There is suddenly nothing so excellent as teaching Latin. On the days he is due at Hewlands, the tutor is up at first call, folding his bedclothes and washing himself vigorously at the pail. He combs his hair and beard with careful strokes. He fills his breakfast plate but leaves the table before he has finished. He helps his brothers find their books and escorts them to the door, as they leave for school, waving them off. He has been known to hum, even to yield a polite nod to his father. His sister eyes him, sideways, as he whistles to himself, fastening his jerkin one way then the other, checking his reflection in the window pane before leaving, tucking and retucking his hair behind his ears, banging the door after him.
On the days when he is not at Hewlands, he lies in his bed until his father threatens to tan his hide unless he stirs himself. Once upright, he will slope about the house, sighing, not answering if spoken to, chewing absently on a crust of bread, picking things up, putting them down again. He is observed in the workshop, leaning on the counter, turning over pair after pair of ladies’ gloves, as if searching for some meaning hidden in their seams, their inert fingers. He then sighs once more and pushes them all haphazardly back into their box. He stands over Ned, watching as he stitches a falconer’s belt, so closely that the boy is quite put off his work, causing John to roar at the boy about how there’s only the door between him and the street.
‘And you,’ John turns on his son, ‘get out of here. Find some useful occupation. If you can.’ John shakes his head, turning his attention back to the cutting of a squirrel skin into useful, narrow strips. ‘All that education,’ he mutters, to himself, to the slippery lengths of pelt, ‘and not an ounce of sense.’
His sister, Eliza, is sent later by her mother to find him. After wandering the ground floor, the yard, she takes the stairs and goes from the boys’ chamber to hers, to her parents’ and back; she calls his name.
The reply takes a while to come and, when it does, it is flat in tone, annoyed, displeased.
‘Where are you?’ she asks wonderingly, turning her head from side to side.
Again, the long, reluctant pause. Then: ‘Up here.’
‘Where?’ she asks, mystified.
‘Here.’
Eliza moves from her parents’ chamber, to stand at the foot of the ladder to the attic. She calls his name again.
A sigh. A mysterious rustle. ‘What do you want?’
For a moment, Eliza thinks he might be doing the thing that boys – young men – do sometimes. She has enough brothers to know that there is something that happens in private, and they are ill-tempered if interrupted. She hesitates at the bottom of the ladder, one hand on a rung.
‘May I . . . come up?’
A silence.
‘Are you sick?’
Another sigh. ‘No.’
‘Mother says, can you go to the tannery and then to the—’
There is a strangled, inarticulate cry from above, the sound of something weighty being thrown against the wall, a boot perhaps or a loaf of bread, a movement, then a thud, not unlike someone standing up and hitting their head on a rafter. ‘Ow,’ he screams, and lets out a volley of curses, some startling, some Eliza has never heard before but will ask him about later, when he is in a better humour.
‘I’m coming up,’ she says, and begins to climb the ladder.
She rises, head first, into a warm and dusty space, the only light coming from two candles propped on a bale. Her brother is sitting collapsed on the floor, his head cradled in his hands.
‘Let me see,’ she says.
He mutters something inaudible, possibly heretical, but the meaning is clear: he wants her to go away and leave him alone.
She puts her hands on his, peels back his fingers. With her other hand, she lifts the candle and examines the place of pain. There is a swelling, reddened and bruised, just under his hairline. She presses its outer edges, making him wince.
‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘You’ve had worse.’
He lifts his eyes to hers and they regard each other for a moment. He gives a half-smile. ‘That is true,’ he says.
She lets her hand drop and, still holding the candle, sits herself down on one of the wool bales that are crammed into the space between floor and roof. They have been up here for several years. Once, last winter, in the yard, as they were wrapping gloves in linen, to be placed finger to wrist, finger to wrist, in baskets on a cart, her brother spoke up and asked why the attic was filled with wool bales, and what was their intended purpose? Their father leant across the cart and seized a fistful of his son’s jerkin. There are no wool bales in this house, he said, giving his son a shake with each word. Is that clear? Eliza’s brother had stared steadily back into his father’s eyes, without blinking. Clear enough, he had replied, eventually. Their father had held on, fist clenched around his son’s clothing, as if considering whether or not he was being insolent, then released him. Don’t speak of what doesn’t concern you, he had muttered, as he returned to his wrapping, and everyone in the yard let out the breath they had been holding.
Eliza allows herself to bounce up and down on the wool bale, the existence of which they are bound always to deny. Her brother watches her for a moment but says nothing. He tips his head back and stares at the rafters.
She wonders if he is recalling that this attic was always their space – hers and his, and also Anne’s, before she died. The three of them would retreat here in the afternoons, when he got back from school, pulling the ladder up after them, despite the wails and entreaties of their younger siblings. It was mostly empty then, save for a few spoilt hides that their father was saving for some unspecified reason. Nobody could reach them there; it was just her and him and Anne, until they were called by their mother to perform some task or to take over the care of one of the younger children.
Eliza hadn’t realised her brother still came up here; she hadn’t known he still sought this place as a refuge from the household. She hasn’t climbed the ladder since Anne died. She lets her gaze rove over the room: slanted ceilings, the undersides of the roof tiles, the bales and bales of wool, which are to be kept here, out of sight. She sees old candle stubs, a folding knife, a bottle of ink. There are, scattered over the floor, several curls of paper with words scrawled on them, crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again, then crumpled and tossed aside. Her brother’s thumb and finger, the rims of his nails, she sees, are stained black. What can he be studying up here, in secret?
‘What is the matter?’ she says.
‘Nothing,’ he answers, without looking at her. ‘Not a thing.’
‘What is ailing you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then what are you doing up here?’
‘Nothing.’
She looks at the curls of paper. She sees the words ‘never’ and ‘fire’, and something that might be ‘fly’ or ‘try’. When she raises her eyes again, she sees that he is looking at her, eyebrows raised. She gives an involuntary quick smile. He is the only person in this house – indeed, this whole town – who knows that she has her letters, that she can read. And how does he know this? Because he is the one who taught her and Anne. Every afternoon, here, after he returned from school. He would trace a letter in the dust, on the floor, and say, Look, Eliza, look, Anne, this is a d, this is an o, and if you put a g at the end, it says ‘dog’. Do you see that? You need to blend the sounds, run them together, until the sense of the word arrives in your head.
‘Is “nothing” the only thing you’re willing to say?’ she says.
She sees his mouth twitch and knows that he is drawing on all his lessons in rhetoric and argument to find a way to answer this question with that very word.
‘You can’t do it,’ she says, with glee. ‘You can’t find a way to reply “nothing”, can you, however hard you try? You can’t do it. Admit it.’
‘I admit nothing,’ he says triumphantly.
They sit for a moment, eyeing each other. Eliza balances the heel of one shoe on the toe of the other.
‘People are saying,’ she says carefully, ‘that you’ve been seen with the girl from Hewlands.’
She doesn’t say some of the coarser or more defamatory things she has heard against her brother, who is penniless and tradeless, not to mention rather young to be courting such a woman, who is of age and would come with a large dowry. What a way out it would be for the boy, she heard a woman at the market whisper, behind her back. You can see why he’d want to marry into money and get away from that father.
She tells herself to refrain from mentioning what people say of this girl. That she is fierce and savage, that she puts curses on people, that she can cure anything but also cause anything. Those wens on the stepmother’s cheeks, she overheard someone say the other day, she gave her those when the stepmother took away her falcon. She can sour the milk just by touching it with her fingers.
When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.
‘I’ve heard,’ she continues, with great control, ‘that you take walks together. After the lessons. Is that true?’
He doesn’t look at her when he says, ‘And what of it?’
‘Into the woods?’
He shrugs, neither yes nor no.
‘Does her mother know?’
‘Yes,’ he replies, quickly, too quickly, then amends this to ‘I don’t know.’
‘But what if . . .?’ Eliza finds the question she would like to put to him almost too unwieldy to ask; she has only the vaguest grasp of its content, the deeds involved, the matters at stake. She tries again: ‘What if you are caught? While taking one of these walks?’
He lifts a shoulder, then lets it drop. ‘Then we are caught.’
‘Does the thought not give you pause?’
‘Why would it?’
‘The brother . . .’ she begins ‘. . . the sheep farmer. Have you not seen him? He is a giant of a man. What if he were to—’
Eliza’s brother waves his hand. ‘You worry too much. He is always off with his sheep. I have never encountered him at Hewlands, in all the times I have been there.’
She folds her hands together, squints again at the curls of paper, but can make no sense of what is written there. ‘I don’t know if you know,’ she says, timidly, ‘what people say of her but—’
‘I know what is said of her,’ he snaps. ‘There are many who claim she is—’
He straightens, his colour suddenly high. ‘None of it is true. None of it. I’m surprised that you would attend to such idle gabble.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Eliza cries, crestfallen. ‘I’m merely – ’
‘It is all falsehoods,’ he continues, as if she hasn’t spoken, ‘spread by her stepmother. She is so jealous of her it twists her like a snake and—’
‘– frightened for you!’
He regards her, taken aback. ‘For me? Why?’
‘Because . . .’ Eliza tries to order her thoughts, to sift through all she has heard ‘. . . because our father will never agree to this. You must know that. We are in debt to that family. Father will never even speak their name. And because of what is said of her. I don’t believe it,’ she adds hastily, ‘of course I don’t. But, still, it is troubling. People are saying that no good can come of this attachment of yours.’
He slumps back to the wool bales, as if defeated, shutting his eyes. His whole body is quivering, with anger or something else. Eliza doesn’t know. There is a long silence. Eliza folds the fabric of her smock into tiny tight pleats. Then she remembers something else she wanted to ask him, and leans forward.
‘Does she really have a hawk?’ she whispers, in a new voice.
He opens his eyes, lifts his head. Brother and sister regard each other for a moment.
‘She does,’ he says.
‘Really? I had heard that but did not know if it was—’
‘It’s a kestrel, not a hawk,’ he says, in a rush. ‘She trained it herself. A priest taught her. She has a gauntlet and the bird takes off, like an arrow, up through the trees. You have never seen anything like it. It is so different when it flies – it is almost, you might think, two creatures. One on the ground and another in the air. When she calls, it returns to her, circling in these great wheels in the sky, and it lands with such force upon the glove, such determination.’
‘She has let you do this? Wear her glove and catch the hawk?’
‘Kestrel,’ he corrects, then nods, and the pride of it makes him almost glow. ‘She has.’
‘I should love,’ Eliza breathes, ‘to see that.’
He looks at her, rubs his chin with his stained fingertips. ‘Maybe,’ he says, almost to himself, ‘I’ll take you with me one day.’
Eliza lets go of her dress, the pleats falling from the fabric. She is thrilled and terrified, all at once. ‘You will?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you think she will let me fly the hawk? The kestrel?’
‘I see no reason why not.’ He considers his sister for a moment. ‘You will like her, I think. You and she are not dissimilar, in some ways.’
Eliza is shocked by this revelation. She is not dissimilar to the woman of whom people say such terrible things? Only the other day, at church, she had an opportunity to observe the complexion of the mistress of Hewlands – those boils and blotches and wens – and the idea that a person might be able to do that to another is deeply disturbing to her. She doesn’t say this to her brother, though, and, in truth, there is a part of her that longs to see the girl up close, to look into her eyes. So Eliza says nothing. Her brother does not appreciate being pressed or rushed. He is someone who must be approached sideways, with caution, as with a restive horse. She must gently probe him and, in that way, she will likely find out more.
‘What manner of person is she, then?’ Eliza asks.
Her brother thinks before he answers. ‘She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.’ He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.’ He glances at Eliza. ‘Those are rare qualities, are they not?’
Eliza feels her head nodding and nodding. She is amazed at the detail in this speech, honoured at being its recipient. ‘She sounds . . .’ she gropes for the right word, recalling one he taught her himself, a few weeks ago ‘. . . peerless.’
He smiles and she knows he remembers teaching it to her. ‘That’s exactly what she is, Eliza. Peerless.’
‘It also sounds,’ she begins carefully, ever so carefully, so as not to alarm him, not to make him retreat into silence again – she cannot believe he has already said as much as he has, ‘as though you are . . . decided. That you are fixed. On her.’
He doesn’t say anything, just stretches out to tap his palm against the wool bale next to him. For a moment, she believes she has gone too far, that he will refuse to be drawn any further, that he will get up and leave, with no more confidences.
‘Have you spoken to her family?’ she ventures.
He shakes his head and shrugs.
‘Are you going to speak to them?’
‘I would,’ he mutters, head lowered, ‘but I am in no doubt that my case would be refused. They would not view me as a good prospect for her.’
‘Perhaps if you – waited,’ Eliza says, faltering, laying a hand on his sleeve, ‘a year or so. Then you’d be of age. And more established in your position. Maybe Father’s business will have seen some improvement and he might regain some of his standing in the town, and perhaps he could be persuaded to stop this wool—’
He jerks his arm away, pulling himself upright. ‘And when,’ he demands, ‘have you ever known him to listen to persuasion, to sense? When has he ever changed his mind, even when he was wrong?’
Eliza stands up from the bale. ‘I just think—’
‘When,’ continues her brother, ‘has he ever exerted himself to give me something I want or need? When have you known him to act in my favour? When have you known him not to go deliberately out of his way to thwart me?’
Eliza clears her throat. ‘Perhaps if you waited, then—’
‘The problem is,’ her brother says, striding through the attic, through the words scattered on the floor, making the curls of paper skitter and swirl around his boots, ‘that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.’
He turns, steps on to the ladder and disappears from view. She watches the two points of the ladder judder with his every step, then fall still.
The lines and lines of apples are moving, jolting, rocking on their shelves. Each apple is centred in a special groove, carved into the wooden racks that run around the walls of this small storeroom.
Rock, rock, jolt, jolt.
The fruit has been placed with care, just so: the woody stem down and the star of the calyx up. The skin mustn’t touch that of its neighbour. They must sit like this, lightly held by the wooden groove, a finger width from each other, over the winter or they will spoil. If they touch each other, they will brown and sag and moulder and rot. They must be preserved in rows, like this, separate, stems down, in airy isolation.
The children of the house were given this duty: to pluck the apples from the twisted branches of the trees, to stack them together in baskets, then bring them here, to the apple store, and line them up on these racks, spaced evenly and carefully, to air, to preserve, to last the winter and spring, until the trees bring forth fruit again.
Except that something is moving the apples. Again and again and again, over and over, with a shunting, nudging, insistent motion.
The kestrel, on her perch, is hooded but alert, always alert. Her head rotates within its ruff of flecked feathers, to ascertain the source of this repetitive, distracting noise. Her ears, tuned so acutely that they can, if required, discern the heartbeat of a mouse a hundred feet away, a stoat’s footfall across the forest, the wingbeat of a wren over a field, pick up on the following: twenty score apples being nudged, jostled, bothered in their cradles. The breathing of mammals, of a size too large to elicit the interest of her appetite, increasing in pace. The hollow of a palm landing lightly on muscle and bone. The click and slither of a tongue against teeth. Two planes of fabric, of differing texture, moving over each other in obverse direction.
The apples are turning on their heads; stalks are appearing from undersides, calyxes are facing sideways, then back, then upwards, then down. The pace of the knocking varies: it pauses; it slows; it builds; it pulls back again.
Agnes’s knees are raised, splayed open like butterfly wings. Her feet, still in their boots, rest on the opposite shelf; her hands brace against the whitewashed wall. Her back straightens and bows, seemingly of its own accord, and low, near-growls are being pulled out of her throat. This takes her by surprise: her body asserting itself in this way. How it knows what to do, how to react, how to be, where to put itself, her legs white and folded in the dim light, her rear resting on the shelf edge, her fingers gripping the stones of the wall.
In the narrow space between her and the opposite shelf is the Latin tutor. He stands in the pale V of her legs. His eyes are shut; his fingers grip the curve of her back. It was his hands that undid the bows at her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light – and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another; their pink-brown eyes stared back in shock. It was her hands, however, that lifted her skirts, that pushed herself back on to this shelf, that drew the body of the Latin tutor towards her. You, the hands said to him, I choose you.
And now there is this – this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?
The apples, stretching away from her one way and the other, rotate and jostle in their grooves.
The Latin tutor opens his eyes for a moment, the black of his pupils wide, almost unseeing. He smiles, places his hands on either side of her face, murmurs something, she isn’t sure what, but it doesn’t matter at this particular moment. Their foreheads touch. Strange, she thinks, to have another at such proximity: the overwhelming scale of lash, of folded eyelid, of the hairs of the brow, all facing the same way. She doesn’t take his hand, not even out of habit: she doesn’t need to.
When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt – what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all – it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.
She watches an apple turn its red-stained flesh towards her, then away, a pitted tree-mark appearing, then the flash of the navel-like end.
Last time he came to the farm, they had walked together after his lesson, up to the furthest field, as dusk settled on the land, dimming the trees to black, as the furrows of the new-cut hayfields seemed to deepen into valleys, and come upon Joan, stepping between the springy flanks of their flocks. She liked to check on Bartholomew’s work, or liked Bartholomew to know she was checking. One of the two. She had seen them coming, Agnes knew. She had seen Joan’s head turn towards them, take a long look at them, as they walked up the path together. She would have realised why they were coming, would have seen their joined hands. Agnes had sensed the anxiety of the tutor: all at once, his fingers were cold and she could feel them tremble. She pressed his hand once, twice, before releasing it and letting him go ahead of her, through the gate.
Never, was what Joan had said. You? Then she laughed, a harsh trill that startled the sheep around her, making them lift their blunt heads and shift their cloven feet. Never, she said again. What age are you? She didn’t wait for a reply but answered herself: Not old enough. I know your family, Joan had said, screwing up her face into a contemptuous pout, pointing at the tutor. Everyone knows them. Your father and his shady dealings, his disgrace. He was bailiff, she said, spitting out the word ‘was’. How he loved to lord it over us all, swanning about in his red robes. But not any more. Have you any idea how much your father owes around the town? How much he owes us? You could tutor my sons until they are all grown men and it wouldn’t come close to clearing his debt here. So, no, she said, looking round him at her, you cannot marry her. Agnes will marry a farmer, by and by – someone with prospects, someone to provide for her. She’s been brought up for that life. Her father left her a dowry in his will – I’m sure you know that, don’t you? She’ll not marry a feckless, tradeless boy like you.
And she had turned away, as if that had been an end to it. But I don’t want to marry a farmer, Agnes had cried. Joan had laughed again. Is that so? You want to marry him? Yes, she said. I do. Very much. And Joan had laughed again, shaking her head.
But we are handfasted, the tutor said. I asked her and she answered and so we are bound.
No, you are not, said Joan. Not unless I say so.
The tutor had left the field, marched down the path and off through the woods, his face dark and thunderous, and Agnes was left with her stepmother, who told her to stop standing there like a simpleton, go back to the hall and mind the children. The next time he came to the farm, Agnes beckoned to him. I know a way, she said. I have an answer. We can, she said, take matters into our own hands. Come. Come with me.
Each apple, to her, at this moment, seems toweringly different, distinct, unique, each one streaked with variations of crimson, gold and green. All of them turning their single eye upon her, then away, then back. It is too much, all too much, it is overwhelming, how many of them there are, the noise they are all making, the tapping, rhythmic, rocking sound, on and on it goes, faster and faster. It steals her breath, makes her heart trip and race in her chest, she cannot take it much more, she cannot, she cannot. Some apples rock right out of their places, on to the floor, and perhaps the tutor has trodden on them because the air is filled with a sweetish, acrid smell and she grips his shoulders. She knows, she feels, that all will be well, that everything will go their way. He holds her to him and she can feel the breath leave him, enter him, leave him again.
Joan is not an idle woman. She has six children (eight, if you count the half-mad step-girl and the idiot brother she was forced to take on when she married). She is a widow, as of last year. The farmer left the farm to Bartholomew, of course, but the terms of the will allow her, Joan, to remain living here to oversee matters. And oversee she will. She doesn’t trust that Bartholomew to look further than his nose. She has told him she will continue to run the kitchen, the yard and the orchard, with the help of the girls. Bartholomew will see to the flocks and the fields, with the help of the boys, and she will walk the land with him, once a week, to make sure all is as it should be. So Joan has the chickens and pigs to see to, the cows to milk, food for the men, the farmhand and the shepherd to prepare, day in, day out. Two younger boys to educate as best she can – and Lord knows they will need an education as the farm will not be coming down to them, more’s the pity. She has three daughters (four, if you count the other, which Joan usually doesn’t) to keep under her eye. She has bread to bake, cattle to milk, berries to bottle, beer to brew, clothes to mend, stockings to darn, floors to scrub, dishes to wash, beds to air, carpets to beat, windows to polish, tables to scour, hair to brush, passages to sweep, steps to scrub.
orgive her, then, if it is almost three months before she notices that a number of monthly cloths are missing from the wash.
At first, she believes she has made a mistake. The washing is done once a fortnight, early on a Monday morning, which allows time for airing and pressing. There is always a day with a small number of the monthly cloths; she and her daughters bleed at the same time; the other one keeps to her own time, of course, as she does with everything else. She and the girls all know the rhythm: there is the fortnight’s wash with her and her daughters’ cloths, heaps of them, dried to rust, and there is the wash with the smaller number of Agnes’s. Joan tends to toss them into the pot with wooden tongs, holding her breath, covering them with salt.
On a morning in late October, Joan is sifting through the mounds of laundry in the washhouse. A pile of shifts and cuffs and caps, ready for a dousing in scalding water and salt; a pile of stockings, for a cooler tub; breeches, caked with filth and mud, a spattered kirtle, a cloak that had borne the brunt of a puddle. The pile Joan thinks of as ‘the dirties’ is smaller than usual.
Joan lifts a piece of soiled cloth, one hand over her nose, a bedsheet with the tang of urine (her youngest son, William, is still not wholly reliable in that respect, despite threats and cajolings, though he is only three, bless him). A shirt smeared with some manner of dung is stuck to a cap. Joan frowns, looks about her. She stands for a moment, considering.
She goes outside, where her daughters, Caterina, Joanie and Margaret, are twisting a sheet between them. Caterina has tied a rope around William’s middle, the end of which is looped around her waist. He strains and tugs at the end, grumbling in a low murmur, holding fistfuls of grass. He is trying to get to the pig-pen but Joan has heard too many stories about swine trampling children or eating them or crushing them. She will not let her young ones wander at will.
‘Where are the monthlies?’ she says, standing in the doorway.
They turn to look at her, her daughters, separated and linked by the tortured sheet, which is dripping water to the ground. They shrug, their faces blank and innocent.
Joan goes back into the washhouse. She must have made a mistake. They must be here somewhere. She lifts pile after pile from the floor. She sifts through shifts and caps and stockings. She marches out, past her daughters, into the house and straight to the cupboard. There, she counts the thick cloths, folded and laundered, on the upper shelf. She knows how many there are in this house and that exact number is right there in front of her.
Joan stamps down the passage, out through the door and slams it behind her. She stands for a moment on the step, her breath streaming in and out of her nostrils. The air is cool, with the crisp edge that denotes the tipping of autumn into winter. A chicken struts up the ladder into the henhouse; the goat, at the end of its rope, chews ruminatively on a mouthful of grass, eyeing her. Joan’s mind is clear, tolling with one single thought: which one, which one, which one?
Perhaps she already knows but, still, she marches down the steps, across the farmyard and up to the washhouse where her girls are still twisting wet sheets, giggling together about something. She seizes Caterina, first, by the arm and presses her hand to the girl’s belly, looking into her eyes, ignoring her cries. The sheet falls to the wet, leafy ground, trodden on by her and the frightened girl. Joan feels: a flat stomach, the nudge of a hipbone, an empty pod. She lets Caterina go and gets hold of Joanie who is young, still a girl, for pity’s sake, and if it is her, if someone has done this to her, Joan will, she will, do something terrible, something bad and fearful and vengeful, and that man will rue the day he ever set foot in Hewlands, ever took her daughter wherever it was he took her and she will—
Joan lets her hand drop. Joanie’s belly is flat, almost hollow. Perhaps, she finds herself thinking, she should feed up these girls of hers a bit more, encourage them to take a larger share of meat. Is she underfeeding them? Is she? Is she allowing the boys to take more than their due?
She shakes her head to banish that line of thought. Margaret, she thinks, surveying her youngest daughter’s smooth and anxious face. No. It cannot be. She is still a child.
‘Where is Agnes?’ she says.
Joanie is staring at her, aghast, glancing down at the muddied sheet beneath their feet; Caterina, Joan notes, looks away, looks sideways, as if she understands what this means.
‘I don’t know,’ says Caterina, stooping to pick up the sheet. ‘She may have—’
‘She’s milking the cow,’ blurts out Margaret.
Joan is screeching even before she reaches the byre. The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets, words she didn’t even know she knew, words that dart and crackle and maim, words that twist and mangle her tongue.
‘You,’ she is yelling, as she comes into the warmth of the byre, ‘where are you?’
Agnes’s head is pressed against the smooth flank of the cow as she milks. Joan hears the psht-psht-u-psht of milk jetting into the pail. At the sound of Joan’s cry, the cow shifts and Agnes lifts her cheek and turns to look at her stepmother, a wary expression on her face. Here it comes now, she seems to be thinking.
Joan grabs her by the arm, yanks her off the milking stool, and pushes her up against the stall partition. Too late, she sees her son James standing in the next stall: he must have been helping Agnes with the milking. Joan has to fumble through the girl’s kirtle, the fastenings of her gown, and the girl is struggling, pushing her fingers away, trying to break free, but Joan gets her hand through, just for a moment, and feels – what? A swelling, hard in texture, and hot. A quickening mound, risen like a loaf.
‘Whore,’ Joan spits, as Agnes pushes her away. ‘Slut.’
Joan is propelled backwards, towards the cow, which is tossing its head now, uneasy at this change in atmosphere, at this unexplained hiatus in the milking. She falls against the cow’s rump and stumbles slightly and Agnes is off, away, running through the byre, past the dozing ewes, through the door, and Joan is not going to let her get away. She rights herself, goes after her stepdaughter, and her fury propels her to a new speed because she catches up with her easily.
Her hand reaches out, closes over a lock of Agnes’s hair. So simple to yank it, to pull the girl to a stop, to feel her head jerked back by her grip, as if pulled up by a bridle. The ease of it astonishes and fuels her: Agnes drops to the ground, falling awkwardly on her back and Joan can keep her there by winding the hair round and round her fist.
In this way, the two of them by the fence to the farmyard, Joan can get Agnes to listen to anything she says.
‘Who,’ she screams at the girl, ‘did this? Who put that child in your belly?’
Joan is running through the not inconsiderable number of suitors who have sought Agnes’s hand, ever since the details of the dowry in her father’s will became known. Could it have been one of them? There was the wheelwright, the farmer from the other side of Shottery, that blacksmith’s apprentice. But the girl hadn’t seemed to take to any of them. Who else? Agnes is reaching round, trying to prise Joan’s fingers off her hair. Her face – that haughty, high-cheekboned pale face of hers of which she is so proud – is contorted by pain, by thwarted anger. There are tears streaking down her cheeks, pooling in her eye sockets.
‘Tell me,’ Joan says, into this face, which she has had to see, every day, looking back at her with indifference, with insolence, since the day she came here. This face, which Joan knows resembles that of the first wife, the beloved wife, the woman her husband would never speak of, whose hair he had kept pressed in a kerchief in a shirt pocket, next to his heart – she had discovered this as she was laying him out for burial. It must have been there all along, all the years she had washed and cleaned for him, fed him, borne his children, and there it was, the hair of the first wife. She, Joan, will never get over the smart and sting of that insult.
‘Was it the shepherd?’ Joan says and she sees that, despite everything, this suggestion makes Agnes grin.
‘No,’ Agnes gets out, ‘not the shepherd.’
‘Who, then?’ Joan demands and is just about to name the son at the neighbouring farm when Agnes twists around and lands a kick on her shin, a kick of such force that Joan staggers backwards, her hands springing open.
Agnes is up, off, away, scrambling to her feet, gathering her skirts. Joan gets up unsteadily, and goes after her. They are in the farmyard when Joan catches up with her. She grabs her by the wrist, swings her round, lands a slap on the girl’s face.
‘You will tell me who—’ she begins, but never finishes the sentence because there is a noise at the left side of her head: a deafening explosion, like a clap of thunder. For a moment, she cannot comprehend what has happened, what the noise means. Then she feels the pain, the smart of skin, the deeper ache of bone, and she realises that Agnes has struck her.
Joan puts a hand to her face, aghast. ‘How dare you?’ she shrieks. ‘How dare you hit me? A girl raising a hand to her mother, someone who—’
Agnes’s lip is swollen, bleeding, so her words are slurred, indistinct, but Joan still manages to hear her say: ‘You are not my mother.’
Enraged, Joan slaps her again. Agnes, unbelievably and without hesitation, slaps her back. Joan lifts her hand again but it is seized from behind. Someone has her around the waist – it is that great brute Bartholomew and he is lifting her up and away, forcing down her hands and holding them fast with the effortless grip of his fingers. Her son, Thomas, is there too, standing now between her and Agnes, holding up a sheep crook, and Bartholomew is telling her to stop, to calm herself. Her other children stand by the henhouse, open-mouthed, amazed. Caterina has her arms around Joanie, who is crying. Margaret holds little William, who is burying his face in her neck.
Joan feels herself carried to the other side of the yard and Bartholomew is restraining her, asking what is amiss, what has brought this on, and she is telling him, pointing a finger at Agnes, now being helped to her feet by Thomas.
Bartholomew’s face falls as he listens. He closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out. He rubs a hand over the bristles of his beard and examines his feet for a moment.
‘The Latin tutor,’ he says, and looks across at Agnes.
Agnes doesn’t reply but lifts her chin a notch.
Joan looks from stepson to stepdaughter, to sons, to daughters. All of them, save the stepdaughter, drop their gaze and she realises that they all, every one of them, saw what she did not. ‘The Latin tutor?’ she repeats. She pictures him suddenly, standing at a gate in the furthest field, asking her for Agnes’s hand, in a faltering voice. She had almost forgotten. ‘Him? That – that boy? That wastrel? That wageless, useless, beardless—’ She breaks off to laugh, a harsh, mirthless sound that leaves her chest feeling emptied and hot. She remembers it all, now, the lad standing there as she told him no; she remembers feeling a brief stab of pity for him, that young lad, his face so crestfallen, and with such a father, too. But Joan had dismissed the thought of him, as soon as he had left her sight.
Joan shakes off Bartholomew’s hand. She becomes focused, ruthless. She marches into the house, past Agnes, past her children, past the chickens. She bangs open the door and, once inside, is fast and thorough. She moves through the room, collecting anything that belongs to her stepdaughter. A pair of shifts, a spare cap, an apron. A wooden comb, a stone with a hole, a belt.
The family is still gathered in the farmyard when Joan comes out of the house and hurls a bundle at Agnes’s feet.
‘You,’ she cries, ‘are banished from this house for ever more.’
Bartholomew shifts his gaze from Agnes to Joan and back again. He folds his arms and steps forward. ‘This is my house,’ he says, ‘left to me, in my father’s will. And I say that Agnes may stay.’
Joan stares at him, wordless, the colour rising in her cheeks. ‘But . . .’ she blusters, trying to rally her thoughts ‘. . . but . . . the terms of the will stated that I may stay in the house until such time—’
‘You may stay,’ Bartholomew says, ‘but the house is mine.’
‘But I was given the running of the house!’ She seizes upon this triumphantly, desperately. ‘And you the care of the farm. So by that fact, I am within my rights to send her away, for this is a matter of the house, not of the farm and—’
‘The house is mine,’ Bartholomew repeats softly. ‘And she stays.’
‘She cannot stay,’ Joan shrieks, infuriated, powerless. ‘You need to think about – about your brothers and sisters, this family’s reputation, not to mention your own, our standing in—’
‘She stays,’ Bartholomew says.
‘She has to go, she must.’ Joan tries to think fast, scrabbling about for something to make him change his mind. ‘Think of your father. What would he have said? It would have broken his heart. He would never—’
‘She will stay. Unless it comes to pass that—’
Agnes puts a hand on her brother’s sleeve. They look at each other for a long moment, without speaking. Then Bartholomew spits into the dirt and lifts a hand to her shoulder. Agnes smiles at him crookedly, with her split and bleeding mouth. Bartholomew nods in reply. She sweeps a sleeve up and over her face; she unpicks the knot of the bundle, ties and reties it.
Bartholomew watches as she shoulders the bundle. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he says, to her, touching her hand. ‘Not to worry.’
‘I shan’t,’ Agnes says.
She walks, only a little unsteadily, across the farmyard. She enters the apple store and, after a few moments, emerges with her kestrel on her glove. The bird is hooded, wings folded, but its head pivots and twitches, as if it is acquainting itself with its new circumstances.
Agnes shoulders her pack and, without saying goodbye, exits the farmyard, taking the path around the side of the house, and is gone.
He is behind his father’s stall in the market, lounging against the counter. The day is crisp, with the startling metallic cold of early winter. He is watching his breath leave his body in a visible, vanishing stream, half listening to a woman debate squirrel-lined versus rabbit-trimmed gloves, when Eliza materialises beside him.
She gives him an odd, wide-eyed, teeth-gritted smile.
‘You need to go home,’ she says, in a low voice, without letting her fixed expression falter. She then turns to the browsing woman and says, ‘Yes, madam?’
He pushes himself upright. ‘Why do I need to go home? Father told me I should—’
‘Just go,’ she hisses, ‘now,’ and addresses the customer, in a louder tone: ‘I believe the rabbit trim to be the very warmest.’
He lopes across the market, weaving in and out of the stalls, dodging a cart laden with cabbages, a boy carrying a bundle of thatch. He is in no hurry: it will be some complaint of his father’s about his conduct or his chores or his forgetfulness or his laziness or his inability to remember important things or his reluctance to put in what his father has the temerity to call ‘an honest day’s work’. He will have forgotten to take an order or to pick up skin from the tanners or omitted to chop the wood for his mother. He wends his way up the wide thoroughfare of Henley Street, stopping to pass remarks with various neighbours, to pat a child on the head and, finally, he turns into the door of his house.
He wipes his boots against the matting, letting the door close behind him, and casts a glance into his father’s workshop. His father’s chair is empty, pushed back, as if in haste. The thin shoulders of the apprentice are bent over something at the workbench. At the sound of the latch hooking into itself, the boy turns his head and looks at him, with round, frightened eyes.
‘Hello, Ned,’ he says. ‘How goes it?’
Ned looks as if he might speak but closes his mouth. He gives a gesture with his head that is halfway between a nod and a shake, then points towards the parlour.
He smiles at the apprentice, then steps through the door from the passage, across the squared flags of the hall, past the dining table, past the empty grate, and into the parlour.
The scene that greets him is so unaccountable, so confusing, that it takes him a moment to catch up, to assess what is happening. He stops in his tracks, framed by the doorway. What is immediately clear to him is that his life has taken a new turn.
Agnes is sitting on a low stool, a ragged bundle at her feet, his mother opposite her, next to the fire; his father is at the window, his back to the room. The kestrel is perched on the topmost rung of a ladderback chair, claws curled around the wood, its jesses and bell hanging down. Part of him wants to turn and run. The other part wants to burst into laughter: the idea of a falcon, of Agnes, in his mother’s parlour, surrounded by the curlicued and painted wall hangings of which she is so proud.
‘Ah,’ he says, attempting to gather himself, and all three turn towards him. ‘Now . . .’
The words shrivel in his mouth because he catches sight of Agnes’s face. Her left eye is swollen shut, reddened, bruised; the skin under the brow is split and bleeding.
He steps towards her, closing the gap between them. ‘Good God,’ he says, placing a hand on her shoulder, feeling the flex and pull of her shoulder-blade, as if she might fly, take to the air, like her bird, if only she could. ‘What happened? Who did this to you?’
There are vivid marks on her cheek, a cut on her lip, the tracks of fingernails, raw patches on her wrist.
Mary clears her throat. ‘Her mother,’ she says, ‘has banished her from the house.’
Agnes shakes her head. ‘Stepmother,’ she says.
‘Joan,’ he puts in, ‘is Agnes’s stepmother, not—’
‘I know that,’ Mary snaps. ‘I used the word merely as a—’
‘And she didn’t banish me,’ Agnes says. ‘It isn’t her house. It’s Bartholomew’s. I chose to leave.’
Mary inhales, shutting her eyes for a moment, as if mustering the final shreds of her patience. ‘Agnes,’ she says, opening her eyes and fixing them on her son, ‘is with child. Says it’s yours.’
He gives a nod and a shrug, all at the same time, eyeing the broad back of his father, who looms behind his mother, still facing the street. He is, despite himself, despite the fact that he is clutching the hand of the woman he has vowed to marry, despite everything, working out which way he will have to duck to avoid the inevitable fist, to feint, to parry, and to shield Agnes from the blows he knows will come. Such a thing has no precedent in their family. He can only imagine what his father will do, what is fermenting in that balding, lumpen head of his. And then he realises, with a deep undertow of shame, Agnes will see how matters stand between him and his father; she will see the tumult and struggle of it all; she will see him for what he is, a man with his leg caught in the jaws of a trap; she will see and know all, in only a moment.
‘Is it?’ his mother says, her face white, stretched.
‘Is it what?’ he says, feeling skittish and a little mad, therefore unable to keep himself from lapsing into verbal sparring.
‘Yours.’
‘Is what mine?’ he returns, almost gleefully.
Mary presses her lips together. ‘Did you put it there?’
‘Did I put what where?’
At this point he is aware of Agnes turning her head to look at him – he can imagine her dark eyes on him, assessing, gathering information, like a spool gathers thread – but he still can’t stop. He wants whatever is coming his way to come soon: he wants to goad, to tip his father into action; he wants to have done with it, once and for all. Enough creeping around the matter. Let the truth of who his father is come out. Let Agnes see.
‘The child.’ Mary speaks in a slow, loud voice, as if to someone simpleheaded. ‘In her belly. Did you put it there?’
He feels his face curling into a smile. A child. Made by him and Agnes, among the apples in the storehouse. How can they not be married now? Nothing can be done to stop it, in such circumstances. It will be, just as she said it would. They will be married. He will be a husband and a father, and his life will begin and he can leave behind this, all of this, this house, this father, this mother, the workshop, the gloves, this life as their son, the drudgery and tedium of working in the business. What a thought, what a thing. This child, in Agnes’s belly, will change everything for him, will free him from the life he hates, from the father he cannot live with, from the house he can no longer bear. He and Agnes will take flight: to another house, another town, another life.
‘I did,’ he says, feeling a smile broaden across his face.
Several things happen at once. His mother launches herself from her seat, towards him, peppering him with her fists; he feels the blows make contact with his chest and shoulders, like taps on a drum. He hears Agnes’s voice, saying, Enough, stop, and another voice, his own, saying that they are handfasted, that there is no sin in it, they will wed, they must. His mother is shrieking that he is not of age, that he will need their consent and they will never give it, something about how he has been bewitched, what ruination this is, she will send him away, she would rather he went to sea than marry this wench, what a catastrophe. Behind him, he is aware of the bird shifting uneasily on its chair, shrugging its feathers, the flap and flutter of its open wings, the jangling of its bell. And then the dark broad shape of his father is near, and where is Agnes in all this chaos, is she behind him, is she safely out of his father’s reach because, by God, he will kill him, he will, if the man so much as lays a finger on her.
His father is stretching out an arm and he is ready, muscles tensed, but the meaty hand doesn’t strike him, doesn’t curl into a ball, doesn’t injure him. Instead, it lands on his shoulder. He can feel all five fingertips denting his flesh, through the cloth of his shirt, can catch the familiar whiff of leather, of whittawing – acrid, smarting, uric – off them.
There is the unfamiliar sensation of his father’s hand pressing him down, into a chair. ‘Sit,’ his father says, his voice even. He gestures to Agnes, who is behind them, soothing her bird. ‘Sit down, lass.’
After a moment, he complies. Agnes comes to stand beside him, smoothing the feathers on the kestrel’s neck with the back of her fingers. He sees his mother examining her with an expression of disbelief, of naked amazement. It makes him want to laugh, again. Then his father speaks and his attention is pulled back.
‘I’m in no doubt,’ his father is saying, ‘we can . . . come to an arrangement.’
The expression on his father’s face is an odd one. He stares at it, struck by its peculiarity. John’s lips are pulled back from his teeth, his eyes strangely alight. It takes him several seconds to realise that John is, in fact, smiling.
‘But, John,’ his mother is exclaiming, ‘there is no possible way that we can agree to such—’
‘Hush, woman,’ John says. ‘The boy said they were handfasted. Did you not hear him? No son of mine will go back on his promises, will shirk his responsibilities. The lad has got this girl with child. He has a responsibility, a—’
‘He’s eighteen years of age! He has no trade! How can you think—’
‘I told you to hush.’ His father speaks with his accustomed rough fury, just for a moment, before reassuming the odd, almost wheedling tone. ‘My son made you a promise, did he?’ he says, looking at Agnes. ‘Before he took you to the woods?’
Agnes strokes her bird. She looks at John, with a level gaze. ‘We made a promise to each other.’
‘And what does your mother – your, ah, stepmother – say to the match?’
‘She . . . was not in favour. Before. And now,’ she gestures towards her belly, ‘I cannot say.’
‘I see.’ His father pauses for a moment, his mind working. And there is, to the son, something familiar in this silence of his father’s, and just as he is staring at him, frowning, wondering, he realises what it is. This is the face his father wears when he is contemplating a business deal, an advantageous one. The expression is the same as when a cheap lot of skins has come his way, or a couple of extra bales of wool, to be hidden in the attic, or an inexperienced merchant has been sent to barter with him. It is the expression he assumes when he is trying not to let on to the other party that he will come out of the deal better off.
It is covetous. It is gleeful. It is suppressed. It chills the son, right down to the marrow of his bones. It makes him clutch the edges of the chair beneath him with both hands.
This marriage, the son suddenly sees, with a choking sensation of disbelief, will be beneficial to his father, to whatever dealings he has with the sheep farmer’s widow. His father is about to turn all this – Agnes’s bleeding face, her arrival here, the kestrel, the baby growing in her belly – to his own good.
He cannot believe it. He cannot. That he and Agnes have, unwittingly, played into his father’s hands. The thought makes him want to run from the room. That what happened between them both at Hewlands, in the forest, the kestrel diving like a needle through the fabric of leaves above them, can be twisted into a rope with which his father will tether him ever more closely to this house, to this place. It is insupportable. It cannot be borne. Will he never get away? Will he never be free of this man, this house, this trade?
John begins to talk again, in the same honeyed voice, saying how he will go out to Hewlands directly, to talk to the yeoman’s widow, to Agnes’s brother. He is sure, he tells them, he can broker an agreement, can draw up terms beneficial to all. The boy wants to marry the girl, he says to his wife, the girl wants to marry the boy: who are they to forbid this union? The baby must be born in wedlock, cannot be delivered into this world on the wrong side of the sheet. It is their grandchild, is it not? Many weddings are brought about thus. It is nature’s way.
At this point, he turns to his wife and gives a laugh, reaches out a hand to grab at her hip, and the son must look at the floor, so queasy does he feel.
John leaps to his feet, his face flushed, all eagerness and fervour. ‘It is settled, then. I will go out to Hewlands, to set out my terms . . . our terms . . . to . . . to seal this most . . . sudden . . . and, it must be said, blessed union between our families. The girl will remain here.’ He beckons to his son. ‘A word with you, in private, if you please.’
Out in the passage, John lets the pretence at geniality drop. He grips his son by the collar, his fingers cold against his skin; he pushes his face right up to his.
‘Tell me,’ he says, with low, grizzled menace, ‘there are no more.’
‘No more what?’
‘Say it. There are no more. Are there?’
The son feels the wall pressing into his back, his shoulder. The fingers grip his collar with such force that they stop the air in his throat.
‘Are there?’ his father hisses into his face. His breath is vaguely fishy, loamy. ‘Will there be other Warwickshire doxies lolloping up to my door to tell me that you swelled their bellies with a child? Must I be dealing with others? Tell me the truth, now. Because, by God, if there are others and her family hear of it, there’ll be trouble. For you and for all of us. Understand?’
He gasps, pushes back against his father but there is an elbow pressed into his shoulder, a forearm across his throat. He tries to say, no, never, there is only her, she is no doxy, how dare you say such a thing, but the words cannot make it to his mouth.
‘Because if you have ploughed and planted another one – just one – I’ll kill you. And if I don’t, her brother will. Do you hear me? I swear I will part you from your life, with God as my witness. Remember that.’
His father gives one final shove to his windpipe, then moves off, out of the door, letting it clang shut behind him.
John walks directly to Hewlands. He doesn’t stop at his stall to chivvy Eliza, to mete out criticisms and judgements, or to check on the stock. He doesn’t pause to exchange words with a guildsman he meets on Rother Street. He takes the path to Shottery and hurries along it, almost as if the girl might have the baby at any minute and somehow nullify this opportunity. His steps are quick and, he is pleased to think, sprightly, especially for a man of his years. He feels the anticipation of a good deal ahead of him, senses that particular pleasure run through his veins, like a cup of wine. John knows this is the moment, that a deal must be struck without delay, lest things change and the advantage slip away from him, as well it might. He has the upper hand, yes, he does. He has possession of the girl, in his house; he has the boy, who will require a special licence to wed because of his youth, the signed permission of his parents. There is the matter of the old debt between them, but their most pressing issue will be the girl. They need her to be married, in her state, and no marriage can take place unless he, John, agrees to it. It is the perfect position. He holds every card. He allows himself, as he walks the path, to whistle out loud, an old dancing tune from his youth.
He finds the brother in a distant field; he must pick his way through the filth to reach him, the brother leaning on his crook, watching him approach, without moving.
Groups of sheep shift around him, turning their bulging eyes on him, veering from him, as if he is a large and terrifying predator. Gloves, he mutters to them, under his breath, without letting his smile drop, you’ll all be gloves before ye know it. You’ll be worn on the hands of the Warwickshire gentry before the year is out, if I have anything to do with it. It is difficult, as he steps over the field, to prevent the glee from showing on his face.
The puddles, beneath his town boots, are frozen white clouds, solidified into the ridges and furrows of mud.
John reaches the sheep-farming brother. He holds out his hand. The brother looks at it for a moment. He is a huge man, with a look of Agnes about the eyes, with black hair tied back from his face. He is dressed in a sheepskin cape, like the father used to wear, and carries a carved cudgel. Another fairer, younger lad, also with a crook, hovers in the background, watchful, and for a moment, John feels a slight qualm. What if these men, these brothers, these people, mean to harm him, to wreak vengeance on him for his wastrel son who has taken the maidenhead of their sister? What if he has misread the situation and it is not, after all, to his advantage, and he has made a grave mistake in coming? He sees, for a fleeting moment, death coming for him, here, in a frosty Shottery field. Sees his corpse, the head stoved in by a shepherd’s crook, his brain spattered and spent, steaming in the frozen earth. His Mary a widow, his young children, little Edmond and Richard, fatherless. All the fault of his errant son.
The farmer shifts his cudgel to his opposite hand, spits emphatically on the ground, and takes John’s fingers, giving them a painfully strong squeeze. John hears himself give a high, almost girlish cry.
‘Well,’ John says, with the deepest, manliest chuckle he can muster, ‘I believe, Bartholomew, we have matters to discuss.’
The brother looks at him for a long moment. Then he nods, looking past him at something over John’s shoulder.
‘That we do,’ he says and, points. ‘Here comes Joan. She will want to have her say, I’ll warrant.’
Joan comes hurrying over the fields, flanked by daughters, a small boy perched on her hip.
‘You,’ she calls, as though he were one of her farm-boys. ‘A word with you, if you please.’
John waves his hand at her cordially, then turns to include Bartholomew in a smile and a head tilt. It is a knowing, sideways, male nod that John offers him, one that says, Women, eh? Always wanting their way. We men must let them feel included.
Bartholomew holds his gaze for a moment, his flecked eyes so like his sister’s, but expressionless, cold. Then he drops his gaze and, with an imperceptible gesture, bids his brother to leave, to open the gate for Joan, whistling for the dogs to go with them.
They stand in the field for a long time, Bartholomew, Joan and John. The other children watch, unseen, hidden behind a wall. After a while, they begin to ask each other, Is it settled, is it done, has Agnes gone to their house, will she be wed, is she never to come back? The smallest brother tires of this game of standing at a wall and whines to be put down. The sisters’ eyes never leave the three figures standing among the sheep. The dogs scuffle and yawn, dropping their heads on to their paws, raising them, every now and again, to check with Thomas, awaiting his orders.
Their brother is seen to shake his head, to turn sideways, as if to leave the talk. The glover seems to make an entreaty, uncurling first one hand, then the other. He counts something off on the fingers of his right hand. Joan speaks animatedly for a long time, waving her arms, pointing towards the house, gripping her apron. Bartholomew looks long and hard at the sheep, before reaching out to touch the back of one, turning his face to look at the glover, as if proving a point about the animal to the other man. The glover nods vigorously, gives a long speech, then smiles as if in triumph. Bartholomew taps his cudgel against his boot, a sure sign that he is unhappy. The glover steps closer; Joan holds her ground. The glover puts a hand on Bartholomew’s shoulder; the farmer lets it remain.
Then they shake hands. The glover with Joan, and then with Bartholomew. Oh, says one of the girls. The sons let out their breath. It is done, whispers Caterina.
