At night, she rises from her bed and goes outside. She sits between the woven, rough sides of her skeps. The humming, vibrating noises from within, beginning just after dawn, seem to her the most eloquent, articulate, perfect language there is.
Susanna, scorched with rage, sits down at her desk-box with a blank sheet of paper. How could you? she writes to her father. Why would you, how could you not tell us?
Judith carries bowls of soup to her mother’s bed, a posy of lavender, a rose in a vase, a basket of fresh walnuts, their shells sealed up.
The baker’s wife comes. She brings rolls, a honey cake. She affects not to notice Agnes’s appearance, her untended hair, her etched and sleepless face. She sits on the edge of the bed, settling her skirts around her, takes Agnes’s hand in her warm, dry grip and says: he always was an odd one, you know that. Agnes says nothing but stares up at the tapestry roof of her bed. More trees, some with apples studding their branches.
‘Do you not wonder what is in it?’ the baker’s wife asks, ripping off a hunk of the bread and offering it to Agnes.
‘In what?’ Agnes says, ignoring the bread, barely listening.
The baker’s wife pushes the strip of bread between her own teeth, chews, swallows, tears off another shred before answering: ‘The play.’
Agnes looks at her, for the first time.
To London, then.
She will take no one with her, not her daughters, not her friend, not her sisters, none of her in-laws, not even Bartholomew.
Mary declares it madness, says Agnes will be attacked on the road or murdered in her bed at an inn along the way. Judith begins to cry at this and Susanna tries to hush her, but looks worried all the same. John shakes his head and tells Agnes not to be a fool. Agnes sits at her in-laws’ table, composed, hands in her lap, as if she can’t hear these words.
‘I will go,’ is all she says.
Bartholomew is sent for. He and Agnes take several turns around the garden. Past the apple trees, past the espaliered pears, through the skeps, past the marigold beds, and round again. Susanna and Judith and Mary watch from the window of Susanna’s chamber.
Agnes’s hand is tucked into the crook of her brother’s arm. Both their heads are bowed. They pause, briefly, beside the brewhouse for a moment, as if examining something on the path, then continue on their way.
‘She will listen to him,’ says Mary, her voice more decisive than she feels. ‘He will never permit her to go.’
Judith brings her fingers up to the watery pane of glass. How easy it is to obliterate them both with a thumb.
When the back door slams, they rush downstairs but there is only Bartholomew in the passage, placing his hat on his head, preparing to leave.
‘Well?’ Mary says.
Bartholomew lifts his face to look at them on the stairs.
‘Did you persuade her?’
‘Persuade her in what?’
‘Not to go to London. To give up this madness.’
Bartholomew straightens the crown of his hat. ‘We leave tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I am to secure horses for us.’
Mary is saying, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and Judith is starting to weep again and Susanna clasping her hands together, saying, ‘Us? You will go with her?’
‘I shall.’
The three women surround him, a cloud wrapping itself around the moon, peppering him with objections, questions, entreaties, but Bartholomew breaks free, steps towards the door. ‘I will see you tomorrow, early,’ he says, then steps out into the street.
Agnes is a competent if not committed horsewoman. She likes the beasts well enough but finds being aloft a not altogether comfortable experience. The ground rushing by makes her feel giddy; the shift and heave of another being beneath her, the squeak and squeal of saddle leather, the dusty, parched scent of the mane mean she is counting down the hours she must spend on horseback, before she reaches London.
Bartholomew insists that the road via Oxford is safer and faster; a man who trades in mutton has told him this. They ride through the gentle dips and heights of the Chiltern Hills, through a rainstorm and a smattering of hail. In Kidlington, her horse becomes lame so she changes to a piebald mare with narrow hips and a flighty way of high-stepping if they come across a bird. They pass the night at an inn in Oxford; Agnes barely sleeps for the sound of mice in the walls and the snores of someone in the room next door.
Towards mid-morning on the third day of riding, she sees first the smoke, a grey cloth thrown over a hollow. There it is, she says to Bartholomew, and he nods. As they move closer, they hear the peal of bells, catch the scent of it – wet vegetable, animal, lime, some other things Agnes cannot name – and see its vast sprawl, a broken clutter of a city, the river winding through it, clouds pulling up threads of smoke from it.