His grip is strong, perhaps too strong; he has never known or recognised his own extraordinary strength. His fingers are cold, the skin rough and grainy. He walks her towards the church door. The groom is already reaching out for her, his arm eagerly extended. Bartholomew pauses, pulling Agnes to a stop. The groom waits, hand outstretched, a smile on his face. Bartholomew leans forward, still holding Agnes back by the hand. He reaches out his other hand and grips the husband-to-be by the shoulder. Agnes knows he doesn’t intend her to hear but she does: her hearing is sharp as a hawk’s. Bartholomew leans in and whispers in her husband-to-be’s ear: ‘Take good care of her, Latin boy, very good care, and no harm will come to you.’
When Bartholomew leans back again, towards his sister, he is grinning, teeth bared, facing the crowd; he releases Agnes’s hand and she steps towards her groom, who is looking a little pale.
The priest dips the ring in holy water, murmuring a blessing, and then the groom takes it. In nomine Patris, he says, in a clear voice, audible to all, even those at the back, sliding the ring on to her thumb and then off again, in nomine Filii, the ring is pushed on to her first finger, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, her middle finger. At Amen, the ring encircles her third finger where, the groom told her the other day, as they were hiding in the orchard, runs a vein that travels straight to her heart. It feels cold, for a moment, against her skin, and damp with holy water, but then the blood, flowing straight from her heart, warms it, brings it up to the temperature of her body.
She steps into the church, conscious of the three things she is holding. The ring on her finger, the spray of rowan berries, curled into her palm, the hand of her husband. They walk down the aisle together, a surge of people behind them, their feet clattering on the stone, taking their places in the pews. Agnes kneels at the altar, at the left side of her husband, to hear Mass. They bow their heads in unison and the priest places linen over them, to protect them from demons, from the devil, from all that is bad and undesirable in the world.
gnes moves across the upstairs room, through the converging shafts of light, where dust motes swarm and drift. Her daughter is lying on the rush pallet, still in her dress, her shoes shed beside her.
She is breathing, Agnes is telling herself, telling her fluttering heart, her thumping pulse, as she gets nearer, and that is good, is it not? There is her chest, going up and going down and, look, her cheeks are flushed, her hands resting beside her, fingers curled. All is not so bad. Surely. She is here and Hamnet is here.
Agnes reaches the bed and crouches down, her skirts inflating around her.
‘Judith?’ she says, and puts a hand to the girl’s forehead, then to her wrist, then back to the cheek.
Aware that Hamnet is in the room, just behind her, Agnes bows her head while she thinks. Fever, she tells herself, in a silent voice that sounds so calm, so cool. Then she corrects herself: a high fever, the skin damp and fire-hot. Breathing rapid and shallow. Pulse weak, erratic and fast.
‘How long has she been like this?’ She speaks aloud, without turning.
‘Since I returned from school,’ says Hamnet, his voice pitched high. ‘We were playing with the kittens and Jude said . . . that is, Grandmamma had asked us to chop the wood and we were about to start, on the wood, but we were having a game with the kittens and a bit of ribbon. The wood was there and I—’
‘Never mind the wood,’ she says, with control. ‘It matters not. Tell me about Judith.’
‘She said her throat was hurting her but we played a bit longer and then I said that I would chop the wood and she said that she was feeling ever so tired, so she came up here and lay down on the bed. So I did some of the wood – not all of it – and then I came up to see her and she wasn’t at all well. And then I looked for you and Grandmamma and everybody,’ his voice is rising now, ‘but there was no one here. I went all over, looking for you and calling for you. And I ran for the physician but he wasn’t there either and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to . . . I didn’t know . . .’
Agnes straightens, comes towards her son. ‘There now,’ she says, reaching out for him. She tucks his smooth, fair head to her shoulder, feels the shake of his body, the shudder of his breaths. ‘You did well. Very well. None of this is your—’
He wrenches away from her, his face stricken and wet. ‘Where were you?’ he yells, fear becoming anger, his voice wavering, as it has begun to do, of late, deepening on the second word, then rising again for the third. ‘I looked everywhere!’