, continuous flow of letters, like a skein of embroidery, from the tip of his quill.
And she knows, in the way she always does, that she will reach the other side of birth, that she and this baby will live.
“How can you know her mind so quickly and yet I, who am married to her, cannot begin—” Bartholomew has had enough of this.
She finds herself frequently unable to look away from her child, to remove her gaze from her daughter’s face. Why would she ever want to behold anything else, when she could be taking in the sight of Susanna’s ears, like the pale folds of roses, the winglike sweep of her tiny eyebrows, the dark hair, which clings to her crown as if painted there with a brush?
She has never smelt it before. If it had a colour, it would be greyish green.
Susanna is gripping the spoon, banging it rhythmically on the table, blinking with each impact, her lips pursed together, as if this percussion is an act that requires the fullest concentration.
when Susanna’s father comes down the stairs,
Have I said yet that it’s clever how the book doesn’t name him? It’s not about you!
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?
The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.
How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain.
You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.
“I won’t watch you walk away.” “I’ll walk backwards,” he says, backing away, “so I can keep you in my sights.”
The boy tucks it into his sleeve, not before examining the slanted scrawl on the front. He has never learnt to read so it is meaningless to him but, all the same, he likes the loops, the shapes, the dark cross-hatchings of ink, like the marks made when branches are shaken against an iced-over windowpane.
The theatres are closed, because of the plague, by order of the court, and so the lodger and his company of players have taken themselves off to tour nearby towns, places where it is permitted to gather in a crowd.
Girl the lockdown
and calls out an approximation of his name, in an assertive, reedy voice, waving a letter aloft, as if it were a flag.
It is smaller than we are used to, but used to it we must be.”
While he is deciding what length of glove, what manner of beading, what embroidery would best suit a player king, she is clenched by agony and about to die.
If death is to come, let it be quick, she prays. Let the child within her live. Let him come back and be with his children. Let him think kindly of her, always.
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.
She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time.
The other part of her, which nursed and tended and cared and petted and fed and clothed and embraced and kissed this child, thinks: This cannot be, this cannot happen, please, not her.
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?
