‘What is this?’ he asks, turning it over.
‘I was left it by a neighbour when she died,’ Agnes says, touching her fingertip to the frontispiece. ‘She used to do spinning for us and I would take the wool to her, then collect it when she was done. She was always kind to me and wrote in her will that I was to have it. It had belonged to her husband, who had been an apothecary. I used to help her with her garden when I was a child. She told me once . . .’ and here she pauses ‘。 . . that she and my mother used to consult it together.’
He has taken his arm from around her and is holding the book in both hands, parting the pages. ‘And you’ve had it since you were young?’ he is saying, his eyes raking the closely printed words. ‘It’s in Latin,’ he says, frowning. ‘It’s about plants. Their uses. How to recognise them. How they heal certain illnesses and distempers.’
Agnes looks over his shoulder. She sees the picture of a plant with tear-shaped petals and a long, dark tangle of roots, an illustration of a bough with heavy berries. ‘I know that,’ she says. ‘I have looked through it often enough, although I cannot read it, of course. Will you read it to me?’ she asks.
He seems to recall himself. He puts down the book; he looks her over. ‘I will indeed,’ he says, his fingers working at the ties on her shift. ‘But not now.’
It seems strange to Agnes, during this time, that she has, in the space of a month, exchanged country for town, a farm for an apartment, a stepmother for a mother-in-law, one family for another.
One house, she is learning, runs very differently from another. Instead of the sprawl of generations, all working together to look after animals and land, the house in Henley Street has a distinct structure: there are the parents, then the sons, then the daughter, then the pigs in the pig-pen and the hens in the henhouse, then the apprentice and then, right at the bottom, the serving maids. Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen.
Agnes watches people come and people go. She is a gatherer, during this time, of information, of confidences, of the daily routines, of personalities and interactions. She is like a painting on the wall, eyes missing nothing. She has her own house, the small, narrow apartment, but she can go out of her back door and there is the communal yard: she and her husband will share the kitchen garden, the cookhouse, the piggery, the hens, the washhouse, the brewhouse. So she can withdraw into her own place but also mix and mingle with the others. She is at once observer and participant.
The maids rise early, as early as Agnes does: town people lie in their beds much longer than those of the country, and Agnes is accustomed to beginning the day before sunrise. These girls bring in the firewood, light the fires in the hall and the cookhouse. They let out the hens and scatter seed and grain for them in the yard. They take the slops to the pig-pen. They bring ale from the brewhouse. They take the dough, proved overnight in the cookhouse jar, and beat it into shape, leaving it beside the warming oven. It’s a good hour or so before any of the family emerges from their chamber.
Here, in town, there are no fences to mend; there is no mud to clean off boots. Clothes do not acquire streaks of soil, hair, dung. No men return at midday, ravenous of appetite and cold of bone. There are no lambs to warm by the hearth, no beasts with colic or worm or foot-rot. There are no animals to feed, early in the morning, and no kestrel either: her bird has gone to live with the priest who conducted the wedding. Agnes can visit whenever she likes, he says. No sheep trying to escape through fences. No ravens or pigeons or woodcocks landing on the thatch and calling down the chimney.
Instead, there are carts going up and down outside all day, people shouting to each other in the street, crowds and groups passing by. There are deliveries, to be made and to receive. There is a storehouse at the back for the glove workshop, where the empty skins of forest creatures are stretched out like penitents on racks. There are the serving maids who skulk in and out of the hall, shoes flapping and slapping on the flags. They look Agnes up and down, as if assessing her worth and finding her lacking. They sigh, ever so slightly, if she happens to be standing in their way, but if Mary appears, they stand upright, straighten their caps and say, Yes, mistress, no, mistress, I do not know, mistress.
In the country, people are too taken up with their livestock and crops to make calls but in this house people come at all hours of the day, expecting to find company: Mary’s relatives, John’s business associates. The former are to be brought to the parlour; the latter are to be shown first into the workshop, where John will decide to which room they will be taken. Mary is mostly in the house, keeping her eye on the servants and the apprentice or sitting at her needlework, unless out on calls. John is often nowhere to be seen. The younger boys are at school. Agnes’s husband is sometimes in, sometimes out: he teaches, he goes out to taverns in the evenings, he is sometimes sent on errands for his father. The remainder of the time, he skulks upstairs in their apartment, reading or staring out of the window.