Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  The first thing she registers is that Judith’s hand is not, as she first thought, clasping her other hand. It is entwined with another’s. There is someone on the pallet with Judith, another body, another – as strange as it seems – Judith. There are two Judiths, curled up together, in front of the dying fire.

  She blinks. She shakes herself. It is Hamnet, of course. He has come down in the night and squeezed himself on to the pallet next to his twin. And there he lies, in peaceful, deep sleep, next to her, holding her hand.

  Agnes regards the scene, candle held aloft. She will think back to this moment later, and ask herself when she knew all was not as she’d thought it was. When did she notice? What was it that alerted her?

  There is her daughter, very sick indeed, lying on her back, her face blanched by fever, and there is her son, curled next to her, his arm around her. And yet there is something not right about that arm. Agnes stares at it, mesmerised. It is Hamnet’s arm and yet it is not.

  She switches her gaze to the hand it holds, Judith’s hand, and sees that the fingernails of this one are stained with something black. Almost like ink.

  And when, Agnes asks herself, does Judith use ink?

  A strange, dementing confusion starts up inside her, like the buzz of a hundred bees. She darts forward and, pushing the candle into a stick on the hearth, places her hands on her children.

  Her son, a healthy colour, is next to the fire, and her daughter is on the other side of the pallet. But here, tucked into Hamnet’s neck, her fingers find the long plait belonging to Judith. And here are Hamnet’s wrists, protruding from Judith’s smock, with the crescent-shaped scar he got from a sickle when he was young. It is Hamnet’s shorter hair that is dark with the sweat of Judith’s fever; it is Judith who is sleeping the untroubled sleep of the well.

  Agnes cannot understand what she sees. Can she be dreaming? Is this some nightly apparition? She yanks back the sheet covering them and looks at them, lying there. The feet of the sick child reach further down the mattress. The taller child is the one who is sick.

  It is Hamnet, not Judith.

  At that moment, perhaps feeling the cold air, the eyes of the smaller twin open and fix themselves on her, standing there above them with the sheet in her hands.

  ‘Mamma?’ the child says.

  ‘Judith?’ Agnes whispers, because she still cannot believe what her eyes are telling her.

  ‘Yes,’ the child says.

  Hamnet cannot know about the horse hired for his father. He will never know that his father’s friend secured a mare for him, a beast with a temper, a fiery eye, a muscled shoulder and a coat that shone like a conker.

  He has no idea that his father is, even now, making his way as fast as this ill-tempered mare will carry him, stopping only for water and as much food as he can find in the minutes he allows himself. From Tunbridge to Weybridge, then on to Thame. He swaps horses in Banbury. He is thinking only of his daughter, how he must narrow down the miles between them, he must make it home, he must hold her in his arms, he must look upon her once more, before she passes into that other realm, before she breathes her last.

  His son, though, knows nothing of this. None of them does. Not Susanna, who has been sent to her mother’s physick garden at the back of the house to collect roots of gentian and lovage for a poultice. Not Mary, who is scolding the maid in the cookhouse because the girl has been weeping and wailing all afternoon about how she wants to go home, how she needs to see her mother. Not Eliza, who is explaining to a woman who has come to the window hatch that Agnes cannot speak with her today, or tomorrow, but perhaps come back next week. And not Agnes herself, who crouches by the pallet with her back to the window.

  Judith, her child, her daughter, her youngest born, is seated in a chair. Agnes still cannot believe it. Her face is pallid but her eyes are bright and alert. She is thin and weak, but she opens her mouth for broth, she fixes her gaze on her mother.

  Agnes is pulled in two, as she sits beside her son, holding on to his shivering body. Her daughter has been spared; she has been delivered back to them, once again. But, in exchange, it seems that Hamnet may be taken.

  She has given him a purgative, she has fed him jelly of rosemary and mint. She has given him all that she gave Judith, and more. She has placed a stone with a hole beneath his pillow. Several hours ago, she called for Mary to bring the toad and she has bound it to his stomach with linen.

  None of it has pulled him back; none of it has restored him. She feels her hope for him begin to leak from her, like water from a punctured bucket. She is a fool, a blind idiot, the worst kind of simpleton. All along, she thought she needed to protect Judith, when it was Hamnet who was destined to be taken. How could Fate be so cruel in setting her such a trap? To make her concentrate on the wrong child so that it could reach out, while she was distracted, and snatch the other?

  She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?

  Her son’s body is in a place of torture, of hell. It writhes, it twists, it buckles and strains. Agnes holds him by the shoulders, by the chest, to keep him still. There is, she is starting to see, nothing more she can do. She can stay beside him, comfort him as best she can, but this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious. It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him. It has a musky, dank, salty smell. It has come to them, Agnes thinks, from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement. It has cut a swingeing path for itself through humans and beasts and insects alike; it feeds on pain and unhappiness and grief. It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, blackest kind of evil.

  Agnes does not leave his side. She swabs his brow, his limbs with the damp cloth. She packs salt in the bed with him. She lays a posy of valerian and swans’ feathers on his chest, for comfort, for solace. Hamnet’s fever climbs and climbs, the buboes swell tighter and tighter. She lifts his hand, which is a grim blue-grey along its side, and presses it to her cheek. She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.

  His body sweats, its humours expressing outwards through the skin, as if emptying itself.

  Hamnet’s mind, however, is in another place. For a long time, he could hear his mother and his sisters, his aunt and his grandmother. He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognise. It is cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on. It piles up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weighs down the branches of trees; it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis. The silence, the cool, the altered silver light of it is something more than soothing to him. He wants only to lie down in this snow, to rest himself; his legs are tired, his arms ache. To lie, to surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him. Something is telling him that he must not lie down, he must not give in to this desire. What could it be? Why shouldn’t he rest?

  Outside his body, Agnes is speaking. She is trying to apply the poultice to the swellings in his neck and armpits but he is trembling so much that the mixture will not stay in place. She is saying his name, over and over again. Eliza is scooping up Judith in her arms and taking her to the opposite end of the room. Judith is letting out a hoarse whistling noise, kicking against the clutches of her aunt. Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peace
ful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

  Susanna watches her brother, convulsing by the hearth, watches her mother fussing around with her useless paste and bandages. She would like to snatch them from her hands and hurl them at the wall and say, Stop, leave him be, let him alone. Can you not see it is too late for that? Susanna presses fierce fists to her eyes. She cannot look any more; she cannot bear it.

  Agnes is whispering, Please, please, Hamnet, please, don’t leave us, don’t go. Near the window, Judith is struggling, asking to be placed next to him on the pallet, saying she needs him, she must speak to him, let her go. Eliza holds her, saying, There, there, to her, but has no idea what she means by that. Mary is kneeling at the end of the pallet, holding on to one of his ankles. Susanna is leaning her forehead into the plaster of the wall, her hands over her ears.

  All at once, he stops shaking and a great soundlessness falls over the room. His body is suddenly motionless, his gaze focused on something far above him.

  Hamnet, in his place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes, to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.

  Eliza rocks Judith, tucking the child’s head under her chin, and mutters a prayer. Susanna’s face is turned towards her brother, her wet cheek to the wall. Mary crosses herself, gripping Agnes’s shoulder. Agnes bends forward to touch her lips to his forehead.

  And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath.

  He draws it in, he lets it out.

  Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.

  II

  I am dead:

  Thou livest;

  . . . draw thy breath in pain,

  To tell my story

  Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

  room. Long and thin, with flags fitted together, smoothed to a mirror. A group of people are standing in a cluster near the window, turned towards each other, in hushed conference. Cloths have been draped over the panes, so there is little light, but someone has propped open the window, just a crack. A breeze threads through the room, stirring the air inside it, toying with the wall drapes, the mantel-cloth, carrying with it the scent of the street, dust from the dry road, a hint of a pie baking somewhere nearby, the acrid sweetness of caramelising apple. Every now and again the voices of people passing by outside catapult odd words into the room, severed from sense, small bubbles of sound released into the silence.

  Chairs are tucked into place around the table. Flowers stand upright in a jar, petals turned back, pollen dusting the table beneath. A dog asleep on a cushion wakes with a start, begins to lick its paw, then thinks better of it and subsides back into slumber. There is a pitcher of water on the table, tailed by a cluster of cups. No one drinks. The people by the window continue to murmur to each other; one reaches out and clasps the hand of another; this person inclines their head, the white, starched top of their coif displayed to the rest.

  They glance towards the end of the room, where the fireplace is, again and again, then turn back to each other.

  A door has been lifted from its hinges and placed on two barrels by the fireplace. A woman is sitting beside it. She is motionless, back bent, head lowered. It is not immediately apparent that she even breathes. Her hair is disarrayed and falls in strands around her shoulders. Her body is curved over, her feet tucked under, her arms outstretched, the nape of her neck exposed.

  Before her is the body of a child. His bared feet splay outwards, his toes curled. The soles and nails still bear the dirt so recently accrued from life: grit from the road, soil from the garden, mud from the riverbank, where he swam not a week ago with his friends. His arms are by his sides, his head turned slightly towards his mother. His skin is losing the appearance of the living, becoming parchment white, stiff and sunken. He is dressed, still, in his nightshirt. His uncles were the ones to unhinge the door and bring it into the room. They lifted him, gently, gently, with careful hands, with held breath, from the pallet where he died to the hard wooden surface of the door.

  The younger uncle, Edmond, had wept, tears blurring his sight, which was, for him, a relief because he found it too painful to look into the still features of his brother’s dead son. This is a child whom he has known and seen every day of his short life, a child whom he taught to catch a wooden ball, to pick fleas from a dog, to whittle a pipe from a reed. The older uncle, Richard, did not cry: instead his sadness passed over into anger – at the grim task they had been bidden to do, at the world, at Fate, at the fact that a child could fall ill and then be lying there dead. The anger made him snap at Edmond whom he thought wasn’t taking enough of the boy’s weight, not holding the legs as firmly as he should have done, by the knees and not the ankles, fumbling the job, messing it up.

  Both uncles leave soon afterwards, exchanging a few words with the people in the room, then finding excuses of work, of errands to run, of places they must go.

  In the room there are mostly women: the boy’s grandmother, the baker’s wife, who is godmother to the boy, the boy’s aunt. They have done all they can. Burnt the bedding and the mattress and the straw and the linens. Aired the room. Put the twin girl to bed upstairs, for she is still weak, still unwell, although making a good recovery. They have cleaned the room, sprinkling lavender water around it, letting in the air. They have brought a white sheet, strong thread, sharp needles. They have said, in respectful and quiet voices, that they will help with the laying out, that they are here, that they will not leave, that they are ready to begin. The boy must be prepared for burial: there is no time to lose. The town decrees that any who die of the pestilence must be buried quickly, within a day. The women have communicated this to the mother, in case she is not aware of the ruling, or has forgotten it, in her grief. They have placed bowls of warm water and cloths beside the mother and cleared their throats.

  But nothing. She does not respond. She does not raise her head. She does not listen or even seem to hear suggestions to start the laying out, the washing of the body, the stitching of the shroud. She will not look at the bowls of water, instead letting them cool beside her. She did not glance at the white bolt of the sheet, folded into a neat square, placed at the foot of the door.

  She will only sit, her head bent, one hand touching the boy’s inert, curled fingers, the other his hair.

  Inside Agnes’s head, her thoughts are widening out, then narrowing down, widening, narrowing, over and over again. She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realise it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

  The three words contain no sense for her. She cannot bend her mind to their meaning. It is an impossible idea that her son, her child, her boy, the healthiest and most robust of her children, should, within days, sicken and die.

  She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet
? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he?

  Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see.

  And Hamnet? Where is he?

  With her back to the door, she faces the fireplace, which is filled only with ashes, held in the fragile shape of the log they once were.

  She is aware of people arriving and leaving, via the door to the street, and the door out to the yard. Her mother-in-law, Eliza, the baker’s wife, the neighbour, John, some other people she cannot place.

  They speak to her, these people. She hears words and voices, murmured mostly, but she doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t raise her head. These people, walking in and out of her house, pushing speech and utterances towards her ears, are nothing to do with her. They offer nothing she wants or needs.

  One of her hands rests on her son’s hair; the other still grips his fingers. These are the only parts of him that are familiar, that still look the same. She allows herself to think this.

  His body is different. Increasingly so, as the day wears on. It is as if a strong wind – the one from her dream, she believes – has lifted her son off the ground, battered him against rocks, whirled him around a cliff, then set him back down. He is misused, abused, marked, maltreated: the illness has ravaged him. For a while after he died, the bruises and black marks spread and widened. Then they stopped. His skin has turned to waxy tallow, the bones standing up beneath. The cut above his eye, the one she has no idea how he came by, is still livid and red.

  She regards the face of her son, or the face that used to belong to her son, the vessel that held his mind, produced his speech, contained all that his eyes saw. The lips are dry, sealed. She would like to dampen them, to allow them a little water. The cheeks are stretched, hollowed by fever. The eyelids are a delicate purplish-grey, like the petals of early spring flowers. She closed them herself. With her own hands, her own fingers, and how hot and slippery her fingers had felt, how unmanageable the task, how difficult it had been to put her fingers – trembling and wet – over those lids, so dear, so known, she could draw them from memory if someone were to put a stick of charcoal in her hand. How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.