‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these. If your daughter is suffering from the pestilence, I regret to say that there is very little that may—’
The rest of the speech is cut off, curtailed, lost because Agnes has banged the hatch shut. Hamnet watches as her fingers fumble to lock it. Her face is furious, desperate, flushed. She is muttering something under her breath: he catches the word ‘man’， and ‘dare’ and ‘fool’。
He unfastens his arms and watches as she walks across the room, agitatedly straightening a chair, picking up and putting down a bowl, then coming to crouch by the pallet where Judith has been placed, next to the fire.
‘A toad, indeed,’ his mother is murmuring, as she dabs Judith’s brow with a wet cloth.
Across the room, his grandmother closes the front door and slides the bolt into place. Hamnet sees her place the parcel with the dried toad on a high shelf.
She mouths something incomprehensible to Hamnet, with a nod.
n a morning in the spring of 1583, if they had risen early enough, the residents of Henley Street would have seen the new daughter-in-law of John and Mary exit the door of the little narrow cottage where the newlywed couple live. They would have seen her shoulder a basket, straighten her kirtle, and set off in a north-westerly direction.
Upstairs, her young husband turns over in bed. He sleeps deeply, and always has. He does not notice that her side of the bed is vacant and rapidly cooling. His head presses further into the pillow, an arm is tucked about the coverlet, his hair fallen over most of his face. He is in the profound, untroubled slumber of the young; if undisturbed, he could sleep on for hours. His mouth opens slightly, drawing in air, and he begins, softly, to snore.
Agnes continues on her way across Rother Market, where stallholders are beginning to arrive. A man selling bundles of lavender; a woman with a cart of willow strips. Agnes pauses to speak to her friend, the baker’s wife. They exchange words about the fairness of the day, the threat of rain, the heat of the ovens in the bakery, the progress of Agnes’s pregnancy and how low the baby feels in her bones. The baker’s wife tries to press a bun into Agnes’s hand. Agnes refuses. The baker’s wife insists, lifting the covering on Agnes’s basket and pushing it inside. She catches sight of cloths, clean and neatly folded, a pair of scissors, a stoppered jar, but thinks nothing of it. Agnes nods to her, smiles, says she needs to go.
The baker’s wife stands for a moment before her empty market stall, watching her friend walk away. Agnes pauses momentarily, at the edge of the market, putting one hand up to the wall. The baker’s wife frowns and is just about to call out, but Agnes straightens and continues on her way.
During the night, Agnes dreamt of her mother, as she does from time to time. Agnes had been standing in the farmyard at Hewlands and her skirts had been dragging in the dirt; there was a heavy feeling around her, as if her gown was waterlogged. When she looked down, there were birds standing and trampling on the hem of her dress: ducks, hens, partridges, doves, tiny wrens. They were struggling and pushing each other, wings unfolded and awkward, trying to remain standing on her skirts. Agnes was trying to shoo them away, trying to free herself, when she became aware of someone approaching. She turned and saw her mother passing by: her hair in a braid down her back, a red shawl knotted over a blue smock. Her mother smiled but didn’t pause, her hips swaying as she walked past.
Agnes had felt an unravelling deep within her, a profound longing starting up, like the whir of a wheel. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘wait, wait for me.’ She tried to step forward, to follow her mother, but the birds were still stepping on her skirt, their low-slung feathered bellies, their webbed and clawed feet trampling it down. ‘Wait!’ Agnes cried, in the dream, at her mother’s receding back.
Her mother didn’t stop but turned her head and said, or seemed to say: ‘The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.’ Then she continued to walk towards the forest.
Agnes called after her again, stumbling forward, tripping over the massed bodies of the insistent, flapping birds, falling to the mud. Just as she hit the ground, she woke, with a start and a gasp, sitting up, and suddenly she was no longer at Hewlands, in the yard, calling to her mother. She was in her house, in bed, her shift slipping off her shoulder, the baby curled inside her skin, her husband next to her, reaching out in sleep to pincer her closer with his arm.