Hamnet and Judith

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Dear Brother,

  I am sorrie to tel you that Judith, your daughter, is verie sick. We belief she has not manie hours left to her. Pleafe come bak to us, if you can. And make hast.

  God fpeed to you, dearest brother.

  Your loving sister,

  Eliza

  Mary melts the sealing-wax over a candle; she sees Agnes watching as they drip it on to the folded page. Eliza writes the address of her brother’s lodgings on the front, then Mary takes up the letter and goes next door with it, to her own house. She will find a coin, open a window, call to whoever is in the street to take it to the inn on the road out of Stratford and ask the innkeeper to convey it, fast as he can, to London, to her son.

  * * *

  —

  Not long after Mary leaves to find a coin, to hail a passer-by, Hamnet drifts to the surface of sleep. He lies for a while under the sheet, wondering why nothing feels right, why the world feels as though it has slanted slightly, why he feels so dry of mouth, so heavy of heart, so sore in the head.

  He looks one way in the dark room and sees his parents’ bed: empty. He looks the other and sees the pallet where his sisters sleep. Only one body is under the covers and then he remembers: Judith is sick. How could he have forgotten?

  He lurches upright, pulling the bedclothes with him, and makes two discoveries. His head is filled with pain, like a bowl brimful of scalding water. It is a strange, confusing kind of pain – it drives out all thought, all sense of action. It saturates his head, spreading itself to the muscles and focus of his eyes; it tinkers with the roots of his teeth, with the byways of his ears, the paths of his nose, the very shafts of his hair. It feels enormous, significant, bigger than him.

  Hamnet crawls from the bed, dragging the sheet with him, but no matter. He needs to find his mother: amazing how strong this instinct is, even now, as a great lad of eleven. He recalls this sensation, this urge – just – from when he was much younger: the driving need to be with his mother, to be under her gaze, to be by her side, close enough to be able to reach out and touch her, because no one else would do.

  It must be near dawn because the new light of day is seeping into the rooms, thin and pale as milk. He makes it down the stairs, which seem to lurch and sway in front of him, one step at a time. He has to turn to face the wall because everything around him is in motion.

  Downstairs is the following scene: his aunt Eliza is asleep at the table, her head resting on her arms. The candles have burnt out, drowned in pools of themselves. The fire is reduced to a heap of idling ashes. His mother is bent forward, her head on the pallet, asleep, a cloth gripped in her hand. And Judith is looking right at him.

  ‘Jude,’ he says, or tries to say, because his voice doesn’t seem to be working. It rasps; it prickles; it seems unable to get out of his dry and raw throat.

  He drops to his knees and crawls along the straw to reach her.

  Her eyes glitter with a strange, silvery light. She is worse: he can see this. Her cheeks are sunken, white, her lips cracked and bloodless, the swellings in her neck red and shining. He comes to crouch next to his twin, careful not to wake his mother. His hand finds hers; their fingers twine together.

  He sees Judith’s eyes roll back in her head, once, twice. Then they open wide and slide towards him. It seems to take her a great deal of effort.

  Her lips curve upwards in what might be a smile. He feels a pressure on his fingers. ‘Don’t cry,’ she whispers.

  He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same.

  ‘You shall be well,’ she murmurs.

  He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.’ He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’

  Again, the flicker of a smile, the pressure of her fingers. ‘Nay,’ she says, his tears glistening on her face. ‘You shall stay. They need you.’

  He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free. Should he insist it takes him too? Should they go together, just as they always have?

  Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other. Their faces are the same. People remark on this all the time, at least once a day. All it takes is for Hamnet to put on Judith’s shawl or for her to don his hat; they will sit at the table like that, eyes lowered, smiles concealed, and their mother will place a hand on Judith’s shoulder and say, Hamnet, can you bring in the wood? Or their father might come into a room and see what he thinks is his son, dressed in a jerkin, and ask him to conjugate a verb in Latin, only to discover it is his daughter, hiding her laughter, revelling in the illusion, and she will push aside the door to reveal the real son, hidden away.

  Could he pull off their trick, their joke, just once more? He thinks he can. He thinks he will. He glances over his shoulder at the tunnel of dark beside the door. The blackness is depthless, soft, absolute. Turn away, he says to Death. Close your eyes. Just for a moment.

  He slides his hands underneath Judith, one palm under her shoulders, the other under her hips, and he shunts her sideways, towards the fireplace. She is lighter than he expected; she rolls to her side and her eyes open a crack as she rights herself. She watches, frowning, as he lays himself down in the dip her body has made, as he takes her place, as he smooths his hair down, on either side of his face, as he pulls the sheet up over both of them, tucking it under their chins.

  They will look, he is sure, the same. No one will know which is which. It will be easy for Death to make a mistake, to take him in her place.

  She is stirring beside him, trying to sit up. ‘Nay,’ she is saying again. ‘Hamnet, nay.’

  He knew she would know straight away what he was doing. She always does. She is shaking her head, but is too weak to raise herself from the pallet. Hamnet holds the sheet fast over both of them.

  He breathes in. He breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the whorls of her ear; he breathes in his strength, his health, his all. You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.

  They cannot both live: he sees this and she sees this. There is not enough life, enough air, enough blood for both of them. Perhaps there never was. And if either of them is to live, it must be her. He wills it. He grips the sheet, tight, in both hands. He, Hamnet, decrees it. It shall be.

  Susanna, shortly before her second birthday, sits in a basket on the floor of her grandmother’s parlour, her legs crossed, her skirts billowing up around her, filled with air. She holds a wooden spoon in each hand and with these she paddles as fast as she can. She is sculling down the river. The current is fast and weaving. Weeds waft and unravel. She has to paddle and paddle to stay afloat – if she stops, who knows what may happen? Ducks and swans drift alongside her, seemingly se
rene and unruffled, but Susanna knows that their webbed feet are working, working beneath the water. No one but she can see these animals. Not her mother, who stands at the window, her back to the room, scattering seed on the sill. Not her grandmother, who sits at the table, her workbox open in front of her. Not her father, who is a pair of legs, encased in dark stockings, pacing from one wall to another. The soles of his shoes scuff and thud on the surface of Susanna’s river. He walks past a duck, through a swan, across a bank of reeds. Susanna wants to tell him to be careful, to check if he can swim. She has a vision of her father’s head – dark, like his stockings – disappearing beneath the brownish-green lapping waters. She feels her throat clutch, her eyes sting at the thought.

  She looks up at her father and sees that he has stopped pacing. His legs are still, straight, a pair of tree trunks. He is standing in front of his mother, who is still sewing, her needle disappearing and reappearing through the fabric. It looks to Susanna like a fish, a slender silver one, a minnow perhaps or a grayling, leaping out of the water and diving back down, leaping out, diving down, and she is thinking about her river again when she realises that her grandmother has slammed down her sewing, has stood up, has begun to shout at Susanna’s father, right up into his face. Susanna watches, aghast, spoon-paddles poised. She takes in this unusual sight, presses it into her mind: her grandmother, face distorted by anger, her hand gripping the arm of her son; her father wresting his arm from her grip, speaking in a low and menacing tone; then her grandmother gesturing towards Susanna’s mother, rapping out her name – said by her grandmother so that it sounds like Annis – making her mother turn around. Her mother’s dress is stuffed out at the front with another baby. A brother or sister for you, she has been told. Her mother is also holding a squirrel on her arm. Can this be true? Susanna knows it is. The animal’s tail flares red as a flame in the sunlight coming through the glass. It scampers up her mother’s sleeve, to nestle under her cap, next to the hair, which Susanna is sometimes permitted to unravel, to brush, to plait.

  Her mother’s face is serene. She contemplates the parlour, the grandmother, the man, the child in the boat-basket. She strokes the squirrel’s tail; Susanna feels a pull, a longing to do the same, but the squirrel will never let her come near. Her mother strokes the tail and shrugs at whatever is being said to her. She gives a vague smile and turns away, lifting the squirrel down from her shoulder and letting it escape out of the open casement.

  Susanna watches all this. The ducks and swans swim closer and closer, crowding in.

  * * *

  —

  Mary stitches and stitches, the needle rising from the seam and falling into it. She hardly knows what she is doing but she can see that, as she listens to what her son is saying, her stitches are getting bigger, clumsier, and this annoys her in a specific way because she is known for her needlework – she is, she knows it. She tries to keep her head, tries to remain calm, but her son is saying that he has no doubt this plan will work, that he will be able to expand John’s business in London. Mary can barely contain her rage, her scorn. Her daughter-in-law is contributing nothing to this discussion, of course, but merely standing at the window, making half-witted noises into the air.

  There is a reddish, rat-faced squirrel that lives in a tree outside the house: Agnes likes to feed and pet it, from time to time. Mary cannot for the life of her understand why, and she has told her daughter-in-law that it must not enter the house, heaven knows what diseases and plagues it might carry, but Agnes will not listen. Agnes never listens. Not even now, when her husband is proposing to leave the house, to run away, to hide, when what he really ought to be doing is falling on his knees and begging forgiveness, from his mother, who took him and his bride and her swollen belly into her own house not three years ago, from his father who, with God as their witness, has his faults but always tries to do his best by his family. Not-listening is Agnes’s customary state.

  She cannot look at her son; she cannot look at her daughter-in-law, standing there, her belly swollen once more, fussing over that damn squirrel in her hands, as if nothing of any consequence is happening here.

  John treats Agnes as a simpleton, a rural idiot. He nods at her, if he passes her in the house or sees her at table. How are we today, Agnes? he will say, as if to a child. He will look upon her mildly, if she brings a tangle of filthy roots out of her pocket, or opens her hands to show them a collection of shining acorns. He tolerates her eccentricities, her night-time wanderings, her sometimes dishevelled appearance, the daft imaginings and predictions she on occasion comes out with, the various animals and other creatures she brings into the house (a newt, which she put in the water pitcher, a featherless dove, which she nursed back to full health). If Mary complains to him as they lie in bed at night, he pats her hand and says, Let the girl alone. She’s from the country, remember, not from the town. At which Mary could say three things: Agnes is no girl. She is a woman who enticed a much younger boy, our boy, into marriage for the worst possible reason. And: You forgive her too much, and only because of that dowry of hers. Don’t think I don’t see this. And: I am also from the country, brought up on a farm, but do I run about the place in the night and bring wild animals into the house? No, I do not. Some of us, she will sniff to her husband, know how to conduct ourselves.

  ‘It would help matters,’ her son is saying, airily, insistently, ‘help all of us, to expand Father’s business like this. It’s an inspired idea of his. God knows things in this town have become difficult enough for him. If I were to take the trade to London, I am certain I might be able to—’

  Before even realising that her patience has slipped out from under her, like ice from under her feet, she is up, she is standing, she is gripping her son by the arm, she is shaking it, she is saying to him, ‘This whole scheme is nothing but foolishness. I have no idea what put this notion into your father’s head. When have you ever shown the slightest interest in his business? When have you proved yourself worthy of this kind of responsibility? London, indeed! Remember when we sent you to fetch those deerskins in Charlecote and you lost them on the way back? Or the time you traded a dozen gloves for a book? Remember? How can you and he even consider taking business to London? You think there are no glovers in London? They’ll eat you alive, soon as look at you.’

  What she really wants to say is, Don’t go. What she really wants is for him to be able to unpick this marriage to this scullion with wildness running in her veins, for him never to have seen her, this woman from the forest whom everybody said was a strange, unmarriageable sort. Why would she have set her sights on Mary’s son, who had no job, no property? She wishes she had never come up with the scheme to send her son as tutor to that farm by the forest: if she could go back and undo that, she would. Mary hates having this woman in her house, the way she can appear in the room without being heard, the way she looks at you, right into you, right through you, as if you are nothing but water and air to her, the way she croons and sings to the child. What she really wants is for her son never to have got wind of John’s plan to branch out into London. The thought of the city, its crowds, its diseases, stops the breath in her chest.

  ‘Agnes,’ she says, as her son irritably pulls away his arm, ‘surely you agree with me. He cannot go. He cannot just walk away like this.’

  Agnes turns at last, from the window. She is still holding, Mary is incensed to see, the squirrel in her hands. Its tail slides and slips through her fingers; its eyes, gold beads pierced with black, fix themselves on Mary. Beautiful fingers, Agnes has, Mary is pained to notice. Tapering, white, slender. Agnes is, Mary is forced to admit, a striking woman. But it is an unsettling, wrong sort of beauty: the dark hair is ill-matched with the golden-green eyes, the skin whiter than milk, the teeth evenly spaced but pointed, like a fox’s. Mary finds she cannot look at her daughter-in-law for long, she cannot hold her gaze. This creature, this woman, this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite – becaus
e she is that, everyone says so, Mary knows it to be true – bewitched and ensnared her boy, lured him into a union. This, Mary can never forgive.

  Mary appeals to Agnes now. Surely, on this, they may be united. Surely, her daughter-in-law will come down on her side in this matter, the task of keeping him with them, at home, safe, where they can see him.

  ‘Agnes,’ Mary says, ‘we are in agreement, are we not? These are foolish plans with no basis in sense. He must stay here, with us. He should be here, when this baby is born. His place is with you, with the children. He must get down to work, here, in Stratford. He cannot take off like this. Can he? Agnes?’

  Agnes lifts her head and her face is visible for a moment, beneath her cap. She smiles, her most enigmatic, maddening smile, and Mary feels a falling in her chest, sees her mistake, sees that Agnes is never going to side with her.

  ‘I see no reason,’ Agnes says, in her light, fluting voice, ‘to keep him against his will.’

  Fury swarms into Mary’s throat. She could strike the woman, no matter that she is with child. She could take this needle and drive it into the white flesh of her, flesh that her son has touched and taken and kissed and everything else. The thought of it makes Mary sick, makes her stomach heave, the idea of her boy, her child, and this creature.

  She gives an inarticulate noise, half sob, half scream. She hurls her needlework to the floor and stamps away from the table, away from her work, away from her son, stepping over the child, who is sitting in a basket by the hearth, two kitchen spoons in her hands.

  It does not escape her notice, as she makes her way towards the passage, that Agnes and her son start to laugh, softly at first, then more loudly, shushing each other, their footsteps sounding on the flags, walking towards each other, no doubt.