Agnes moves across the upstairs room, through the converging shafts of light, where dust motes swarm and drift. Her daughter is lying on the rush pallet, still in her dress, her shoes shed beside her.
She is breathing, Agnes is telling herself, telling her fluttering heart, her thumping pulse, as she gets nearer, and that is good, is it not? There is her chest, going up and going down and, look, her cheeks are flushed, her hands resting beside her, fingers curled. All is not so bad. Surely. She is here and Hamnet is here.
Agnes reaches the bed and crouches down, her skirts inflating around her.
‘Judith?’ she says, and puts a hand to the girl’s forehead, then to her wrist, then back to the cheek.
Aware that Hamnet is in the room, just behind her, Agnes bows her head while she thinks. Fever, she tells herself, in a silent voice that sounds so calm, so cool. Then she corrects herself: a high fever, the skin damp and fire-hot. Breathing rapid and shallow. Pulse weak, erratic and fast.
‘How long has she been like this?’ She speaks aloud, without turning.
‘Since I returned from school,’ says Hamnet, his voice pitched high. ‘We were playing with the kittens and Jude said . . . that is, Grandmamma had asked us to chop the wood and we were about to start, on the wood, but we were having a game with the kittens and a bit of ribbon. The wood was there and I—’
‘Never mind the wood,’ she says, with control. ‘It matters not. Tell me about Judith.’
‘She said her throat was hurting her but we played a bit longer and then I said that I would chop the wood and she said that she was feeling ever so tired, so she came up here and lay down on the bed. So I did some of the wood – not all of it – and then I came up to see her and she wasn’t at all well. And then I looked for you and Grandmamma and everybody,’ his voice is rising now, ‘but there was no one here. I went all over, looking for you and calling for you. And I ran for the physician but he wasn’t there either and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to . . . I didn’t know . . .’
Agnes straightens, comes towards her son. ‘There now,’ she says, reaching out for him. She tucks his smooth, fair head to her shoulder, feels the shake of his body, the shudder of his breaths. ‘You did well. Very well. None of this is your—’
He wrenches away from her, his face stricken and wet. ‘Where were you?’ he yells, fear becoming anger, his voice wavering, as it has begun to do, of late, deepening on the second word, then rising again for the third. ‘I looked everywhere!’
She gazes at him steadily, then back at Judith. ‘I was out at Hewlands. Bartholomew sent for me because the bees were swarming. I was longer than I’d planned. I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’ She reaches out again for him, but he ducks away from her hand and moves towards the bed.
Together, they kneel next to the girl. Agnes takes her hand.
‘She’s got . . . it,’ Hamnet says, in a hoarse whisper. ‘Hasn’t she?’
Agnes doesn’t look at him. His is a mind so quick, so attuned to others that she knows he can read her thoughts, like words written on a page. So she must keep them to herself, her head bowed. She is checking each fingertip for a change in colour, for a creeping tide of grey or black. Nothing. Each finger is rosy pink, each nail pale, with an emerging crescent moon. Agnes examines the feet, each toe, the round and vulnerable bones of the ankle.
‘She’s got . . . the pestilence,’ Hamnet whispers. ‘Hasn’t she? Mamma? Hasn’t she? That’s what you think, isn’t it?’
She is gripping Judith’s wrist; the pulse is fluttering, inconstant, surging up and down, fading then galloping. Agnes’s eye falls on the swelling at Judith’s neck. The size of a hen’s egg, newly laid. She reaches out and touches it gently, with the tip of her finger. It feels damp and watery, like marshy ground. She loosens the tie of Judith’s shift and eases it down. There are other eggs, forming in her armpits, some small, some large and hideous, bulbous, straining at the skin.
She has seen these before; there are few in the town, or even the county, who haven’t at some time or other in their lives. They are what people most dread, what everyone hopes they will never find, on their own bodies or on those of the people they love. They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.
And yet here they are. Round swellings, pushing up from under her daughter’s skin.
Agnes seems to split in two. Part of her gasps at the sight of the buboes. The other part hears the gasp, observes it, notes it: a gasp, very well. Tears spring into the eyes of the first Agnes, and her heart gives a great thud in her chest, an animal hurling itself against its cage of bones. The other Agnes is ticking off the signs: buboes, fever, deep sleep. The first Agnes is kissing her daughter, on the forehead, on the cheeks, at the place where hair meets skin on her temple; the other is thinking, a poultice of crumbed bread and roasted onion and boiled milk and mutton fat, a cordial of hips and powdered rue, borage and woodbine.
She stands, she moves through the room and down the stairs. There is something strangely familiar, almost recognisable, about her movements. What she has always dreaded is here. It has come. The moment she has feared most, the event she has thought about, mulled over, turned this way and that, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in her mind, during the dark of sleepless nights, at moments of idleness, when she is alone. The pestilence has reached her house. It has made its mark around her child’s neck.
She hears herself telling Hamnet to find his grandmother, his sister, yes, they are back, they are in the cookhouse, go and bid them come, go now, yes, directly. And then she is in front of her shelves and her hands are reaching out to find the stoppered pots. There is rue and there is cinnamon, and that is good for drawing out the heat, and here is bindweed root and thyme.
She drops her gaze to her shelves. Rhubarb? She holds the dried stalk in her hand for a moment. Yes, rhubarb, to purge the stomach, to drive out the pestilence.
At the word, she is aware of letting out a small noise, like the whimper of a dog. She leans her head into the plaster of the wall. She thinks: My daughter. She thinks: Those swellings. She thinks: This cannot be, I will not have it, I will not permit it.
She seizes her pestle and brings it down with a thump into the mortar, scattering powders and leaves and roots over the table.
Hamnet is out, down the path, into the backyard and at the door of the cookhouse, where his grandmother is fossicking in a barrel of onions and the maid is standing beside her, apron held out, ready to receive whatever Mary will see fit to toss into it. The fire blasts and cracks in the grate, its flames reaching up to bait and caress the undersides of several pots. Susanna is standing by the butter churn, one listless hand curled around the handle.
She is the first to see him. Hamnet looks at her; she looks back, her mouth slightly open at the sight of him. She frowns, as if she might speak, might remonstrate with him about something. Then she turns her head towards her grandmother, who is instructing the maid to peel the onions and chop them small. The heat in the room is unbearable to Hamnet – he can feel it, breathing at him, like fumes from the gates of Hell. It almost blocks the doorway, filling the space, pressing its fierce mass against the walls. He doesn’t know how the women stand it. He passes a hand over his brow and its outer edges seem to shimmer and he sees, or seems to see, just for a moment, a thousand candles in the dark, their flames guttering and flaring, wisp lights, goblin candles. He blinks and they are gone; the scene before him is as before. His grandmother, the maid, the onions, his sister, the butter churn, the headless pheasant on the table, scaled legs fastidiously drawn up, as if the bird is worried about getting its feet muddy, even though it happens to be decapitated and very much dead.
‘Grandmamma?’ Susanna says uncertainly, still with her eyes on her brother. Later, this moment will return to Susanna, again and again, particularly in the early morning, when she wakes. Her brother, standing there, framed by the doorway. She will remember thinking that he looked white-faced, shocked, quite unlike himself, a cut under his eyebrow. Would it have made a difference if she had remarked upon this to her grandmother? If she had drawn the attention of her mother or grandmother to it? Would it have changed anything? She will never know because all she says at the time is: ‘Grandmamma?’
Mary is in the middle of saying to the maid, ‘And mind you don’t burn them this time, not even a little at the edges – as soon as they begin to catch, you lift the pot off the fire, do you hear?’ She turns, first towards her granddaughter, and then, following Susanna’s gaze, towards the doorway and Hamnet.
She jumps, her hand travelling to her heart. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You frightened me! Whatever are you doing, boy? You look like a ghost, standing there like that.’
Mary will tell herself, in the days and weeks to come, that she never said these words. She couldn’t have done. She would never have said ‘ghost’ to him, would never have told him that there was anything frightening, anything amiss about his appearance. He had looked entirely well. She never said such a thing.
With trembling hands, Agnes is sweeping the scattered petals and roots back into the mortar and begins to grind, her wrist twisting, twisting, her knuckles whitening, her fingernails gripping the wooden pestle. The dried rhubarb stalk, the rue, the cinnamon are mashed together, their scents mingling, the sweet, the sharp and the bitter.
As she grinds, she counts off to herself the people this mixture has saved. There was the wife of the miller, who had been raving and tearing at her clothes. The very next day, after drinking two draughts of this potion, she was sitting up in bed, quiet as a lamb, supping soup. There was the nephew of the landowner at Snitterfield: Agnes had been taken there in the middle of the night, after the landowner had sent for her. The lad had recovered well with this medicine and a poultice. The blacksmith from Copton, the spinster from Bishopton. They had all recovered, hadn’t they? It is not an impossibility.
She is concentrating so hard that she jumps when someone touches her elbow. The pestle falls from her fingers to the table. Her mother-in-law, Mary, is next to her, her cheeks red from the cookhouse, her sleeves rolled back, a frown pinching together her brow.
‘Is it true?’ she says.
Agnes takes a breath, her tongue registering the dusky tang of cinnamon, the acid of the powdered rhubarb and, realising she might cry if she speaks, she nods.
‘She has buboes? A fever? It’s true?’
Agnes nods again, once. Mary’s face is clenched, her eyes blazing. You might think she was angry, but Agnes knows better. The two women look at one another and Agnes sees that Mary is thinking of her daughter, Anne, who died of the pestilence, aged eight, covered with swellings and hot with fever, her fingers black and odorous and rotting off her hands. She knows this because Eliza told her once but, then, she knew it anyway. Agnes doesn’t turn her head, doesn’t break her gaze with Mary, but she knows that little Anne will be there in the room with them, over by the door, her winding sheet caught over her shoulder, her hair unravelled, her fingers sore and useless, her neck swollen and choking. Agnes makes herself form the thought, Anne, we know you are there, you are not forgotten. How frail, to Agnes, is the veil between their world and hers. For her, the worlds are indistinct from each other, rubbing up against each other, allowing passage between them. She will not let Judith cross over.
Mary mutters a string of words under her breath, a prayer, of sorts, an entreaty, then pulls Agnes to her. Her touch is almost rough, her fingers gripping Agnes’s elbow, her forearm pressing down hard on Agnes’s shoulder. Agnes’s face is pressed to Mary’s coif; she smells the soap in it, soap she herself made – with ashes and tallow and the narrow buds of lavender – she hears the rasp of hair against cloth, underneath. Before she shuts her eyes, submitting herself to the embrace, she sees Susanna and Hamnet step in through the back door.
Then Mary has released her and is turning, the moment between them over, done. She is all business now, brushing down her apron, inspecting the contents of the mortar, going to the fireplace, saying she will build it up, telling Hamnet to bring wood, quickly, boy, we shall build a great blaze for there is nothing so efficacious to the driving out of fever as a hot fire. She is clearing a space before the hearth and Agnes knows that Mary will bring down the rush mattress; she will bring clean blankets, she will make up a bed there, by the fire, and Judith will be brought down before the blaze.
Whatever differences Agnes and Mary have – and there are many, of course, living at such close quarters, with so much to do, so many children, so many mouths, the meals to cook and the clothes to wash and mend, the men to watch and assess, soothe and guide – dissolve in the face of tasks. The two of them can gripe and prickle and rub each other up the wrong way; they can argue and bicker and sigh; they can throw into the pig-pen food the other has cooked because it is too salted or not milled finely enough or too spiced; they can raise an eyebrow at each other’s darning or stitching or embroidery. In a time such as this, however, they can operate like two hands of the same person.
Look. Agnes is pouring water into a pan and sprinkling the powder into it. Mary is working the bellows, taking the wood from Hamnet, instructing Susanna to go to the coffer next door and bring out sheets. She is lighting the candles now, the flames flaring and lengthening, spreading circles of light into the dark corners of the room. Agnes is handing the pan to Mary, who is setting it to warm over the flames. They are both climbing the stairs now, without conferring, and Agnes knows that Mary will greet Judith with a smiling face, will call out some rousing and unconcerned words. Together, they will see to the girl, lift down the pallet, give her the medicine. They will take this matter in hand.
