Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Agnes cannot understand what this means, what has happened. How can her son’s name be on a London playbill? There has been some odd, strange mistake. He died. This name is her son’s and he died, not four years ago. He was a child and he would have been a man but he died. He is himself, not a play, not a piece of paper, not something to be spoken of or performed or displayed. He died. Her husband knows this, Joan knows this. She cannot understand.

  She is aware of Judith leaning over her shoulder, of her saying, What, what is it? and of course she cannot read the letters, cannot string them together to make sense to her – strange that she cannot recognise the name of her own twin – and she is aware of Susanna holding steady the corner of the playbill; her own fingers are trembling, as if caught in the wind from outside, just long enough for her to read it. Susanna tries to tweak it from her grasp but Agnes isn’t letting go, there is no way she’s letting go, not of that piece of paper, not of that name. Joan is looking at her, open-mouthed, taken aback at the turn her visit has taken. She was evidently underestimating the effect of the playbill, had no idea it might produce such a reaction. Agnes’s daughters are ushering Joan from the room, saying that their mother isn’t quite herself, Joan should return another time, and Agnes is able, despite the playbill, despite the name, despite everything, to hear the false concern in Joan’s voice as she bids them all goodbye.

  Agnes takes to her bed, for the first time in her life. She goes to her chamber and she lies down and will not get up, not for meals, not for callers, not for sick people who knock at the side door. She doesn’t undress but lies there, on top of the blankets. Light streams in through the latticed windows, pushing itself into cracks in the bed-curtains. She keeps the playbill folded between her hands.

  The sounds of the street outside, the noises of the house, the footsteps of the servants coming up and down the corridor, the hushed tones of her daughters all reach her. It is as if she is underwater and they are all up there, in the air, looking down on her.

  At night, she rises from her bed and goes outside. She sits between the woven, rough sides of her skeps. The humming, vibrating noises from within, beginning just after dawn, seem to her the most eloquent, articulate, perfect language there is.

  Susanna, scorched with rage, sits down at her desk-box with a blank sheet of paper. How could you? she writes to her father. Why would you, how could you not tell us?

  Judith carries bowls of soup to her mother’s bed, a posy of lavender, a rose in a vase, a basket of fresh walnuts, their shells sealed up.

  The baker’s wife comes. She brings rolls, a honey cake. She affects not to notice Agnes’s appearance, her untended hair, her etched and sleepless face. She sits on the edge of the bed, settling her skirts around her, takes Agnes’s hand in her warm, dry grip and says: he always was an odd one, you know that. Agnes says nothing but stares up at the tapestry roof of her bed. More trees, some with apples studding their branches.

  ‘Do you not wonder what is in it?’ the baker’s wife asks, ripping off a hunk of the bread and offering it to Agnes.

  ‘In what?’ Agnes says, ignoring the bread, barely listening.

  The baker’s wife pushes the strip of bread between her own teeth, chews, swallows, tears off another shred before answering: ‘The play.’

  Agnes looks at her, for the first time.

  To London, then.

  She will take no one with her, not her daughters, not her friend, not her sisters, none of her in-laws, not even Bartholomew.

  Mary declares it madness, says Agnes will be attacked on the road or murdered in her bed at an inn along the way. Judith begins to cry at this and Susanna tries to hush her, but looks worried all the same. John shakes his head and tells Agnes not to be a fool. Agnes sits at her in-laws’ table, composed, hands in her lap, as if she can’t hear these words.

  ‘I will go,’ is all she says.

  Bartholomew is sent for. He and Agnes take several turns around the garden. Past the apple trees, past the espaliered pears, through the skeps, past the marigold beds, and round again. Susanna and Judith and Mary watch from the window of Susanna’s chamber.

  Agnes’s hand is tucked into the crook of her brother’s arm. Both their heads are bowed. They pause, briefly, beside the brewhouse for a moment, as if examining something on the path, then continue on their way.

  ‘She will listen to him,’ says Mary, her voice more decisive than she feels. ‘He will never permit her to go.’

  Judith brings her fingers up to the watery pane of glass. How easy it is to obliterate them both with a thumb.

  When the back door slams, they rush downstairs but there is only Bartholomew in the passage, placing his hat on his head, preparing to leave.

  ‘Well?’ Mary says.

  Bartholomew lifts his face to look at them on the stairs.

  ‘Did you persuade her?’

  ‘Persuade her in what?’

  ‘Not to go to London. To give up this madness.’

  Bartholomew straightens the crown of his hat. ‘We leave tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I am to secure horses for us.’

  Mary is saying, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and Judith is starting to weep again and Susanna clasping her hands together, saying, ‘Us? You will go with her?’

  ‘I shall.’

  The three women surround him, a cloud wrapping itself around the moon, peppering him with objections, questions, entreaties, but Bartholomew breaks free, steps towards the door. ‘I will see you tomorrow, early,’ he says, then steps out into the street.

  Agnes is a competent if not committed horsewoman. She likes the beasts well enough but finds being aloft a not altogether comfortable experience. The ground rushing by makes her feel giddy; the shift and heave of another being beneath her, the squeak and squeal of saddle leather, the dusty, parched scent of the mane mean she is counting down the hours she must spend on horseback, before she reaches London.

  Bartholomew insists that the road via Oxford is safer and faster; a man who trades in mutton has told him this. They ride through the gentle dips and heights of the Chiltern Hills, through a rainstorm and a smattering of hail. In Kidlington, her horse becomes lame so she changes to a piebald mare with narrow hips and a flighty way of high-stepping if they come across a bird. They pass the night at an inn in Oxford; Agnes barely sleeps for the sound of mice in the walls and the snores of someone in the room next door.

  Towards mid-morning on the third day of riding, she sees first the smoke, a grey cloth thrown over a hollow. There it is, she says to Bartholomew, and he nods. As they move closer, they hear the peal of bells, catch the scent of it – wet vegetable, animal, lime, some other things Agnes cannot name – and see its vast sprawl, a broken clutter of a city, the river winding through it, clouds pulling up threads of smoke from it.

  They ride through the village of Shepherd’s Bush, the name of which makes Bartholomew smile, and past the gravel pits of Kensington and over the brook at Maryburne. At the Tyburn hanging-tree, Bartholomew leans down from his saddle to ask the way to the parish of St Helen’s, in Bishopsgate. Several people walk by without answering him, a young man laughs, skittering off into a doorway on bare, cut feet.

  On towards Holborn, where the streets are narrower and blacker; Agnes cannot believe the noise and the stench. All around are shops and yards and taverns and crowded doorways. Traders approach them, holding out their wares – potatoes, cakes, hard crab-apples, a bowl of chestnuts. People shout and yell at each other across the street; Agnes sees, she is sure, a man coupling with a woman in a narrow gap between buildings. Further on, a man relieves himself into a ditch; Agnes catches sight of his appendage, wrinkled and pale, before she averts her gaze. Young men, apprentices, she supposes, stand outside shops, entreating passers-by to enter. Children still with first teeth are wheeling barrows along the road, calling out their contents, and ancient men and women sit with gnarled carrots, shelled nuts, loaves laid out around them.

  The scent of cabbage-heads and burnt hide and
bread dough and filth from the street fills her nose as she guides her horse, both hands gripping the reins. Bartholomew reaches over to seize the bridle, so that they won’t become separated.

  Thoughts begin to cram into Agnes’s head as she rides close to her brother: what if we can’t find him, what if we get lost, what if we don’t find his lodgings by nightfall, what shall we do, where should we go, shall we secure rooms now, why did we come, this was madness, my madness, it is all my fault.

  When they reach what they believe is his parish, Bartholomew asks a cake-seller to direct them to his lodgings. They have it written out, on a piece of paper, but the cake-seller waves it away from her, with a gap-toothed smile, telling them to go that way, then this, then straight on, then sharp sideways past the church.

  Agnes grips the reins of her horse, sitting straighter in her saddle. She would do anything to be able to get down, for their journey to be at an end. Her back aches, her feet, her hands, her shoulders. She is thirsty, she is hungry, and yet now she is here, now she is about to see him, she wants to pull on the bridle of her horse, turn it around, and head directly back to Stratford. What had she been thinking? How can she and Bartholomew just arrive on his doorstep? This was a terrible idea, a dreadful plan.

  ‘Bartholomew,’ she says, but he is ahead of her, already dismounting, tying his horse to a post, and walking up to a door.

  She says his name again, but he doesn’t hear her because he is knocking at the door. She feels her heart pound against her bones. What will she say to him? What will he say to them? She can’t remember now what it was she wanted to ask him. She feels again for the playbill in her saddlebag and glances up at the house: three or four storeys, with windows uneven and stained in places. The street is narrow, the houses leaning towards each other. A woman is propped against her doorway, staring at them with naked curiosity. Further down, two children are playing a game with a length of rope.

  Strange to think that these people must see him every day, as he comes to and fro, as he leaves the house in the morning. Does he exchange a word with them? Does he ever eat at their homes?

  A window opens above them; Agnes and Bartholomew look up. It is a girl of nine or ten, her hair neatly parted on either side of her sallow face, carrying an infant on her hip.

  Bartholomew speaks the name of her husband and the girl shrugs, jiggling the now crying infant. ‘Push the door,’ she says, ‘and go up the stairs. He’s up in the attic.’

  Bartholomew indicates, with a jerk of his head, that she must go and he will stay in the street. He takes the bridle of her horse as she slides down.

  The stairs are narrow and her legs tremble as she climbs, from the long ride or the peculiarity of it all, she doesn’t know, but she has to haul herself up by the rail.

  At the top, she waits for a moment, to catch her breath. There is a door before her. Panelled wood with knots flowing through it. She reaches out a hand and taps it. She says his name. She says it again.

  Nothing. No answer. She turns to look down the stairs and almost goes down them. Perhaps she doesn’t want to see what lies beyond this door. Might there be signs of his other life, his other women? There may be things here she does not want to know.

  She turns back, lifts the latch and steps in. The room has a low ceiling slanting inwards at all angles. There is a low bed, pushed up against the wall, a small rug, a cupboard. She recognises a hat, left on top of a coffer, the jerkin lying on the bed. Under the light of the window there is a square table, with a chair tucked beneath. The desk-box on top of it is open and she can see a pen-case, inkwell and pen-knife. A collection of quills is lined up next to three or four table-books, bound by his hand. She recognises the knots and stitching he favours. There is a single sheet of paper in front of the chair.

  She doesn’t know what she expected but it wasn’t this: such austerity, such plainness. It is a monk’s cell, a scholar’s study. There is a strong sense in the air, to her, that no one else ever comes here, that no one else ever sees this room. How can the man who owns the largest house in Stratford, and much land besides, be living here?

  Agnes touches her hand to the jerkin, the pillow on the bed. She turns around, to take it all in. She walks towards the desk and bends over the sheet of paper, the blood hammering at her head. At the top, she sees the words:

  My dear one –

  She almost rears back, as if burnt, then she sees, on the next line:

  Agnes

  There is nothing more, just four words, then a blank.

  What would he have written to her? She presses her fingers to the empty space on the page, as if trying to glean what he might have said, had he been able. She feels the grain of the paper, the sun-warmed wood of the table; she runs her thumb across the letters forming her name, feeling the minute indentations of his quill.

  She is startled by a call, a cry. She straightens up, lifting her hand from the page. It is Bartholomew, shouting her name.

  She crosses the room, she moves through the door, and descends the stairs. Her brother is waiting for her at the open door. He says that the woman in the house over the street has told him they won’t find Agnes’s husband at home, that he won’t be back until nightfall.

  Agnes glances over at the woman, who is still leaning against her doorframe. She shakes her head at Agnes. ‘You won’t find him here, I tell you. Look for him at the playhouse, if you want him.’ She points with her arm. ‘Over the river. Yonder. That’s where he’ll be.’

  She ducks back inside her house and bangs the door.

  Agnes and Bartholomew regard each other for a moment. Then Bartholomew goes to fetch the horses.

  The neighbour in the doorway is right: he is, as she predicted, at the playhouse.

  He is standing in the tiring house, just behind the musicians’ gallery, at a small opening that gives out over the whole theatre. The other actors know this habit of his and never store their costumes or props there, never take up the space around that window.

  They think he stands there to watch the people as they arrive. They believe he likes to assess how many are coming, how big the audience will be, how much the takings.

  But that is not why. To him, it is the best place to be, before a performance: the stage below him, the audience filling the circular hollow in a steady trickle, and the other players behind him, transforming themselves from men to sprites or princes or soldiers or ladies or monsters. It is the only place to be alone in such a crowd. He feels like a bird, above the ground, resting on nothing but air. He is not of this place but above it, apart from it, observing it. It brings to mind, for him, the wind-hovering kestrel his wife used to keep, and the way it would hold itself in high currents, far above the tree tops, wings outstretched, looking down on all around it.

  He waits, with both hands on the lintel. Beneath him, far beneath him, people are gathering. He can hear their calls, their murmurings, the shouts, the greetings, demands for nuts or sweetmeats, arguments that brew up quickly, then die away.

  From behind him comes a crash, a curse, a burst of laughter. Someone has tripped on someone else’s feet. There is a ribald joke about falling, about maidenheads. More laughter. Someone else comes running up the stairs, asking, Has anyone seen my sword, I’ve lost my sword, which of you whoreson dogs have taken it?

  Soon, he will need to disrobe, to take off the clothes of daily life, of the street, of ordinariness, and put on his costume. He will need to confront his image in a glass and make it into something else. He will take a paste of chalk and lime and spread it over his cheeks, his nose, his beard. Charcoal to darken the eye sockets and the brows. Armour to strap to his chest, a helmet to slot over his head, a winding sheet to place about his shoulders. And then he will wait, listening, following the lines, until he hears his cue, and then he will step out, into the light, to inhabit the form of another; he will inhale; he will say his words.

  He cannot tell, as he stands there, whether or not this new play is good. Sometimes, as he list
ens to his company speak the lines, he thinks he has come close to what he wanted it to be; other times, he feels he has entirely missed the mark. It is good, it is bad, it is somewhere in between. How does a person ever tell? All he can do is inscribe strokes on a page – for weeks and weeks, this was all he did, barely leaving his room, barely eating, never speaking to anyone else – and hope that at least some of these arrows will hit their targets. The play, the complete length of it, fills his head. It balances there, like a laden platter on a single fingertip. It moves through him – this one, more than any other he has ever written – as blood through his veins.

  The river is casting its frail net of mist. He can scent it on the breeze, its dank and weed-filled fumes wafting towards him.

  Perhaps it is this fog, this river-heavy air, he doesn’t know, but the day feels ill to him. He is filled with an unease, a slight foreboding, as if something is coming for him. Is it the performance? Does he feel something will be amiss with it? He frowns, thinking, running over in his head any moments that might feel un-rehearsed or ill-prepared. There is not one. They are ready and waiting. He knows this because he himself pushed them through it, over and over again.

  What is it, then? Why does he have this feeling that something approaches him, that some kind of reckoning awaits him, so that he must be constantly glancing over his shoulder?

  He shivers, despite the heat and closeness of the room. He moves his hands through his hair, tugs on the hoops through his ears.

  Tonight, he decides, out of nowhere, he will return to his room, straight away. He will not go drinking with his friends. He will go directly to his lodgings. He will light a candle, he will sharpen a quill. He will refuse to go to a tavern with the rest of the company. He will be firm. He will remove their hands from his arms, if they try to drag him. He will cross over the river, go back to Bishopsgate and write to his wife, as he has been trying to, for a long time. He will not avoid the matter in hand. He will tell her about this play. He will tell her all. Tonight. He is certain of it.