She can hear, at the back of the house, her mother banging pots and pans in the cookhouse. She is in a filthy temper and has already caused the maid to cry. Mary is pouring all her ire and fury into the food. The joint won’t cook. The pastry for the pie will crumble. The dough hasn’t risen fast enough. The sweetmeats taste grainy. It seems to Eliza that the cookhouse is at the centre of a whirlwind and she must stay here, away from it, with Edmond, where they are safe.
Tuck, tuck, go her fingertips, severed stem ends into the weave; the palm of the opposite hand turns the circle of the crown as she works.
Above her, she can hear the thud and clatter of her brothers’ feet. They are wrestling at the top of the stair, by the sound of it. A grunt, a gust of laughter, Richard’s plaintive plea to be let go, Gilbert’s false reassurances, a thud, a creak of floorboard, then the smothered “Ow!”
“Boys!” comes the roar from the glove shop. “Stop that this instant! Or I’ll come up there and give you something to wail about, wedding or no wedding.”
The three brothers appear in the doorway, jostling each other out of the way. Eliza’s eldest brother, the bridegroom, skids across the room, seizes her, kisses the top of her head, then whirls around to lift Edmond high in the air. Edmond is still gripping his wooden spoon in one hand and a fistful of leaves in the other. His eldest brother spins him around, once, twice. Edmond quirks his eyebrows and smiles, the air lifting the hair from his forehead. He tries to cram the spoon sideways into his mouth. Then he is set down and all three bigger brothers promptly disappear out of the door into the street. Edmond lets his spoon drop, looking after them, forlorn, unable to understand this sudden desertion.
Eliza laughs. “They’ll be back, Ed,” she says. “By and by. When he is wed. You’ll see.”
Agnes appears in the doorway. Her hair is all unravelled and brushed. It spreads down her back and over her shoulders like black water. She is wearing a gown Eliza hasn’t seen before, in a pale primrose, the front of which is ever so slightly pushed out.
“Oh,” says Eliza, clasping her hands together. “The yellow will pick out the hearts of the daisies.” She leaps to her feet, holding out the crown. Agnes ducks down so that Eliza can place it on her head.
—
Frost has descended overnight. Each leaf, each blade, each twig on the road to the church has encased itself, replicated itself, in frost. The ground is crisp and hard underfoot. The groom and his men are up ahead: the noise from their group is of hooting, yelling, breaks of song, the trill of a pipe, played by a friend who skips half on, half off the verge. Bartholomew brings up the rear, his height obscuring those ahead of him, his head lowered.
The bride walks in a straight line, not looking left or right. With her are Eliza, Edmond riding on her hip, Mary, several of Agnes’s friends, the baker’s wife. Off to the side are Joan and her three daughters. Joan is pulling her youngest son by the hand. The sisters walk in tight formation, arm-in-arm, three abreast, giggling and whispering to each other. Eliza glances sideways at them, several times, before turning her head away.
Agnes sees this, sees Eliza’s sadness gather about her, like fog. She sees everything. The rosehips on the hedgerow that are turning to brown at their tips; unpicked blackberries, too high to reach; the swoop and dip of a thrush from the branches of an oak by the side of the track; the white stream of breath from the mouth of her stepmother as she carries the youngest boy on her back, the strands of strangely colourless hair escaping from her kerchief, the wide swing of her hips. Agnes sees that Caterina has her mother’s nose, flat and broad across the bridge, Joanie her mother’s low hairline and Margaret the thick neck and elongated earlobes. She sees that Caterina has the gift or ability to make her life happy, and Margaret, to a lesser degree, but that Joanie does not. She sees her father in the youngest boy, walking now, and holding Caterina’s hand: his fair hair, the squarish set of his head, the upturned ends of his mouth. She feels the ribbons tied about her stockings, tightening and releasing as the muscles of her legs work beneath her. She feels the prickle and shift of the herbs and berries and flowers of her crown, feels the minute trickle of water within the veins of their stems and leaves. She feels a corresponding motion within herself, in time with the plants, a flow or current or tide, the passage of blood from her to the child within. She is leaving one life; she is beginning another. Anything may happen.
She senses, too, somewhere off to the left, her own mother. She would be here with her had life taken a different turn. She would be the one holding her hand as Agnes walked to her wedding, her fingers encasing her daughter’s. Her footsteps would have followed her beat. They would be walking this path together, side by side. It would have been her making the crown, affixing it to Agnes’s head, brushing the hair so that it hung all around her. She would have taken the blue ribbons and wound them around her stockings, woven them into the hanks of her hair. It would have been her.
So it follows, of course, that she will be here now, in whatever form she can manage. Agnes does not need to turn her head, does not want to frighten her away. It is enough to know that she is there, manifest, hovering, insubstantial. I see you, she thinks. I know you are here.
She looks ahead instead, along the road, where her father would have been, up ahead with the men, and sees her husband-to-be. The dark worsted wool of his cap, the motion of his walk, springier than that of the other men around him—his brothers, his father, his friends, her brothers. Look back, she wills him, as she walks, look back at me.
She is unsurprised when he does exactly that, his head turning, his face revealing itself to her as he pushes back his hair to look at her. He holds her gaze for a moment, pausing in the road, then smiles. He makes a gesture, holding up one hand and moving the other towards it. She tilts her head quizzically. He does it again, still smiling. She thinks he is miming a ring going on to a finger—something like that. Then one of his brothers, Gilbert, Agnes thinks, but can’t be sure, launches himself at him sideways, seizing him around the shoulders and shoving him. He responds in kind, wrestling Gilbert into a headlock, making the boy howl in outrage.
The priest is waiting at the church door, his cassock a dark shape against the frost-whitened stone. The men and boys fall silent as they move up the path. They gather in a cluster near him, nervous, silent, their faces flushed in the morning air. As Agnes comes up the church path, the priest smiles at her, then breathes in.
He closes his eyes and speaks: “I declare the banns for this marriage between this man and this woman.” A stillness falls over all of them, even the children. But Agnes is making an internal plea of her own: If you are here, she thinks, show me now, make yourself known, now, please, I am waiting for you, I am here. “If any of ye know of any cause or just impediment why these persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it. This is for the first time of asking.”
The lids of his eyes open and he looks around them all, one by one. Thomas is poking James’s neck with a holly leaf; Bartholomew cuffs him quickly, efficiently, on the back of the head. Richard is jigging from foot to foot, looking very much as if he needs to relieve himself. Caterina and Margaret are covertly eyeing the groom’s brothers, assessing their worth. John is grinning, thumbs slotted into the straining ties of his doublet. Mary stares at the ground, her face immobile, almost stricken.