Joan is screeching even before she reaches the byre. The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets, words she didn’t even know she knew, words that dart and crackle and maim, words that twist and mangle her tongue.
‘You,’ she is yelling, as she comes into the warmth of the byre, ‘where are you?’
Agnes’s head is pressed against the smooth flank of the cow as she milks. Joan hears the psht-psht-u-psht of milk jetting into the pail. At the sound of Joan’s cry, the cow shifts and Agnes lifts her cheek and turns to look at her stepmother, a wary expression on her face. Here it comes now, she seems to be thinking.
Joan grabs her by the arm, yanks her off the milking stool, and pushes her up against the stall partition. Too late, she sees her son James standing in the next stall: he must have been helping Agnes with the milking. Joan has to fumble through the girl’s kirtle, the fastenings of her gown, and the girl is struggling, pushing her fingers away, trying to break free, but Joan gets her hand through, just for a moment, and feels – what? A swelling, hard in texture, and hot. A quickening mound, risen like a loaf.
‘Whore,’ Joan spits, as Agnes pushes her away. ‘Slut.’
Joan is propelled backwards, towards the cow, which is tossing its head now, uneasy at this change in atmosphere, at this unexplained hiatus in the milking. She falls against the cow’s rump and stumbles slightly and Agnes is off, away, running through the byre, past the dozing ewes, through the door, and Joan is not going to let her get away. She rights herself, goes after her stepdaughter, and her fury propels her to a new speed because she catches up with her easily.
Her hand reaches out, closes over a lock of Agnes’s hair. So simple to yank it, to pull the girl to a stop, to feel her head jerked back by her grip, as if pulled up by a bridle. The ease of it astonishes and fuels her: Agnes drops to the ground, falling awkwardly on her back and Joan can keep her there by winding the hair round and round her fist.
In this way, the two of them by the fence to the farmyard, Joan can get Agnes to listen to anything she says.
‘Who,’ she screams at the girl, ‘did this? Who put that child in your belly?’
Joan is running through the not inconsiderable number of suitors who have sought Agnes’s hand, ever since the details of the dowry in her father’s will became known. Could it have been one of them? There was the wheelwright, the farmer from the other side of Shottery, that blacksmith’s apprentice. But the girl hadn’t seemed to take to any of them. Who else? Agnes is reaching round, trying to prise Joan’s fingers off her hair. Her face – that haughty, high-cheekboned pale face of hers of which she is so proud – is contorted by pain, by thwarted anger. There are tears streaking down her cheeks, pooling in her eye sockets.
‘Tell me,’ Joan says, into this face, which she has had to see, every day, looking back at her with indifference, with insolence, since the day she came here. This face, which Joan knows resembles that of the first wife, the beloved wife, the woman her husband would never speak of, whose hair he had kept pressed in a kerchief in a shirt pocket, next to his heart – she had discovered this as she was laying him out for burial. It must have been there all along, all the years she had washed and cleaned for him, fed him, borne his children, and there it was, the hair of the first wife. She, Joan, will never get over the smart and sting of that insult.
‘Was it the shepherd?’ Joan says and she sees that, despite everything, this suggestion makes Agnes grin.
‘No,’ Agnes gets out, ‘not the shepherd.’
‘Who, then?’ Joan demands and is just about to name the son at the neighbouring farm when Agnes twists around and lands a kick on her shin, a kick of such force that Joan staggers backwards, her hands springing open.
Agnes is up, off, away, scrambling to her feet, gathering her skirts. Joan gets up unsteadily, and goes after her. They are in the farmyard when Joan catches up with her. She grabs her by the wrist, swings her round, lands a slap on the girl’s face.
‘You will tell me who—’ she begins, but never finishes the sentence because there is a noise at the left side of her head: a deafening explosion, like a clap of thunder. For a moment, she cannot comprehend what has happened, what the noise means. Then she feels the pain, the smart of skin, the deeper ache of bone, and she realises that Agnes has struck her.
Joan puts a hand to her face, aghast. ‘How dare you?’ she shrieks. ‘How dare you hit me? A girl raising a hand to her mother, someone who—’