She says his name. No response. She says it again. He raises his chin and looks at her: his face is horrifying to her. Grey, puffy, beard straggly and unkempt. How did he get like this? How did it happen? How can she not have noticed this change coming? What is it she has not seen, or chosen not to see?
“Are you ill?” she asks him.
“Me?” he says, and it seems to take him a long time to hear her, to articulate a response. “No. Why do you ask?”
“You do not look well.”
He sighs. He rubs a hand over his brow, his eyes. “Do I not?” he says.
She stands, shifting Susanna to her hip. She touches his forehead, which feels clammy and cool, like the skin of a frog. He twists irritably out of her grasp, waving away her hand.
“All’s well,” he says, and his words are heavy, as if he is spitting out pebbles as he speaks. “Don’t fuss.”
“What ails you?” she says. Susanna is kicking her legs, trying to turn her mother’s face towards her, telling her she needs to sing.
“Nothing,” he says. “I’m tired. That is all.” He stands, scraping the chair against the floor. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Why don’t you eat?” Agnes asks, trying to shush Susanna, bouncing her up and down. “Some bread? Honey?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Remember your father wanted you to go early to—”
He interrupts her, with a curt wave of his hand. “Tell him to send Gilbert. I’ll not go anywhere today.” He heads for the stairs, dragging his feet across the floor, pulling the misty smell after him, like a ream of old, unwashed cloth. “I need to sleep,” he says.
Agnes watches him go up the stairs, pulling himself up by the rail. She turns to look into the round, dark, wise eyes of her daughter.
“Sing, Mamma” is Susanna’s advice.
—
In the still of the night, she whispers to him, asks him what is wrong, what is on his mind, can she help him? She puts her hand to his chest, where she feels his heart tap against her palm, over and over, over and over, as if asking the same question and getting no answer.
“Nothing,” is what he replies.
“It must be something,” she says. “Can you not say?”
He sighs, his chest lifting and falling under her hand. He fidgets with the sheet edge, rearranges his legs. She feels the scrape of his shin against hers, the restless tug of the sheet. The bed-curtains are close around them, forming a cave where the two of them lie together, with Susanna asleep on the pallet, arms flung wide, her mouth pursed, hair plastered to her cheeks.
“Is it…” she begins, “…are you…do you wish we had not…wed? Is that it?”
He turns to her, for what feels like the first time in many days, and his face is pained, aghast. He presses his hand down on top of hers. “No,” he says. “Never. How could you say such a thing? You and Susanna are all I live for. Nothing else matters.”
“What is it, then?” she says.
He lifts her fingers, one by one, to his lips, kissing their tips. “I don’t know,” he says. “Nothing. A heaviness of spirit. A melancholy. It’s nothing.”
She is just falling into sleep, when he says, or seems to say, “I am lost. I have lost my way.”
He moves towards her, then, and grips her round the waist, as if she is drifting away from him, into huge, tidal waters.
—
Over the next while, she observes him carefully, in the manner of a doctor watching a patient. She sees how he cannot sleep at night but then cannot rouse himself in the morning. How he rises at midday, groggy, whey-faced, his mood flat and grey. The smell off him is worse then, the sour, rank scent soaked into his clothing, his hair. His father comes to the door, shouting and bawling, telling him to stir himself, to put in a day’s work. She sees how she, Agnes, must remain calm, steady, must make herself bigger, in a way, to keep the house on an even keel, not to allow it to be taken over by this darkness, to square up to it, to shield Susanna from it, to seal off her own cracks, not to let it in.
She sees how he drags his feet and sighs when he goes off to teach his pupils. She watches him stare out of the window when his brother Richard returns from school. She sees the way he sits at table with his parents, a scowl on his face, his hand toying with the food, with the plate. She sees him reach for the ale pitcher when his father praises Gilbert’s handling of a certain worker at the tannery. She sees Edmond come and stand at his side and lay his head on his sleeve; the boy has to butt him with his forehead several times before his brother realises he is there. She sees the absent, weary way he lifts the child to his lap. She sees Edmond stare intently into his brother’s face, a small hand pressed to each stubbled cheek. She sees that Edmond, alone, is the only other person who notices that something is amiss with him.
She sees how her husband starts in his seat if the cat leaps on the table, if the door slams in a breeze, if a plate is put down too roughly. She sees the way John snaps at him, sneers, invites Gilbert to join in with this. You are useless, she hears John say to him, when he spills ale on the tablecloth. Can’t even pour your own ale, eh, eh, Gilbert, did you see?
She sees the cloud above him grow darker, gather its horrible rank strength. She wants to reach across the table then, to lay her hand on his arm. She wants to say, I am here. But what if her words are not enough? What if she is not enough of a salve for his nameless pain? For the first time in her life, she finds she does not know how to help someone. She does not know what to do. And, anyway, she cannot take his hand, not here, not at this table. There are plates and cups and candlesticks between them, and Eliza is standing now to clear the meat dish and Mary is trying to feed Susanna cuts of meat that are too large for her. There is so much to do in a family of this size, so much to see to, so many people needing so many different things. How easy is it, Agnes thinks, as she lifts the plates, to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stoppered too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until—what?
Agnes doesn’t know.
—
He drinks too much, late into the night, not out with his friends, but sitting at the table in the bedchamber. He cuts feather after feather into quills, but none is quite right, he says. One is too long, another too short, a third too thin for his fingers. They split or scratch the page or blur and spot. Is it too much to ask for a man to have a working quill? Agnes wakes one night to hear him shout this, hurling the whole lot at the wall, ink pot and all, making Susanna wail. She doesn’t recognise him, then, holding her screaming child to her side: his livid face, his dishevelled hair, his yelling mouth, the splash of ink, like a black island, on the wall.
In the morning, as he lies sleeping, she ties Susanna to her back and walks the path to Hewlands, stopping on the way to gather feathers, the heads of poppies, sprays of nettles.
She finds Bartholomew by following a noise of repetitive thudding. He is at the nearest fold, swinging a hammer on to the top of a fence post, driving it into the earth: thwack, crack. He is making enclosures for the new lambs. She knows that he could have told one of the others to do this job but he is a good fencer: his height, his extraordinary strength, his unswerving, unstinting approach to a task.
As she approaches, he lets the hammer fall to his feet. He waits, mopping at his face, watching her as she walks towards him.
“I brought you this,” Agnes says, holding out a hunk of bread and a packet of the cheese she makes herself, in the outhouse in Henley Street, straining ewe’s milk through muslin.
Bartholomew nods, accepts the food, takes a bite and chews, all without taking his eyes from Agnes’s face. He lifts the corner of Susanna’s bonnet and passes a finger over her sleeping cheek. Then his eyes are pulled back to Agnes. She smiles at him; he continues to chew.