Eliza says to Agnes that she will make the wedding crown. If, she adds, that is what Agnes would like.
It is an offer made shyly, in a tentative voice, early one morning. Eliza is lying back to back with the woman who has come into their house so unexpectedly, so dramatically. It is just after dawn and it is possible to hear the first carts and footfalls out on the street.
Eliza must, Mary has said, share her bed with Agnes, until such time as the wedding can be arranged. Her mother told her this with tight, rigid lips, not meeting Eliza’s eye, flapping out an extra blanket over the bed. Eliza had looked down at the half of the pallet nearest the window, which has remained empty since her sister Anne died. She had glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.
Instead, though, Eliza wakes alone in the bed, every day.
But now here is this woman who will marry her brother: an Agnes instead of an Anne. It has all been a rush and a bother to arrange, with her brother needing a special licence and – Eliza isn’t clear on this point – a protracted discussion (heated) about money. Some friends of Agnes’s brother have put up surety: this much she knows. There is a baby in her belly, Eliza has heard, but only through doors. No one has explicitly told her this. Just as no one has thought to tell her that the wedding will be tomorrow, in the morning: her brother and Agnes will walk to the church in Temple Grafton, where a priest has agreed to marry them. It is not their priest, and it is not the church they attend every Sunday. Agnes says she knows this priest well. He is a particular friend of her family. It was him, in fact, who gave her the kestrel. He reared it himself, from an egg, and he once taught her how to cure lung rot in a falcon; he will marry them, she said airily, as she worked the treadle of Mary’s spinning wheel, because he has known her since she was a child and has always been kind to her. She once traded some jesses for a barrel of ale with him. He is, she explained, gathering wool in her spare hand, an expert in matters of falconry and brewing and bee-keeping, and has shared with her his great knowledge of all three.
When Agnes made this speech, from her place at the spinning, by the fire in the parlour, Eliza’s mother let her knitting needles fall, as if she could not believe what she was hearing, which had made Eliza’s brother laugh immoderately into his cup, which in turn had made their father angry. Eliza, however, had listened, rapt, to every word. Never had she heard such things said, never had anyone spoken in such a way in their house before, with such unselfconscious flow, such frank cheer.
Either way, the wedding is set. The hawking, honey-producing, ale-trading priest will marry them early the next day, in a ceremony arranged quickly, furtively, secretively.
When Eliza gets married, she wants to walk down Henley Street in a crown of flowers, in bright sunshine, so that all may see her. She does not want some ceremony miles from town, in a small church with a strange priest sneaking her and her groom in through the door; she will hold her head high and marry in town. She is sure of it. She will have her banns read loudly at the church door. But her father and Agnes’s brother cooked this up between them so nothing more can be said.
She would, however, like to make the flower crown for Agnes. Who else will do it? Not Agnes’s stepmother, Eliza is sure, or her sisters: they are keeping themselves to themselves, back in Shottery. They may come to the wedding, Agnes has shrugged, or they may not.
But Agnes must have a crown. She cannot be married without one, baby or no baby. So Eliza asks her. She clears her throat. She laces her fingers together, as if about to pray.
‘May I . . .’ she begins, speaking into the icy air of the room ‘. . . I wondered if you would like it if I . . . made your flower crown? For tomorrow?’
She feels Agnes behind her, listening. Eliza hears her inhale and she thinks for a moment that she will refuse, she will say no, that Eliza has spoken out of turn.
The pallet rustles and judders as Agnes turns over to face her.
‘A crown?’ Agnes says, and Eliza can hear in her voice that she is smiling. ‘I would like that very much indeed. Thank you.’
Eliza rolls over and the two of them stare into each other’s faces, sudden conspirators.
‘I don’t know,’ Eliza says, ‘what flowers we will find, this time of year. Maybe some berries or—’
‘Juniper,’ Agnes cuts in. ‘Or holly. Some fern. Or pine.’
‘There’s ivy.’
‘Or hazel flowers. We could go down to the river, you and I,’ Agnes says, catching hold of Eliza’s hand, ‘later today, and see what we can find.’
‘I saw some monkshood there last week. Maybe—’
‘Poisonous,’ Agnes says, turning on to her back, keeping hold of Eliza’s hand and placing it square on her belly. ‘Do you want to feel the baby? She moves about in the early morning. She’ll be needing her breakfast.’
‘She?’ says Eliza, amazed at this abrupt intimacy, the heat of the woman’s taut, hard skin, the strong grip of her hand.
‘I think it will be a girl,’ Agnes says, with a yawn, neat and quick.
Eliza’s hand is being pressed between Agnes’s fingers. It is the oddest sensation, as if something is being drawn from her, like a splinter in the skin or infection from a wound, at the same time as something else is being poured into her. She cannot work out if she is being made to give or receive something. She wants to withdraw her hand, at the same time as wanting it to remain.
‘Your sister,’ Agnes says softly. ‘She was younger than you?’
Eliza stares at the smooth brow, the white temples and black hair of her soonto-be sister-in-law. How does she know that Eliza had been thinking of Anne?
‘Yes,’ Eliza says. ‘By almost two years.’
‘And she was how old when she died?’
‘Eight.’
Agnes clicks her tongue in sympathy. ‘I am sorry,’ she murmurs, ‘for this loss.’
Eliza doesn’t say that she worries about Anne, all alone, so young, without her, wherever she may be. That for a long time she lay awake at night, whispering her name, just in case she was listening, from wherever she was, in case the sound of Eliza’s voice was a comfort to her. The pain of wondering if Anne was distressed somewhere and that she, Eliza, was unable to hear her, unable to reach her.
Agnes pats the back of Eliza’s hand and speaks in a rush: ‘She has her other sisters with her, remember. The two who died before you were born. They all look after each other. She doesn’t want you to worry. She wants you . . .’ Agnes pauses, looks at Eliza, who is shivering with the cold or the shock or both. ‘I mean,’ she says, in a new, careful voice, ‘I expect that she wouldn’t want you to worry. She would want you to rest easy.’
They are silent for a moment. The clop-clop of a horse’s hoofs passes by the window, heading north up the street.
‘How did you know,’ Eliza whispers, ‘about the other two girls who died?’
Agnes seems to think for a moment. ‘Your brother told me,’ she says, without looking at Eliza.
‘One of them,’ Eliza breathes, ‘was called Eliza. The first child. Did you know that?’
Agnes starts to nod and then shrugs.
‘Gilbert says sometimes that . . .’ Eliza has to cast a look over her shoulder before she speaks ‘. . . that she might come, in the middle of the night, to stand at my bed, wanting her name back from me. That she’ll be angry because I took it.’
‘Nonsense,’ Agnes says crisply. ‘Gilbert’s talking nonsense. Don’t you listen to him. Your sister is happy for you to have her name, for you to carry it on. Remember that. If I hear Gilbert saying that to you, again, ever, I’ll put nettles in his breeches.’
Eliza bursts out laughing. ‘You will not.’
‘I most certainly will. And that will teach him not to go about frightening people.’ Agnes releases Eliza’s hand and pushes herself upright. ‘Now then. Time to start the day.’
Eliza looks down at her hand. There is a dent in her skin, from the press of Agnes’s thumbnail, a rose-red bloom all around it. She rubs at it with her opposite hand, surprised at its heat, as if it has been held near a candle.
The crown Eliza makes is of fern, larch and Michaelmas daisies. She sits at the dining table to do it. She has been given the task of minding her youngest brother, Edmond, as she works, so she gives him some larch leaves and daisy petals. He sits on the floor, legs outstretched, and drops the leaves, one by one, solemnly, into a wooden bowl, where he stirs them with a spoon. She listens to the string of sounds that comes from his mouth breathily, as he stirs: ‘eef’ is in there, for ‘leaf’, and ‘ize’, for ‘Eliza’, and ‘oop’, for ‘soup’. The words exist, if you know how to listen.
Her fingers – strong, slender, more used to the stitching of leather – weave the stems together in a circlet. Edmond gets to his feet. He toddles to the window, then back, then to the fireplace, admonishing himself as he gets closer: ‘Na-nana-na-na.’ Eliza smiles and says, ‘Nay, Edmond, not the fire.’ He turns a delighted face towards her, thrilled at being understood. The fire, the heat, no, don’t touch. He knows he is not allowed near it but it fills him with a great and irresistible longing, the bright, leaping colour, the blast of warmth to his face, the array of fascinating implements to stoke and poke and grip.
She can hear, at the back of the house, her mother banging pots and pans in the cookhouse. She is in a filthy temper and has already caused the maid to cry. Mary is pouring all her ire and fury into the food. The joint won’t cook. The pastry for the pie will crumble. The dough hasn’t risen fast enough. The sweetmeats taste grainy. It seems to Eliza that the cookhouse is at the centre of a whirlwind and she must stay here, away from it, with Edmond, where they are safe.
Tuck, tuck, go her fingertips, severed stem ends into the weave; the palm of the opposite hand turns the circle of the crown as she works.
Above her, she can hear the thud and clatter of her brothers’ feet. They are wrestling at the top of the stair, by the sound of it. A grunt, a gust of laughter, Richard’s plaintive plea to be let go, Gilbert’s false reassurances, a thud, a creak of floorboard, then the smothered ‘Ow!’
‘Boys!’ comes the roar from the glove shop. ‘Stop that this instant! Or I’ll come up there and give you something to wail about, wedding or no wedding.’
The three brothers appear in the doorway, jostling each other out of the way. Eliza’s eldest brother, the bridegroom, skids across the room, seizes her, kisses the top of her head, then whirls around to lift Edmond high in the air. Edmond is still gripping his wooden spoon in one hand and a fistful of leaves in the other. His eldest brother spins him around, once, twice. Edmond quirks his eyebrows and smiles, the air lifting the hair from his forehead. He tries to cram the spoon sideways into his mouth. Then he is set down and all three bigger brothers promptly disappear out of the door into the street. Edmond lets his spoon drop, looking after them, forlorn, unable to understand this sudden desertion.
Eliza laughs. ‘They’ll be back, Ed,’ she says. ‘By and by. When he is wed. You’ll see.’
Agnes appears in the doorway. Her hair is all unravelled and brushed. It spreads down her back and over her shoulders like black water. She is wearing a gown Eliza hasn’t seen before, in a pale primrose, the front of which is ever so slightly pushed out.
‘Oh,’ says Eliza, clasping her hands together. ‘The yellow will pick out the hearts of the daisies.’ She leaps to her feet, holding out the crown. Agnes ducks down so that Eliza can place it on her head.
Frost has descended overnight. Each leaf, each blade, each twig on the road to the church has encased itself, replicated itself, in frost. The ground is crisp and hard underfoot. The groom and his men are up ahead: the noise from their group is of hooting, yelling, breaks of song, the trill of a pipe, played by a friend who skips half on, half off the verge. Bartholomew brings up the rear, his height obscuring those ahead of him, his head lowered.
The bride walks in a straight line, not looking left or right. With her are Eliza, Edmond riding on her hip, Mary, several of Agnes’s friends, the baker’s wife. Off to the side are Joan and her three daughters. Joan is pulling her youngest son by the hand. The sisters walk in tight formation, arm-in-arm, three abreast, giggling and whispering to each other. Eliza glances sideways at them, several times, before turning her head away.
Agnes sees this, sees Eliza’s sadness gather about her, like fog. She sees everything. The rosehips on the hedgerow that are turning to brown at their tips; unpicked blackberries, too high to reach; the swoop and dip of a thrush from the branches of an oak by the side of the track; the white stream of breath from the mouth of her stepmother as she carries the youngest boy on her back, the strands of strangely colourless hair escaping from her kerchief, the wide swing of her hips. Agnes sees that Caterina has her mother’s nose, flat and broad across the bridge, Joanie her mother’s low hairline and Margaret the thick neck and elongated earlobes. She sees that Caterina has the gift or ability to make her life happy, and Margaret, to a lesser degree, but that Joanie does not. She sees her father in the youngest boy, walking now, and holding Caterina’s hand: his fair hair, the squarish set of his head, the upturned ends of his mouth. She feels the ribbons tied about her stockings, tightening and releasing as the muscles of her legs work beneath her. She feels the prickle and shift of the herbs and berries and flowers of her crown, feels the minute trickle of water within the veins of their stems and leaves. She feels a corresponding motion within herself, in time with the plants, a flow or current or tide, the passage of blood from her to the child within. She is leaving one life; she is beginning another. Anything may happen.
She senses, too, somewhere off to the left, her own mother. She would be here with her had life taken a different turn. She would be the one holding her hand as Agnes walked to her wedding, her fingers encasing her daughter’s. Her footsteps would have followed her beat. They would be walking this path together, side by side. It would have been her making the crown, affixing it to Agnes’s head, brushing the hair so that it hung all around her. She would have taken the blue ribbons and wound them around her stockings, woven them into the hanks of her hair. It would have been her.
So it follows, of course, that she will be here now, in whatever form she can manage. Agnes does not need to turn her head, does not want to frighten her away. It is enough to know that she is there, manifest, hovering, insubstantial. I see you, she thinks. I know you are here.
She looks ahead instead, along the road, where her father would have been, up ahead with the men, and sees her husband-to-be. The dark worsted wool of his cap, the motion of his walk, springier than that of the other men around him – his brothers, his father, his friends, her brothers. Look back, she wills him, as she walks, look back at me.
She is unsurprised when he does exactly that, his head turning, his face revealing itself to her as he pushes back his hair to look at her. He holds her gaze for a moment, pausing in the road, then smiles. He makes a gesture, holding up one hand and moving the other towards it. She tilts her head quizzically. He does it again, still smiling. She thinks he is miming a ring going on to a finger – something like that. Then one of his brothers, Gilbert, Agnes thinks, but can’t be sure, launches himself at him sideways, seizing him around the shoulders and shoving him. He responds in kind, wrestling Gilbert into a headlock, making the boy howl in outrage.
The priest is waiting at the church door, his cassock a dark shape against the frost-whitened stone. The men and boys fall silent as they move up the path. They gather in a cluster near him, nervous, silent, their faces flushed in the morning air. As Agnes comes up the church path, the priest smiles at her, then breathes in.
He closes his eyes and speaks: ‘I declare the banns for this marriage between this man and this woman.’ A stillness falls over all of them, even the children. But Agnes is making an internal plea of her own: If you are here, she thinks, show me now, make yourself known, now, please, I am waiting for you, I am here. ‘If any of ye know of any cause or just impediment why these persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony, ye are to declare it. This is for the first time of asking.’
The lids of his eyes open and he looks around them all, one by one. Thomas is poking James’s neck with a holly leaf; Bartholomew cuffs him quickly, efficiently, on the back of the head. Richard is jigging from foot to foot, looking very much as if he needs to relieve himself. Caterina and Margaret are covertly eyeing the groom’s brothers, assessing their worth. John is grinning, thumbs slotted into the straining ties of his doublet. Mary stares at the ground, her face immobile, almost stricken.
The priest inhales again. He says his words for the second time. Agnes breathes in, once, twice, and the baby turns inside her, as if it has heard a noise, a cry, as if it has heard its name for the first time. Show me now, Agnes thinks again, forming the words in her head with deliberate, delicate care. Joan bends to hear something her son is mouthing; she shushes him with a finger at her lips. John shifts to the other foot and barges accidentally into his wife. Mary drops the gloves she is holding and must bend to retrieve them, but not before glaring at him.
The banns are said for the third time, the priest holding them all in his gaze, his hands parted, as if he would embrace them all. Before he has finished speaking the final words, the groom steps forward, into the church porch, taking up his place beside the priest, as if to say, Let’s get this under way. There is a ripple of laughter throughout the group, a release of tension, and Agnes sees a flash to her right, in the corner of her eyes, a burst of colour, like the fall of a hair across her face, like the motion of a bird in flight. Something is dropping from a tree above them. It lands on Agnes’s shoulder, on the yellow stuff of her gown, and then on her chest, to the gentle swell of her stomach. She catches it neatly, cupping it against her body. It is a spray of rowan berries, fire-red, still with several narrow silver-backed leaves attached.
She holds it in her fingers for a moment. Then her brother steps forward. He takes in the berries, held in Agnes’s palm. He looks up at the tree above them. Brother and sister regard each other. Then Agnes reaches for Bartholomew’s hand.
His grip is strong, perhaps too strong; he has never known or recognised his own extraordinary strength. His fingers are cold, the skin rough and grainy. He walks her towards the church door. The groom is already reaching out for her, his arm eagerly extended. Bartholomew pauses, pulling Agnes to a stop. The groom waits, hand outstretched, a smile on his face. Bartholomew leans forward, still holding Agnes back by the hand. He reaches out his other hand and grips the husband-to-be by the shoulder. Agnes knows he doesn’t intend her to hear but she does: her hearing is sharp as a hawk’s. Bartholomew leans in and whispers in her husband-to-be’s ear: ‘Take good care of her, Latin boy, very good care, and no harm will come to you.’
When Bartholomew leans back again, towards his sister, he is grinning, teeth bared, facing the crowd; he releases Agnes’s hand and she steps towards her groom, who is looking a little pale.
The priest dips the ring in holy water, murmuring a blessing, and then the groom takes it. In nomine Patris, he says, in a clear voice, audible to all, even those at the back, sliding the ring on to her thumb and then off again, in nomine Filii, the ring is pushed on to her first finger, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, her middle finger. At Amen, the ring encircles her third finger where, the groom told her the other day, as they were hiding in the orchard, runs a vein that travels straight to her heart. It feels cold, for a moment, against her skin, and damp with holy water, but then the blood, flowing straight from her heart, warms it, brings it up to the temperature of her body.
She steps into the church, conscious of the three things she is holding. The ring on her finger, the spray of rowan berries, curled into her palm, the hand of her husband. They walk down the aisle together, a surge of people behind them, their feet clattering on the stone, taking their places in the pews. Agnes kneels at the altar, at the left side of her husband, to hear Mass. They bow their heads in unison and the priest places linen over them, to protect them from demons, from the devil, from all that is bad and undesirable in the world.
