Agnes goes in at the front door of her own house, for the second time that evening.
And she sees, standing at the foot of the stair, her son. He is stock still, his face white, his fingers gripping the stair rail. He has a swelling, a cut on his brow that she is sure wasn’t there this morning.
She moves towards him swiftly, covering the room in a few paces.
‘What?’ she says, taking him by the shoulders. ‘What is it? What happened to your face?’
He does not speak. He shakes his head. He points towards the stairs. Agnes takes them, two at a time.
liza says to Agnes that she will make the wedding crown. If, she adds, that is what Agnes would like.
It is an offer made shyly, in a tentative voice, early one morning. Eliza is lying back to back with the woman who has come into their house so unexpectedly, so dramatically. It is just after dawn and it is possible to hear the first carts and footfalls out on the street.
Eliza must, Mary has said, share her bed with Agnes, until such time as the wedding can be arranged. Her mother told her this with tight, rigid lips, not meeting Eliza’s eye, flapping out an extra blanket over the bed. Eliza had looked down at the half of the pallet nearest the window, which has remained empty since her sister Anne died. She had glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.
Instead, though, Eliza wakes alone in the bed, every day.
But now here is this woman who will marry her brother: an Agnes instead of an Anne. It has all been a rush and a bother to arrange, with her brother needing a special licence and – Eliza isn’t clear on this point – a protracted discussion （heated） about money. Some friends of Agnes’s brother have put up surety: this much she knows. There is a baby in her belly, Eliza has heard, but only through doors. No one has explicitly told her this. Just as no one has thought to tell her that the wedding will be tomorrow, in the morning: her brother and Agnes will walk to the church in Temple Grafton, where a priest has agreed to marry them. It is not their priest, and it is not the church they attend every Sunday. Agnes says she knows this priest well. He is a particular friend of her family. It was him, in fact, who gave her the kestrel. He reared it himself, from an egg, and he once taught her how to cure lung rot in a falcon; he will marry them, she said airily, as she worked the treadle of Mary’s spinning wheel, because he has known her since she was a child and has always been kind to her. She once traded some jesses for a barrel of ale with him. He is, she explained, gathering wool in her spare hand, an expert in matters of falconry and brewing and bee-keeping, and has shared with her his great knowledge of all three.
When Agnes made this speech, from her place at the spinning, by the fire in the parlour, Eliza’s mother let her knitting needles fall, as if she could not believe what she was hearing, which had made Eliza’s brother laugh immoderately into his cup, which in turn had made their father angry. Eliza, however, had listened, rapt, to every word. Never had she heard such things said, never had anyone spoken in such a way in their house before, with such unselfconscious flow, such frank cheer.
Either way, the wedding is set. The hawking, honey-producing, ale-trading priest will marry them early the next day, in a ceremony arranged quickly, furtively, secretively.
When Eliza gets married, she wants to walk down Henley Street in a crown of flowers, in bright sunshine, so that all may see her. She does not want some ceremony miles from town, in a small church with a strange priest sneaking her and her groom in through the door; she will hold her head high and marry in town. She is sure of it. She will have her banns read loudly at the church door. But her father and Agnes’s brother cooked this up between them so nothing more can be said.
She would, however, like to make the flower crown for Agnes. Who else will do it? Not Agnes’s stepmother, Eliza is sure, or her sisters: they are keeping themselves to themselves, back in Shottery. They may come to the wedding, Agnes has shrugged, or they may not.
But Agnes must have a crown. She cannot be married without one, baby or no baby. So Eliza asks her. She clears her throat. She laces her fingers together, as if about to pray.
‘May I . . .’ she begins, speaking into the icy air of the room ‘。 . . I wondered if you would like it if I . . . made your flower crown? For tomorrow?’