Judith is two, her mother staying awake with her each night, steaming bowls of pine and clove inside the bed-curtains, so that she may breathe, so that the blue fades from her lips, and she might sleep, before it is apparent to everyone that the move to London will never take place. The child’s health is too fragile. She would never survive the city.
The father will visit them, during plague season, when the playhouses are closed. He has given up selling gloves, hawking his father’s wares, severing himself entirely from the business. He now works only in the playhouses. He watches one night as his wife walks the floor with the girl; she has a distemper of the stomach.
She is a preternaturally beautiful child, even to the indifferent observer, with clear blue eyes and soft, celestial curls. She fixes her gaze, over her mother’s shoulder as they walk from one side of the room to the other, on her father. Silent tears edge down her cheeks and she grips her mother’s shift in both hands. He looks back at her steadily. He clears his throat. He tells his wife that he has decided to spend the money he has saved, not on a house in London but on some land just outside Stratford. It will bring in good rent, he tells her. He stands, as if to square up to this decision, to this new future.
In the birthing room, with the tiny twins on his lap, a hand curled around each of their heads, he says to Agnes that he believes her foresight, her prophecy about two children was false. Or, rather, that it was a sense of the twins’ coming. It meant, he says, still gazing at his pair of babies, that she would have twins. Susanna and then twins.
His wife is silent. When he looks at the bed, he sees she has fallen asleep, as if all she was waiting for was for him to arrive, to take the babies on to his lap, to cradle their heads in his hands.
gnes startles awake, her head jerking up, her lips and tongue in the middle of forming a word; she isn’t sure what it would have been. She had been dreaming about wind, a great invisible force whipping her hair from side to side, tugging at the clothes on her body, hurling dust and grit into her face.
She looks down at herself. She isn’t in bed but seems to be half sitting, half slumped on the edge of a pallet, still in her gown. She has a cloth in one hand. It is damp, creased, warmed in the cradle of her palm. Why is she holding it? Why is she sitting like this, asleep?
It comes to her in a rush, as if a gust of wind from her dream is crossing the room. Judith, the fever, the night.
Agnes lurches to her feet. Has she been sleeping? How could she have slept? She shakes her head, once, twice, as if trying to rid herself of slumber, of the dream. The room is profoundly dark: it is the deepest part of the night, the most lethal hour. The fire is almost out, just a rubble of red embers, the candle spent. She feels about her desperately, blindly: there is a limb, under a sheet, a knee, an ankle. Agnes gropes upwards and encounters a wrist and two hands clasped together. The flesh, under her touch, is hot. Which, she tells herself, as she turns and begins scrabbling in the coffer for a candle, is good, very good, because it means that Judith is still alive.
It is good, she is telling herself, it is good, as she seizes the cool waxy column of a candle and holds its wick to an ember. If there is life, there is hope.
The candlewick catches, the flame guttering, nearly vanishing, then gathering strength. A circle of light appears around Agnes’s outstretched arm, and widens out, pushing back the darkness.
There is the fireplace, the mantel. There are Agnes’s slippers and her shawl, fallen to the floor. There is the pallet and there are Judith’s feet, poking up under the sheet; there are her legs, her knees, and there is her face.
Agnes covers her mouth when she sees it. The skin is so pale as to be almost colourless; the eyelids are half open, with the eyes rolled up under the lids. Her lips, white and cracked, are open and she is taking tiny half-sips of air.
Still with her hand over her mouth, Agnes looks down upon her daughter. The part of her that has attended the sick, the ailing, the convalescents, the malingerers, the grieving, the mad, thinks: It will not be long. The other part of her, which nursed and tended and cared and petted and fed and clothed and embraced and kissed this child, thinks: This cannot be, this cannot happen, please, not her.
Agnes bends to touch her forehead, to take her pulse, to try to give her some ease, and as she does so, the candle reveals a sight so peculiar, so unexpected that it takes a moment for Agnes to understand what she is seeing.
The first thing she registers is that Judith’s hand is not, as she first thought, clasping her other hand. It is entwined with another’s. There is someone on the pallet with Judith, another body, another – as strange as it seems – Judith. There are two Judiths, curled up together, in front of the dying fire.