If you were to stand at the window in Hewlands and crane your neck sideways, it would be possible to see the edge of the forest.
You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it.
On a morning in early spring, fifteen years or so before Hamnet runs to the house of the physician, a Latin tutor is standing in this place at the window, absently tugging on the hoop through his left ear. He is watching the trees. Their collective presence, lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, brings to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting, that the city or streets of the previous scene are gone, that they are now on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.
A slight frown appears on his face. He remains at the window, the fingertips of one hand pressed white to the glass. The boys are behind him; they are conjugating verbs, temporarily unheard by the tutor, who is intent on the startling contrast between the sharply blue spring sky and the new-leaf green of the forest. The colours seem to fight, vying for supremacy, vibrancy: the green versus the blue, one against the other. The children’s Latin verbs wash over him, through him, like the wind through the trees. Somewhere in the farmhouse a bell is rung, first briefly and then more insistently. There are footfalls along the passage, the sound of a door banging into its frame. One of the boys – the younger one, James, the tutor knows, without turning – sighs, coughs, clears his throat, then rejoins the intoning. The tutor readjusts his collar, smooths his hair.
The Latin verbs roll on and on, around him, like a fenland fog, through his feet, up and over his shoulders, past his ears, to seep out of the cracks in the window lead. He allows the chanted words to merge into an aural blur that fills the room, right to its high, blackened rafters. It collects up there, along with the curls and veils of smoke from the chimneyless fire that smoulders in the grate. He has instructed the boys to conjugate the verb ‘incarcerare’: the repeated hard c sound seems to scrape at the walls of the room, as if the very words themselves are seeking escape.
The tutor is forced to come here twice a week by his father, the glover, who is in some manner of debt to Hewlands, after the souring of an agreement or deal with the yeoman who used to own the farm. The yeoman had been a broad-backed man who carried through his belt a sheep-hook shaped like a cudgel, and there was something about his open, candid face that the tutor had rather liked. But the yeoman had died suddenly last year, leaving all his acres and flocks, along with a wife and eight or nine children (the tutor is unsure exactly how many). It was an event his own father had greeted with barely concealed glee. Only he knew of the nature of the loan: the tutor had overheard his father crowing, late at night, when he thought no one could overhear (the tutor is very good at clandestine listening): Don’t you see? The widow will not know or, if she does, will not dare to come and ask me to make good on it, or that overgrown dullard of an eldest son.
It appears, however, that the widow or son has done just that and this arrangement (the tutor has gleaned, from listening in to conversations going on behind the door of his parents’ chamber) is something to do with what his father did with a consignment of the yeoman’s sheepskins. His father had told the yeoman that the hides were to be sent for whittawing and the yeoman had believed him. But then his father had insisted that the wool should be left on, which had aroused the suspicion of the yeoman, which for some reason has caused all this trouble. The tutor is unclear on this last point as his mother was called away from the whispered conversation by the querulous, creaking cry of Edmond, her youngest child.
The tutor’s glover father has some new, slightly illicit venture that none of them are supposed to know about: this much the tutor can tell. They were to make out, their parents told them, to anyone who asked, that the sheepskins were for gloves. He and his siblings had been baffled as it had not occurred to them that the skins were for anything other than gloves. Whatever else could his father, the most successful glover in town, possibly want them for?
There is a debt or a fine and their father cannot – will not? – pay, and the yeoman’s widow or son will not let it drop so it appears that he himself is the payment. His time, his Latin grammar, his brain. Twice a week, his father told him, he must walk the mile or so out of town, along the stream, to this low-lying hall, surrounded by sheep, where he must run the younger boys through their lessons.
He had had no warning of this plan, this web being spun around him. His father had called him into the workshop one evening, as the household was preparing for bed, to tell him that he was to go to Hewlands to ‘start drumming some education into the boys there’. The tutor had stood in the doorway and stared hard at his father. When, he asked, was this arranged? His father and mother had been wiping and polishing the tools in preparation for the next day. Doesn’t concern you, his father said. All you need to know is that you are going. What, the son replied, if I don’t care to? The father fitted a long knife back into its leather sleeve, seemingly without hearing this response. His mother had glanced at her husband, then at her son, giving him a minute shake of her head. You’ll go, his father said eventually, laying down his rag, and there’s an end to it.
The desire to push himself away from these two people, to stride out of the room, to wrench open the front door and run into the street rose in the son, like sap in a tree. And, yes, to strike his father, to do some harm to that body, to take his own fists and arms and fingers and give back to this man all that had been dealt to him. They had, all six of them, from time to time, received the blows and grips and slaps that resulted from the father’s temper, but with nothing like the regularity and brutality of this eldest son. He didn’t know why but something about him had always drawn his father’s anger and frustration to him, like a horseshoe to a magnet. He carried within him, always, the sensation of his father’s calloused hand enclosing the soft skin of his upper arm, the inescapable grip that kept him there so his father could rain down blows with his other, stronger, hand. The shock of a slap landing, sudden and sharp, from above; the flensing sting of a wooden instrument on the back of the legs. How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones. The doused, drenched feeling of fury, of impotent humiliation, in the long minutes of a beating.
His father’s rages arrived from nowhere, like a gale, then blew quickly on. There was no pattern, no warning, no rationale; it was never the same thing twice that tipped him over. The son learnt, at a young age, to sense the onset of these eruptions and a series of feints and dodges to avoid his father’s fists. As an astronomer reads the minuscule shifts and alterations in the alignment of the planets and spheres, to see what lies in store, this eldest son became an expert in reading his father’s moods and expressions. He could tell, from the sound the front door made when his father entered from the street, from the rhythm of his footsteps on the flagstones, whether or not he was in for a beating. A spilt ladle of water, a boot left in the wrong place on the floor, a facial expression deemed insufficiently respectful – any of these might be the excuse the father sought.
In the last year or so, the son has grown tall, taller than the father: he is stronger, younger, faster. His walks to various local markets, to outlying farms, to and from the tannery, with sacks of skins or finished gloves on his back, have brought muscle and weight to his shoulders and neck. It has not eluded the son’s notice that his father’s blows have, of late, tailed off. There was a moment, several months ago, when the father came out of his workshop late in the evening and, finding the son in the passageway, without a word, bore down on him and, lifting the wineskin he was holding, lashed the son about the face. The pain was of the stinging sort, not aching, not bruising, not pressing: it had a sharp, whipped, lacerating quality. There would, the son knew, be a red, broken mark on his face. The sight of the mark seemed to enrage the father further because he lifted his arm again, for a second blow, but the son reached up. He seized his father’s arm. He pushed, with all his might, against him and found, to his surprise, that his father’s body yielded under his. He could push this man, this leviathan, this monster of his childhood, back against the wall with very little effort. He did so. He kept his father there with the point of his elbow. He shook his father’s arm, like that of a puppet, and the wineskin dropped to the floor. He leant his face into his, noticing at the same time that he was looking down on him. That, he said to him, is the last time you will ever hit me.
As he stands at Hewlands’ window, the need to leave, to rebel, to escape is so great it fills him to his very outer edge: he can eat nothing from the plate the farmer’s widow left for him, so crammed is he with the urge to leave, to get away, to move his feet and legs to some other place, as far away from here as he can manage.
The Latin rolls on, the verbs coming around again, from pluperfect tense to present. He is just about to turn and face his pupils when he sees, from the trees, a figure emerge.
For a moment, the tutor believes it to be a young man. He is wearing a cap, a leather jerkin, gauntlets; he moves out of the trees with a brand of masculine insouciance or entitlement, covering the ground with booted strides. There is some kind of bird on his outstretched fist: chestnut-brown with a creamy white breast, its wings spotted with black. It sits hunched, subdued, its body swaying with the movement of its companion, its familiar.
The tutor is imagining this person, this hawk-taming youth, is some kind of factotum to the farm. Or a relative to the family, a visiting cousin perhaps. Then he registers the long plait, hanging over the shoulder, reaching past the waist, the jerkin laced tight around a form that curves suspiciously inwards around the middle. He sees the skirts, which had been bunched up, now hastily being dragged down around the stockings. He sees a pale, oval face under the cap, an arched brow, a full red mouth.
He moves closer to the glass, leaning on the sill, and watches as the woman moves from the right to the left of the window frame, her bird riding on her fist, her skirts swishing around her boots. Then she enters the farmyard, moves through the chickens and geese, around the side of the house, and is gone.
He straightens, his frown vanished, a smile forming under his scant beard. Behind him, the room has fallen silent. He recalls himself: the lesson, the boys, the verb conjugation.
He turns. He arches his fingers together, as he imagines a tutor ought to do, as his own masters did at school not so long ago.
‘Excellent,’ he says to them.
They look towards him, plants turning to the sun. He smiles at their soft, unformed faces, pale as unrisen dough in the light from the window. He pretends not to see that the younger brother is being poked under the table with a peeled stick, that the elder has filled his slate with a pattern of repeated loops.
‘Now,’ he says to them, ‘I would like you to work on a translation of the following sentence: “I thank you, sir, for your kind letter.”’
They begin to labour over their slates, the elder (and stupidest, the tutor knows) breathing through his mouth, the younger laying his head down on his arm. And, really, what sense is there in giving the boys these lessons? Aren’t they destined to be farmers, like their father and older brothers? But, then, what use has it been to him? Years and years at the grammar school and look where it has got him – a smoke-hazed hall, coaxing the sons of a sheep farmer to learn conjugation and word order.
He waits until the boys have half finished this exercise before he says: ‘What is the name of that serving girl? The one with the bird?’
The younger brother looks at him with a direct, frank gaze. The tutor smiles back. He is, he prides himself, adept at dissembling, at reading the thoughts of others, at guessing which way they will jump, what they will do next. Life with a quick-tempered parent will hone these skills at an early age. The tutor knows the elder will not guess the intent behind his question but that the younger one, all of nine years old, will.
‘Bird?’ the elder one says. ‘She doesn’t have a bird.’ He glances at his brother. ‘Does she?’
‘No?’ The tutor gathers their blank looks. He sees again, for a moment, the mottled tawny feathers of the hawk. ‘Perhaps I am mistaken.’
The younger brother says, in a rush, ‘There’s Hettie, who looks after the pigs and hens.’ He creases his brow. ‘Hens are birds, aren’t they?’
The tutor nods at him. ‘Indeed they are.’
He turns again to the window. Looks out. All is as before. The wind, the trees, the leaves, the filthy ewes in a huddle, the stretch of tamed, cultivated land meeting the hem of the forest. No girl to be seen. Could it have been a hen on her outstretched arm? He doubts it.
Later that day, after the lesson is finished, the tutor steps around the back of the house. He ought to be taking the path to town, beginning the long walk home, but he wants to see the girl one more time, wants to observe her, perhaps exchange some words with her. He has an urge to examine that bird up close, to hear what kind of voice will emerge from that mouth. He would like to weigh that plait in his hand, feel the silken ridged weave of it slip between his fingers. He glances up at the house’s windows as he makes his way around the walls. There is, of course, no excuse for him being here in the farmyard. The boys’ mother might divine in an instant what he is seeking and send him off. He might lose his position here, might jeopardise whatever tenuous agreement his father has brokered with the yeoman’s widow. Not even this thought gives the tutor pause.
He steps through the farmyard, avoiding puddles and clods of dung. It rained earlier, as he was trying to teach the subjunctive: he heard the tick-tick of it on the high thatch of the hall. The sky is beginning to drain of light; the sun is fading for the day; there is still the chill grip of winter in the air. A chicken scratches diligently in the earth, groaning quietly to itself.
He is thinking of the girl, her braid, her hawk. A way to lighten the load of these indentured visits now presents itself to him. This position, with these children, in this drear and awful place, might become tolerable after all. He is imagining liaisons after tutoring, a walk in the woods, a meeting behind one of these sheds or outhouses.
He does not, even for one moment, entertain the idea that the woman he saw is in fact the eldest daughter of the house.
She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad. He has heard that she wanders the back roads and forest at will, unaccompanied, collecting plants to make dubious potions. It is wise not to cross her for people say she learnt her crafts from an old crone who used to make medicines and spin, and could kill a baby with a single glance. It is said that the stepmother lives in terror of the girl putting hexes on her, especially now the yeoman is dead. Her father must have loved her, though, because he left her a sizeable dowry in his will. Not that anyone, of course, would want to wed her. She is said to be too wild for any man. Her mother, God rest her soul, had been a gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite: the tutor has heard many of these fanciful tales about her. His own mother shakes her head and tuts when this girl comes up in conversation.
The tutor has never seen her but he pictures a half-woman, half-animal: thickbrowed, hobbling, hair streaked with grey, clothing clotted with mud and foliage. The daughter of a dead forest witch. She will walk with a limp, muttering to herself as she fumbles in her bag of curses and cures.
He casts a glance around him, at the shadow in the lee of the pig-pen, at the bare branches of apple trees bending over the fence at the perimeter of the farmyard. He wouldn’t want to come across this daughter unawares. He goes through a gate in the fence and out along a track. He glances over his shoulder at the windows of the house, into the doors of the barn, where cattle chew and nod in their stalls. Where might she be?
He is distracted from thinking about the mad, witchy sister by a movement to his left: a door opening, the swirl of skirts, the squeal of a hinge. It is the girl with the bird! The very same. Emerging from some roughly built outhouse, closing the door behind her. Right here, in front of him, as if he had summoned her presence by thought alone.
He coughs into his fist.
‘Good day to you,’ he says.
She turns. She looks at him for a moment, raises her eyebrows, very slightly, as if she has seen the spool of his thoughts, as if his head is transparent as water. She looks all the way down to his boots and back again.
‘Sir,’ she replies, after a while, with the merest hint of a curtsy. ‘What brings you to Hewlands?’
Her voice is clear, modulated, articulate. It has an instant effect upon him: a quickening of his pulse, a heat in his chest.
‘I am tutoring the boys here,’ he says. ‘In Latin.’
He expects her to be impressed, to nod deferentially. A learned man is he; a man of letters, of education. No rustic stands before you, madam, he wishes he could say, no mere peasant.
But the girl’s expression is unchanged. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘The Latin tutor. Of course.’
He is puzzled by the flatness of her reply. She is an altogether confusing person: her age is hard to guess, as is her standing in the household. She is perhaps a little older than him. She is dressed like a servant, in coarse and dirty clothes, but speaks like a lady. She is erect in stature, almost of a height with him, her hair dark as his own. She meets his eye as a man would, but her figure and form fill out that jerkin in a manner that is distinctly female.
The tutor decides that boldness is the best course of action here. ‘May I see your . . . your bird?’
She frowns. ‘My bird?’
‘I saw you earlier, emerging from the forest, did I not? With a bird on your arm? A hawk. A most intriguing—’
For the first time, her face betrays an emotion: concern, worry, an element of fear. ‘You won’t tell them,’ she gestures towards the farm, ‘will you? I was forbidden to take her out today, you see, but she was so restless, so hungry, I couldn’t bear to shut her up all afternoon. You won’t say, will you, that you saw me? That I was out?’
The tutor smiles. He steps towards her. ‘I shall never speak of it,’ he is able to say, grandly, consolingly. He puts his hand on her arm. ‘Do not concern yourself.’
She flicks her gaze up to meet his. They regard each other at close quarters. He sees eyes almost gold in colour, with a deep amber ring around their centres. Flecks of green. Long dark lashes. Pale skin with freckles over the nose and along the cheekbones. She does a strange thing: she puts her hand to his, where it is resting on her forearm. She takes hold of the skin and muscle between his thumb and forefinger and presses. The grip is firm, insistent, oddly intimate, on the edge of painful. It makes him draw in his breath. It makes his head swim. The certainty of it. He doesn’t think anyone has ever touched him there, in that way, before. He could not take his hand away without a sharp tug, even if he wanted to. Her strength is surprising and, he finds, peculiarly arousing.
‘I . . .’ he begins, without any idea where that sentence will go, what he wants to say. ‘Do you . . .’
All at once, she drops his hand; she moves her arm away from him. His hand, where she gripped him, feels hot and very naked. He rubs at his forehead with it, as if to make it right again.
‘You wanted to see my bird,’ she said, all business and competence now, taking a key from a chain hidden in her skirts, unlocking the door and pushing it open. She steps inside and, dazed, he follows.
It is a small, dim, narrow space, with a desiccated and familiar smell to it. He inhales: the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous. Also a chalky, musky undertone. And the woman beside him: he can smell her hair and skin, one of which carries the faint scent of rosemary. He is just about to reach out for her again – her shoulder, her waist are tantalisingly close to him, and why else would she bring him in here, really, if she didn’t also have in mind—
‘There she is,’ she whispers, urgent and low. ‘Can you see her?’
‘Who?’ he says, distracted by the waist, the rosemary, the shelves around him, which are becoming clearer in the gloom, as his eyes adjust to the dark. ‘What?’
‘My falcon,’ she says, and steps forward, and the tutor sees, at the far end of the outhouse, a tall wooden stake on which perches a bird of prey.
It is hooded, wings folded back on themselves, scaled ochre talons gripping the stand. Its stance is hunched, shrugged, as if assailed by rain. The feathers of its wings are dark but its breast is pale and rippled like the bark of a tree. It seems extraordinary to him to be in such close proximity to a creature which is so emphatically from another element, from wind or sky or perhaps even myth.
‘Good God,’ he hears himself say, and she turns and, for the first time, she smiles.
‘She’s a kestrel,’ she murmurs. ‘A friend of my father’s, a priest, gave her to me as a chick. I take her out to fly most days. I won’t take her hood off now but she knows you’re here. She’ll remember you.’
The tutor doesn’t doubt it. Although the bird’s eyes and beak are covered with a miniature hood, fashioned from leather – sheep or perhaps kid leather, he catches himself wondering, to his irritation – its head twitches and swivels with every word they speak, every movement they make. He would like, he finds, to look into the bird’s face, to see that eye, to know what lies behind that hood.
‘She caught two mice today,’ the woman says. ‘And a vole. She flies,’ she says, turning to him, ‘entirely in silence. They cannot hear her come.’
The tutor, emboldened by her stare, puts out a hand. He encounters her sleeve, her jerkin and, finally, her waist. He curves his hand around it, as firmly as she had touched him, attempting to draw her towards him.
‘What’s your name?’ he says.
She pulls away but he grips her more tightly.
‘I shan’t tell you.’
‘You shall.’
‘Let me go.’
‘Tell me first.’
‘And then will you let me go?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do I know you’ll keep your promise, Master Tutor?’
‘I always keep my promises. I am a man of my word.’
‘As well as a man of hands. Let me go, I tell you.’
‘Your name, first.’
‘And then you will release me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well.’
‘You will tell me?’
‘Yes, it’s . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘Anne,’ she says, or seems to say, at the same time as he is saying: ‘I must know.’
‘Anne?’ he repeats, thrown, the word at once familiar yet queer in his mouth. It was the name of his sister, who died not quite two years ago. He has not, he realises, spoken the name since the day she was buried. He sees again, and for a moment, the wet churchyard, the dripping yew trees, the dark maw of the ground, ripped open to accept the white-wrapped body, so slight and small. Too small, it seemed, to go into the earth like that, alone.
The falconer girl takes advantage of his momentary confusion to push him away from her; he topples into the shelves that run around the walls. There is a strange, echoey sound, like a thousand game counters or balls finding their place. He gropes around himself and finds several round objects, tight-skinned, cool, a spike at their centre. Suddenly he realises what the familiar smell in here is.
‘Apples,’ he says.
She gives a short laugh, across the space from him, her hands resting on the shelf behind her, the falcon beside her. ‘It’s the apple store.’
He brings one up to his face and inhales the scent, sharp, specific, acidic. It brings a slew of distant images to mind: fallen leaves, sodden grass, woodsmoke, his mother’s kitchen.
‘Anne,’ he says, biting into the apple’s flesh.
She smiles, her lips curving in a way that maddens and delights him, all at the same time. ‘That is not my name,’ she says.
He lowers the apple, in mock-outrage, in partial relief. ‘You told me it was.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did.’
‘You weren’t listening, then.’
He flings aside the half-eaten apple and comes towards her. ‘Tell me now.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You will.’
He puts his hands to her shoulders, then lets his fingertips skip down her arms, watching her shiver at his touch.
‘You’ll tell me,’ he says, ‘when we kiss.’
She puts her head to one side. ‘Presumptuous,’ she says. ‘What if we never kiss?’
‘But we shall.’
Again, her hand finds his; her fingers grip the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. He raises his brows and looks into her face. She has the expression of a woman reading a particularly hard piece of text, a woman trying to decipher something, to work something out.
‘Hmm,’ she says.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks. ‘Why do you hold my hand like that?’
She frowns; she looks at him directly, searchingly.
‘What is it?’ he says, suddenly disquieted by her, her silence, her concentration, her grip on his hand. The apples rest in their grooves around them. The bird sits immobile on its perch, listening in.
The woman leans towards him. She releases his hand, which again feels raw, peeled, ravaged. Without warning, she presses her mouth to his. He feels the twin plushness of her lips, the hard press of her teeth, the impossible smoothness of the skin of her face. Then she pulls back.
‘It’s Agnes,’ she says. And this name, too, he knows, although he has never met anyone with it. Agnes. Said differently from how it might be written on a page, with that near-hidden, secret g. The tongue curls towards it yet barely touches it. Ann-yis. Agn-yez. One must lean into the first syllable, then skip over the next.
She is slipping out of the space between his body and the shelves. She opens the door and the light beyond is dazzling white, overwhelming. Then the door bangs behind her and he is alone, with the falcon, with the apples, with the smell of wood and autumn, and the dry, feathered, meaty smell of the bird.
He is so stupefied, by the kiss, by the apple store, by the remembered feel of her shoulders, by plans of what he will do next time he is sent to Hewlands, schemes to get that maid on her own again, that he is halfway back to town before a thought hits him. Isn’t it said that the household’s eldest daughter keeps a hawk?
There used to be a story in these parts about a girl who lived at the edge of a forest.
People would say these words, to each other, Did you ever hear about the girl who lived at the edge of a forest? as they sat around the fire at night, as they kneaded dough, as they carded wool for spinning. Such stories, of course, make the night pass more quickly, soothe a fractious child, distract others from their cares.
At the edge of a forest, a girl.
There is a promise, from teller to listener, concealed in that opening, like a note tucked into a pocket, a hint that something is about to happen. Anyone in the vicinity would turn their head and prick their ears, their mind already forming a picture of the girl, perhaps picking her way through trees, or standing beside the green wall of a forest.
And what a forest it was. Dense, verdant, crazily cross-stitched with brambles and ivy, the trees so closely packed that there were whole swathes, it was said, that received no light at all. Not a place to get lost, then. There were paths that went round and back on themselves, paths that led travellers from their route, their intentions. Breezes that whipped up from nowhere. Certain clearings where you might hear music or whispers or murmurs of your name, saying, Here, come here, come this way.
The children who lived near the forest were instructed from the cradle never to venture in alone. Maidens were exhorted to stay away, warned of what might lurk in those green and brambled depths. There were creatures in there who resembled humans – wood-dwellers, they were called – who walked and talked, but had never set foot outside the forest, had lived all their lives in its leafish light, its encircling branches, its wet and tangled interior. It was said that a hunting hound, a marvellous creature it was, with sleek flanks and gleaming fangs, had dived into the bushes in pursuit of a deer, and was not seen again. It followed the white flash of the animal and the forest closed around it, never to release it.
People who needed to go through the forest would stop to pray; there was an altar, a cross, where you could pause and put your safety in the hands of the Lord, hope that He had heard you, trust that He would watch for you, that He wouldn’t let your path intersect with those of the wood-dwellers or the forest sprites or the creatures of the leaves. The cross became covered, choked, some said, with tight skeins of ivy. Other travellers put their faith in darker powers: all around the fringes of the forest there were shrines where people tied shreds of their clothing to branches, left cups of ale, loaves of bread, scraps of crackling, strings of bright beads in the hope that the spirits of the trees might be appeased and give them safe passage.
So, in a house right at the edge of the forest, dwelt the girl and her little brother. The trees could be seen from the back windows, tossing their restless heads on windy days, shaking their bare and twisted fists in winter. The girl and her brother were born feeling the pull of the forest, its beckoning power.
People who had lived in the village a long time believed that the girl’s mother had come out of this wood. From where, no one knew. She might have been a wood-dweller who got lost, who became separated from those of her kind, or she might have been something other.
Nobody knew. The story went that she had appeared one day, parting the brambles, stepping out of the green, twilit world, and from then on the farmer, who happened to be standing there, watching his sheep, could never look away from her. He picked the leaves from her hair and the snails from her skirts. He brushed the twigs and moss from her sleeves, bathed the mud from her feet. He took her into his house, fed her, clothed her, married her and, not long after, a baby girl was born to them.
At this point in the story, the tellers would usually make it clear that no woman had ever doted on a child like this one. She bound the baby to her back and carried it wherever she went, walking about the farmhouse on her bare feet, even on the coldest winter days. She would not lay the child in a cradle, even at night, but kept her close, the way an animal might. She disappeared for hours on end into the forest, with the baby, coming home after dark, with perhaps an apronful of unpeeled chestnuts, to a house with no fire, no food, nothing ready for her husband to eat. The wives in neighbouring houses began to whisper, asking each other how the man put up with it. And, knowing the new mother was herself motherless, or appeared so, those women came to the farm, to give her their wisdom on housekeeping, weaning, the avoidance of illness, the best way to stitch cloth, how the woman must wear a coif to cover her hair, now that she was married.
The woman nodded at them all, with a distant smile. She was frequently seen in the road with her hair uncovered and loose about her shoulders. She had dug a patch of ground outside the farmhouse and was growing strange plants in it – woodland ferns and clambering worts, peppery flowers and ugly, low-lying bushes. The only person she seemed to talk to was an old widow-woman who lived at the far end of the village. They could often be seen in conversation in the widow’s small walled garden, the older woman leaning on her stick as the younger, baby bound to her back, still barefoot, still with her hair on display, stooped to tend the widow’s herbs.
It wasn’t long before the woman was brought to bed again, this time giving birth to a boy, who was strong from the moment he drew breath. He was an enormous child, with wide hands and feet big enough to walk on. The woman did as before, tying the baby to her, but a day or two after he was born, she took off into the forest, the girl child toddling beside her.
When her belly was swollen for the third time, the woman’s luck ran out. She took to bed, to birth her third child, but this time, she did not rise up from it again. The village women came to wash and lay her out, prepare her for the next world. They wept as they did so, not because they had been fond of the woman, who had appeared out of the forest and married one of their own, who went by the name of a tree, who had so little to say to them, who had rebuffed their attempts at companionship, but because her death reminded them of the possibility of their own. They cried together as they cleaned and combed her hair, as they peeled the dirt from under her fingernails, as they pulled a white shift over her head, as they wrapped up the tiny pod of the stillborn child and placed it in the corpse’s arms.
The little girl sat watching, her back to the wall, legs crossed under her, not uttering a sound. She did not sob, she did not weep; she said not a word. Her gaze did not waver from the body of her mother. In her lap, she held her little brother, who sobbed and snivelled and wiped his eyes on her dress. If any of those well-meaning neighbours approached, the girl would spit and claw, like a cat. She would not let go of her brother, no matter how many people tried to prise him from her. Hard to help a child like that, they said, hard to feel anything for her.
The only person she would let near her was the widow-woman, who had been a particular friend of her mother’s. The widow sat on a chair near the children, quite motionless, a bowl of meal in her lap. Every now and again, the girl would permit the woman to spoon some pap into the boy’s mouth.
One of the neighbours remembered her unmarried sister, Joan, who was young but had had care of many smaller siblings, as well as pigs, and was used to hard work. Why not engage her at the farmer’s place? Someone would have to keep house, to mind the children, to tend the fire and stir the pot. Who knew what might ensue? The farmer was, everyone knew, a man of means, with a fine hall and acres of land; the children could be brought to heel, with the right handling.
Now, it may or may not be true that before Joan had passed a month at the farm she was complaining about the girl to anyone who would listen. The child was driving her to distraction. She had twice woken in the night to find the girl standing above her, gripping her hand. She had caught her sliding into her pocket something which, on inspection, appeared to be twigs bound up with a chicken’s feather. She had discovered ivy leaves under her pillow, and who else would have put them there?
The women of the village didn’t know what to say or whether to believe her, but it was noticed by many that Joan’s skin became spotted and pocked. That her hands grew warts. That her spinning was tangled and frayed, that her bread refused to rise. But the girl was only a child, a very young child, so how could it be that she was capable of such deeds?
You might think that Joan would be put off, would leave the farm and return home to her family. Joan was not so easily deterred by a naughty, wayward child. She held on grimly, rubbing pig fat into her warts, scrubbing her face with a cloth dipped in ash.
In time, as is often the way of these things, Joan’s persistence was rewarded. The farmer took her for his wife and she went on to bear him six children, all of them fair and rosy and round, like herself, like the father.
After her wedding, Joan stopped complaining to people about the girl, as abruptly as if someone had sewn up her mouth. There was nothing unusual about her, she would say tartly. Nothing at all. It was nonsense and gossip to say that the girl could see into people’s souls. There was nothing amiss in her family, in her farmhouse, nothing at all.
Word spread, of course, about the girl’s unusual abilities. People came under cover of darkness. The girl, as she grew older, found a way for her path to coincide with those of the people who needed her. It was known, in the area, that she walked the perimeter of the forest, the fringes of the trees, in late afternoon, in early evening, her falcon swooping into the branches and back to land on her leather gauntlet. She took out this bird at dusk so, if you were of a mind, you could arrange to be walking in the area.
If asked, the girl – a woman, now – would remove the falconer’s glove and hold your hand, just for a moment, pressing the flesh between thumb and forefinger where all your hand’s strength lay, and tell you what she felt. The sensation, some said, was dizzying, draining, as if she was drawing all the strength out of you; others said it was invigorating, enlivening, like a shower of rain. Her bird circled the sky above, feathers spread, calling out, as if in warning.
People said the girl’s name was Agnes.
This is the story, the myth of Agnes’s childhood. She herself might tell a different story.
Outside were the sheep and they must be fed, watered, cared for, no matter what. They must be brought in and out and from one field to another.
Inside was the fire and it must never be left to go out. It must be fed and fed and tended and poked, and sometimes her mother must blow on it, with pursed lips.
And the mother herself was a slippery thing, because there had been a mother, and she’d had slender, strong ankles above bare feet. Those feet had blackened soles and walked one way then the other over the patterns of the flagstones, and sometimes they walked out of the house and past the sheep and into the forest, where they stepped through leaves and twigs and mosses. There was a hand, too, that held Agnes’s, to stop her falling, and it was warm and firm. If Agnes was lifted from the forest floor to that mother’s back, she could nestle under the cloak of hair. The trees appeared then, to her, through the dark skeins, like a lantern show. Look, the mother said, a squirrel, and a reddish flourish of tail disappeared up a trunk, as if she herself had conjured it from the bark. Look, a kingfisher: a jewel-backed arrow piercing the silver skin of a brook. Look, hazelnuts: the mother clambering into the boughs, shaking them with her strong arms and down came clusters of dun-jacketed pearls.
Her brother, Bartholomew, with the wide, surprised eyes and fingers that opened into white stars, rode on their mother’s front and the two of them could stare into each other’s faces as they went along, interlace their fingers over the round bones of their mother’s shoulders. Their mother cut green rushes for them, which she dried, then wove into dolls. The dolls were identical, and Agnes and Bartholomew tucked them side by side into a box, their blank green faces gazing trustingly up at the roof.
Then this mother was gone and another was there in her place beside the fire, stoking it with wood, blowing at the flames, hauling the pot from hearthstone to grating, saying, Don’t touch, mind, hot. This second mother was wider, her hair pale, screwed up in a knot, hidden under a coif grimed by sweat. She smelt of mutton and oil. She had reddened skin covered with freckles, as if splashed by a cart going through mud. She had a name, ‘Joan’, that made Agnes think of a howling dog. She took a knife and lopped off Agnes’s hair, saying she hadn’t the time to be attending to that every day. She picked up the rush babies, declared them devilish poppets, and fed them to the fire. When Agnes burnt her fingers trying to pull out their scorched forms, she laughed and said Agnes had got what she deserved. She had shoes tied over her feet. Those feet never went from farm to forest. If Agnes went alone, without asking, this mother removed one of the shoes and lifted Agnes’s skirt and brought the shoe down on the back of her legs, whack, crack, and the pain was so surprising, so unfamiliar that Agnes forgot to cry out. She stared instead at the beams, high above, where the other mother had tied a bundle of herbs to a stone with a hole at its centre. To keep away bad luck, she had said. Agnes remembered her doing this. She bit her lip. She ordered herself not to cry. She looked at the black eye of the stone. She wondered when this mother would come back. She did not weep.
This new mother would also remove her shoe if Agnes said, You are not my mother, or if Bartholomew trod on the dog’s tail, or if Agnes spilt the soup, or let the geese out into the road, or didn’t lift the pig-pail all the way to the slop trough. Agnes learnt to be agile, quick. She learnt the advantages of invisibility, how to pass through a room without drawing notice. She learnt that what is hidden within a person may be brought forth if, say, a sprinkling of bladderwort were to find its way into that person’s cup. She learnt that creepers disentangled from an oak trunk, brushed against bed linen, will ensure no sleep for whoever lies there. She learnt that if she took her father by the hand and led him to the back door, where Joan had uprooted all the forest plants, her father would go silent, and then Joan would wail and tell him she hadn’t meant any harm, she’d taken them for weeds. And she learnt that, afterwards, Joan would reach under the table and pinch her, leaving purple blotches on her skin.
It was a time of confusion, of the seasons following hard upon each other. Of rooms dim with smoke. Of the constant bleat and groan of sheep. Of her father away from the hearth for most of the day, tending the animals. Of trying to stop the mud of the outside reaching the clean inside. Of keeping Bartholomew away from the fire, away from Joan, away from the millpond and the carts in the road and the trampling hoofs of horses and the stream and the swinge of the scythe. Ailing lambs were put in a basket by the fire, fed from milk-soaked rags, their reedy cries sawing through the room. Her father in the yard, ewes gripped between his knees, their eyes rolling heavenwards in terror, him guiding the shears through their wool. The fleeces fell like storm clouds to the ground and out of each rose quite a different creature – thin, milk-skinned, gaunt.
Everyone told Agnes that there had been no other mother. Whatever are you talking about? they cried. When she insisted, they changed tack. You won’t remember your real mother – you couldn’t possibly remember. She told them this wasn’t true; she stamped her foot; she banged her fists against the table; she screeched at them like a fowl. What did it mean? Why did they persist with these lies, these falsehoods? She remembered. She remembered everything. She said this to the apothecary’s widow who lived at the edge of the village, a woman who took in wool for spinning; she continued to work her treadle, as if Agnes hadn’t spoken, but then had nodded. Your mother, she said, was pure of heart. There was more kindness in her little finger – and she held up her own gnarled hand – than in the whole of any of those others.
She remembered everything. Everything except where she had gone, why she had left.
At night, Agnes whispered to Bartholomew about the woman who liked to walk with them through the forest, who tied a stone with a hole to herbs, who made them rush babies, who had a garden of plants at the back door. She remembered it all. Almost all.
Then one day she came upon her father behind the pig-pen, his knee on the neck of a lamb, bringing down his knife. The smell, the sight, the colour took her back to a bed soaked red and a room of carnage, of violence, of appalling crimson. She stared at her father, stared and stared, yet did not see him at all. Instead, she saw a bed with a red bloom at its centre and then a narrow box. In it, she knew, was her mother, but not as she had been. This mother was different again. She was waxy and chill and silent, and in her arms was a wrapped bundle with the sad, wizened face of a doll. The priest had had to come at night because it was a secret, and he was a priest Agnes had never seen before. He had long robes and a burning bowl that he swung over the box, muttering strange, songlike words. Agnes must never tell, her father had said, between sobs, never tell the neighbours or anyone that the priest came and spoke magic words over the wax woman and the sad baby. Before he left, the priest had touched Agnes once, lightly, on the head, his thumb pressing into her brow, and he had said, looking straight into her eyes, in language familiar to her, Poor lamb.
Agnes says all this to her father, as he kneels there on this other lamb, red pumping from the line drawn in its neck. She shouts it – she yells it from the base of her lungs, the core of her heart. She says, I remember, I know all that.
Hush, maidy, he says, turning to her. You cannot remember. Hush, now. Don’t say these things. There was no priest in the night. He did not touch your head. Don’t ever let anyone hear you say that. Don’t let your mother hear.
Agnes doesn’t know if he means Joan, the woman in the house, or her own mother, up in Heaven. It feels to her as though the world has cracked open, like an egg. The sky above her could, at any moment, split and rain down fire and ash upon them all. At the edges of her sight seem to hover dark, nebulous shapes. The farmhouse, the pig-pen, her brothers and sisters in the yard, all seem at once far away and unbearably close. She knows there had been a priest. How can her father pretend otherwise? She remembers the cross around his neck that he brought to his lips to kiss, the way his bowl left feather smoke in the air over her mother and the baby, that he spoke her mother’s name, over and over, in the middle of his mysterious prayers: Rowan, Rowan. She remembers. Poor lamb, he had said to her. Her father says, Hush, never say that, so she runs from him, from the lamb, slack and empty of blood now, little more than a sack of gizzard and bone, and into the forest where she screams these things to the trees, to the leaves, to the branches, where no one can hear. She grips the thorned stems of brambles until they pierce her skin and she shouts to the God of the church they walk to every Sunday, in neat formation, carrying the babies on their backs, where there is no smoke, no bowls, no speaking in tongues. She calls on him, she bawls his name. You, she says, you, do you hear me, I am finished with you. After this time, I will go to your church because I must but I shan’t say a word there because there is nothing after you die. There is the soil and there is the body and it all comes to nothing.
She tells this to the apothecary’s widow and these words make the old woman look up. The wheel whirs more slowly, winding down, as the woman stares at the child. Never say this to anyone else, she says to Agnes, in her creaking voice. Never. You’ll bring seven kinds of trouble down on your head, otherwise.
She grows up watching the mother with the shoes hug and pet her fair, chubby children. She watches her place the freshest breads, the choicest meat on their plates. Agnes must live with a sense of herself as second-tier, deficient in some way, unwanted. She is the one who must sweep the floors, change the babies’ napkins, rock them to sleep, rake out the grate and coax the fire to life. She sees, she recognises, that any accident or misfortune – a dropped platter, a broken jug, some ravelled knitting, unrisen bread – will somehow be her fault. She grows up knowing that she must protect and defend Bartholomew from all of life’s blows, because no one else will. He is of her blood, wholly and completely, in a way that no one else is. She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her. You need to get away, the flame tells her. You must.
Agnes will rarely – if ever – be touched. She will grow up craving just that: a hand on hers, on her hair, on her shoulder, the brush of fingers on her arm. A human print of kindness, of fellow feeling. Her stepmother never comes near her. Her siblings paw and claw at her but that doesn’t count.
She grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible. It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird and all the strength of the grip can be found there, all the power of the grasp. A person’s ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned. All that they have held, kept, and all they long to grip is there in that place. It is possible, she realises, to find out everything you need to know about a person just by pressing it.
When she is no more than seven or eight, a visitor lets Agnes hold her hand in this way and Agnes says, You will meet your death within the month, and doesn’t it come true, just like that, the visitor being struck down with an ague the very next week? She says that the shepherd will be knocked off his feet and hurt his leg, that her father will be caught in a storm, that the baby will fall ill on its second birthday, that the man offering to buy her father’s sheepskins is a liar, that the pedlar at the back door has intentions towards the kitchen maid.
Joan and the father worry. It is not Christian, this ability. They beg her to stop, not to touch people’s hands, to hide this odd gift. No good will come of it, her father says, standing over Agnes as she crouches by the fire, no good at all. When she reaches up to take his hand, he snatches it away.
She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.
There is just enough of this recollection alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognise it if she meets it again. And if she does, she won’t hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. She won’t listen to the protestations of others, their objections, their reasoning. This will be her chance, her way through the narrow hole at the heart of the stone, and nothing will stand in her way.
