Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

There is, she is starting to see, nothing more she can do. She can stay beside him, comfort him as best she can, but this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious. It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him.

It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, blackest kind of evil.

She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as “slipping away” or “peaceful” has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes, to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.

I am dead: Thou livest; …draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story

Don’t bring horatio into this 😭😭

The soles and nails still bear the dirt so recently accrued from life: grit from the road, soil from the garden, mud from the riverbank, where he swam not a week ago with his friends.

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.

How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.

Before he turns away, he reaches out and rests his hand on the boy’s chest, just above where his heart used to beat.

You see, she says to him, you cannot change what you are given, cannot bend or alter what is dealt to you.

Mary was with her when Hamnet came into the world; she may stay to see him out of it.

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.

Agnes selects rue, comfrey, yellow-eyed chamomile. She takes purple lavender and thyme, a handful of rosemary. Not heartsease, because Hamnet disliked the smell. Not angelica, because it is too late for that and it did not help, did not perform its task, did not save him, did not break the fever. Not valerian, for the same reason. Not milk thistle, for the leaves are so spiny and sharp, enough to pierce the skin, to bring forth drops of blood.

Those are Ophelia’s second flowers aren’t they 😭😭😭

She is a sailor, stitching a sail, preparing a boat that will carry her son into the next world.

Then she says, “Will he never come back?”

Her whole being longs for, grieves for her son, her daughters, her absent husband, for all of them, when she says, “No, my love, he will never come again.”

And now their lives are carrying on, unchanged, their dogs still yawning by the fireplaces, their children still whining for supper, while he is no more.

She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.

A strangely difficult idea, too, that she entered this place with three children and she leaves it with two.

She can see, in his face, the cheekbones of her dead son, the set of his brow, but nothing else. Just life, just blood, just evidence of a pumping, resilient heart, an eye that is bright with tears, a cheek flushed with feeling.

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?

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.

Nowhere else can he escape the noise and life and people around him; nowhere else is he able to let the world recede, the sense of himself dissolve, so that he is just a hand, holding an ink-dipped feather, and he may watch as words unfurl from its tip.

He sees how he may become mired in Stratford for ever, a creature with its leg in the jaws of an iron trap, with his father next door, and his son, cold and decaying, beneath the churchyard sod.

“The world does not stand still. There are people waiting for me.

To her, it is simple. Their boy, their child, is dead, barely cold in his grave. There will be no leaving. There will be staying.

I cannot just abandon these men who—” “But you may abandon us?”

There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way.

Nothing will get past her this time. She will be waiting. Nothing will come to take her children. Never again.

God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day. She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time. She says nothing. She takes her daughters’ arms and walks away.

Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.

Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

(and no one else on stage with him, not one of the other players, his closest friends, will know that he finds himself looking out, every evening, over the watching crowd, in search of a particular face, a boy with a slightly crooked smile and a perpetually surprised expression; he scans the audience minutely, carefully, because he still cannot fathom that his son could just have gone; he must be somewhere; all he has to do is find him).

But the magnitude, the depth of his wife’s grief for their son exerts a fatal pull. It is like a dangerous current that, if he were to swim too close, might suck him in, plunge him under. He would never surface again; he must hold himself separate in order to survive. If he were to go under, he would drag them all with him.

If she just keeps on making stitches, over and over, of equal size, perhaps all this will pass.

How dare he come here and speak to her of flowers? Take your ignorance, she wants to say to him, and your bracelets and your shining, fancy boots back to London and stay there. Never come back.

How could he leave, after the death of their son, and seek solace in others? How could he return to her, with these prints on him?

“Joan is never content and she cannot rest if others are. The only thing that pleases her is making others as unhappy as she is. She likes company in her perpetual dissatisfaction. So hide what will make you happy. Make her believe you want its opposite. Then all will be as you wish. You’ll see.”

and he would be talking to her—how he loved to talk—about

She will live in it but it will never be hers.

He comes to stand next to her in the outhouse while she works, ducking his head to see under her cap.

william you are horrible but also that’s so cute

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

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.

her father in London, acting out plays that people say are extremely bawdy,

Well

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?

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.

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 listens to the roar of her pulse, her ragged breathing and she knows, she hears, underneath her own, another’s breathing. She does. She really does.