Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Despite everything, Bartholomew wants to laugh. The idea of this pasty-faced scholar engaging in bare-knuckled combat with him is preposterous. ‘Damn right you don’t,’ he says.

  ‘We have the same end in mind here,’ the husband says, stepping back and forth, ‘you and I. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘What end would that be?’

  ‘We both want to find her. Don’t we? To make sure she’s safe. And the baby.’

  At the thought of Agnes’s safety – and the baby’s – Bartholomew’s anger rises again, like a pot left on the boil.

  ‘You know,’ he mutters, ‘I have never really understood why my sister chose you, above all others. “What do you want to go marrying him for?” I said to her. “What use is he?”’ Bartholomew takes his crook and places it squarely between his feet. ‘You know what she said to me?’

  The husband, standing straight as a reed now, arms folded, lips pressed together, shakes his head. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.’

  The husband stares, as if he can’t believe what he is hearing. His face is anguished, pained, astonished. ‘She said that?’

  Bartholomew nods. ‘Now, I can’t pretend to understand her choice, in marrying you, but I do know one thing about my sister. You want to know what it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is rarely wrong. About anything. It’s a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask. So if she thinks that about you, there’s a possibility it’s true.’

  ‘I cannot divine,’ the husband puts in, ‘whether—’

  Bartholomew continues, speaking over him, ‘It is of no importance, either way, at this present moment. Our task now is to find her.’

  The husband says nothing, but lowers himself to the ground, his head in his hands. When he speaks, his voice is muffled. ‘She wrote something on a page before she left. It was perhaps some manner of message for me.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Something about rain. And branches. But I couldn’t properly make it out.’

  Bartholomew regards him for a second or two, turning these words over and over in his mind. Rain and branches. Branches. Rain. Then he lifts his crook and tucks it into his belt.

  ‘Get up,’ he says.

  The husband is still speaking, more to himself than anyone else. ‘She was there this morning and then she wasn’t,’ he is saying. ‘The Fates have intervened and swept her away from me, as if on a tide, and I have no idea how to find her, no idea where to look and –’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘– I shall not rest until I find her, until we are—’ The husband stops short and raises his head. ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’ he demands. ‘How can you know her mind so quickly and yet I, who am married to her, cannot begin—’

  Bartholomew has had enough of this. He nudges the husband’s leg with his boot. ‘Up, I tell you,’ he says. ‘Come.’

  The lad springs upright and regards Bartholomew with a wary air. ‘Where?’

  ‘The forest.’

  Bartholomew puts two fingers into his mouth and, without taking his eyes off the lad’s face, whistles for his dogs.

  Agnes is dozing, somewhere between awake and asleep, with the baby tucked at her breast, when Bartholomew finds them.

  He has walked over the fields, his dogs at his heels, the husband trailing in his wake, still moaning and whining, and he has found her, here, just where he suspected she might be.

  ‘There now,’ he says to her, bending to hoist her into his arms – the mess and stink and matter of birth are of no consequence to him. ‘You cannot stay here.’

  She protests, lightly, drowsily, but then leans her head into her brother’s chest. The baby, he notices, is alive and its cheeks are drawing in and out. At suck, then. Bartholomew nods to himself.

  The husband has caught up with them now, making a fuss and bother of the moment, gesturing, clutching his hair, his voice still churning away, throwing out words and words and more words into the greenery. He will carry her, he is saying, and what is the baby, a girl or a boy, and what was she thinking, running off like that, she’s had them all frantic, he had no idea where she had gone. Bartholomew considers giving him a kick, to shut him up, to fell him to the fecund, leaf-damp ground, but resists. The husband tries to take Agnes from him, but Bartholomew brushes him off, as he might a bothersome fly.

  ‘You get the basket,’ he says to the lad. Then adds, over his shoulder, as he strides away: ‘If it’s not too heavy for you.’

  or the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.

  The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.

  Several months before the day Judith takes to her bed, as the year is turning from 1595 to 1596, the master glassmaker, who is skilled in the layering of five or six colours to produce the star or flower-patterned glass beads known as millefiori, is momentarily distracted by a fight breaking out between the stokers across the glassworks. His hand slips and two of his fingers enter the roaring white flame that was, a moment earlier, heating the bulb of glass to stretchable, malleable gum. The pain is so severe that it goes beyond sensation and at first he cannot feel it at all; he cannot think what has happened, why everyone is staring, then running towards him. There is a smell of roasting meat, a yelling almost canine in its intensity, a flurry around him.

  The result, later in the day, is two amputations.

  One of his fellow workers, then, is the one to pack up the tiny red, yellow, blue, green and purple beads into boxes the following day. This man doesn’t know that the master glassmaker – now at home, bandaged and dosed into a stupor with poppy syrup – usually pads and packs the beads with wood shavings and sand to prevent breakage. He grabs instead a handful of rags from the glassworks floor and tucks them in and around the beads, which look like hundreds of tiny, alert, accusing eyes staring up at him.

  In Alexandria, at exactly the same moment, all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, the cabin boy must leave his ship, for Judith to contract the pestilence and for a tragedy to be set in motion, halfway across the world. He must receive orders to go ashore and find some victuals for his hungry and overworked shipmates.

  So he does.

  He goes down the gangplank, clutching the purse given to him by the midshipman, along with a short, sharp kick in the backside, which would explain the boy’s listing, limping gait.

  His crewmates are hauling crates of Malaysian cloves and Indian indigo off the ship, before taking on sacks of coffee beans and bales of textiles.

  The dockside, under the cabin boy’s feet, is disconcertingly firm and solid after weeks at sea. Nevertheless, he staggers off towards what looks to him like a tavern, passing a stall selling spiced nuts, a woman holding a snake about her neck. He pauses to look at a man with a monkey on a golden chain. Why? Because he has never seen a monkey before. Because he loves animals of all kinds. Because he is, after all, not much older than Hamnet, who is, at this very moment, sitting in a cold wintry schoolroom, watching the schoolmaster hand out horn books of Greek poetry.

  The monkey at the port of Alexandria is wearing a little red jacket and a matching hat; its back is curved and soft, like that of a puppy, but its face is expressive, oddly human, as it peers up at the boy.

  The cabin boy – a young lad from a Manx family – looks at the monkey and the monkey looks at the boy. The animal puts its head on one side, eyes bead-bright, and chatters softly, a slight judder of sound, its voice light and fluting. It reminds the boy of an instrument his uncle plays at gatherings on the Isle of Man, and for a moment he is back at his sister’s churching, at his cousin’s wedding, back in the safety of his kitchen at
home, where his mother would be gutting a fish, telling him to mind his boots, to wipe his shirt front, to eat up now. Where his uncle would be playing his flute and everyone speaking the language he had grown up with, and no one would be yelling at him or kicking him or telling him what to do, and later on there might be dancing and singing.

  Tears prick the eyes of the cabin boy and the monkey, still regarding him, with a sentient and understanding gaze, reaches out its hand.

  The fingers on the monkey’s hand are familiar and strange, to the boy, all at once. Black and shiny, like boot leather, with nails like apple pips. Its palm, though, is striated, just like the boy’s and there passes between them, there, under the palm trees that line the wharf, the confluence of sympathy that can flow between human and beast. The boy feels the golden chain, as if it is around his own neck; the monkey sees the boy’s sadness, his longing for his home, the bruises on his legs, the blisters and calluses on his fingers, the peeling skin on his shoulders from the relentless scorch of months in the ocean sun.

  The boy holds out his hand to the monkey and the monkey takes it. Its grip is surprisingly strong: it speaks of urgency, of maltreatment, of need, of craving for kind company. The monkey climbs up the boy’s arm, using all four of its feet, across his shoulders and up on to his head, where it sits, paws buried in the boy’s hair.

  Laughing, the boy puts up a hand to be sure of what is happening. Yes, there is a monkey sitting on his head. He feels himself fill with numerous, warring urges: to run about the dockside, shouting to his crewmates, Look at me, look; to tell his little sister this, to say, You’ll never guess what happened to me, a monkey sat on my head; to keep the monkey for himself, to dart away, to jerk the chain from the man’s hand and sprint up the gangplank and disappear into the ship; and to cradle this creature in his arms, for ever, never let it go.

  The man is getting to his feet, gesturing at the boy. He has skin that is pocked and scarred, a mouthful of blackened teeth, an eye that doesn’t quite match its pair, in either direction or colour. He is rubbing the fingers of his hand together, in the universal language that means: money.

  The boy shakes his head. The monkey clings tighter, curling its tail about the boy’s neck.

  The man with the scarred, pocked skin bears down, gripping the boy’s arm. He repeats his gestures. Money, he is insisting, money. He points at the monkey, then makes the gesture again.

  Again, the boy shakes his head, presses his lips together, puts a protective hand over the purse tied to his belt. He knows what will happen to him if he returns to the ship without food, without ale. He will carry the memory of the midshipman’s lash – given to him twelve times in Malacca and seven times in Galle, ten in Mogadishu – for ever.

  ‘No,’ says the boy. ‘No.’

  The man lets out a stream of angry words, into the boy’s face. The language they speak in this place called Alexandria is jabbing, nicking, like the point of a knife. The man reaches up to seize the monkey, which chatters and then shrieks, a piercing high cry of distress, gripping the boy’s hair, the collar of his shirt, the tiny black nails scoring the skin of his neck.

  The boy, almost sobbing now, tries to hold on to his new friend. For a moment, he has him, by the forelimb, the warm fur of the elbow fitted into his palm, but then the man jerks the chain and the monkey falls, screaming, from the boy’s grasp, to the cobbled dock, where it rights itself and then, tugged again, scrambles after the man, whimpering.

  Aghast, the boy watches the animal leave, the hunch of its back, the workings of its haunches, trying to keep up with its master. He swipes at his face, at his eyes, his head feeling bare and empty, wishing that he might bring the moment back, that he could have somehow persuaded the man to let him keep it. The monkey belonged to him: surely anyone could see that?

  What the boy doesn’t know – can’t know – was that the monkey leaves part of itself behind. In the scuffle, it has shed three of its fleas.

  One of these fleas falls, unseen, to the ground, where the boy will unwittingly crush it with the sole of his foot. The second stays for a while in the sandy hair of the boy, making its way to the front of his crown. When he is paying for a flagon of the local brew in the tavern, it will make a leap – an agile, arching spring – from his forehead to the shoulder of the innkeeper.

  The third of the monkey’s fleas will remain where it fell, in the fold of the red cloth tied around the boy’s neck, given to him by his sweetheart at home.

  Later, when the boy has returned to the ship for the night, having eaten a dinner of some of the spiced nuts and a curious patty of bread, shaped like a pancake, he will pick up his favourite of the ship’s cats, an animal mostly white but with a striped tail, and nuzzle it against his neck. The flea, alert to the presence of a new host, will transfer itself from the boy’s neckerchief, to the thick, milk-white fur of the cat’s neck.

  This cat, feeling unwell, and with the feline’s unerring eye for those who dislike it, will take up residence, the next day, in the hammock of the midshipman. When he, that night, comes to his hammock, he will curse at the now-dead animal he finds there, turn it unceremoniously out, kicking it across the room.

  Four or five fleas, one of which once belonged to the monkey, will remain where the cat lay. The monkey’s flea is a clever one, intent on its survival and success in the world. It makes its way, by springing and leaping, to the fecund and damp armpit of the sleeping, snoring midshipman, there to gorge itself on rich, alcohol-laced sailor blood.

  Three days out, past Damascus and heading for Aleppo, the quartermaster enters the captain’s cabin to report that the midshipman is unwell and confined below. The captain nods, still examining his charts and sextant, and thinks nothing more of it.

  The next day, he receives word, as he stands on the upper deck, that the midshipman is raving, foaming at the mouth, his head quite pushed sideways by a tumour in his neck. The captain frowns as the quartermaster speaks these words into his ear, then gives orders for the ship’s physician to visit the man. Oh, the quartermaster then adds, and several of the ship’s cats seem to have expired.

  The captain turns his face to regard the quartermaster. The expression on his face is one of distaste, bafflement. Cats, you say? The quartermaster nods, respectfully, eyes cast down. How very peculiar.

  The captain thinks for a moment longer, then flicks his fingers towards the sea. Throw ’em overboard.

  The deceased cats, three in all, are taken by their striped tails and flung into the Mediterranean. The cabin boy watches, from a hatch in the deck, wiping his eyes with his red scarf.

  Shortly afterwards, they dock at Aleppo, where they offload more of the cloves and a portion of the coffee and several score rats, which make a dash for the shore. The ship’s physician knocks on the door of the captain’s cabin, where he is conferring about weather and sails with his second officer.

  ‘Ah,’ says the captain, ‘how is the man . . . the, well, midshipman?’

  The physician scratches under his wig and smothers a belch. ‘Dead, sir.’

  The captain frowns, surveying the man, taking in his crooked wig, the potent smell of rum off him. ‘By what cause?’

  The physician, a man more suited to setting bones and extracting teeth, looks up, as if the answer might be found on the low, planked ceiling of the cabin. ‘A fever, sir,’ he says, with a drunkard’s decisiveness.

  ‘A fever?’

  ‘An Afric fever would be,’ the physician slurs, ‘my opinion. He’s turned all black, you see, in patches, around the limbs and also in other places I will refrain from mentioning here, in this salubrious place, and so it is necessary for me to conclude that he must have taken ill and—’

  ‘I see.’ The captain cuts him off by turning away from him, towards his charts, the matter dealt with, as far as he is concerned.

  The second officer clears his throat. ‘We shall, sir,’ he says, ‘arrange a sea burial.’

  The midshipman is wrapped in a sheet and
brought up on deck. The sailors nearby cover their noses and mouths with cloth: the corpse is excessively odorous. The captain gives a short reading from the Bible; he, too, is struggling with the dead man’s smell, despite twenty-five years at sea and more watery funerals than he can recall.

  ‘In the name of the Father,’ the captain enunciates, raising his voice above the sounds of discreet retching at the back, ‘the Son and the Holy Ghost we commend this body unto the waves.

  ‘You,’ he gestures at the two sailors nearest him, ‘take the . . . do the . . . ah . . . yes . . . overboard.’

  They dart forward and, with green faces, lift the corpse up and over the side.

  The choppy, pleated surface of the Mediterranean folds over the body of the midshipman.

  By the time they reach Constantinople, with an order to collect a consignment of furs from the north, the cats are all dead and the rat population is becoming a problem. They are eating through the crates and getting at the dried-meat rations, the second officer tells the captain. There were fifteen or sixteen of them in the cook’s quarters this morning. The men are demoralised, he says, keeping his eyes on the line of horizon out of the window, and several more have fallen ill overnight.

  Two more men die, then a third, and a fourth. All with the same Afric fever that swells the neck and turns the skin red and blistered and black in places. The captain is forced to make an unscheduled stop in Ragusa, to take on more sailors, for whom he has no references or recommendations, which is the kind of hasty, slipshod seamanship he likes to avoid.

  These new sailors are shifty-eyed, snaggle-toothed; they keep to themselves and speak very little, and only in some kind of Polack language. The Manx crew distrusts them on sight and will not communicate with them, or willingly share quarters.

  The Polacks, however, are skilled at killing rats. They approach it as a sport, baiting a string with food, then lying in wait with an enormous shovel. When the creature appears – sleek, with drooping belly, gorged as it is on the sailors’ rations – the Polacks leap on it, shouting, singing, and beat it to death, rat brains and entrails sprayed on the walls and ceilings. They then cut off the tails and string them to their belts, passing around a clear liquid in a bottle, from which they all drink.