‘Grandmamma?’ Susanna says uncertainly, still with her eyes on her brother. Later, this moment will return to Susanna, again and again, particularly in the early morning, when she wakes. Her brother, standing there, framed by the doorway. She will remember thinking that he looked white-faced, shocked, quite unlike himself, a cut under his eyebrow. Would it have made a difference if she had remarked upon this to her grandmother? If she had drawn the attention of her mother or grandmother to it? Would it have changed anything? She will never know because all she says at the time is: ‘Grandmamma?’
Mary is in the middle of saying to the maid, ‘And mind you don’t burn them this time, not even a little at the edges – as soon as they begin to catch, you lift the pot off the fire, do you hear?’ She turns, first towards her granddaughter, and then, following Susanna’s gaze, towards the doorway and Hamnet.
She jumps, her hand travelling to her heart. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘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.
With trembling hands, Agnes is sweeping the scattered petals and roots back into the mortar and begins to grind, her wrist twisting, twisting, her knuckles whitening, her fingernails gripping the wooden pestle. The dried rhubarb stalk, the rue, the cinnamon are mashed together, their scents mingling, the sweet, the sharp and the bitter.
As she grinds, she counts off to herself the people this mixture has saved. There was the wife of the miller, who had been raving and tearing at her clothes. The very next day, after drinking two draughts of this potion, she was sitting up in bed, quiet as a lamb, supping soup. There was the nephew of the landowner at Snitterfield: Agnes had been taken there in the middle of the night, after the landowner had sent for her. The lad had recovered well with this medicine and a poultice. The blacksmith from Copton, the spinster from Bishopton. They had all recovered, hadn’t they? It is not an impossibility.
She is concentrating so hard that she jumps when someone touches her elbow. The pestle falls from her fingers to the table. Her mother-in-law, Mary, is next to her, her cheeks red from the cookhouse, her sleeves rolled back, a frown pinching together her brow.
‘Is it true?’ she says.
Agnes takes a breath, her tongue registering the dusky tang of cinnamon, the acid of the powdered rhubarb and, realising she might cry if she speaks, she nods.
‘She has buboes? A fever? It’s true?’
Agnes nods again, once. Mary’s face is clenched, her eyes blazing. You might think she was angry, but Agnes knows better. 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 hands. She knows this because Eliza told her once but, then, she knew it anyway. Agnes doesn’t turn her head, doesn’t break her gaze with Mary, but she knows that little Anne will be there in the room with them, over by the door, her winding sheet caught over her shoulder, her hair unravelled, her fingers sore and useless, her neck swollen and choking. Agnes makes herself form the thought, Anne, we know you are there, you are not forgotten. 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.
Mary mutters a string of words under her breath, a prayer, of sorts, an entreaty, then pulls Agnes to her. Her touch is almost rough, her fingers gripping Agnes’s elbow, her forearm pressing down hard on Agnes’s shoulder. Agnes’s face is pressed to Mary’s coif; she smells the soap in it, soap she herself made – with ashes and tallow and the narrow buds of lavender – she hears the rasp of hair against cloth, underneath. Before she shuts her eyes, submitting herself to the embrace, she sees Susanna and Hamnet step in through the back door.
Then Mary has released her and is turning, the moment between them over, done. She is all business now, brushing down her apron, inspecting the contents of the mortar, going to the fireplace, saying she will build it up, telling Hamnet to bring wood, quickly, boy, we shall build a great blaze for there is nothing so efficacious to the driving out of fever as a hot fire. She is clearing a space before the hearth and Agnes knows that Mary will bring down the rush mattress; she will bring clean blankets, she will make up a bed there, by the fire, and Judith will be brought down before the blaze.
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.
Look. Agnes is pouring water into a pan and sprinkling the powder into it. Mary is working the bellows, taking the wood from Hamnet, instructing Susanna to go to the coffer next door and bring out sheets. She is lighting the candles now, the flames flaring and lengthening, spreading circles of light into the dark corners of the room. Agnes is handing the pan to Mary, who is setting it to warm over the flames. They are both climbing the stairs now, without conferring, and Agnes knows that Mary will greet Judith with a smiling face, will call out some rousing and unconcerned words. Together, they will see to the girl, lift down the pallet, give her the medicine. They will take this matter in hand.
t is past midnight on Agnes’s wedding night; it might even be near dawn. It is cold enough for her breath to be visible with every exhalation, for it to collect in droplets on the blanket she has wrapped about her.
Henley Street, when she looks through the windows, is drenched in the darkest black. No one is abroad. An owl can be heard intermittently, from somewhere behind the house, sending its shivering cry out into the night.
Some, Agnes reflects, as she stands at the window, blanket clutched around her, might take this as a bad omen, the owl’s cry being a sign of death. But Agnes isn’t afraid of the creatures. She likes them, likes their eyes, which resemble the centre of marigolds, their overlapped, flecked feathers, their inscrutable expressions. They seem, to her, to exist in some doubled state, half spirit, half bird.
Agnes has risen from her marriage bed and is walking about the rooms of her new house. Because sleep won’t seem to come for her and fold her in its plumes. Because the thoughts in her head are too many, too crowded, jostling for space. Because there is too much to take in, too much of the day to go over. Because this is the first time she has ever been expected to sleep either in a bed or on an upstairs floor.
And so she is drifting through the apartment, touching things as she goes: the back of a chair, an empty shelf, the fire irons, the door handle, the stair rail. She moves to the front of the house, to the back, and again to the front; she goes down the stairs, she comes up again. She runs a hand down the curtains surrounding the bed, given to them as a wedding gift by his parents. She pulls aside the curtain and contemplates the form of the man within, her husband, ocean-deep in sleep, sprawled in the middle of the bed, arms outstretched, as if drifting on a current. She looks up at the ceiling, beyond which is a small, slope-roofed attic.
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.
Agnes has a strong sense that this arrangement has something to do with her brother, and was perhaps part of his terms for the marriage. Bartholomew had been there when they first came over the threshold. He had looked over the narrow rooms, going up the stairs and coming back down, walking from wall to wall, before nodding at John, who had remained standing at the door.
Bartholomew had had to nod at him twice before John turned over the key to his son. It had been an odd moment, interesting to Agnes. She had watched as father slowly, slowly, held out the key to son. The father’s reluctance to relinquish it was matched – perhaps outdone – by the son’s unwillingness to accept it. His fingers had been listless, slack; he hesitated, examining the iron key in his father’s hand, as if unsure what it was. Then he plucked it from him with only finger and thumb, and held it, at arm’s length, as if deciding whether or not it might harm him.
John had attempted to smooth over the awkwardness, making a remark about hearths and happiness and wives, reaching forward to slap the son on the back. It was a gesture intended to be kind, in a gruff, fatherly sort of way, but was there not, Agnes would think later, something uneasy about it? Something unnatural? The slap had had a little too much force, a little too much intent. The son wasn’t expecting it and it made him stagger sideways, lose his balance. He had righted himself, quickly, almost too quickly, like a boxer or a fencer, raising himself on his toes. They looked for a moment, the pair of them, as if they might begin to exchange blows, not keys.
She and Bartholomew had observed this from either end of the room. When the son turned away and instead of putting the key into the purse at his waist, placed it on the tabletop, with a dull, metallic click, she and Bartholomew had looked at each other. Her brother’s face was expressionless, except for a minor inflection of one eyebrow. To Agnes, this spoke a great deal. You see now, she knew her brother was saying, what you are marrying into? You see now, that eyebrow movement meant, why I insisted upon a separate dwelling?
Agnes leans towards the glass panes, allowing her breath to collect upon them. They remind her, these rooms, of the initial letter of her name, a letter her father taught her to recognise, scratching it into the mud with a sharpened stick: ‘A’. (She can recall this so clearly, sitting with both her parents on the ground between her mother’s shins, her head leaning against the muscle of her knee; she could reach down and grip her mother’s feet. She can summon the sensation of the fall of her mother’s hair on her shoulder as she leant forward to see the movements of Agnes’s father’s stick, saying, ‘Here, Agnes, look.’ The letter manifesting itself from under the blackened point, hardened to charcoal in the kitchen fire: ‘A’. Her letter, always hers.)
The apartment is formed like the letter, sloping together at the top, with a floor across its middle. Agnes takes this as her sign – the letter etched in the dirt, the memory of her mother’s strong feet, the brush of her hair – not the owl, not the long, pained looks of her mother-in-law, not the youth of her husband, not the narrow feel of this house, its atmosphere of emptiness and inertia, that hard back slap of her father-in-law, none of this.
She is untying a cloth bundle and laying out items on the floor when a voice from the bed makes her start.
‘Where are you?’ His voice, deep anyway, is made deeper still by sleep, by the muffled layer of curtain.
‘Here,’ she says, still crouched on the floor, holding a purse, a book, her crown – wilting now and dishevelled, but she will tie it up and dry the flowers and none will be lost.
‘Come back.’
She stands and, still holding her possessions, moves towards the bed, pushes aside the curtains and looks down at him. ‘You’re awake,’ she says.
‘And you’re very far away,’ he says, squinting up at her. ‘What are you doing all the way over there when you should be here?’ He points at the space next to him.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Why not?’
‘The house is an A.’
There is a pause and she wonders if he heard her. ‘Hmm?’ he says, raising himself on one elbow.
‘An A,’ she repeats, shuffling everything she is holding into one hand so that she can inscribe the letter in the chill winter air between them. ‘That is an A, is it not?’
He nods at her gravely. ‘It is. But what has it to do with the house?’
She cannot believe he can’t see it as she does. ‘The house slopes together at the top and has a floor across its middle. I do not know that I shall ever be able to sleep up here.’
‘Up where?’ he asks.
‘Here.’ She gestures around them. ‘In this room.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because the floor is floating in mid-air, like the cross stroke of the A. There is no ground underneath it. Just empty space and more empty space.’
His face breaks into a smile, his eyes examining her intently, and he flops back to the bed. ‘Do you know,’ he says, addressing the covering above him, ‘that this is the foremost reason I love you?’
‘That I cannot sleep in the air?’
‘No. That you see the world as no one else does.’ He holds out his arms. ‘Come back to bed. Enough of this. I put it to you that we shall have no need of sleep for a while.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, it is.’
He gets to his feet, lifts her and places her carefully in the bed. ‘I shall have my Agnes,’ he says, climbing in beside her, ‘in our A. And I shall have her again and again and again.’
He is kissing her for emphasis, with each word and she is laughing and her hair is spilling all over them, between them, catching in his lips, his beard, his fingers.
‘There shall not be much sleeping in this bed,’ he is saying, ‘not for a while.’ And: ‘Why in God’s name are you holding all these things? What are they for? I don’t think we need any of them at this moment.’
He is taking all the things, one by one – her gloves, her crown, her purse – out of her hands and placing them on the floor. He removes the Bible from her hand and then another book, but before he puts it down, he pauses, looking at it.
‘What is this?’ he asks, turning it over.
‘I was left it by a neighbour when she died,’ Agnes says, touching her fingertip to the frontispiece. ‘She used to do spinning for us and I would take the wool to her, then collect it when she was done. She was always kind to me and wrote in her will that I was to have it. It had belonged to her husband, who had been an apothecary. I used to help her with her garden when I was a child. She told me once . . .’ and here she pauses ‘. . . that she and my mother used to consult it together.’
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.
He seems to recall himself. He puts down the book; he looks her over. ‘I will indeed,’ he says, his fingers working at the ties on her shift. ‘But not now.’
It seems strange to Agnes, during this time, that she has, in the space of a month, exchanged country for town, a farm for an apartment, a stepmother for a mother-in-law, one family for another.
One house, she is learning, runs very differently from another. Instead of the sprawl of generations, all working together to look after animals and land, the ho
use in Henley Street has a distinct structure: there are the parents, then the sons, then the daughter, then the pigs in the pig-pen and the hens in the henhouse, then the apprentice and then, right at the bottom, the serving maids. Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen.
Agnes watches people come and people go. She is a gatherer, during this time, of information, of confidences, of the daily routines, of personalities and interactions. She is like a painting on the wall, eyes missing nothing. She has her own house, the small, narrow apartment, but she can go out of her back door and there is the communal yard: she and her husband will share the kitchen garden, the cookhouse, the piggery, the hens, the washhouse, the brewhouse. So she can withdraw into her own place but also mix and mingle with the others. She is at once observer and participant.
The maids rise early, as early as Agnes does: town people lie in their beds much longer than those of the country, and Agnes is accustomed to beginning the day before sunrise. These girls bring in the firewood, light the fires in the hall and the cookhouse. They let out the hens and scatter seed and grain for them in the yard. They take the slops to the pig-pen. They bring ale from the brewhouse. They take the dough, proved overnight in the cookhouse jar, and beat it into shape, leaving it beside the warming oven. It’s a good hour or so before any of the family emerges from their chamber.
Here, in town, there are no fences to mend; there is no mud to clean off boots. Clothes do not acquire streaks of soil, hair, dung. No men return at midday, ravenous of appetite and cold of bone. There are no lambs to warm by the hearth, no beasts with colic or worm or foot-rot. 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 can visit whenever she likes, he says. No sheep trying to escape through fences. No ravens or pigeons or woodcocks landing on the thatch and calling down the chimney.
Instead, there are carts going up and down outside all day, people shouting to each other in the street, crowds and groups passing by. There are deliveries, to be made and to receive. There is a storehouse at the back for the glove workshop, where the empty skins of forest creatures are stretched out like penitents on racks. There are the serving maids who skulk in and out of the hall, shoes flapping and slapping on the flags. They look Agnes up and down, as if assessing her worth and finding her lacking. They sigh, ever so slightly, if she happens to be standing in their way, but if Mary appears, they stand upright, straighten their caps and say, Yes, mistress, no, mistress, I do not know, mistress.
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