She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.
There is the stall they passed earlier, piled high with tin pots and cedar shavings. There is the woman they saw, still making her decision, holding two pots in her hands, weighing them, and how can she still be there, how can she still be engaged in the same activity, in the choosing of a pot, when such a change, such a transformation has occurred in Agnes’s life? Her very world has cloven in two, and here is the same dog, dozing in a doorway. Here is a young woman, tying up clothing into bundles, just as she was doing when they passed. Here is her neighbour, a man with grizzled hair and a yellowish tinge to his thin face （he will not last the year, Agnes thinks, the fact flitting through her mind like a swallow across a sky）， giving her a grave nod as he walks by. Can he not see, can he not read that life as she knows it is over, that he is gone?
The baby gives a swift, shrugging movement, pressing a palm, a foot, a shoulder against the wall of skin. She places a hand there – a hand outside, next to the hand inside – as if nothing has changed, as if the world is just as it was.
liza’s letter is taken by a lad from a few houses along: he was up and out, walking down Henley Street before dawn because he has been sent by his father to see to a cow in calf on the far side of the river. Mary hailed him from the window, gave him the letter, with instructions to take it to the posting inn, pressing a coin into his hands.
The boy tucks it into his sleeve, not before examining the slanted scrawl on the front. He has never learnt to read so it is meaningless to him but, all the same, he likes the loops, the shapes, the dark cross-hatchings of ink, like the marks made when branches are shaken against an iced-over windowpane.
He takes it to the inn near the bridge, then continues on to his cow, which still hasn’t calved and stares at him with large and what seem to the boy frightened eyes, jaws grinding cud. Later that morning the innkeeper hands it, with others, to a grain merchant, who is riding that day to London.
Eliza’s letter to her brother travels in the leather satchel of the grain merchant as far as Banbury. From there, it is taken by cart to Stokenchurch, and it lands at the door of the lodgings. The landlord squints at it, holding it up to the sunlight, which enters his passageway at a slant. His eyesight is poor. He sees the name of his lodger, who yesterday left for Kent. The theatres are closed, because of the plague, by order of the court, and so the lodger and his company of players have taken themselves off to tour nearby towns, places where it is permitted to gather in a crowd.
The landlord must wait for his son to come back from some business in Cheapside. When he does – grumpily, because the person he was due to meet did not arrive and it rained heavily and the son is wet to the skin – it is several hours before he gets out ink and quill, takes the letter from the mantel, and painstakingly, tongue wedged in the corner of his mouth, writes the address of the inn in Kent, where the lodger told them he would be staying.
The letter is then passed from hand to hand, to an inn in the outskirts of the city, where it waits for someone travelling to Kent – in this instance, a man pushing a cart, sat upon by a woman and a dog and a chicken.
When the letter reaches him, he – lodger, brother, husband, father and, here, player – is standing in a guildhall in a small town on the eastern fringes of Kent. The hall smells of cured meat, of boiled beets; there is a heap of farming implements and sacking in the corner; narrow blades of light enter the space from high, mildew-spotted windows.
He is leaning back, regarding these weak beams of light, reflecting on how they meet each other halfway across the hall, creating archways of light, and how they give the whole space an underwater feel, as if he and the rest of the company are fish, swimming about in the gloomy depths of a greenish pond.
A small child – a boy, he supposes – darts in, barefoot, bareheaded, ragged of smock, scrofulous of complexion, and calls out an approximation of his name, in an assertive, reedy voice, waving a letter aloft, as if it were a flag.
‘It is I,’ he says wearily, holding out his hand. It will be a demand for money, a complaint, an edict from a patron. ‘Hear this,’ he says to his colleagues, who are milling aimlessly on the raised dais, as if, he thinks, they aren’t putting on a performance in less than three hours, as if nothing in particular is happening here in this dusty hall. ‘You will need to count your paces from left to right, like so,’ he demonstrates, walking towards the shoeless child, ‘or else one of you will fall offstage and into the audience. It is smaller than we are used to, but used to it we must be.’ He comes to a halt in front of the child. Strangely colourless hair and wide-set eyes. A sore on the bottom lip. Fingernails rimmed with filth. Six or seven years of age, perhaps more.