Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Where?’ she asks, mystified.

  ‘Here.’

  Eliza moves from her parents’ chamber, to stand at the foot of the ladder to the attic. She calls his name again.

  A sigh. A mysterious rustle. ‘What do you want?’

  For a moment, Eliza thinks he might be doing the thing that boys – young men – do sometimes. She has enough brothers to know that there is something that happens in private, and they are ill-tempered if interrupted. She hesitates at the bottom of the ladder, one hand on a rung.

  ‘May I . . . come up?’

  A silence.

  ‘Are you sick?’

  Another sigh. ‘No.’

  ‘Mother says, can you go to the tannery and then to the—’

  There is a strangled, inarticulate cry from above, the sound of something weighty being thrown against the wall, a boot perhaps or a loaf of bread, a movement, then a thud, not unlike someone standing up and hitting their head on a rafter. ‘Ow,’ he screams, and lets out a volley of curses, some startling, some Eliza has never heard before but will ask him about later, when he is in a better humour.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ she says, and begins to climb the ladder.

  She rises, head first, into a warm and dusty space, the only light coming from two candles propped on a bale. Her brother is sitting collapsed on the floor, his head cradled in his hands.

  ‘Let me see,’ she says.

  He mutters something inaudible, possibly heretical, but the meaning is clear: he wants her to go away and leave him alone.

  She puts her hands on his, peels back his fingers. With her other hand, she lifts the candle and examines the place of pain. There is a swelling, reddened and bruised, just under his hairline. She presses its outer edges, making him wince.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘You’ve had worse.’

  He lifts his eyes to hers and they regard each other for a moment. He gives a half-smile. ‘That is true,’ he says.

  She lets her hand drop and, still holding the candle, sits herself down on one of the wool bales that are crammed into the space between floor and roof. They have been up here for several years. Once, last winter, in the yard, as they were wrapping gloves in linen, to be placed finger to wrist, finger to wrist, in baskets on a cart, her brother spoke up and asked why the attic was filled with wool bales, and what was their intended purpose? Their father leant across the cart and seized a fistful of his son’s jerkin. There are no wool bales in this house, he said, giving his son a shake with each word. Is that clear? Eliza’s brother had stared steadily back into his father’s eyes, without blinking. Clear enough, he had replied, eventually. Their father had held on, fist clenched around his son’s clothing, as if considering whether or not he was being insolent, then released him. Don’t speak of what doesn’t concern you, he had muttered, as he returned to his wrapping, and everyone in the yard let out the breath they had been holding.

  Eliza allows herself to bounce up and down on the wool bale, the existence of which they are bound always to deny. Her brother watches her for a moment but says nothing. He tips his head back and stares at the rafters.

  She wonders if he is recalling that this attic was always their space – hers and his, and also Anne’s, before she died. The three of them would retreat here in the afternoons, when he got back from school, pulling the ladder up after them, despite the wails and entreaties of their younger siblings. It was mostly empty then, save for a few spoilt hides that their father was saving for some unspecified reason. Nobody could reach them there; it was just her and him and Anne, until they were called by their mother to perform some task or to take over the care of one of the younger children.

  Eliza hadn’t realised her brother still came up here; she hadn’t known he still sought this place as a refuge from the household. She hasn’t climbed the ladder since Anne died. She lets her gaze rove over the room: slanted ceilings, the undersides of the roof tiles, the bales and bales of wool, which are to be kept here, out of sight. She sees old candle stubs, a folding knife, a bottle of ink. There are, scattered over the floor, several curls of paper with words scrawled on them, crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again, then crumpled and tossed aside. Her brother’s thumb and finger, the rims of his nails, she sees, are stained black. What can he be studying up here, in secret?

  ‘What is the matter?’ she says.

  ‘Nothing,’ he answers, without looking at her. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘What is ailing you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then what are you doing up here?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She looks at the curls of paper. She sees the words ‘never’ and ‘fire’, and something that might be ‘fly’ or ‘try’. 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. Every afternoon, here, after he returned from school. He would trace a letter in the dust, on the floor, and say, Look, Eliza, look, Anne, this is a d, this is an o, and if you put a g at the end, it says ‘dog’. Do you see that? You need to blend the sounds, run them together, until the sense of the word arrives in your head.

  ‘Is “nothing” the only thing you’re willing to say?’ she says.

  She sees his mouth twitch and knows that he is drawing on all his lessons in rhetoric and argument to find a way to answer this question with that very word.

  ‘You can’t do it,’ she says, with glee. ‘You can’t find a way to reply “nothing”, can you, however hard you try? You can’t do it. Admit it.’

  ‘I admit nothing,’ he says triumphantly.

  They sit for a moment, eyeing each other. Eliza balances the heel of one shoe on the toe of the other.

  ‘People are saying,’ she says carefully, ‘that you’ve been seen with the girl from Hewlands.’

  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. What a way out it would be for the boy, she heard a woman at the market whisper, behind her back. You can see why he’d want to marry into money and get away from that father.

  She tells herself to refrain from mentioning what people say of this girl. That she is fierce and savage, that she puts curses on people, that she can cure anything but also cause anything. Those wens on the stepmother’s cheeks, she overheard someone say the other day, she gave her those when the stepmother took away her falcon. She can sour the milk just by touching it with her fingers.

  When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.

  ‘I’ve heard,’ she continues, with great control, ‘that you take walks together. After the lessons. Is that true?’

  He doesn’t look at her when he says, ‘And what of it?’

  ‘Into the woods?’

  He shrugs, neither yes nor no.

  ‘Does her mother know?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies, quickly, too quickly, then amends this to ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But what if . . .?’ Eliza finds the question she would like to put to him almost too unwieldy to ask; she has only the vaguest grasp of its content,
the deeds involved, the matters at stake. She tries again: ‘What if you are caught? While taking one of these walks?’

  He lifts a shoulder, then lets it drop. ‘Then we are caught.’

  ‘Does the thought not give you pause?’

  ‘Why would it?’

  ‘The brother . . .’ she begins ‘. . . the sheep farmer. Have you not seen him? He is a giant of a man. What if he were to—’

  Eliza’s brother waves his hand. ‘You worry too much. He is always off with his sheep. I have never encountered him at Hewlands, in all the times I have been there.’

  She folds her hands together, squints again at the curls of paper, but can make no sense of what is written there. ‘I don’t know if you know,’ she says, timidly, ‘what people say of her but—’

  ‘I know what is said of her,’ he snaps.

  ‘There are many who claim she is—’

  He straightens, his colour suddenly high. ‘None of it is true. None of it. I’m surprised that you would attend to such idle gabble.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eliza cries, crestfallen. ‘I’m merely –’

  ‘It is all falsehoods,’ he continues, as if she hasn’t spoken, ‘spread by her stepmother. She is so jealous of her it twists her like a snake and—’

  ‘– frightened for you!’

  He regards her, taken aback. ‘For me? Why?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Eliza tries to order her thoughts, to sift through all she has heard ‘. . . because our father will never agree to this. You must know that. We are in debt to that family. Father will never even speak their name. And because of what is said of her. I don’t believe it,’ she adds hastily, ‘of course I don’t. But, still, it is troubling. People are saying that no good can come of this attachment of yours.’

  He slumps back to the wool bales, as if defeated, shutting his eyes. His whole body is quivering, with anger or something else. Eliza doesn’t know. There is a long silence. Eliza folds the fabric of her smock into tiny tight pleats. Then she remembers something else she wanted to ask him, and leans forward.

  ‘Does she really have a hawk?’ she whispers, in a new voice.

  He opens his eyes, lifts his head. Brother and sister regard each other for a moment.

  ‘She does,’ he says.

  ‘Really? I had heard that but did not know if it was—’

  ‘It’s a kestrel, not a hawk,’ he says, in a rush. ‘She trained it herself. A priest taught her. She has a gauntlet and the bird takes off, like an arrow, up through the trees. You have never seen anything like it. It is so different when it flies – it is almost, you might think, two creatures. One on the ground and another in the air. When she calls, it returns to her, circling in these great wheels in the sky, and it lands with such force upon the glove, such determination.’

  ‘She has let you do this? Wear her glove and catch the hawk?’

  ‘Kestrel,’ he corrects, then nods, and the pride of it makes him almost glow. ‘She has.’

  ‘I should love,’ Eliza breathes, ‘to see that.’

  He looks at her, rubs his chin with his stained fingertips. ‘Maybe,’ he says, almost to himself, ‘I’ll take you with me one day.’

  Eliza lets go of her dress, the pleats falling from the fabric. She is thrilled and terrified, all at once. ‘You will?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you think she will let me fly the hawk? The kestrel?’

  ‘I see no reason why not.’ He considers his sister for a moment. ‘You will like her, I think. You and she are not dissimilar, in some ways.’

  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. She doesn’t say this to her brother, though, and, in truth, there is a part of her that longs to see the girl up close, to look into her eyes. So Eliza says nothing. Her brother does not appreciate being pressed or rushed. He is someone who must be approached sideways, with caution, as with a restive horse. She must gently probe him and, in that way, she will likely find out more.

  ‘What manner of person is she, then?’ Eliza asks.

  Her brother thinks before he answers. ‘She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.’ He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘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.’ He glances at Eliza. ‘Those are rare qualities, are they not?’

  Eliza feels her head nodding and nodding. She is amazed at the detail in this speech, honoured at being its recipient. ‘She sounds . . .’ she gropes for the right word, recalling one he taught her himself, a few weeks ago ‘. . . peerless.’

  He smiles and she knows he remembers teaching it to her. ‘That’s exactly what she is, Eliza. Peerless.’

  ‘It also sounds,’ she begins carefully, ever so carefully, so as not to alarm him, not to make him retreat into silence again – she cannot believe he has already said as much as he has, ‘as though you are . . . decided. That you are fixed. On her.’

  He doesn’t say anything, just stretches out to tap his palm against the wool bale next to him. For a moment, she believes she has gone too far, that he will refuse to be drawn any further, that he will get up and leave, with no more confidences.

  ‘Have you spoken to her family?’ she ventures.

  He shakes his head and shrugs.

  ‘Are you going to speak to them?’

  ‘I would,’ he mutters, head lowered, ‘but I am in no doubt that my case would be refused. They would not view me as a good prospect for her.’

  ‘Perhaps if you – waited,’ Eliza says, faltering, laying a hand on his sleeve, ‘a year or so. Then you’d be of age. And more established in your position. Maybe Father’s business will have seen some improvement and he might regain some of his standing in the town, and perhaps he could be persuaded to stop this wool—’

  He jerks his arm away, pulling himself upright. ‘And when,’ he demands, ‘have you ever known him to listen to persuasion, to sense? When has he ever changed his mind, even when he was wrong?’

  Eliza stands up from the bale. ‘I just think—’

  ‘When,’ continues her brother, ‘has he ever exerted himself to give me something I want or need? When have you known him to act in my favour? When have you known him not to go deliberately out of his way to thwart me?’

  Eliza clears her throat. ‘Perhaps if you waited, then—’

  ‘The problem is,’ her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, ‘that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.’

  He turns, steps on to the ladder and disappears from view. She watches the two points of the ladder judder with his every step, then fall still.

  The lines and lines of apples are moving, jolting, rocking on their shelves. Each apple is centred in a special groove, carved into the wooden racks that run around the walls of this small storeroom.

  Rock, rock, jolt, jolt.

  The fruit has been placed with care, just so: the woody stem down and the star of the calyx up. The skin mustn’t touch that of its neighbour. They must sit like this, lightly held by the wooden groove, a finger width from each other, over the winter or they will spoil. If they touch each other, they will brown and sag and moulder and rot. They must be preserved in rows, like this, separate, stems down, in airy isolation.

  The children of the house were given this duty: to pluck the apples from the twisted branches of the trees, to stack them together in baskets, then bring them here, to the apple store, and line them up on these racks, spaced evenly a
nd carefully, to air, to preserve, to last the winter and spring, until the trees bring forth fruit again.

  Except that something is moving the apples. Again and again and again, over and over, with a shunting, nudging, insistent motion.

  The kestrel, on her perch, is hooded but alert, always alert. Her head rotates within its ruff of flecked feathers, to ascertain the source of this repetitive, distracting noise. Her ears, tuned so acutely that they can, if required, discern the heartbeat of a mouse a hundred feet away, a stoat’s footfall across the forest, the wingbeat of a wren over a field, pick up on the following: twenty score apples being nudged, jostled, bothered in their cradles. The breathing of mammals, of a size too large to elicit the interest of her appetite, increasing in pace. The hollow of a palm landing lightly on muscle and bone. The click and slither of a tongue against teeth. Two planes of fabric, of differing texture, moving over each other in obverse direction.

  The apples are turning on their heads; stalks are appearing from undersides, calyxes are facing sideways, then back, then upwards, then down. The pace of the knocking varies: it pauses; it slows; it builds; it pulls back again.

  Agnes’s knees are raised, splayed open like butterfly wings. Her feet, still in their boots, rest on the opposite shelf; her hands brace against the whitewashed wall. Her back straightens and bows, seemingly of its own accord, and low, near-growls are being pulled out of her throat. This takes her by surprise: her body asserting itself in this way. How it knows what to do, how to react, how to be, where to put itself, her legs white and folded in the dim light, her rear resting on the shelf edge, her fingers gripping the stones of the wall.

  In the narrow space between her and the opposite shelf is the Latin tutor. He stands in the pale V of her legs. His eyes are shut; his fingers grip the curve of her back. It was his hands that undid the bows at her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light – and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another; their pink-brown eyes stared back in shock. It was her hands, however, that lifted her skirts, that pushed herself back on to this shelf, that drew the body of the Latin tutor towards her. You, the hands said to him, I choose you.