Her husband holds her close as she clasps him with both arms, despite everything, just as she did that night, his body fitted to hers. He breathes in and out, into the curved side of her coif, as if he might speak, but she doesn’t want the words, has no need of them. She sees, over his shoulder, that travelling bag of his, at his feet.
There will be no going back. No undoing of what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way.
‘Go, then,’ she says, turning from him, pushing him away, ‘if you are going. Return when you can.’
She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes. That sore skin around the eyes may be treated with oil infused with a tincture of eyebright and chamomile. That it is possible to comfort your daughters with assurances about places in Heaven and eternal joy and how they may all be reunited after death and how he will be waiting for them, while not believing any of it. That people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died. That some will cross the street to avoid her merely because of this. That people not considered to be good friends will come, without warning, to the fore, will leave bread and cakes on your sill, will say a kind and apt word to you after church, will ruffle Judith’s hair and pinch her wan cheek.
It is hard to know what to do with his clothes.
For weeks, Agnes cannot move them from the chair where he left them before taking to bed.
A month or so after burial she lifts the breeches, then puts them down. She fingers the collar of his shirt. She nudges the toe of his boot so that the pair are lined up, side by side.
Then she buries her face in the shirt; she presses the breeches to her heart; she inserts a hand into each boot, feeling the empty shapes of his feet; she ties and unties the necklines; she pushes buttons into holes and out again. She folds the clothes, unfolds them, refolds them.
As the fabric runs through her fingers, as she puts each seam together, as she flaps out the creases in the air, her body remembers this task. It takes her back to the before. Folding his clothes, tending to them, breathing in his scent, she can almost persuade herself that he is still here, just about to get dressed, that he will walk through the door at any moment, asking, Where are my stockings, where is my shirt?, worrying about being late for the school bell.
She and Judith and Susanna sleep together in the curtained bed, without discussing the matter: the girls’ truckle is never pulled out but remains tucked away. She draws the curtains tight around the three of them. She tells herself that nothing can get them, nothing will come in through the windows or down the chimney. She stays awake most of the night, listening for the knock and keen of bad spirits trying to find a way in. She puts her arms around her slumbering daughters. She wakes often, during the night, to check them for fevers, swellings, strange colorations of the skin. She switches sides, from time to time, throughout the night, so that she lies between Judith and the outside world, and then Susanna. Nothing will get past her this time. She will be waiting. Nothing will come to take her children. Never again.
Susanna says she will pass the night next door, with her grandparents. I cannot sleep here, she says, avoiding her mother’s eye. There’s too much shifting about.
She gathers her nightcap, her gown, and leaves the room, her skirts gathering the dust mice that have collected on the floor.
Agnes cannot see the point of sweeping the floor. It just gets dirty again. Cooking food seems similarly pointless. She cooks it, they eat it and then, later on, they eat more.
The girls go next door for their meals; Agnes doesn’t stop them.
To walk by his grave every Sunday is both a pain and a pleasure. She wants to lie there so that her body covers it. She wants to dig down with her bare hands. She wants to strike it with a tree branch. She wants to build a structure over it, to shield it from the wind and the rain. Perhaps she would come to live in it, there, with him.
God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day.
She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.
She says nothing. She takes her daughters’ arms and walks away.
She has a dream that she is in the fields at Hewlands. It is dusk and the earth is bare and dug into deep furrows. Ahead of her is her mother, bending to the soil and straightening up. When Agnes gets closer she sees that her mother is sowing tiny pearl-white teeth in the ground. Her mother doesn’t turn or pause as Agnes approaches, just smiles at her, then carries on dropping milk teeth into the ground, one after another.