Joan, agitated by the letter’s appearance at their door, walks back and forth across the room, asking what is in it, is it from ‘that man’， as she refers to Agnes’s husband? She demands to know, it is only right. Does he want to borrow money? Does he? Has he come to a bad end in London? She always knew he would. She had him pegged for a bad sort from the day she first laid eyes on him. It still grieves her that Agnes threw away her chance on a good-for-nothing like him. Is he asking to borrow money from Bartholomew? She hopes Bartholomew isn’t for a minute considering lending him anything at all. He has the farm to think of, and the children, not to mention all his brothers and sisters. He really should listen to her, Joan, on this matter. Is he listening? Is he?
Bartholomew continues to eat his porridge in silence, as if he can’t hear her, his spoon dipping and rising, dipping and rising. His wife becomes nervous and spills the milk, half on the floor and half on the fire, and Joan scolds her, getting down on her hands and knees to mop up the mess. A child starts to cry. The wife tries to fan the fire back to life.
Bartholomew pushes the remainder of his breakfast away from him. He stands, Joan’s voice still twittering away behind him, like a starling’s. He claps his hat to his head and leaves the farmhouse.
He walks over the land to the east of Hewlands, where the ground has become boggy of late. Then he comes back.
His wife, his stepmother and his children gather round him again, asking, Is it bad news from London? Has something happened? Joan has, of course, examined the letter, which has been passed from hand to hand in the farmhouse, but neither she nor Bartholomew’s wife can read. Some of the children can but they cannot decipher the script of their mysterious uncle.
Bartholomew, still ignoring the women’s questions, takes out a sheet of paper and a quill. Painstakingly, he dips into the ink and, with his tongue held firmly between his teeth, he writes back to his brother-in-law and says, yes, he will help.
Several weeks later, he goes to find his sister. He looks for her first at the house, then at the market, and then at a cottage where the baker’s wife directs him – a small dark place on the road out by the mill.
When Bartholomew pushes open the door, she is applying a poultice to the chest of an elderly man lying on a rush mat. The room is dim; he can see his sister’s apron, the white shape of her cap; he can smell the acrid stink of the clay, the damp of the dirt floor and something else – the overripe stench of sickness.
‘Wait outside,’ she says to him softly. ‘I’ll be there in a moment.’
He stands in the street, slapping his gloves against his leg. When she appears at his side, he begins to walk away from the door of the sick man.
Agnes looks at him as they proceed towards the town; he can feel her reading him, assessing his mood. After a moment or two, he reaches across and takes the basket from her arm. A brief glance into it reveals a cloth parcel, with some kind of dried plant sticking out of it, a bottle with a seal, some mushrooms and a half-burnt candle. He suppresses a sigh. ‘You shouldn’t go into places like that,’ he says, as they approach the marketplace.
She straightens her sleeves but says nothing.
‘You shouldn’t,’ he says again, knowing all the while that he is wasting his breath. ‘You need to look to your own health.’
‘He’s dying, Bartholomew,’ she says simply. ‘And he has no one. His wife, his children. All dead.’
‘If he’s dying, why are you trying to cure him?’
‘I’m not.’ Her eyes flash as she looks at him. ‘But I can ease his passage, take away his pain. Isn’t that what we all deserve, in our final hour?’
She puts out a hand and tries to take back her basket but Bartholomew won’t let go.
‘Why are you in such an ill humour today?’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s Joan,’ she says, finally giving up her pointless struggle for the basket and fixing him with a gimlet gaze, ‘is it not?’
Bartholomew inhales, moving the basket to his other hand so it is out of Agnes’s reach, once and for all. He hasn’t come here to talk about Joan but it was foolish of him to think that Agnes wouldn’t notice his gloom. There had been an argument over breakfast with his stepmother. He has been saving money for years to extend the farmhouse, to put on an upper floor and further rooms at the back – he is weary of sleeping in a hall with endless children, a gurning stepmother and various beasts. Joan has been obstructive about the plan from the start. This place was good enough for your father, she cried, as she served the porridge this morning, why isn’t it good enough for you? Why must you raise the thatch, take the roof from over our heads?