Judith lies alone on her bed, opening and closing her eyes. She cannot comprehend what has happened to this day. One moment, she and Hamnet were pulling bits of thread for the cat’s new kittens – keeping an eye open for their grandmother, because Judith had been told to chop the kindling and polish the table while Hamnet did his schoolwork – and then she had suddenly felt a weakness in her arms, an ache in her back, a prickling in her throat. I don’t feel well, she’d said to her brother, and he had looked up from the kittens, at her, and his eyes had travelled all over her face. Now she is on this bed and she has no idea how she got here or where Hamnet has gone or when her mother is coming back or why no one is there.
The maid is taking a long time to make her selection from the late milking at the market, flirting with the dairyman behind his stall. Well, well, he is saying, not letting go of the pail. Oh, the maid is replying, tugging at the handle. Will you not let me have it? Have what? the dairyman says, raising his eyebrows.
Agnes has finished collecting her honey and has taken up a sack and the burning rosemary and is making for the swarm of bees. She will sweep them into the sack and return them to the hive, but gently, ever so gently.
The father is two days’ ride away, in London, and is, at this very moment, striding through Bishopsgate towards the river, where he aims to buy one of the flat, unleavened griddle cakes that sell on stalls there. He has a terrible hunger in him today; he woke with it, and his breakfast of ale and porridge and his lunch of pie has not sated it. He is careful with his money, keeping it close to his person, never spending more than he has to. It is the subject of much ribbing from those he works with. People say of him that he has gold stored in bags under the boards of his lodging: he has heard this and smiled. It is, of course, not true: everything he earns he sends home to Stratford, or takes with him, wrapped and stowed in his saddlebags, if he is making the journey. But, still, he doesn’t spend a groat unless absolutely necessary. And this day the griddle cake, in mid-afternoon, is such a necessity.
Alongside him walks a man, the son-in-law of his landlord. This man has been talking since they left the house. Hamnet’s father is listening only intermittently to what the man is saying – something about a grudge towards his father-in-law, a dowry unfulfilled, a promise not kept. He is thinking instead of the way the sun reaches down, like ladders, through the narrow gaps in buildings to illuminate the rain-glazed street, of the griddle cake that awaits him near the river, of the flap and soap-tang of laundry hanging above his head, of his wife, fleetingly, the way her twinned shoulder-blades flex together and apart as she pins up the weight of her hair, of the stitching in the toe of his boot that seems to have worked itself loose and how he must now pay a visit to the cobbler, perhaps after he has eaten his griddle cake, as soon as he has rid himself of the landlord’s son-in-law and his querulous babbling.
And Hamnet? He is re-entering the narrow house, built in a gap, a vacancy. He is sure, now, that other people will be back. He and Judith will no longer be alone. There will be someone here now who will know what to do, someone to assume charge of this, someone who will tell him that all is well. He steps in, letting the door swing closed behind him. He calls, to say he is back, he is home. He pauses, waiting for an answer, but there is nothing: only silence.
f you were to stand at the window in Hewlands and crane your neck sideways, it would be possible to see the edge of the forest.
You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it.
On a morning in early spring, fifteen years or so before Hamnet runs to the house of the physician, a Latin tutor is standing in this place at the window, absently tugging on the hoop through his left ear. He is watching the trees. Their collective presence, lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, brings to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting, that the city or streets of the previous scene are gone, that they are now on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.
A slight frown appears on his face. He remains at the window, the fingertips of one hand pressed white to the glass. The boys are behind him; they are conjugating verbs, temporarily unheard by the tutor, who is intent on the startling contrast between the sharply blue spring sky and the new-leaf green of the forest. The colours seem to fight, vying for supremacy, vibrancy: the green versus the blue, one against the other. The children’s Latin verbs wash over him, through him, like the wind through the trees. Somewhere in the farmhouse a bell is rung, first briefly and then more insistently. There are footfalls along the passage, the sound of a door banging into its frame. One of the boys – the younger one, James, the tutor knows, without turning – sighs, coughs, clears his throat, then rejoins the intoning. The tutor readjusts his collar, smooths his hair.