Bartholomew continues to eat his porridge in silence, as if he can’t hear her, his spoon dipping and rising, dipping and rising. His wife becomes nervous and spills the milk, half on the floor and half on the fire, and Joan scolds her, getting down on her hands and knees to mop up the mess. A child starts to cry. The wife tries to fan the fire back to life.
Bartholomew pushes the remainder of his breakfast away from him. He stands, Joan’s voice still twittering away behind him, like a starling’s. He claps his hat to his head and leaves the farmhouse.
He walks over the land to the east of Hewlands, where the ground has become boggy of late. Then he comes back.
His wife, his stepmother and his children gather round him again, asking, Is it bad news from London? Has something happened? Joan has, of course, examined the letter, which has been passed from hand to hand in the farmhouse, but neither she nor Bartholomew’s wife can read. Some of the children can but they cannot decipher the script of their mysterious uncle.
Bartholomew, still ignoring the women’s questions, takes out a sheet of paper and a quill. Painstakingly, he dips into the ink and, with his tongue held firmly between his teeth, he writes back to his brother-in-law and says, yes, he will help.
—
Several weeks later, he goes to find his sister. He looks for her first at the house, then at the market, and then at a cottage where the baker’s wife directs him—a small dark place on the road out by the mill.
When Bartholomew pushes open the door, she is applying a poultice to the chest of an elderly man lying on a rush mat. The room is dim; he can see his sister’s apron, the white shape of her cap; he can smell the acrid stink of the clay, the damp of the dirt floor and something else—the overripe stench of sickness.
“Wait outside,” she says to him softly. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
He stands in the street, slapping his gloves against his leg. When she appears at his side, he begins to walk away from the door of the sick man.
Agnes looks at him as they proceed towards the town; he can feel her reading him, assessing his mood. After a moment or two, he reaches across and takes the basket from her arm. A brief glance into it reveals a cloth parcel, with some kind of dried plant sticking out of it, a bottle with a seal, some mushrooms and a half-burnt candle. He suppresses a sigh. “You shouldn’t go into places like that,” he says, as they approach the marketplace.
She straightens her sleeves but says nothing.
“You shouldn’t,” he says again, knowing all the while that he is wasting his breath. “You need to look to your own health.”
“He’s dying, Bartholomew,” she says simply. “And he has no one. His wife, his children. All dead.”
“If he’s dying, why are you trying to cure him?”
“I’m not.” Her eyes flash as she looks at him. “But I can ease his passage, take away his pain. Isn’t that what we all deserve, in our final hour?”
She puts out a hand and tries to take back her basket but Bartholomew won’t let go.
“Why are you in such an ill humour today?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Joan,” she says, finally giving up her pointless struggle for the basket and fixing him with a gimlet gaze, “is it not?”
Bartholomew inhales, moving the basket to his other hand so it is out of Agnes’s reach, once and for all. He hasn’t come here to talk about Joan but it was foolish of him to think that Agnes wouldn’t notice his gloom. There had been an argument over breakfast with his stepmother. He has been saving money for years to extend the farmhouse, to put on an upper floor and further rooms at the back—he is weary of sleeping in a hall with endless children, a gurning stepmother and various beasts. Joan has been obstructive about the plan from the start. This place was good enough for your father, she cried, as she served the porridge this morning, why isn’t it good enough for you? Why must you raise the thatch, take the roof from over our heads?
“Do you want my advice?” Agnes asks.
Bartholomew shrugs, his mouth set.
“With Joan, you must pretend,” Agnes says, as they come in sight of the first stalls of the marketplace, “that what you want isn’t what you want at all.”
“Eh?”
Agnes pauses to examine a row of cheeses, to greet a woman in a yellow shawl, before walking on.
“Let her believe you’ve changed your mind,” she says, as she weaves ahead of him, in and out of the market crowds. “That you don’t want to rebuild the hall. That you think it’s too much bother, too costly.” Agnes throws him a look from over her shoulder. “I promise you, within a week, she will be saying that she thinks the hall has become too crowded, that more rooms are needed, that the only reason you aren’t building them is because you’re too lazy.”
Bartholomew considers this as they reach the far side of the market. “You think that will work?”
Agnes allows him to catch up with her, so that they are once again walking side by side. “Joan is never content and she cannot rest if others are. The only thing that pleases her is making others as unhappy as she is. She likes company in her perpetual dissatisfaction. So hide what will make you happy. Make her believe you want its opposite. Then all will be as you wish. You’ll see.”
Agnes is just about to turn towards Henley Street, when Bartholomew catches her elbow and tucks her arm into his, easing her down a different street, towards the Guildhall and the river.
“Let us walk this way,” he says.
She hesitates for a moment, giving him a quizzical look, then silently relents.
They pass by the windows of the grammar school. It is possible to hear the pupils chanting a lesson. A mathematical formula, a verb construction, a verse of poetry, Bartholomew cannot tell what it is. The noise is rhythmic, fluting, like the cries of distant marsh birds. When he glances at his sister, he sees her head is bent, her shoulders hunched inwards, as if she is protecting herself from hail. The grip on his arm tells him that she wishes to cross the street, so they do.
“Your husband,” Bartholomew says, as they wait for a horse to pass, “wrote to me.”
Agnes raises her head. “He did? When?”
“He instructed me to buy a house for him and—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“But why didn’t you tell me before now, before I—”
“Do you want to see it?”
She presses her lips together. He can tell that she wants to say no, but is simultaneously filled with curiosity.
She opts to shrug, affecting indifference. “If you like.”
“No,” Bartholomew says, “if you like.”
She shrugs again. “Perhaps another day, when—”
Bartholomew reaches out with his free hand and points to a building across the road from where they are standing. It is an enormous place, the biggest in the town, with a wide central doorway, three storeys stacked on top of each other, and arranged on a corner, so that the front of it faces them, the side stretching away from them.
Agnes follows the direction of his pointing finger. He watches her look at the house. He watches her glance at either side of it. He watches her frown.
“Where?” she says.
“There.”
“That place?”
“Yes.”
Her face is puckered with confusion. “But which part of it? Which rooms?”
Bartholomew puts down the basket he is holding and rocks back on his heels before he says, “All of them.”
“What are you saying?”
“The whole house,” he says, “is yours.”
—
The new house is a place of sound. it is never quiet. At night Agnes walks the corridors and stairs and chambers and passageways, her feet bare, listening out.
In the new house, the windows shudder in their frames. A breath of wind turns a chimney into a flute, blowing a long, mournful note down into the hall. The click of wooden wainscots settling for the night. Dogs turning and sighing in their baskets. The small, clawed feet of mice skittering unseen in the walls. The thrashing of branches in the long garden at the back.