‘Two of you,’ she mutters again. ‘Always thought it would be my children, standing at the bed, but it turns out that it was you.’
‘What was that?’ the midwife says, disappearing once again under the hem of Agnes’s shift.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Mary says, more brightly than she feels.
‘She’s raving,’ the midwife says, with a shrug. ‘Doesn’t know where she is. It takes some like that. Well,’ she says, hauling herself upright again, ‘this baby is coming, so we need to get her up off that bed.’
Between them, gripping her under each arm, they get Agnes up. She permits them to lead her out of bed to the stool and she slumps down on it without a murmur. Mary stands behind Agnes, propping up her limp form.
After a while, Agnes begins to speak, if the sounds and disjointed words could be called that. ‘I should never . . .’ she mutters, and her voice is no more than a whisper, gulping for air ‘. . . I should never . . . I got it wrong . . . He’s not here . . . I cannot—’
‘You can,’ the midwife says, from her position on the floor. ‘And you will.’
‘I cannot . . .’ Agnes grips Mary’s arm, her face wet, her eyes wide, glittering, unseeing, willing her to understand ‘. . . you see, my mother died . . . and . . . and I sent him away . . . I cannot—’
‘You—’ the midwife begins, but Mary interrupts her.
‘Hold your tongue,’ she snaps. ‘Attend to your work.’ She cups her hand around Agnes’s bloodless face. ‘What is it?’ she whispers.
Agnes looks at her and her flecked eyes are pleading, scared. Mary has never seen this look on her face before.
‘The thing is . . .’ she whispers ‘. . . it was me . . . I sent him away . . . and then my mother died.’
‘I know she did,’ Mary says, moved. ‘You won’t, though. I am sure of it. You are strong.’
‘She . . . she was strong.’
Mary grips her hand. ‘You will be fine, you’ll see.’
‘But the problem . . .’ Agnes says ‘. . . is that . . . I should never . . . I should never have . . .’
‘What? What should you never have done?’
‘I should never have sent him . . . to . . . to London . . . It was wrong . . . I should—’
‘It wasn’t you,’ Mary says soothingly. ‘It was John.’
Agnes’s head, lolling on its neck, snaps round to face her. ‘It was me,’ she mutters, teeth clenched.
‘It was John,’ Mary insists.
Agnes shakes her head. ‘I shan’t make it through,’ she gasps. She grips Mary by the hand, her fingers pressing painful spots into the flesh. ‘Will you take care of them? You and Eliza. Will you?’
‘Take care of who?’
‘The children. Will you?’
‘Of course, but—’
‘Don’t let my stepmother take them.’
‘Certainly not. I would never—’
‘Not Joan. Anyone but Joan. Promise me.’ Her expression is maddened, drained, her fingers clamped into Mary’s hand. ‘Promise me you’ll look after them.’
‘I promise,’ Mary says, frowning, staring into the face of her daughter-in-law. What has she seen? What does she know? Mary is chilled, discomforted, her skin crawling with horror. She refuses, for the main part, to believe what people say about Agnes, that she can see people’s futures, she can read their palms, or whatever it is she does. But now, for the first time, she has a sense of what people mean. Agnes is of another world. She does not quite belong here. The thought, however, of Agnes dying, in front of her, fills her with despair. She cannot let that happen. What would she say to her son?
‘I promise,’ she says again, looking her daughter-in-law right in the eye. Agnes lets go of her hand. Together, they look down at the dome of her belly, at the shoulders of the midwife, below.
The second labour is short, fast and difficult. The pains come without interval, on and on, and Mary can see that Agnes, like a swimmer going under, cannot catch her breath in between. Her screams, by the end, are ragged, hoarse, desperate. Mary holds her, her own face wet with tears. She begins to form, in her head, the words she will say to her son. We tried our best. We did everything we could. In the end, we couldn’t save her.
When the baby emerges, it is clear to them all that the death they have been dreading is not Agnes’s after all. The baby is grey in colour, the cord tight around its neck.
No one says anything as the midwife eases the body out with one hand and catches it in the other. A girl child, half the size of the first, and silent. Eyes shut tight, fists curled, lips pursed, as if in apology.
The midwife unloops the cord quickly, deftly, and turns the little doll upside-down. She lands a slap on its bottom, once, twice, but nothing. No noise, no cry, no flicker of life. The midwife raises her hand a third time.
‘Enough,’ says Agnes, holding out her arms. ‘Let me have her.’
The midwife mumbles about how she should not look on it, how it is bad luck. It is best, she says, you don’t see it. She will take it away, she says, and make sure it gets a decent burial.
‘Give her to me,’ Agnes says, and goes to rise from the stool.
Mary steps forward and takes the child from the midwife. Its face is perfect, she thinks, and the image of its brother’s – the same brow, the same line of jaw and cheek. It has eyelashes and fingernails and is still warm.
Mary hands the tiny form to Agnes, who takes it and holds it to her, cradling the head in her palm.
The room is silent.
‘You have a beautiful boy,’ the midwife says, after a moment. ‘Let’s bring him here and you may feed him.’
‘I will fetch him,’ Mary says, starting towards the cradle.
‘No, I will,’ says the midwife, crossing before her, stepping into her path.
Annoyed, Mary pushes at her shoulder. ‘Out of my way. I will fetch my grandson.’
‘Mistress, I need to say that—’ The midwife is squaring up to her, but she never finishes her sentence because from behind them comes a thin, spiralling cry.
They both turn, in unison.
The child in Agnes’s arms, the girl, is wailing, arms rigid with outrage, her minute form rinsing itself pink as she draws in air.
Two babies, then, not one. Agnes tells herself this as she lies in bed, curtains drawn against the sharp draughts.
It is by no means certain, in those first few weeks, whether the girl-child will survive. Agnes knows this. She knows it in her mind, in her bones, in her skin, right down to her heart. She knows in the way her mother-in-law tiptoes into the room and peers at the children, sometimes putting a quick hand to their chests. She sees it in the way Mary urges John to take the babies to be churched: she and John wrap the infants in blanket after blanket, then tuck them into their clothing and hurry to the priest. Mary bursts back into the house a while later, with the air of a woman who has completed a race, outrun an enemy, holding out the smaller of the twins towards her, saying, There, it is done, here she is.
Agnes may not sleep, it seems. She may not rise from the bed. She may not have a hand spare or empty. One or both of the babies will need to be held at any given moment. She will feed one, then the other, then the first again; she will feed them both at once, heads meeting in the centre of her chest, their bodies podded under each of her arms. She feeds and feeds and feeds.
The boy, Hamnet, is strong. This she has known since the moment she first saw him. He latches on with a definite and sure force, sucking with great concentration. The girl, Judith, needs to be encouraged on to the breast. Sometimes, when her mouth is opened for her and the breast placed inside it, she looks confused, as if unsure what she is meant to do. Agnes must stroke her cheek, tap her chin, run a finger along her jaw, to remind her to suck, to sup, to live.
Agnes’s concept of death has, for a long time, taken the form of a single room, lit from within, perhaps in the middle of an expanse of moorland. The living inhabit the room; the dead mill about outside it,
pressing their palms and faces and fingertips to the window, desperate to get back, to reach their people. Some inside the room can hear and see those outside; some can speak through the walls; most cannot.
The idea that this tiny child might have to live out there, on the cold and misted moor, without her, is unthinkable. She will not let her pass over. It is always the smaller twin who is taken: everybody knows this. Everyone, she can tell, is waiting, breath held, for this to happen. She knows that for the girl child, the door leading out of the room of the living is ajar; she can feel the chill of the draught, scent that icy air. She knows that she is meant to have only two children but she will not accept this. She tells herself this, in the darkest hours of the night. She will not let it happen; not tonight, not tomorrow, not any day. She will find that door and slam it shut.
She keeps the twins tucked into bed, on either side of her; she has one breathing in one ear and one in the other. When Hamnet wakes, with a creaking cry, to feed, Agnes rouses Judith. Feed, little one, she whispers to her, time to feed.
She fears her foresight; she does. She remembers with ice-cold clarity the image she had of two figures at the foot of the bed where she will meet her end. She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time. But she will not have it. She will not. She will fill this child, these children, with life. She will place herself between them and the door leading out, and she will stand there, teeth bared, blocking the way. She will defend her three babes against all that lies beyond this world. She will not rest, not sleep, until she knows they are safe. She will push back, fight against, undo the foresight she has always had, about having two children. She will. She knows she can.
When her husband comes, there is a moment when he doesn’t recognise her. He is looking for his handsome, full-lipped wife, standing by her pots and pestle, but he finds instead, prostrate on the bed, a waif, half crazed with sleeplessness and determination and single-minded purpose. He finds a woman worn thin with feeding, with grey-ringed eyes, with a face desperate and focused. He finds two babies with the same inscrutable face, one double the size of the other.
He takes them in his hands; he meets their steady gazes; he looks into their identical eyes; he arranges them, head to foot, upon his knee; he watches as one takes the thumb of the other into its mouth and sucks upon it; he sees that the pair have led a life together that began before anything else. He touches their heads with both of his palms. You, he says, and you.
She can tell, even through her dazed exhaustion, even before she can take his hand, that he has found it, he is fitting it, he is inhabiting it – that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do. It makes her smile, there on the bed, to see him stand so tall, his chest thrown wide, his face clear of worry and frustration, to inhale his scent of satisfaction.
They still believe, as they sit together in the birthing room, that she will join him in London soon, that she will bring the three children to the city and they will live there together. They believe that this is shortly to happen. She is already planning what to pack and take with them. She is telling Susanna that soon they will live in a big city and she will see houses and boats and bears and palaces. Will the babies come with us? Susanna asks, with a sidelong glance at the cradle. Yes, Agnes says, hiding her smile.
He has already looked at houses; he is saving money to buy a place for them. He has envisaged taking Susanna on his shoulders to look at the river, bringing them all to the playhouse. He has imagined his new friends looking with wistful envy at his wife’s dark eyes and slender gloved wrists, at the pretty heads of his children. He pictures a kitchen with two cradles, his wife bending over the fire, a yard at the back where they might keep hens or rabbits. It will just be the five of them, perhaps more in time: he permits himself this thought. No one else. No family next door. No brothers or parents or in-laws bursting into the place at odd hours. Nobody at all. Just them, this kitchen, these cradles. He can almost smell this kitchen: the beeswax on the table surface, the curdled-milk smell of the babies, the starch of the laundry. His wife will hum to herself as she works, the babes will gurgle and chatter, Susanna will be out at the back, talking to the rabbits, examining their liquid eyes, their sleek fur, and he will sit at his hearth, surrounded by his family, not cramped into a lodging room, writing letters that take four days to reach them. He will no longer lead this double life, this split existence. They will be there, with him; he will need only to raise his head to see them. He will be alone no more in the big city: he will have a firmer foothold there, a wife, a family, a house. With Agnes there, beside him, who knows what may be possible for him?
Neither he nor his wife, as they sit in the room with their tiny babies, knows that this plan will never come off. She will never bring the children to join him in London. He will never buy a house there.
The girl child will live. She will grow from a baby to an infant to a child, but her hold on life will remain tenuous, frail, indefinite. She will suffer convulsions, her limbs shaking and trembling, fevers, congestion of the chest. Her skin will flush with rashes, her lungs will labour to draw in air. If the other two children get a head cold, she will be seized by an ague. If they have a cough, she will be racked by wheezing. Agnes will delay their departure for London by a few months: until she is well, she asks Eliza to write to him. Until spring comes. Until the heat of summer is over. When the winds of autumn are past. When the snow has melted.
Judith is two, her mother staying awake with her each night, steaming bowls of pine and clove inside the bed-curtains, so that she may breathe, so that the blue fades from her lips, and she might sleep, before it is apparent to everyone that the move to London will never take place. The child’s health is too fragile. She would never survive the city.
The father will visit them, during plague season, when the playhouses are closed. He has given up selling gloves, hawking his father’s wares, severing himself entirely from the business. He now works only in the playhouses. He watches one night as his wife walks the floor with the girl; she has a distemper of the stomach.
She is a preternaturally beautiful child, even to the indifferent observer, with clear blue eyes and soft, celestial curls. She fixes her gaze, over her mother’s shoulder as they walk from one side of the room to the other, on her father. Silent tears edge down her cheeks and she grips her mother’s shift in both hands. He looks back at her steadily. He clears his throat. He tells his wife that he has decided to spend the money he has saved, not on a house in London but on some land just outside Stratford. It will bring in good rent, he tells her. He stands, as if to square up to this decision, to this new future.
In the birthing room, with the tiny twins on his lap, a hand curled around each of their heads, he says to Agnes that he believes her foresight, her prophecy about two children was false. Or, rather, that it was a sense of the twins’ coming. It meant, he says, still gazing at his pair of babies, that she would have twins. Susanna and then twins.
His wife is silent. When he looks at the bed, he sees she has fallen asleep, as if all she was waiting for was for him to arrive, to take the babies on to his lap, to cradle their heads in his hands.
gnes startles awake, her head jerking up, her lips and tongue in the middle of forming a word; she isn’t sure what it would have been. She had been dreaming about wind, a great invisible force whipping her hair from side to side, tugging at the clothes on her body, hurling dust and grit into her face.
She looks down at herself. She isn’t in bed but seems to be half sitting, half slumped on the edge of a pallet, still in her gown. She has a cloth in one hand. It is damp, creased, warmed in the cradle of her palm. Why is she holding it? Why is she sitting like this, asleep?
It comes to her in a rush, as if a gust of wind from her dream is crossing the room. Judith, the fever, the night.
Agnes lurches to her feet. Has she been sleeping? How could she have slept? She shakes her head, o
nce, twice, as if trying to rid herself of slumber, of the dream. The room is profoundly dark: it is the deepest part of the night, the most lethal hour. The fire is almost out, just a rubble of red embers, the candle spent. She feels about her desperately, blindly: there is a limb, under a sheet, a knee, an ankle. Agnes gropes upwards and encounters a wrist and two hands clasped together. The flesh, under her touch, is hot. Which, she tells herself, as she turns and begins scrabbling in the coffer for a candle, is good, very good, because it means that Judith is still alive.
It is good, she is telling herself, it is good, as she seizes the cool waxy column of a candle and holds its wick to an ember. If there is life, there is hope.
The candlewick catches, the flame guttering, nearly vanishing, then gathering strength. A circle of light appears around Agnes’s outstretched arm, and widens out, pushing back the darkness.
There is the fireplace, the mantel. There are Agnes’s slippers and her shawl, fallen to the floor. There is the pallet and there are Judith’s feet, poking up under the sheet; there are her legs, her knees, and there is her face.
Agnes covers her mouth when she sees it. The skin is so pale as to be almost colourless; the eyelids are half open, with the eyes rolled up under the lids. Her lips, white and cracked, are open and she is taking tiny half-sips of air.
Still with her hand over her mouth, Agnes looks down upon her daughter. The part of her that has attended the sick, the ailing, the convalescents, the malingerers, the grieving, the mad, thinks: It will not be long. The other part of her, which nursed and tended and cared and petted and fed and clothed and embraced and kissed this child, thinks: This cannot be, this cannot happen, please, not her.
Agnes bends to touch her forehead, to take her pulse, to try to give her some ease, and as she does so, the candle reveals a sight so peculiar, so unexpected that it takes a moment for Agnes to understand what she is seeing.
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