—
She knows better than to look out of the window at the hour school begins and ends. She keeps herself busy, head averted. She will not go out at this time.
Every golden-haired child in the street puts on his gait, his aspect, his character, making her heart leap, like a deer. Some days, the streets are full of Hamnets. They walk about. They jump and run. They jostle each other. They walk towards her, they walk away from her, they disappear around corners.
Some days she doesn’t go out at all.
—
The lock of his hair is kept in a small earthenware jar above the fire. Judith has sewn a silk pouch for it. She drags a chair to the mantel when she thinks no one is looking and gets it down.
The hair is the same colour as her own; it might have been cut from her own head; it slips like water through her fingers.
—
What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?
Her mother, dipping a folded, doubled wick into heated tallow, pauses but doesn’t turn around.
If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?
I don’t know, her mother says.
Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below.
Maybe there isn’t one, she suggests.
Maybe not, says her mother.
—
Agnes is upstairs. she is sitting at the desk where hamnet kept his collection of pebbles in four pots. He liked to tip them out periodically and sort them in different ways. She is peering into each pot, observing that the last time he arranged them, he did so by colour, not size and—
She looks up to see her daughters standing before her. Susanna has a basket in one hand, a knife in the other. Judith stands behind her, holding a second basket. They are both wearing a rather severe expression.
“It is time,” Susanna says, “to gather rosehips.”
It is something they do every year, at this time, just as summer tips towards autumn, scouring the hedgerows, filling their baskets with the hips that swell and grow in the wake of the petals. She has taught them, these daughters of hers, how to find the best ones, to split them with a knife, to boil them up, to make a syrup for coughs and chest colds, to see them all through the winter.
This year, though, the hips’ ripeness and their brazen colour are an insult, as are the blackberries turning purple, the elder tree’s darkening berries.
Agnes’s hands, curled around the pebble pots, feel enfeebled, useless. She doesn’t think she is able to grip the knife, to grasp the thorned stems, to pluck the waxy-skinned hips. The idea of harvesting them, bringing them home, stripping off their leaves and stems, then boiling them over a fire: she doesn’t think she can do that at all. She would rather lie down in her bed and pull the blankets over her head.
“Come,” says Susanna.
“Please, Mamma,” says Judith.
Her daughters press their hands to her face, to her arms; they haul her to her feet; they lead her down the stairs, out into the street, talking all the while of the place they have seen, filled with rosehips, they tell her, simply filled. She must come with them, they say; they will show her the way.
—
The hedgerows are constellations, studded with fire-red hips.
—
When they were first married, he took her out one night into the street and it was passing strange, to be there, the place so quiet, so black, so empty.
Look up, he had said to her, standing behind her and putting his arms around her, his hands coming to rest on the curve of her stomach. She leant back her head so that it lay propped on his shoulder.
Balanced on the tops of the houses was a sky scattered with jewels, pierced with silver holes. He had whispered into her ear names and stories, his finger outstretched, pulling shapes and people and animals and families out of the stars.
Constellations, he had said. That was the word.
The baby that was Susanna turning over in her belly, as if listening.
—
Judith’s father writes to say that business is good, that he sends his love, that he won’t be home until after winter because the roads are bad.
Susanna reads the letter aloud.
His company are having a great success with a new comedy. They took it to the Palace and the word was that the Queen was much diverted by it. The river in London is frozen over. He is looking to buy more land in Stratford, she finishes. He has been to the wedding of his friend Condell; there had been a wonderful wedding breakfast.
There is a silence. Judith looks from her mother, to her sister, to the letter.
A comedy? her mother asks.
—
It is not easy to be alone in a house like this, Judith finds. There will always be someone bustling in on you, someone calling your name, a person on your heels.
There is a place that was always hers and Hamnet’s, when they were small, a wedge-shaped gap between the wall of the cookhouse and that of the pig-pen: a narrow opening, just possible to squeeze yourself through, if you turned sideways, and then a widening three-corner space. Room enough for two children to sit, legs outstretched, backs to the stone wall.
Judith takes rushes from the floor of the workshop, one by one, hides them in the folds of her skirt. She slips through the gap when no one is looking and weaves the rushes into a roof. The kittens, who are cats now, slink in after her, two of them, with identical striped faces and white-socked feet.
Then she may sit there, hands folded, and let him come, if he will.
She sings to herself, to the cats, to the rush roof above her, a string of notes and words, toora-loora-tirra-lirra-ay-ay-ayee, sings on and on, until the sound finds the hollow place within her, finds it and pours into it, filling it and filling, but of course it will never be full because it has no shape and no edge.
The cats watch her, with their implacable green eyes.
—
Agnes stands in the market with four other women, a tray of honeycombs in her hands. Her stepmother, Joan, is among them. One of them is complaining, telling of how her son refuses to accept an apprenticeship she and her husband have arranged for him, how he shouts if they try to talk to him about it, how he says he will not go, they cannot make him. Even when, the woman says, her eyes popping wide, his father beats him.
Joan leans forward to tell of how her youngest son refuses to rise from his bed in the morning. The other women nod and grumble. And in the evening, she says, her face in a grimace, he will not get into it, stamping around the house, stirring the fire, demanding food, keeping everyone else awake.
Another woman answers with a story about how her son will not stack the firewood in the way she likes, and her daughter has refused an offer of marriage, and what is she to do with children like that?
Fools, Agnes thinks, you fools. She keeps several hand-widths between herself and her stepmother. She stares down into the repeating shapes of the honeycomb. She would like to shrink herself down to the size of a bee and lose herself among them.
—
“Do you think,” Judith says to Susanna, as they push shirts, shifts and stockings under the surface of the water, “that Father doesn’t come home because of…my face?”
The washhouse is hot, airless, full of steam and soap bubbles. Susanna, who hates laundry more than any other task, snaps, “What are you talking about? He does come home. He comes home all the time. And what has your face to do with anything?”