The lad springs upright and regards Bartholomew with a wary air. ‘Where?’
‘The forest.’
Bartholomew puts two fingers into his mouth and, without taking his eyes off the lad’s face, whistles for his dogs.
Agnes is dozing, somewhere between awake and asleep, with the baby tucked at her breast, when Bartholomew finds them.
He has walked over the fields, his dogs at his heels, the husband trailing in his wake, still moaning and whining, and he has found her, here, just where he suspected she might be.
‘There now,’ he says to her, bending to hoist her into his arms – the mess and stink and matter of birth are of no consequence to him. ‘You cannot stay here.’
She protests, lightly, drowsily, but then leans her head into her brother’s chest. The baby, he notices, is alive and its cheeks are drawing in and out. At suck, then. Bartholomew nods to himself.
The husband has caught up with them now, making a fuss and bother of the moment, gesturing, clutching his hair, his voice still churning away, throwing out words and words and more words into the greenery. He will carry her, he is saying, and what is the baby, a girl or a boy, and what was she thinking, running off like that, she’s had them all frantic, he had no idea where she had gone. Bartholomew considers giving him a kick, to shut him up, to fell him to the fecund, leaf-damp ground, but resists. The husband tries to take Agnes from him, but Bartholomew brushes him off, as he might a bothersome fly.
‘You get the basket,’ he says to the lad. Then adds, over his shoulder, as he strides away: ‘If it’s not too heavy for you.’
or the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.
The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.
Several months before the day Judith takes to her bed, as the year is turning from 1595 to 1596, the master glassmaker, who is skilled in the layering of five or six colours to produce the star or flower-patterned glass beads known as millefiori, is momentarily distracted by a fight breaking out between the stokers across the glassworks. His hand slips and two of his fingers enter the roaring white flame that was, a moment earlier, heating the bulb of glass to stretchable, malleable gum. The pain is so severe that it goes beyond sensation and at first he cannot feel it at all; he cannot think what has happened, why everyone is staring, then running towards him. There is a smell of roasting meat, a yelling almost canine in its intensity, a flurry around him.
The result, later in the day, is two amputations.
One of his fellow workers, then, is the one to pack up the tiny red, yellow, blue, green and purple beads into boxes the following day. This man doesn’t know that the master glassmaker – now at home, bandaged and dosed into a stupor with poppy syrup – usually pads and packs the beads with wood shavings and sand to prevent breakage. He grabs instead a handful of rags from the glassworks floor and tucks them in and around the beads, which look like hundreds of tiny, alert, accusing eyes staring up at him.
In Alexandria, at exactly the same moment, all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, the cabin boy must leave his ship, for Judith to contract the pestilence and for a tragedy to be set in motion, halfway across the world. He must receive orders to go ashore and find some victuals for his hungry and overworked shipmates.
So he does.
He goes down the gangplank, clutching the purse given to him by the midshipman, along with a short, sharp kick in the backside, which would explain the boy’s listing, limping gait.
His crewmates are hauling crates of Malaysian cloves and Indian indigo off the ship, before taking on sacks of coffee beans and bales of textiles.
The dockside, under the cabin boy’s feet, is disconcertingly firm and solid after weeks at sea. Nevertheless, he staggers off towards what looks to him like a tavern, passing a stall selling spiced nuts, a woman holding a snake about her neck. He pauses to look at a man with a monkey on a golden chain. Why? Because he has never seen a monkey before. Because he loves animals of all kinds. Because he is, after all, not much older than Hamnet, who is, at this very moment, sitting in a cold wintry schoolroom, watching the schoolmaster hand out horn books of Greek poetry.
The monkey at the port of Alexandria is wearing a little red jacket and a matching hat; its back is curved and soft, like that of a puppy, but its face is expressive, oddly human, as it peers up at the boy.