Susanna makes no move to open the window. ‘She’s not here,’ she calls instead, drawing herself up. ‘You’ll have to come back later.’
She turns on her heel and walks away, retreating to the chair. The woman raps twice more on the pane and then Susanna hears her footsteps walk away.
People, people, always people, coming and going, arriving and departing. Susanna and the twins and her mother might sit down at table to take some broth and before they have lifted their spoons, there will be a knock and up her mother will start, putting aside her broth, as if Susanna hadn’t taken a deal of trouble to make it, from chicken bones and carrots that required washing and more washing, and then peeling, not to mention the hours of stirring and straining in the heat of the cookhouse. Sometimes it seems to Susanna that Agnes isn’t just mother to her – and the twins, of course – but mother to the whole town, the entire county. Will it ever end, this stream of people through their house? Will they ever just leave them in peace to live their lives? Susanna has overheard her grandmother say that she doesn’t know why Agnes carries on with this business because it’s not as if she has need of money, these days. Not, her grandmother added, that it ever brought in a great deal. Her mother had said nothing, not raising her head from her sewing.
Susanna curls her fingers around the carved ends of the chair arms, which are worn apple-smooth with the touch of a hundred palms. She shuffles her body backwards until her spine meets the chair’s back. It is the chair her father likes to sit in, when he comes home. Twice, three, four, five times a year. Sometimes for a week, sometimes more. During the day, he will carry the chair upstairs, where he leans over a table to work; come the evening, he will carry it back downstairs, to sit by the fire. I come whenever I can, he told her, the last time he was here, touching the tips of his fingers to her cheek. You know this to be true, he had said. He had been packing to leave, again – rolls of paper, close with writing, a spare shirt, a book he had bound with cat gut and a cover of pigskin. Her mother gone, vanished, off to wherever she went, for she hated to see him leave.
He writes them letters, which their mother reads, painstakingly, her finger moving from word to word, her lips forming the sounds. Their mother can read a little but is only able to write in a rudimentary fashion. Their aunt Eliza used to write their replies for them – she possesses a fine hand – but, these days, Hamnet does it. He goes to school, six days a week, from dawn until dusk; he can write as fast as you can speak, and read Latin and Greek, and make columns of figures. The scratch of the quill is like the sound of hens’ feet in the dirt. Their grandfather says, with pride, that Hamnet will be the one to take over the glove business, when he is gone, that the boy has a fine head on his shoulders, that he is a scholar, a born businessman, the only one of them with any sense. Hamnet leans over his school books, gives no sign of having heard, the top of his head towards them all as they sit by the fire, the parting of his hair meandering like a stream over his scalp.
The letters from their father speak of contracts, of long days, of crowds who hurl rotten matter if they do not like what they hear, of the great river in London, of a rival playhouse owner who released a bag of rats at the climax of their new play, of memorising lines, lines, more lines, of the loss of costumes, of fire, of rehearsing a scene where the players are lowered to the stage on ropes, of the difficulty of finding food when they are out on the road, of scenery that falls, of props that are mislaid or stolen, of carts losing their wheels and pitching all into the mud, taverns that refuse them beds, of the money he has saved, of what he needs their mother to do, whom she must speak to in the town, about a tract of land he would like to purchase, a house he has heard is for sale, a field they should buy and then lease, of how he misses them, how he sends his love, how he wishes he could kiss their faces, one by one, how he cannot wait until he is home again.
If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.
The latch of the back door clatters open and into the room comes her grandmother, Mary. She is puffing, red in the face, dark half-circles of sweat under her arms.