All this activity in the garden sets Susanna’s teeth on edge; she keeps mostly to the house. The plants that require endless weeding and tending and watering; the infernal bees that drone and sting and zoom into your face; the callers who arrive and depart all day, through the side gate: it drives her to distraction.
She makes an effort, once a day, to teach Judith her letters. She has promised her father that she will do this. Dutifully, she calls her sister in from the back and makes her sit in the parlour, with an old slate in front of them. It is a thankless task. Judith squirms in her seat, stares out of the window, refuses to use her right hand, saying it feels all wrong, picks at a loose thread in her hem, doesn’t listen to what Susanna is saying and, when she does, becomes distracted halfway through by a man shouting about cakes in the street. Judith refuses to grasp the letters, to see how they merge together into sense, wonders if there could be a trace of something Hamnet wrote on this slate, cannot remember from day to day which is an a and which a c, and how is she to tell the difference between a d and a b, for they look entirely the same to her, and how dull it all is, how impossible. She draws eyes and mouths in all the gaps in the letters, making them into different creatures, some sad, some happy, some winsome. It takes a year for Judith to reliably produce a signature: it is a squiggled initial, but upside down and curled like a pig’s tail. Eventually, Susanna gives up.
When she complains to their mother, about how Judith will not learn to write, will not help with the accounts, will not take some responsibility for the running of the house, Agnes gives a slight smile and says, Judith’s skills are different from yours but they are skills just the same.
Why, Susanna thinks, stamping back inside the house, does no one see how difficult life is for her? Her father away and never here, her brother dead, the whole house to see to, the servants to watch. And she must take all this on while living with two…Susanna hesitates at the word “half-wits.” Her mother is not a half-wit, just not like other people. Old-fashioned. A countrywoman. Set in her ways. She lives in this place as if it were the house she was born in, a single hall surrounded by sheep; she behaves, still, like the daughter of a farmer, traipsing about the lanes and fields, gathering weeds in a basket, her skirts wet and filthy, her cheeks flushed and sunburnt.
Nobody ever considers her, Susanna thinks, as she climbs the stairs to her chamber. Nobody ever sees her trials and tribulations. Her mother out in the garden, up to her elbows in leaf mulch, her father in London, acting out plays that people say are extremely bawdy, and her sister somewhere in the house, singing a winding song of her own devising in her breathy, fluty voice. Who will come to court her, she demands of the air, as she flings open the door and lets it slam behind her, with a family like this? How will she ever escape this house? Who would want to be associated with any of them?
—
Agnes watches the child drop from her younger daughter, as a cloak from a shoulder. She is taller, slender as a willow strip, her figure filling out her gowns. She loses the urge to skip, to move quickly, deftly, to skitter across a room or a yard; she acquires the freighted tread of womanhood. Her features become more defined, the cheekbones rising, the nose sharpening, the mouth turning into the mouth it needs to be.
Agnes looks at this face; she looks and looks. She tries to see Judith for who she is, for who she will be, but there are moments when all she is asking herself is: Is this the face he would have had, how would this face have been different on a boy, how would it look with a beard, with a male jaw, on a strapping lad?
—
Night-time in the town. A deep, black silence lies over the streets, broken only by the hollow lilt of an owl, calling for its mate. A breeze slips invisibly, insistently through the streets, like a burglar seeking an entrance. It plays with the tops of the trees, tipping them one way, then the other. It shivers inside the church bell, making the brass vibrate with a single low note. It ruffles the feathers of the lonely owl, sitting on a rooftop near the church. It trembles a loose casement a few doors along, making the people inside turn over in their beds, their dreams intruded upon by images of shaking bones, of nearing footsteps, of drumming hoofs.
A fox darts out from behind an empty cart, moving sideways along the dark and deserted street. It pauses for a moment, one foot held off the ground, outside the Guildhall, near the school where Hamnet studied, and his father before him, as if it has heard something. Then it trots on, before swerving left and vanishing into a gap between two houses.
The land here was once a marsh—damp, watery, half river and half earth. To build houses, the people had first to drain the land, then lay down a bed of rushes and branches to buoy up the buildings, like ships on a sea. In wet weather, the houses remember. They creak downwards, pulled by ancient recall; wainscots crack, chimney breasts fracture, doorways loosen and rupture. Nothing goes away.
The town is quiet, its breath held. In an hour or so, the dark will begin to weaken, light will rise and people will wake in their beds, ready—or not—to face another day. Now, though, the townspeople are asleep.
Except for Judith. She is coming along the street, wrapped in a cloak, the hood covering her head. She goes past the school, where the fox was until a moment ago; she doesn’t see it but it sees her, from its hiding place in an alleyway. It watches her with widened pupils, alarmed by this unexpected creature sharing its nocturnal world, taking in her mantle, her quick-stepping feet, the hurry in her gait.
She crosses the market square quickly, keeping close to the buildings, and turns in to Henley Street.
A woman had come to see her mother in the autumn, seeking something for her swollen knuckles and painful wrists. She was, she told Judith when she opened the side gate to her, the midwife. Her mother seemed to know the woman; she gave her a long look, then a smile. She had taken the woman’s hands in her own, turning them gently over. Her knuckles were lumpen, purple, disfigured. Agnes had wrapped comfrey leaves around them, binding them with cloth, then left the room, saying she would fetch some ointment.
The woman had placed her bandaged hands on her lap. She stared at them for a moment, then spoke, without looking up.
“Sometimes,” she had said, apparently to her hands, “I have to walk through the town late at night. Babies come when they come, you see.”
Judith nodded politely.
The woman smiled at her. “I remember when you came. We all thought you wouldn’t live. But here you are.”
“Here I am,” Judith murmured.
“Many a time,” she continued, “I’ve been coming along Henley Street, past the house where you were born, and I’ve seen something.”
Judith stared at her for a moment. She wanted to ask what, but also dreaded the answer. “What have you seen?” she blurted out.
“Something, or perhaps I should say someone.”
“Who?” Judith asked, but she knew, she knew already.
“Running, he is.”
“Running?”
The old midwife nodded. “From the door of the big house to the door of that dear little narrow one. As clear as anything. A figure, it is, running like the wind, as if the devil himself is at its back.”
Judith felt her heart speed up, as if she were the one condemned to run for eternity along Henley Street, not him.