The words make him flinch. He cannot look at her after she has spoken them; he bows his head, fixing his gaze on his boots.
To her, it is simple. Their boy, their child, is dead, barely cold in his grave. There will be no leaving. There will be staying. There will be closing of the doors, the four of them drawing together, like dancers at the end of a reel. He will remain here, with her, with Judith, with Susanna. How can there be any such talk of leaving? It makes no sense.
She follows his gaze, down to his boots, and sees there, beside his feet, his travelling bag. It is stuffed, filled, like the belly of an expectant woman.
She points at it, mutely, unable to speak.
‘I must go . . . now,’ he mutters, stumbling over his words, this husband of hers who always speaks in the way a stream runs fast and clear over a steep bed of pebbles. ‘There is . . . a trade party leaving today for London . . . and they have . . . a spare horse. It is . . . I need to . . . that is, I mean . . . I shall take your leave . . . and will, in good time, or rather, shall—’
‘You will leave now? Today?’ She is incredulous, turning from the wall to face him. ‘We need you here.’
‘The trade party . . . I . . . that is . . . It is not possible for them to wait and . . . it is a good opportunity . . . so that I may not be travelling alone . . . You don’t like me to make the journey alone, remember . . . You yourself have said so . . . many times . . . so then—’
‘You mean to go now?’
He takes the swine bowl from her and puts it on the wall, taking both her hands in his. ‘There are many who rely on me in London. It is imperative that I return. I cannot just abandon these men who—’
‘But you may abandon us?’
‘No, of course not. I—’
She pushes her face right up to his. ‘Why are you going?’ she hisses.
He averts his eyes from hers but does not let go of her hands. ‘I told you,’ he mutters. ‘The company, the other players, I—’
‘Why?’ she demands. ‘Is it your father? Did something happen? Tell me.’
‘There is nothing to tell.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ She tries to withdraw her hands from his grasp but he will not let go. She twists her wrists one way and then the other.
‘You speak of your company,’ she says, into the space between their faces, which is so narrow they must be breathing each other’s breath, ‘you speak of your season and your preparation, but none of these is the proper reason.’ She struggles to free her hands, her fingers, so that she may grip his hand; he knows this and will not let her. That he prevents her makes her livid, incensed, red-hot with such fury as she has not felt since she was a child.
‘It is no matter,’ she pants, as they struggle there, beside the guzzling swine. ‘I know. You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish.’
‘What place? You mean London?
‘No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’ she says to him, as he binds her wrists together with one of his hands, reaching down for the bag at his feet with the other. ‘Don’t think I don’t.’
Only when he has shouldered his bag does he let go. She shakes her hands, the wrists scored and reddened, rubbing her fingers against the marks of his grip.
He is breathing hard as he stands two paces away from her. He crushes his cap in his hand, avoiding her eye.
‘You will not bid me farewell?’ she says to him. ‘You will walk away without bidding me goodbye? The woman who bore your children? Who nursed your son through his final breath? Who laid him out for burial? You will walk away from me, without a word?’
‘Look after the girls,’ is all he says, and this smarts like the slender but sharp prick of a needle. ‘I will send word,’ he says again. ‘And hope to return to you again before Christmas.’
She turns away from him towards the swine. She sees their bristly backs, their flapping ears, hears their satisfied gruntings.
He is suddenly there, behind her. His arms circle her waist, turn her around, pull her towards him. His head is next to hers: she smells the leather of his gloves, the salt of his tears. They stand like this, together, unified, for a moment, and she feels the pull towards him that she always does and always has, as if there is an invisible rope that circles her heart and ties it to his. Our boy was made, is what she thinks, of him and of her. They made him together; they buried him together. He will never come again. There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in, like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet’s death, his boyhood, his infancy, his birth, right back until the moment she and her husband cleaved together in that bed to create the twins. She would like to unspool it all, render it all back down to raw fleece, to find her way back, to that moment, and she would stand up, she would turn up her face to the stars, to the heavens, to the moon, and appeal to them to change what lay in wait for him, to plead with them to devise a different outcome for him, please, please. She would do anything for this, give anything, yield up whatever the heavens wanted.