Her son’s body is in a place of torture, of hell. It writhes, it twists, it buckles and strains. Agnes holds him by the shoulders, by the chest, to keep him still. There is, she is starting to see, nothing more she can do. She can stay beside him, comfort him as best she can, but this pestilence is too great, too strong, too vicious. It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him. It has a musky, dank, salty smell. It has come to them, Agnes thinks, from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement. It has cut a swingeing path for itself through humans and beasts and insects alike; it feeds on pain and unhappiness and grief. It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, blackest kind of evil.
Agnes does not leave his side. She swabs his brow, his limbs with the damp cloth. She packs salt in the bed with him. She lays a posy of valerian and swans’ feathers on his chest, for comfort, for solace. Hamnet’s fever climbs and climbs, the buboes swell tighter and tighter. She lifts his hand, which is a grim blue-grey along its side, and presses it to her cheek. She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.
His body sweats, its humours expressing outwards through the skin, as if emptying itself.
Hamnet’s mind, however, is in another place. For a long time, he could hear his mother and his sisters, his aunt and his grandmother. He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognise. It is cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on. It piles up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weighs down the branches of trees; it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis. The silence, the cool, the altered silver light of it is something more than soothing to him. He wants only to lie down in this snow, to rest himself; his legs are tired, his arms ache. To lie, to surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him. Something is telling him that he must not lie down, he must not give in to this desire. What could it be? Why shouldn’t he rest?
Outside his body, Agnes is speaking. She is trying to apply the poultice to the swellings in his neck and armpits but he is trembling so much that the mixture will not stay in place. She is saying his name, over and over again. Eliza is scooping up Judith in her arms and taking her to the opposite end of the room. Judith is letting out a hoarse whistling noise, kicking against the clutches of her aunt. Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.
Susanna watches her brother, convulsing by the hearth, watches her mother fussing around with her useless paste and bandages. She would like to snatch them from her hands and hurl them at the wall and say, Stop, leave him be, let him alone. Can you not see it is too late for that? Susanna presses fierce fists to her eyes. She cannot look any more; she cannot bear it.
Agnes is whispering, Please, please, Hamnet, please, don’t leave us, don’t go. Near the window, Judith is struggling, asking to be placed next to him on the pallet, saying she needs him, she must speak to him, let her go. Eliza holds her, saying, There, there, to her, but has no idea what she means by that. Mary is kneeling at the end of the pallet, holding on to one of his ankles. Susanna is leaning her forehead into the plaster of the wall, her hands over her ears.
All at once, he stops shaking and a great soundlessness falls over the room. His body is suddenly motionless, his gaze focused on something far above him.
Hamnet, in his place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes, to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.
Eliza rocks Judith, tucking the child’s head under her chin, and mutters a prayer. Susanna’s face is turned towards her brother, her wet cheek to the wall. Mary crosses herself, gripping Agnes’s shoulder. Agnes bends forward to touch her lips to his forehead.