He gives no answer.
She takes a knife, the one she finds so useful for prising kernels from fruit – she bought it from a gypsy she met in the lane one day – and takes a skein of hair at the back of his head. The knife severs the strands easily, as she knew it would. She holds up the hair. Light yellow at the end, bleached by the summer sun, darkening to near-brown at the roots. She lays it carefully next to the plate.
She wipes his forehead, his closed eyes, his cheeks, his lips, the open wound on his brow. She clears the shell-whorls of both ears, the soft stem of neck. She would wash the fever from him, draw it from his skin, if she could. The nightshirt must be cut from him, so she runs the gypsy’s knife down each arm, along the chest.
She is dabbing the cloth, gently, so gently, over the bruised and swollen armpits, when Mary comes in.
She stands in the doorway, looking down at the boy. Her face is wet, her eyes swollen. ‘I saw the light,’ she says, in a cracked voice. ‘I was not sleeping.’
Agnes nods towards a chair. Mary was with her when Hamnet came into the world; she may stay to see him out of it.
The candle is flaring and burning high, illuminating the ceiling and leaving the edges of the room in shadow. Mary sits in the chair; Agnes can see the white of her nightgown hem.
She dips the cloth, she washes, she dips it again. A repetitive motion. She runs her fingers over the scar on Hamnet’s arm where he fell from a fence at Hewlands, over the puckered knot from a dog bite at a harvest fair. The third finger of his right hand is calloused from gripping a quill. There are small pits in the skin of his stomach from when he had a spotted pox as a small child.
She washes his legs, his ankles, his feet. Mary takes the bowl, changes the water. Agnes washes the feet again, and dries them.
The two women look at each other for a moment, then Mary picks up the folded sheet, holding a corner in each hand. The sheet unravels, opens like an enormous flower, its petals wide, and Agnes is faced with its startling blank white expanse. The brightness of it is star-like, unavoidable, in this dark room.
She takes it. She presses her face to it. It smells of juniper, of cedar, of soap. Its nap is soft, enveloping, forgiving.
Mary helps her to lift Hamnet’s legs and then his torso, to slide the sheet under him.
Hard to fold him in. Hard to lift the sheet’s corners and cover him, smother him in its whiteness. Hard to think, to know, that she will never again see these arms, these knuckles, these shins, that thumbnail, that callus, this face, after this.
She cannot cover him the first time. She cannot do it the second. She takes the sheet, she drapes it over him, she removes it. Does it again. Removes it again. The boy lies, unclothed, washed clean, in the centre of the sheet, hands folded on his chest, chin tilted upwards, eyes shut fast.
Agnes leans on the edge of the board, breathing hard, the fabric gripped in her hands.
Mary watches. She reaches over the body of the boy to touch Agnes’s hand.
Agnes looks at her son. The birdcage ribs, the interlaced fingers, the round bones of the knees, the still face, the corn-coloured hair, which has dried now, standing up from his brow, as it always does. His physical presence has always been so strong, so definite, unlike Judith’s. Agnes has always known if he enters a room, or leaves it: that unmistakable clatter of feet, that passage of air, the heavy thud as he sits down on a chair. And now she must give up this body, submit it to the earth, never to be seen again.
‘I cannot do it,’ she says.
Mary takes the sheet from her. She tucks it one way, over his legs, then the other, over his chest. Some part of Agnes registers, in the deft way she performs this task, that she has done it before, many times.
Then, together, they reach up to the rafters. Agnes selects rue, comfrey, yellow-eyed chamomile. She takes purple lavender and thyme, a handful of rosemary. Not heartsease, because Hamnet disliked the smell. Not angelica, because it is too late for that and it did not help, did not perform its task, did not save him, did not break the fever. Not valerian, for the same reason. Not milk thistle, for the leaves are so spiny and sharp, enough to pierce the skin, to bring forth drops of blood.
She tucks the dried plants into the sheet, nestles them next to his body, where they whisper their comfort to him.
Next is the needle. Agnes threads it with thick twine. She begins at the feet.
The point is sharp; it punctures the weave of the cloth and slides out the other side. She keeps her eyes on her work, the drawing together of the sheet, to make a shroud. She is a sailor, stitching a sail, preparing a boat that will carry her son into the next world.