She gazes at him steadily, then back at Judith. ‘I was out at Hewlands. Bartholomew sent for me because the bees were swarming. I was longer than I’d planned. I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’ She reaches out again for him, but he ducks away from her hand and moves towards the bed.
Together, they kneel next to the girl. Agnes takes her hand.
‘She’s got . . . it,’ Hamnet says, in a hoarse whisper. ‘Hasn’t she?’
Agnes doesn’t look at him. His is a mind so quick, so attuned to others that she knows he can read her thoughts, like words written on a page. So she must keep them to herself, her head bowed. She is checking each fingertip for a change in colour, for a creeping tide of grey or black. Nothing. Each finger is rosy pink, each nail pale, with an emerging crescent moon. Agnes examines the feet, each toe, the round and vulnerable bones of the ankle.
‘She’s got . . . the pestilence,’ Hamnet whispers. ‘Hasn’t she? Mamma? Hasn’t she? That’s what you think, isn’t it?’
She is gripping Judith’s wrist; the pulse is fluttering, inconstant, surging up and down, fading then galloping. Agnes’s eye falls on the swelling at Judith’s neck. The size of a hen’s egg, newly laid. She reaches out and touches it gently, with the tip of her finger. It feels damp and watery, like marshy ground. She loosens the tie of Judith’s shift and eases it down. There are other eggs, forming in her armpits, some small, some large and hideous, bulbous, straining at the skin.
She has seen these before; there are few in the town, or even the county, who haven’t at some time or other in their lives. They are what people most dread, what everyone hopes they will never find, on their own bodies or on those of the people they love. They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.
And yet here they are. Round swellings, pushing up from under her daughter’s skin.
Agnes seems to split in two. Part of her gasps at the sight of the buboes. The other part hears the gasp, observes it, notes it: a gasp, very well. Tears spring into the eyes of the first Agnes, and her heart gives a great thud in her chest, an animal hurling itself against its cage of bones. The other Agnes is ticking off the signs: buboes, fever, deep sleep. The first Agnes is kissing her daughter, on the forehead, on the cheeks, at the place where hair meets skin on her temple; the other is thinking, a poultice of crumbed bread and roasted onion and boiled milk and mutton fat, a cordial of hips and powdered rue, borage and woodbine.
She stands, she moves through the room and down the stairs. There is something strangely familiar, almost recognisable, about her movements. What she has always dreaded is here. It has come. The moment she has feared most, the event she has thought about, mulled over, turned this way and that, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in her mind, during the dark of sleepless nights, at moments of idleness, when she is alone. The pestilence has reached her house. It has made its mark around her child’s neck.
She hears herself telling Hamnet to find his grandmother, his sister, yes, they are back, they are in the cookhouse, go and bid them come, go now, yes, directly. And then she is in front of her shelves and her hands are reaching out to find the stoppered pots. There is rue and there is cinnamon, and that is good for drawing out the heat, and here is bindweed root and thyme.
She drops her gaze to her shelves. Rhubarb? She holds the dried stalk in her hand for a moment. Yes, rhubarb, to purge the stomach, to drive out the pestilence.
At the word, she is aware of letting out a small noise, like the whimper of a dog. She leans her head into the plaster of the wall. She thinks: My daughter. She thinks: Those swellings. She thinks: This cannot be, I will not have it, I will not permit it.
She seizes her pestle and brings it down with a thump into the mortar, scattering powders and leaves and roots over the table.
Hamnet is out, down the path, into the backyard and at the door of the cookhouse, where his grandmother is fossicking in a barrel of onions and the maid is standing beside her, apron held out, ready to receive whatever Mary will see fit to toss into it. The fire blasts and cracks in the grate, its flames reaching up to bait and caress the undersides of several pots. Susanna is standing by the butter churn, one listless hand curled around the handle.
She is the first to see him. Hamnet looks at her; she looks back, her mouth slightly open at the sight of him. She frowns, as if she might speak, might remonstrate with him about something. Then she turns her head towards her grandmother, who is instructing the maid to peel the onions and chop them small. The heat in the room is unbearable to Hamnet – he can feel it, breathing at him, like fumes from the gates of Hell. It almost blocks the doorway, filling the space, pressing its fierce mass against the walls. He doesn’t know how the women stand it. He passes a hand over his brow and its outer edges seem to shimmer and he sees, or seems to see, just for a moment, a thousand candles in the dark, their flames guttering and flaring, wisp lights, goblin candles. He blinks and they are gone; the scene before him is as before. His grandmother, the maid, the onions, his sister, the butter churn, the headless pheasant on the table, scaled legs fastidiously drawn up, as if the bird is worried about getting its feet muddy, even though it happens to be decapitated and very much dead.