Susanna curls her fingers around the carved ends of the chair arms, which are worn apple-smooth with the touch of a hundred palms. She shuffles her body backwards until her spine meets the chair’s back. It is the chair her father likes to sit in, when he comes home. Twice, three, four, five times a year. Sometimes for a week, sometimes more. During the day, he will carry the chair upstairs, where he leans over a table to work; come the evening, he will carry it back downstairs, to sit by the fire. I come whenever I can, he told her, the last time he was here, touching the tips of his fingers to her cheek. You know this to be true, he had said. He had been packing to leave, again—rolls of paper, close with writing, a spare shirt, a book he had bound with cat gut and a cover of pigskin. Her mother gone, vanished, off to wherever she went, for she hated to see him leave.
He writes them letters, which their mother reads, painstakingly, her finger moving from word to word, her lips forming the sounds. Their mother can read a little but is only able to write in a rudimentary fashion. Their aunt Eliza used to write their replies for them—she possesses a fine hand—but, these days, Hamnet does it. He goes to school, six days a week, from dawn until dusk; he can write as fast as you can speak, and read Latin and Greek, and make columns of figures. The scratch of the quill is like the sound of hens’ feet in the dirt. Their grandfather says, with pride, that Hamnet will be the one to take over the glove business, when he is gone, that the boy has a fine head on his shoulders, that he is a scholar, a born businessman, the only one of them with any sense. Hamnet leans over his school books, gives no sign of having heard, the top of his head towards them all as they sit by the fire, the parting of his hair meandering like a stream over his scalp.
The letters from their father speak of contracts, of long days, of crowds who hurl rotten matter if they do not like what they hear, of the great river in London, of a rival playhouse owner who released a bag of rats at the climax of their new play, of memorising lines, lines, more lines, of the loss of costumes, of fire, of rehearsing a scene where the players are lowered to the stage on ropes, of the difficulty of finding food when they are out on the road, of scenery that falls, of props that are mislaid or stolen, of carts losing their wheels and pitching all into the mud, taverns that refuse them beds, of the money he has saved, of what he needs their mother to do, whom she must speak to in the town, about a tract of land he would like to purchase, a house he has heard is for sale, a field they should buy and then lease, of how he misses them, how he sends his love, how he wishes he could kiss their faces, one by one, how he cannot wait until he is home again.
If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.
The latch of the back door clatters open and into the room comes her grandmother, Mary. She is puffing, red in the face, dark half-circles of sweat under her arms.
“What are you doing, sitting there like that?” Mary says. There is no more serious affront to her than an idle person.
Susanna shrugs. She rubs her fingertips against the worn joints of the chair.
Mary casts her eyes about the room. “Where are the twins?” she demands.
Susanna raises one shoulder, lets it drop.
“Haven’t you seen them?” Mary says, mopping her brow with a handkerchief.
“No.”
“I told them,” Mary mutters, bending to pick up Susanna’s fallen cap, placing it on the table, “to chop the kindling and to light the fire in the cookhouse. And have they done it? No, they have not. They are both in for a hiding when they come in.”
She returns to stand in front of Susanna, hands on hips. “And where’s your mother?”
“Don’t know.”
Mary sighs. Almost says something. But doesn’t. Susanna sees this, senses the unsaid words rippling out like pennants into the air between them.
“Well, come on, then,” Mary says instead, flapping her apron at Susanna, “stir yourself. The supper won’t cook itself. Come and help us, girl, instead of sitting there like a brood hen.”
Mary takes Susanna’s arm and hauls her to her feet. They go out of the back door, which slams shut behind them.
Upstairs, Hamnet wakes with a start.
There is suddenly nothing so excellent as teaching Latin. On the days he is due at Hewlands, the tutor is up at first call, folding his bedclothes and washing himself vigorously at the pail. He combs his hair and beard with careful strokes. He fills his breakfast plate but leaves the table before he has finished. He helps his brothers find their books and escorts them to the door, as they leave for school, waving them off. He has been known to hum, even to yield a polite nod to his father. His sister eyes him, sideways, as he whistles to himself, fastening his jerkin one way then the other, checking his reflection in the window pane before leaving, tucking and retucking his hair behind his ears, banging the door after him.
On the days when he is not at Hewlands, he lies in his bed until his father threatens to tan his hide unless he stirs himself. Once upright, he will slope about the house, sighing, not answering if spoken to, chewing absently on a crust of bread, picking things up, putting them down again. He is observed in the workshop, leaning on the counter, turning over pair after pair of ladies’ gloves, as if searching for some meaning hidden in their seams, their inert fingers. He then sighs once more and pushes them all haphazardly back into their box. He stands over Ned, watching as he stitches a falconer’s belt, so closely that the boy is quite put off his work, causing John to roar at the boy about how there’s only the door between him and the street.
“And you,” John turns on his son, “get out of here. Find some useful occupation. If you can.” John shakes his head, turning his attention back to the cutting of a squirrel skin into useful, narrow strips. “All that education,” he mutters, to himself, to the slippery lengths of pelt, “and not an ounce of sense.”
—
His sister, Eliza, is sent later by her mother to find him. After wandering the ground floor, the yard, she takes the stairs and goes from the boys’ chamber to hers, to her parents’ and back; she calls his name.
The reply takes a while to come and, when it does, it is flat in tone, annoyed, displeased.
“Where are you?” she asks wonderingly, turning her head from side to side.
Again, the long, reluctant pause. Then: “Up here.”
“Where?” she asks, mystified.
“Here.”
Eliza moves from her parents’ chamber, to stand at the foot of the ladder to the attic. She calls his name again.
A sigh. A mysterious rustle. “What do you want?”
For a moment, Eliza thinks he might be doing the thing that boys—young men—do sometimes. She has enough brothers to know that there is something that happens in private, and they are ill-tempered if interrupted. She hesitates at the bottom of the ladder, one hand on a rung.
“May I…come up?”
A silence.
“Are you sick?”
Another sigh. “No.”
“Mother says, can you go to the tannery and then to the—”
There is a strangled, inarticulate cry from above, the sound of something weighty being thrown against the wall, a boot perhaps or a loaf of bread, a movement, then a thud, not unlike someone standing up and hitting their head on a rafter. “Ow,” he screams, and lets out a volley of curses, some startling, some Eliza has never heard before but will ask him about later, when he is in a better humour.