She reaches out with her spare hand and brings the blanket and scissors out of the basket. She lays the baby on the blanket and works at the cord with the scissors. Who would ever think it could be so thick, so strong, still pulsing like a long, striped heart? The colours of birth assail Agnes: the red, the blue, the white.
She tugs on her shift, baring her breast, lifting the baby to it, watching in something close to awe as her daughter’s mouth opens wide, as she clamps down and begins to suck. Agnes lets out a laugh. Everything works. The baby knows what to do, better than her.
—
In the house and, shortly afterwards, in the whole town, there follows an enormous hue and cry, a panic and a lament. Eliza is in tears; Mary is screeching, running up and down the stairs in the narrow apartment, as if Agnes has been hiding in a cupboard. I had it all ready for her, she keeps shouting, the birthing room, everything she needs, right here. John thunders in and out of the workshop, alternately roaring that he can’t possibly work with all this racket, and then, where the devil has she got to?
Ned, the apprentice, is dispatched to Hewlands, to see if they have any news of her. No one can find Bartholomew, who went out early in the morning, but soon all the sisters and Joan, neighbours and villagers are out, searching for Agnes. Have you seen a woman, greatly with child, carrying a basket? The sisters have been up and down the lane, asking anyone they meet. But no one has seen her, save the wife of the baker, who said she went in the direction of the Shottery path. She wrung her hands, threw her apron over her head, saying, Why did I let her go, why, when I knew something wasn’t right? Gilbert and Richard are sent out into the streets, to apprehend passers-by, to see if anyone has any news at all.
And the husband? He is the one to find Bartholomew.
When Bartholomew spies him on the path that runs along the outer edge of his land, he throws down the bale of straw he is holding and strides towards him. The lad—Bartholomew cannot think of him as anything other than a lad, soft-handed towns-boy that he is, hair all smoothed back, a ring through his ear—blanches to see him coming over the field. The dogs reach him first and they bound and bark around him.
“What?” Bartholomew demands, as he comes within earshot. “Is she brought to bed? Is all well?”
“Eh,” the husband says, “the situation, such as it is, if indeed one might call it that, is—”
Bartholomew’s fingers seize the front of the husband’s jerkin. “Speak plainly,” he says. “Now.”
“She’s disappeared. We don’t know where she is. Someone saw her, early this morning, heading in this direction. Have you seen her? Have you any clue as to where she—”
“You don’t know where she is?” Bartholomew repeats. He stares at him for a long moment, his grip tightening on the jerkin, then speaks in a quiet, menacing voice: “I thought I made myself very clear. I told you to look after her. Didn’t I? I said that you were to take good care of her. The best of care.”
“I have! I do!” The husband struggles in his grasp but he is a good head and shoulders shorter than Bartholomew, who is a colossus of a man, with hands like bowls and shoulders like an oak tree.
From nowhere, and without warning, a bee drones between them; they feel the movement of it on their faces. Bartholomew reaches up instinctively, to flick it away, and the husband takes the opportunity to wrest himself from Bartholomew’s grasp.
He darts sideways, agile, ready, up on his toes.
“Listen,” he says, from his new distance, holding up his hands, bouncing from foot to foot, “I don’t want to fight you—”
Despite everything, Bartholomew wants to laugh. The idea of this pasty-faced scholar engaging in bare-knuckled combat with him is preposterous. “Damn right you don’t,” he says.
“We have the same end in mind here,” the husband says, stepping back and forth, “you and I. Wouldn’t you say?”
“What end would that be?”
“We both want to find her. Don’t we? To make sure she’s safe. And the baby.”
At the thought of Agnes’s safety—and the baby’s—Bartholomew’s anger rises again, like a pot left on the boil.
“You know,” he mutters, “I have never really understood why my sister chose you, above all others. ‘What do you want to go marrying him for?’ I said to her. ‘What use is he?’ ” Bartholomew takes his crook and places it squarely between his feet. “You know what she said to me?”
The husband, standing straight as a reed now, arms folded, lips pressed together, shakes his head. “What did she say?”
“That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.”
The husband stares, as if he can’t believe what he is hearing. His face is anguished, pained, astonished. “She said that?”
Bartholomew nods. “Now, I can’t pretend to understand her choice, in marrying you, but I do know one thing about my sister. You want to know what it is?”
“Yes.”
“She is rarely wrong. About anything. It’s a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask. So if she thinks that about you, there’s a possibility it’s true.”
“I cannot divine,” the husband puts in, “whether—”
Bartholomew continues, speaking over him, “It is of no importance, either way, at this present moment. Our task now is to find her.”
The husband says nothing, but lowers himself to the ground, his head in his hands. When he speaks, his voice is muffled. “She wrote something on a page before she left. It was perhaps some manner of message for me.”
“What did it say?”
“Something about rain. And branches. But I couldn’t properly make it out.”
Bartholomew regards him for a second or two, turning these words over and over in his mind. Rain and branches. Branches. Rain. Then he lifts his crook and tucks it into his belt.
“Get up,” he says.
The husband is still speaking, more to himself than anyone else. “She was there this morning and then she wasn’t,” he is saying. “The Fates have intervened and swept her away from me, as if on a tide, and I have no idea how to find her, no idea where to look and—”
“I do.”
“—I shall not rest until I find her, until we are—” The husband stops short and raises his head. “You do?”
“Yes.”
“How?” he demands. “How can you know her mind so quickly and yet I, who am married to her, cannot begin—”
Bartholomew has had enough of this. He nudges the husband’s leg with his boot. “Up, I tell you,” he says. “Come.”
The lad springs upright and regards Bartholomew with a wary air. “Where?”
“The forest.”
Bartholomew puts two fingers into his mouth and, without taking his eyes off the lad’s face, whistles for his dogs.
—
Agnes is dozing, somewhere between awake and asleep, with the baby tucked at her breast, when Bartholomew finds them.
He has walked over the fields, his dogs at his heels, the husband trailing in his wake, still moaning and whining, and he has found her, here, just where he suspected she might be.
“There now,” he says to her, bending to hoist her into his arms—the mess and stink and matter of birth are of no consequence to him. “You cannot stay here.”
She protests, lightly, drowsily, but then leans her head into her brother’s chest. The baby, he notices, is alive and its cheeks are drawing in and out. At suck, then. Bartholomew nods to himself.