She wipes his forehead, his closed eyes, his cheeks, his lips, the open wound on his brow. She clears the shell-whorls of both ears, the soft stem of neck. She would wash the fever from him, draw it from his skin, if she could. The nightshirt must be cut from him, so she runs the gypsy’s knife down each arm, along the chest.
She is dabbing the cloth, gently, so gently, over the bruised and swollen armpits, when Mary comes in.
She stands in the doorway, looking down at the boy. Her face is wet, her eyes swollen. “I saw the light,” she says, in a cracked voice. “I was not sleeping.”
Agnes nods towards a chair. Mary was with her when Hamnet came into the world; she may stay to see him out of it.
The candle is flaring and burning high, illuminating the ceiling and leaving the edges of the room in shadow. Mary sits in the chair; Agnes can see the white of her nightgown hem.
She dips the cloth, she washes, she dips it again. A repetitive motion. She runs her fingers over the scar on Hamnet’s arm where he fell from a fence at Hewlands, over the puckered knot from a dog bite at a harvest fair. The third finger of his right hand is calloused from gripping a quill. There are small pits in the skin of his stomach from when he had a spotted pox as a small child.
She washes his legs, his ankles, his feet. Mary takes the bowl, changes the water. Agnes washes the feet again, and dries them.
The two women look at each other for a moment, then Mary picks up the folded sheet, holding a corner in each hand. The sheet unravels, opens like an enormous flower, its petals wide, and Agnes is faced with its startling blank white expanse. The brightness of it is star-like, unavoidable, in this dark room.
She takes it. She presses her face to it. It smells of juniper, of cedar, of soap. Its nap is soft, enveloping, forgiving.
Mary helps her to lift Hamnet’s legs and then his torso, to slide the sheet under him.
Hard to fold him in. Hard to lift the sheet’s corners and cover him, smother him in its whiteness. Hard to think, to know, that she will never again see these arms, these knuckles, these shins, that thumbnail, that callus, this face, after this.
She cannot cover him the first time. She cannot do it the second. She takes the sheet, she drapes it over him, she removes it. Does it again. Removes it again. The boy lies, unclothed, washed clean, in the centre of the sheet, hands folded on his chest, chin tilted upwards, eyes shut fast.
Agnes leans on the edge of the board, breathing hard, the fabric gripped in her hands.
Mary watches. She reaches over the body of the boy to touch Agnes’s hand.
Agnes looks at her son. The birdcage ribs, the interlaced fingers, the round bones of the knees, the still face, the corn-coloured hair, which has dried now, standing up from his brow, as it always does. His physical presence has always been so strong, so definite, unlike Judith’s. Agnes has always known if he enters a room, or leaves it: that unmistakable clatter of feet, that passage of air, the heavy thud as he sits down on a chair. And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.
“I cannot do it,” she says.
Mary takes the sheet from her. She tucks it one way, over his legs, then the other, over his chest. Some part of Agnes registers, in the deft way she performs this task, that she has done it before, many times.
Then, together, they reach up to the rafters. Agnes selects rue, comfrey, yellow-eyed chamomile. She takes purple lavender and thyme, a handful of rosemary. Not heartsease, because Hamnet disliked the smell. Not angelica, because it is too late for that and it did not help, did not perform its task, did not save him, did not break the fever. Not valerian, for the same reason. Not milk thistle, for the leaves are so spiny and sharp, enough to pierce the skin, to bring forth drops of blood.
She tucks the dried plants into the sheet, nestles them next to his body, where they whisper their comfort to him.
Next is the needle. Agnes threads it with thick twine. She begins at the feet.
The point is sharp; it punctures the weave of the cloth and slides out the other side. She keeps her eyes on her work, the drawing together of the sheet, to make a shroud. She is a sailor, stitching a sail, preparing a boat that will carry her son into the next world.
She has reached the shins when something makes her lift her head. There is a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. Agnes’s heart clenches like a fist, she almost cries out, There you are, have you come back, but then she sees it is, in fact, Judith. The same face, but this one is alive, stricken, trembling.
Mary starts up from her chair, saying, Back to bed, now, come, you must sleep, but Agnes says, No, let her stay.
She puts down the needle, carefully, because it must not prick him, even now, and holds out her arms. Judith leaves the stairs, she steps into the room, she hurls herself against her mother, pressing her face into her apron, saying something about kittens, and something else about sickness, about changing places, about it being her fault, and then sobs tear through her, gale winds through a tree.
Agnes says to her: It is no fault of yours. None at all. The fever came for him and there was nothing we could do. We must bear it the best we can. Then she says: Do you want to see him?
Mary arranges the sheet so that Hamnet’s face is uncovered. Judith comes to stand beside him, looking down, her hands drawn up, clenched into themselves. Her expression melds from disbelief to timidity to pity to grief and back again.
“Oh,” she says, drawing in breath. “It is really him?”
Agnes, standing next to her, nods.
“It doesn’t look like him.”
Agnes nods again. “Well, he is gone.”
“Gone where?”
“To…” she inhales a deep, almost steady breath, “…to…Heaven. And his body is left behind. We have to take care of it the best we can.”
Judith puts out a hand and touches the cheek of her twin. Tears course down her face, chasing each other. She has always cried such enormous tears, like heavy pearls, quite at odds with the slightness of her frame. She shakes her head, hard, once or twice. Then she says, “Will he never come back?”
And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.
For the first time, the tears come for Agnes. They fill her eyes without warning, blur her vision, pouring forth to run down her face, her neck, soaking her apron, running between her clothes and her skin. They seem to come not just from her eyes but from every pore of her body. Her whole being longs for, grieves for her son, her daughters, her absent husband, for all of them, when she says, “No, my love, he will never come again.”
—
The milky, uncertain light of dawn is reaching into the room. Agnes is making the final stitches in the shroud, tucking it in at his shoulder, neatening the edges near his knees. Mary has emptied the bowls, wrung out the cloths, swept the loose leaves and buds from the floor. Judith has her cheek against the cloth near his shoulder. Susanna has come in from next door and she sits next to her sister, head lowered.
They have made him ready, between them. He is clean and set for burial, parcelled in white cloth.
Agnes finds that her mind rears back, like a horse refusing a ditch, when she thinks of the grave. She can think forward to walking with him to church—Bartholomew and perhaps Gilbert and John will carry him; she can picture the priest blessing the body. But the lowering of him into the ground, into a dark pit, never to be seen again, she cannot think about. She cannot imagine. She cannot possibly permit this to happen to her child.