Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘I see,’ she says, even though she has a distinct feeling that he shall not be in the gloving business for long.

  ‘The river,’ he continues, ‘is said to have dangerous tides.’

  ‘Oh?’ she says, even though she has heard him telling this to his mother.

  ‘It is crucial, my cousin says, each time you cross to secure an experienced boatman.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  He talks on, about the different shores of the river, the landing stages, how certain times of day are safer than others. She pictures a thick, wide river, twisted with lethal currents, studded with tiny vessels, like a garment sewn with beads. She pictures one of these vessels, containing her husband, swept downstream, his dark head uncovered, his clothes filled with river-drink, streaked with mud, his boots brimming with silt. She has to shake her head, grip her fingers to the solidity of his arm, to rid herself of this. It is not true, it will not be true; it is just her mind playing tricks on her.

  She walks with him as far as the posting inn, him talking now about lodgings, about how he will be back before she knows it, how he will think of her, of Susanna, every day. He will secure a dwelling for all of them there, in London, as soon as he can and they may all live together again, by and by. There, by the milestone with one arrow towards ‘London’ (she knows this word, the large, confident stroke of the L, the rounded os, like a pair of eyes, the repeated arch of the n), they stop.

  ‘You will write?’ he says, his face creasing. ‘When the time comes?’ Both his hands reach towards her and cup the lower curve of her stomach.

  ‘Of course,’ she says.

  ‘My father,’ he gives a rueful smile, ‘is hoping for a boy.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I do not mind. Boy or girl. Maid or lad. It is all one to me. As soon as I get word, I shall make arrangements to come and fetch you all. And then we shall be together, in London.’

  He holds her close, as close as he can, with the swell of the child between them, his arms around her. ‘Do you have no feeling?’ he whispers into her ear. ‘No sense this time? Of what it will be?’

  She leans her head into him, close to the opening of his shirt. ‘No,’ she says, and she is aware of the puzzlement in her voice. It has come as a surprise to her that she has been unable to picture or divine the child she is carrying: girl or boy, she cannot tell. She is receiving no definite signs. She dropped a knife from the table the other day and it fell pointing towards the fire. A girl, then, she thought. But later the same day she found herself spooning the pap of an apple, sharp, pleasingly crisp, into her mouth and she thought: A boy. It is altogether confusing. Her hair is dry and crackles when she brushes it, which means a girl, but her skin is soft, her nails strong, which means a boy. A male peewit flew into her path the other day but then a female pheasant came squawking out of the bushes.

  ‘I cannot tell,’ she says. ‘And I don’t know why. It—’

  ‘You must not worry,’ he says, putting a hand on either side of her face and lifting it up so that they are looking into each other’s eyes. ‘All shall be well.’

  She nods, dropping her gaze.

  ‘Have you not always said you will have two children?’

  ‘I have,’ she says.

  ‘Well, then. Here,’ he rests a palm against her, ‘is the second. Ready and waiting. All shall be well,’ he says again. ‘I know it.’

  He kisses her, full on the mouth, then draws back to regard her. She pulls her face into a smile, catching herself hoping that some of the town may be watching. There, she thinks, as she cups her hand against his cheek, and there, as she touches her fingers to his hair. He kisses her again, for longer this time. Then he sighs, cradling the back of her head, his face buried in her neck.

  ‘I shan’t go,’ he mutters, but she feels the pull and stretch of the words, how he says them, but at the same time they peel away from his real feelings.

  ‘You shall,’ she says.

  ‘I shan’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  He sighs again, his breath rustling in the starch of her coif. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t be leaving you now, while you are . . . I think perhaps—’

  ‘It must be,’ she says, and touches her fingers to the canvas of his pack from which, she knows, he has removed some of the glove samples his father has given him, and replaced them with books and papers. She gives him a wry half-smile. Perhaps he catches her knowledge of this act, perhaps not.

  ‘I have your mother and your sister,’ she continues, pressing her hand to his luggage, ‘and your whole family. Not to mention my own. You need to go. You will find us a new home in London and we will join you there, as soon as we can.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he murmurs. ‘I hate to leave you. And what if I fail?’

  ‘Fail?’

  ‘What if I can’t find work there? What if I can’t expand the business? What if—’

  ‘You won’t fail,’ she says. ‘I know it.’

  He frowns and looks at her more carefully. ‘You know it? What do you know? Tell me. Have you a sense of something? Have you—’

  ‘Never mind what I know. You must go.’ She pushes at his chest, putting air and space between them, feeling his arms slide off her, disentangling them. His face is crumpled, tense, uncertain. She smiles at him, drawing in breath.

  ‘I won’t say goodbye,’ she says, keeping her voice steady.

  ‘Neither will I.’

  ‘I won’t watch you walk away.’

  ‘I’ll walk backwards,’ he says, backing away, ‘so I can keep you in my sights.’

  ‘All the way to London?’

  ‘If I have to.’

  She laughs. ‘You’ll fall into a ditch. You’ll crash into a cart.’

  ‘So be it.’

  He darts forward, catches her to him and kisses her once. ‘That’s for you,’ he says, then kisses her again. ‘That’s for Susanna.’ And again, ‘And that’s for the baby.’

  ‘I shall be sure to deliver it,’ she says, trying to keep the smile on her face, ‘when the time comes. Now go.’

  ‘I’m going,’ he says, walking away from her, still facing her. ‘It doesn’t feel like leaving, if I walk like this.’

  She flaps her hands. ‘Go,’ she tells him.

  ‘I’m going. But I shall be back before you know it to fetch you all.’

  She turns away before he reaches the bend in the road. It will take him four days to reach London, less if he is picked up along the way by a willing farmer with a cart. She will encourage him to go but she will not watch him leave.

  She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

  There is the stall they passed earlier, piled high with tin pots and cedar shavings. There is the woman they saw, still making her decision, holding two pots in her hands, weighing them, and how can she still be there, how can she still be engaged in the same activity, in the choosing of a pot, when such a change, such a transformation has occurred in Agnes’s life? Her very world has cloven in two, and here is the same dog, dozing in a doorway. Here is a young woman, tying up clothing into bundles, just as she was doing when they passed. Here is her neighbour, a man with grizzled hair and a yellowish tinge to his thin face (he will not last the year, Agnes thinks, the fact flitting through her mind like a swallow across a sky), giving her a grave nod as he walks by. Can he not see, can he not read that life as she knows it is over, that he is gone?

  The baby gives a swift, shrugging movement, pressing a palm, a foot, a shoulder against the wall of skin. She places a hand there – a hand outside, next to the hand inside – as if nothing has changed, as if the world is just as it was.

  liza’s lett
er is taken by a lad from a few houses along: he was up and out, walking down Henley Street before dawn because he has been sent by his father to see to a cow in calf on the far side of the river. Mary hailed him from the window, gave him the letter, with instructions to take it to the posting inn, pressing a coin into his hands.

  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.

  He takes it to the inn near the bridge, then continues on to his cow, which still hasn’t calved and stares at him with large and what seem to the boy frightened eyes, jaws grinding cud. Later that morning the innkeeper hands it, with others, to a grain merchant, who is riding that day to London.

  Eliza’s letter to her brother travels in the leather satchel of the grain merchant as far as Banbury. From there, it is taken by cart to Stokenchurch, and it lands at the door of the lodgings. The landlord squints at it, holding it up to the sunlight, which enters his passageway at a slant. His eyesight is poor. He sees the name of his lodger, who yesterday left for Kent. 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.

  The landlord must wait for his son to come back from some business in Cheapside. When he does – grumpily, because the person he was due to meet did not arrive and it rained heavily and the son is wet to the skin – it is several hours before he gets out ink and quill, takes the letter from the mantel, and painstakingly, tongue wedged in the corner of his mouth, writes the address of the inn in Kent, where the lodger told them he would be staying.

  The letter is then passed from hand to hand, to an inn in the outskirts of the city, where it waits for someone travelling to Kent – in this instance, a man pushing a cart, sat upon by a woman and a dog and a chicken.

  When the letter reaches him, he – lodger, brother, husband, father and, here, player – is standing in a guildhall in a small town on the eastern fringes of Kent. The hall smells of cured meat, of boiled beets; there is a heap of farming implements and sacking in the corner; narrow blades of light enter the space from high, mildew-spotted windows.

  He is leaning back, regarding these weak beams of light, reflecting on how they meet each other halfway across the hall, creating archways of light, and how they give the whole space an underwater feel, as if he and the rest of the company are fish, swimming about in the gloomy depths of a greenish pond.

  A small child – a boy, he supposes – darts in, barefoot, bareheaded, ragged of smock, scrofulous of complexion, 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 I,’ he says wearily, holding out his hand. It will be a demand for money, a complaint, an edict from a patron. ‘Hear this,’ he says to his colleagues, who are milling aimlessly on the raised dais, as if, he thinks, they aren’t putting on a performance in less than three hours, as if nothing in particular is happening here in this dusty hall. ‘You will need to count your paces from left to right, like so,’ he demonstrates, walking towards the shoeless child, ‘or else one of you will fall offstage and into the audience. It is smaller than we are used to, but used to it we must be.’ He comes to a halt in front of the child. Strangely colourless hair and wide-set eyes. A sore on the bottom lip. Fingernails rimmed with filth. Six or seven years of age, perhaps more.

  He tweaks the letter from the child’s grip. ‘For me?’ he says, sliding his fingers into his purse and extracting a coin. ‘And for you.’ He flips the coin into the air between them. Instantly, the child is animated, his scrawny body leaping into life.

  He laughs, turning on his heel, pulling at the red seal, stamped slightly off-centre with his family’s insignia. He registers his sister’s hand before he lifts his head. Onstage, the young lad is pacing stiffly towards the older actor, edging around the rim of the dais, as if the floor beneath were awash with boiling lead.

  ‘Good God,’ he roars, his voice stretching at the wooden struts, the skin of plaster on the walls. He knows how to throw his voice, how to expand it so it becomes the sound of a giant. The actors freeze, mouths agape. ‘We have only a few hours before this hall will be filled with the good people of Kent. Are you meaning to give them a circus? Do we intend to make them laugh or are we putting on a tragedy? Look to it or we won’t be eating tomorrow.’

  He cracks the page he is holding against the air, stares at them a moment longer, for effect. It seems to have worked. The young lad looks to be on the verge of tears, twisting his fingers into his costume. He turns, to hide his smile, then glances down at the letter.

  ‘Dear brother,’ he sees. And ‘verie sick’, and ‘your daughter’. ‘Pleaƒe come bak to us,’ it says: ‘not manie hours left to her.’

  It seems hard to breathe, suddenly. The air in the hall is as hot as a furnace, with particles of chaff. He feels his chest labouring in and out, but no air seems to be reaching him. He stares at the page, reading the words once, twice. The whiteness of the paper seems to pulse, stark and glaring, one moment, then recede behind the black strokes of the letters. He sees for a moment his daughter, her face lifted up to look at him, her hands clasped together, her eyes fixed on his. He wants to loosen his clothes; he wants to tear off his fastenings. He must get out, he must leave this building.

  With the letter gripped in his fist, he rushes at the door, pushes his weight against it. Outside, the colours accost his eyes: the glancing lapis sky, the virulent green of the verge, the creamy blossoms of a tree, the pink kirtle of a woman leading a nag along the road. On either side of the animal’s flanks are woven baskets. It is immediately obvious to him that one basket is much heavier than the other: the baskets are uneven, dragging down on one side.

  Even up that load, he wants to yell at her, much as he just yelled at the players inside the hall. But he doesn’t have the breath. His lungs are still heaving in and out, his heart hammering now in his ribcage, hammering, hesitating, hammering once more. His vision seems to shimmer at its edges, the pale tree blossoms wavering, as if seen through a fire’s heat.

  Verie sick, he thinks, not manie hours left.

  He wants to tear down the sky, he wants to rip every blossom from that tree, he wishes to take a burning branch and drive that pink-clad girl and her nag over a cliff, just to be rid of them, to clear them all out of his way. So many miles, so much road stands between him and his child, and so few hours left.

  He is conscious of a hand on his shoulder, a face near his, another hand gripping his arm. Two of his friends are there, saying, What, what is the matter, what has happened? One of them, Heminge, is trying to take the letter from his hand, peeling back his fingers, and he will not let it go, he will not. For someone else to read those words might make them true, make them come to pass. He is shrugging the men off, both of them, all of them, because here are more of them, his players, crowding round him, but somehow he feels the gritted ground under his knees and the voice of his friend, Heminge, is reading the words of the letter aloud. Hands are patting his shoulders now; he is being assisted to his feet. Someone is telling someone else to run for a horse, any horse, that they must get him to Stratford as soon as possible. Go, Heminge is urging the young boy who was, not so long ago, nervous of the drop at the edge of the stage, go and fetch a horse. The young boy takes off down the road, dirt flying up from his heels, his costume – a ridiculous thing of brocade and velvet, made to cast the illusion of a woman on the form of a lad – flapping about him.

  He watches him go, peering through the thicket of legs surrounding him.

  owards the end of Agnes’s second pregnancy, Mary is watchful. She doesn’t let Agnes alone for long. She has noticed her daughter-in-law’s middle getting larger and larger, ro
under than seems possible. She has seen Agnes secreting certain items in a sack under the table: cloths, scissors, twine, packets of herbs and dried rinds. Her appearance is astonishing, as if she is smuggling pumpkins inside her gown. I don’t know how she’s still walking, John mumbled one night, as they lay, curtained tight inside their bed. How does she stay standing?

  Mary keeps an eye on her, and instructs Eliza and the servants to do the same. She will not permit this grandchild – a boy, they are all hoping – to be born in a bush, like poor Susanna. But that, she consoles herself, was before they fully understood the extent of Agnes’s eccentricities and ways.

  ‘The minute she asks you to take care of Susanna, the minute you see her reaching for that sack, let me know,’ Mary hisses to the serving girl. ‘The very minute. Do you hear me?’

  The girl nods, eyes wide.

  Agnes is warming honey over the fire, into which she plans to stir extract of valerian and tincture of chickweed. She dips a spoon into it and pushes it one way, then the other, watching it slide over and around the wooden tip. It is beginning to surrender to the heat, losing its stiffness, easing and loosening into liquid, changing one form for another. She is thinking about the letter that arrived from her husband earlier in the week. She has asked Eliza to read it to her twice and she wants to ask her to read it again today, as soon as she can find her. In it, he told Agnes that he has obtained a contract to make gloves for players at a theatre: Agnes had to ask Eliza to go back and read these words again, so that she was sure she understood, to point them out on the paper, so she could recognise them again, later. Players. Theatre. Gloves. Such gloves they need, Eliza had read haltingly, a frown on her face, as she made out the unfamiliar words. Long gauntlets for fighting, fine gloves with jewels and beads for kings and queens and scenes in court, soft gloves for ladies but the size must necessarily be bigger on these for they are to fit the hands of young stage boys.