In the new house, Susanna sleeps at the furthest end of the corridor; she locks her door against her mother’s nocturnal wanderings. Judith has the chamber next to Agnes’s; she skims over the surface of sleep, waking often, never quite reaching the depths. If Agnes opens the door, just the sound of the hinges is enough to make her sit up, say, Who’s there? The cats sleep on her blankets, one on either side of her.
In the new house, Agnes is able to believe that if she were to walk down the street, across the marketplace, up Henley Street and in through the door of the apartment, she would find them all as they were: a woman with two daughters and a son. It would not be inhabited by Eliza and her milliner husband, not at all, but by them, as they ought to be, as they would be now. The son would be older now, taller, broader, his voice deeper and more sure of itself. He would be sitting at the table, his boots on a chair, and he would be talking to her—how he loved to talk—about his day at school, things that the master had said, who was whipped, who was praised. He would be sitting there and his cap would be hanging behind the door and he would say he was hungry and what was there to eat?
Agnes can let this idea suffuse her. She can hold it within herself, like wrapped and hidden treasure, to be taken out and polished and admired when she is alone, when she walks the new, enormous house at night.
—
She sees the garden as her terrain, her domain; the house is so large an entity, attracting so much comment and admiration and envy, questions about her husband and what he does, how is his business and is it true he is often at court? People are attracted and repelled by the house, all at once. Since her husband bought it, people have been unable to stop talking about it. They express surprise to her face, but behind her back, she knows what is said: how could he have done it, he always was such a useless hare-brain, soft in the head, his gaze up in the clouds, where did such money come from, was he dealing illegally out there in London, no surprise if he was, given what manner of a man his father was, how can money like that have come from working in a playhouse? It’s not possible.
Agnes has heard it all. The new house is a jam pot, pulling flies towards it. She will live in it but it will never be hers.
Outside its back door, though, she can breathe. She plants a row of apple trees along the high brick wall. Two pairs of pear trees on either side of the main path, plums, elder, birch, gooseberry bushes, blush-stemmed rhubarb. She takes a cutting from a dog-rose growing by the river and cultivates it against the warm wall of the malthouse. She puts in a rowan sapling near the back door. She fills the soil with chamomile and marigold, with hyssop and sage, borage and angelica, with wormwort and feverfew. She installs seven skeps at the furthest edge of the garden; on warm July days it is possible to hear the restless rumble of the bees from the house.
She turns the old brewhouse into a room where she dries her plants, where she mixes them, where people come in through the side gate, to ask for cures. She orders a larger brewhouse, the biggest in town, to be built at the back of the house. She clears the old well in the courtyard. She makes a knot garden, with box hedges in an interlocking grid, their vacancies filled with purple-headed lavender.
—
The father comes home to the new house twice, sometimes three times a year. He is home for a month in the second year they live in the house. There have been food riots in the city, he tells them, with apprentices marching on Southwark and pillaging shops. It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud.
Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits. She notes that her father loves the new house. He walks around it, with slow, lingering steps, looking up at the chimneys and lintels, shutting and opening each door. If he were a dog, his tail would be constantly wagging. He is to be seen out in the courtyard, early in the morning, where he likes to pull up the first water from the well and take a drink. The water here, he says, is the freshest, most delicious he has ever tasted.
Judith sees, too, that for the first few days her mother will not look at him. She steps aside if he comes close; she leaves the room if he enters.
He trails her, though, when he is not shut inside his chamber, working. Into the brewhouse, around the garden. He hooks a finger into her cuff. He comes to stand next to her in the outhouse while she works, ducking his head to see under her cap. Judith, crouching in the chamomile path, on the pretext of weeding, sees him pick a basket of apples and offer them, with a smile, to her mother. Agnes takes it without a word and puts it aside.
After a few days, however, there will be a kind of thawing. Her mother will permit his hand to drop to her shoulder as he passes her chair. She will humour him, in the garden, answering his constant enquiries as to what is this flower, and this, and what is it used for? She listens as, holding an ancient-looking book, he compares her names for the plants to those in Latin. She will prepare a sage elixir for him, a tea of lovage and broom. She will carry it up the stairs, into the room where he is bent over his desk, shutting the door after her. She will take his arm when they walk together out in the street. Judith will hear laughter and talk from the outhouses.
It’s as if her mother needs London, and all that he does there, to rub off him before she can accept him back.
—
Gardens don’t stand stilclass="underline" they are always in flux. The apple trees stretch out their limbs until their crowns reach higher than the wall. The pear trees fruit the first year, but not the second, then again the third. The marigolds unfold their bright petals, unfailingly, every year, and the bees leave their skeps to skim over the carpet of blooms, dipping into and out of the petals. The lavender bushes in the knot garden grow leggy and woody, but Agnes will not pull them up; she cuts them back, saving the stems, her hands heavy with fragrance.
Judith’s cats have kittens and, in time, those kittens have kittens. The cook tries to seize them for drowning but Judith will have none of it. Some are taken to live at Hewlands, others at Henley Street, and others throughout the town, but even so, the garden is filled with cats of various sizes and ages, all with a long, slender tail, a white ruff and leaf-green eyes, all lithe and sinewy and strong.
The house has no mice. Even the cook has to admit that there are advantages to living alongside a dynasty of cats.
Susanna grows taller than her mother. She assumes charge of the house keys; she wears them on a hook at her waist. She keeps the account book, pays the servants, oversees what goes in and out of her mother’s cure trade and the burgeoning brewing and malt business. If people fail to pay, she sends one of her uncles round to their door. She corresponds with her father about income, investment, rent accruing from his properties, which tenants have not paid up and which are late with payment. She advises him on how much money to send and how much to keep in London; she lets him know if she hears of a field or a house or a plot of land for sale. She takes it upon herself, at her father’s bidding, to buy furniture for the new house: chairs, pallets, linen chests, wall hangings, a new bed. Her mother, however, refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.
Judith stays close to her mother, keeping in her orbit, as if proximity to her guarantees something. Susanna doesn’t know what. Safety? Survival? Purpose?
Judith weeds the garden, runs errands, tidies her mother’s workbench. If her mother asks her to run and fetch three leaves of bay or a head of marjoram, Judith will know exactly where they are. All plants look the same to Susanna. Judith spends hours with her cats, grooming them, communicating with them in a language of crooning, high-pitched entreaties. Every spring she has kittens to sell; they are, she tells people, excellent mousers. She has the kind of face, Susanna thinks, that people believe: those wide-set eyes, the sweet, quick smile, the alert yet guileless gaze.