She had lain down, fitting herself into his form; he had nestled his face into her back. She had found a skein of his hair and smoothed it, twisting and twisting it between her fingers; she had pictured the thoughts in his head drawing upwards, along his hair, into her fingers, as a reed draws water up its hollow stem.
He was, she could sense, worrying about her, as men will when their wives approach childbirth. His mind circled and circled the thought, Will she survive? Will she come through? His limbs tightened about her, as if he wanted to keep her there, in the safety of their bed. She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things.
After a while she rose, parting the curtains around the bed, stepping out. She walked to the window, spread her hand to the glass. The branches are so dense, she thought. The branches. You cannot feel the rain.
She went to the small table by the fireplace, where her husband kept his papers and a quill. She lifted the lid of the ink pot and dipped the quill, its claw-like point holding the ink. She can write, after a fashion, the letters coming out small and cramped, and perhaps not in an order legible to most （unlike her husband, who has been to the grammar school, and oratory after that, and can produce a looping, continuous flow of letters, like a skein of embroidery, from the tip of his quill. He stays up late into the night, writing, at his desk. What, she does not know. He writes so fast and with such concentration that Agnes cannot keep up, cannot make it out）。 But she knows enough to be able to record an approximation of this sentence: The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.
Agnes has riddled the fire, thrown on logs to revive it, placed a jug of cream and a loaf of bread upon the table. She has taken up her basket and let herself out of the front door. She has spoken with her friend, the baker’s wife, and now she is taking a path beside a stream, her basket straining her arm.
It is mid-May. Sunlight brightens the ground in glancing, shifting shapes; Agnes notices, despite everything, because she cannot not notice such things, what is flowering along the verges. Valerian, campion, dog rose, wood sorrel, wild garlic, river flags. Any other time, she would be on her hands and knees, plucking their heads and blooms. Not today.
Even though it is still early, she skirts the boundary fence of Hewlands. She doesn’t want to risk meeting anyone along the way. Not Joan, not Bartholomew, not any of her brothers and sisters. If they saw her, they would raise the alarm, they would call someone, they would send for her husband, they would force her indoors, into the farmhouse. It is the very last place she would want to be for this. The branches of the forest, her mother had said to her.
She catches sight, in the distance, as she steps along the bridleway, of her brother Thomas, moving from house to yard, and she hears Bartholomew’s piercing whistle to his dogs. There is the thatch of the hall; there the pig-pen; there the rear of the apple store, the sight of which makes her smile.
She enters the wood half a mile or so from Hewlands. By this time, the pains are coming regularly. She can just about catch her breath between them, ready herself, steady herself for the next. She has to wait by a huge elm, pressing her palm to its rough, ridged bark as the sensation begins in her lower back, deep between her legs, and surges upwards, seizing her in its grip, shaking her with its force.
Once she is able, she shoulders her burden and continues. She has reached the part of the forest she was aiming for. Fight through the dense tangle of branches and brambles and juniper bushes. Go over the stream, past a thicket of holly trees, which give the only colour in the winter months. And then there is a clearing, of sorts, where sunlight penetrates, creating a thick fleece of green grass, in circular patterns, the curved fronds of ferns. There is an almost horizontal tree here, an immense fir, felled like a giant in a story, its roots splayed out, its reddish trunk held up in the forked branches of other trees, supported by its lesser neighbours.
And underneath its end, where it once stood in the earth, is a hollow – dry, sheltered, big enough for several people. Agnes and Bartholomew used to come here when they were children, if Joan had been shouting or if she gave them too many tasks. They would bring a cloth sack of bread and cheese, crawling in under the tree roots and say to one another that they would stay there for ever, live in the forest like elves; they would never go back.
Agnes lowers herself to the ground. It is dry, in the lee of the uprooted tree, with a carpet of pine needles. She feels another pain coming, driving towards her, getting closer, like thunder over a landscape. She turns, she crouches, she pants through it, as she knows she must, holding tight to a tree root. Even in the throes of it, when it has her in its clutches, when it drives everything from her mind but the narrow focus of when it might end, she recognises that it is getting stronger. It means business, this pain. It will not leave her be. Soon it will not let her rest or gather herself. It means to force her out of herself, to turn what is inside outside.