“Was it the shepherd?” Joan says and she sees that, despite everything, this suggestion makes Agnes grin.
“No,” Agnes gets out, “not the shepherd.”
“Who, then?” Joan demands and is just about to name the son at the neighbouring farm when Agnes twists around and lands a kick on her shin, a kick of such force that Joan staggers backwards, her hands springing open.
Agnes is up, off, away, scrambling to her feet, gathering her skirts. Joan gets up unsteadily, and goes after her. They are in the farmyard when Joan catches up with her. She grabs her by the wrist, swings her round, lands a slap on the girl’s face.
“You will tell me who—” she begins, but never finishes the sentence because there is a noise at the left side of her head: a deafening explosion, like a clap of thunder. For a moment, she cannot comprehend what has happened, what the noise means. Then she feels the pain, the smart of skin, the deeper ache of bone, and she realises that Agnes has struck her.
Joan puts a hand to her face, aghast. “How dare you?” she shrieks. “How dare you hit me? A girl raising a hand to her mother, someone who—”
Agnes’s lip is swollen, bleeding, so her words are slurred, indistinct, but Joan still manages to hear her say: “You are not my mother.”
Enraged, Joan slaps her again. Agnes, unbelievably and without hesitation, slaps her back. Joan lifts her hand again but it is seized from behind. Someone has her around the waist—it is that great brute Bartholomew and he is lifting her up and away, forcing down her hands and holding them fast with the effortless grip of his fingers. Her son, Thomas, is there too, standing now between her and Agnes, holding up a sheep crook, and Bartholomew is telling her to stop, to calm herself. Her other children stand by the henhouse, open-mouthed, amazed. Caterina has her arms around Joanie, who is crying. Margaret holds little William, who is burying his face in her neck.
Joan feels herself carried to the other side of the yard and Bartholomew is restraining her, asking what is amiss, what has brought this on, and she is telling him, pointing a finger at Agnes, now being helped to her feet by Thomas.
Bartholomew’s face falls as he listens. He closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out. He rubs a hand over the bristles of his beard and examines his feet for a moment.
“The Latin tutor,” he says, and looks across at Agnes.
Agnes doesn’t reply but lifts her chin a notch.
Joan looks from stepson to stepdaughter, to sons, to daughters. All of them, save the stepdaughter, drop their gaze and she realises that they all, every one of them, saw what she did not. “The Latin tutor?” she repeats. She pictures him suddenly, standing at a gate in the furthest field, asking her for Agnes’s hand, in a faltering voice. She had almost forgotten. “Him? That—that boy? That wastrel? That wageless, useless, beardless—” She breaks off to laugh, a harsh, mirthless sound that leaves her chest feeling emptied and hot. She remembers it all, now, the lad standing there as she told him no; she remembers feeling a brief stab of pity for him, that young lad, his face so crestfallen, and with such a father, too. But Joan had dismissed the thought of him, as soon as he had left her sight.
Joan shakes off Bartholomew’s hand. She becomes focused, ruthless. She marches into the house, past Agnes, past her children, past the chickens. She bangs open the door and, once inside, is fast and thorough. She moves through the room, collecting anything that belongs to her stepdaughter. A pair of shifts, a spare cap, an apron. A wooden comb, a stone with a hole, a belt.
The family is still gathered in the farmyard when Joan comes out of the house and hurls a bundle at Agnes’s feet.
“You,” she cries, “are banished from this house for ever more!”
Bartholomew shifts his gaze from Agnes to Joan and back again. He folds his arms and steps forward. “This is my house,” he says, “left to me, in my father’s will. And I say that Agnes may stay.”
Joan stares at him, wordless, the colour rising in her cheeks. “But…” she blusters, trying to rally her thoughts, “…but…the terms of the will stated that I may stay in the house until such time—”
“You may stay,” Bartholomew says, “but the house is mine.”
“But I was given the running of the house!” She seizes upon this triumphantly, desperately. “And you the care of the farm. So by that fact, I am within my rights to send her away, for this is a matter of the house, not of the farm and—”
“The house is mine,” Bartholomew repeats softly. “And she stays.”
“She cannot stay,” Joan shrieks, infuriated, powerless. “You need to think about—about your brothers and sisters, this family’s reputation, not to mention your own, our standing in—”
“She stays,” Bartholomew says.
“She has to go, she must.” Joan tries to think fast, scrabbling about for something to make him change his mind. “Think of your father. What would he have said? It would have broken his heart. He would never—”
“She will stay. Unless it comes to pass that—”
Agnes puts a hand on her brother’s sleeve. They look at each other for a long moment, without speaking. Then Bartholomew spits into the dirt and lifts a hand to her shoulder. Agnes smiles at him crookedly, with her split and bleeding mouth. Bartholomew nods in reply. She sweeps a sleeve up and over her face; she unpicks the knot of the bundle, ties and reties it.
Bartholomew watches as she shoulders the bundle. “I’ll see to it,” he says to her, touching her hand. “Not to worry.”
“I shan’t,” Agnes says.
She walks, only a little unsteadily, across the farmyard. She enters the apple store and, after a few moments, emerges with her kestrel on her glove. The bird is hooded, wings folded, but its head pivots and twitches, as if it is acquainting itself with its new circumstances.
Agnes shoulders her pack and, without saying good-bye, exits the farmyard, taking the path around the side of the house, and is gone.
—
He is behind his father’s stall in the market, lounging against the counter. The day is crisp, with the startling metallic cold of early winter. He is watching his breath leave his body in a visible, vanishing stream, half listening to a woman debate squirrel-lined versus rabbit-trimmed gloves, when Eliza materialises beside him.
She gives him an odd, wide-eyed, teeth-gritted smile.
“You need to go home,” she says, in a low voice, without letting her fixed expression falter. She then turns to the browsing woman and says, “Yes, madam?”
He pushes himself upright. “Why do I need to go home? Father told me I should—”
“Just go,” she hisses, “now,” and addresses the customer, in a louder tone: “I believe the rabbit trim to be the very warmest.”
He lopes across the market, weaving in and out of the stalls, dodging a cart laden with cabbages, a boy carrying a bundle of thatch. He is in no hurry: it will be some complaint of his father’s about his conduct or his chores or his forgetfulness or his laziness or his inability to remember important things or his reluctance to put in what his father has the temerity to call “an honest day’s work.” He will have forgotten to take an order or to pick up skin from the tanners or omitted to chop the wood for his mother. He wends his way up the wide thoroughfare of Henley Street, stopping to pass remarks with various neighbours, to pat a child on the head and, finally, he turns into the door of his house.
He wipes his boots against the matting, letting the door close behind him, and casts a glance into his father’s workshop. His father’s chair is empty, pushed back, as if in haste. The thin shoulders of the apprentice are bent over something at the workbench. At the sound of the latch hooking into itself, the boy turns his head and looks at him, with round, frightened eyes.