Agnes’s lip is swollen, bleeding, so her words are slurred, indistinct, but Joan still manages to hear her say: ‘You are not my mother.’
Enraged, Joan slaps her again. Agnes, unbelievably and without hesitation, slaps her back. Joan lifts her hand again but it is seized from behind. Someone has her around the waist – it is that great brute Bartholomew and he is lifting her up and away, forcing down her hands and holding them fast with the effortless grip of his fingers. Her son, Thomas, is there too, standing now between her and Agnes, holding up a sheep crook, and Bartholomew is telling her to stop, to calm herself. Her other children stand by the henhouse, open-mouthed, amazed. Caterina has her arms around Joanie, who is crying. Margaret holds little William, who is burying his face in her neck.
Joan feels herself carried to the other side of the yard and Bartholomew is restraining her, asking what is amiss, what has brought this on, and she is telling him, pointing a finger at Agnes, now being helped to her feet by Thomas.
Bartholomew’s face falls as he listens. He closes his eyes, breathes in, breathes out. He rubs a hand over the bristles of his beard and examines his feet for a moment.
‘The Latin tutor,’ he says, and looks across at Agnes.
Agnes doesn’t reply but lifts her chin a notch.
Joan looks from stepson to stepdaughter, to sons, to daughters. All of them, save the stepdaughter, drop their gaze and she realises that they all, every one of them, saw what she did not. ‘The Latin tutor?’ she repeats. She pictures him suddenly, standing at a gate in the furthest field, asking her for Agnes’s hand, in a faltering voice. She had almost forgotten. ‘Him? That – that boy? That wastrel? That wageless, useless, beardless—’ She breaks off to laugh, a harsh, mirthless sound that leaves her chest feeling emptied and hot. She remembers it all, now, the lad standing there as she told him no; she remembers feeling a brief stab of pity for him, that young lad, his face so crestfallen, and with such a father, too. But Joan had dismissed the thought of him, as soon as he had left her sight.
Joan shakes off Bartholomew’s hand. She becomes focused, ruthless. She marches into the house, past Agnes, past her children, past the chickens. She bangs open the door and, once inside, is fast and thorough. She moves through the room, collecting anything that belongs to her stepdaughter. A pair of shifts, a spare cap, an apron. A wooden comb, a stone with a hole, a belt.
The family is still gathered in the farmyard when Joan comes out of the house and hurls a bundle at Agnes’s feet.
‘You,’ she cries, ‘are banished from this house for ever more.’
Bartholomew shifts his gaze from Agnes to Joan and back again. He folds his arms and steps forward. ‘This is my house,’ he says, ‘left to me, in my father’s will. And I say that Agnes may stay.’
Joan stares at him, wordless, the colour rising in her cheeks. ‘But . . .’ she blusters, trying to rally her thoughts ‘。 . . but . . . the terms of the will stated that I may stay in the house until such time—’
‘You may stay,’ Bartholomew says, ‘but the house is mine.’
‘But I was given the running of the house!’ She seizes upon this triumphantly, desperately. ‘And you the care of the farm. So by that fact, I am within my rights to send her away, for this is a matter of the house, not of the farm and—’
‘The house is mine,’ Bartholomew repeats softly. ‘And she stays.’
‘She cannot stay,’ Joan shrieks, infuriated, powerless. ‘You need to think about – about your brothers and sisters, this family’s reputation, not to mention your own, our standing in—’
‘She stays,’ Bartholomew says.
‘She has to go, she must.’ Joan tries to think fast, scrabbling about for something to make him change his mind. ‘Think of your father. What would he have said? It would have broken his heart. He would never—’
‘She will stay. Unless it comes to pass that—’
Agnes puts a hand on her brother’s sleeve. They look at each other for a long moment, without speaking. Then Bartholomew spits into the dirt and lifts a hand to her shoulder. Agnes smiles at him crookedly, with her split and bleeding mouth. Bartholomew nods in reply. She sweeps a sleeve up and over her face; she unpicks the knot of the bundle, ties and reties it.
Bartholomew watches as she shoulders the bundle. ‘I’ll see to it,’ he says, to her, touching her hand. ‘Not to worry.’
‘I shan’t,’ Agnes says.