She walks, only a little unsteadily, across the farmyard. She enters the apple store and, after a few moments, emerges with her kestrel on her glove. The bird is hooded, wings folded, but its head pivots and twitches, as if it is acquainting itself with its new circumstances.
Agnes shoulders her pack and, without saying goodbye, exits the farmyard, taking the path around the side of the house, and is gone.
He is behind his father’s stall in the market, lounging against the counter. The day is crisp, with the startling metallic cold of early winter. He is watching his breath leave his body in a visible, vanishing stream, half listening to a woman debate squirrel-lined versus rabbit-trimmed gloves, when Eliza materialises beside him.
She gives him an odd, wide-eyed, teeth-gritted smile.
‘You need to go home,’ she says, in a low voice, without letting her fixed expression falter. She then turns to the browsing woman and says, ‘Yes, madam?’
He pushes himself upright. ‘Why do I need to go home? Father told me I should—’
‘Just go,’ she hisses, ‘now,’ and addresses the customer, in a louder tone: ‘I believe the rabbit trim to be the very warmest.’
He lopes across the market, weaving in and out of the stalls, dodging a cart laden with cabbages, a boy carrying a bundle of thatch. He is in no hurry: it will be some complaint of his father’s about his conduct or his chores or his forgetfulness or his laziness or his inability to remember important things or his reluctance to put in what his father has the temerity to call ‘an honest day’s work’。 He will have forgotten to take an order or to pick up skin from the tanners or omitted to chop the wood for his mother. He wends his way up the wide thoroughfare of Henley Street, stopping to pass remarks with various neighbours, to pat a child on the head and, finally, he turns into the door of his house.
He wipes his boots against the matting, letting the door close behind him, and casts a glance into his father’s workshop. His father’s chair is empty, pushed back, as if in haste. The thin shoulders of the apprentice are bent over something at the workbench. At the sound of the latch hooking into itself, the boy turns his head and looks at him, with round, frightened eyes.
‘Hello, Ned,’ he says. ‘How goes it?’
Ned looks as if he might speak but closes his mouth. He gives a gesture with his head that is halfway between a nod and a shake, then points towards the parlour.
He smiles at the apprentice, then steps through the door from the passage, across the squared flags of the hall, past the dining table, past the empty grate, and into the parlour.
The scene that greets him is so unaccountable, so confusing, that it takes him a moment to catch up, to assess what is happening. He stops in his tracks, framed by the doorway. What is immediately clear to him is that his life has taken a new turn.
Agnes is sitting on a low stool, a ragged bundle at her feet, his mother opposite her, next to the fire; his father is at the window, his back to the room. The kestrel is perched on the topmost rung of a ladderback chair, claws curled around the wood, its jesses and bell hanging down. Part of him wants to turn and run. The other part wants to burst into laughter: the idea of a falcon, of Agnes, in his mother’s parlour, surrounded by the curlicued and painted wall hangings of which she is so proud.
‘Ah,’ he says, attempting to gather himself, and all three turn towards him. ‘Now . . .’
The words shrivel in his mouth because he catches sight of Agnes’s face. Her left eye is swollen shut, reddened, bruised; the skin under the brow is split and bleeding.
He steps towards her, closing the gap between them. ‘Good God,’ he says, placing a hand on her shoulder, feeling the flex and pull of her shoulder-blade, as if she might fly, take to the air, like her bird, if only she could. ‘What happened? Who did this to you?’
There are vivid marks on her cheek, a cut on her lip, the tracks of fingernails, raw patches on her wrist.
Mary clears her throat. ‘Her mother,’ she says, ‘has banished her from the house.’
Agnes shakes her head. ‘Stepmother,’ she says.
‘Joan,’ he puts in, ‘is Agnes’s stepmother, not—’
‘I know that,’ Mary snaps. ‘I used the word merely as a—’
‘And she didn’t banish me,’ Agnes says. ‘It isn’t her house. It’s Bartholomew’s. I chose to leave.’
Mary inhales, shutting her eyes for a moment, as if mustering the final shreds of her patience. ‘Agnes,’ she says, opening her eyes and fixing them on her son, ‘is with child. Says it’s yours.’