Susanna won’t answer the knocks, but watches and listens and gestures to Judith if someone comes to the window.
Agnes refuses for a while. She shakes her head. She waves off her daughters’ entreaties. She turns back to the fire. But when the old woman from the dairy comes for a third time, Agnes nods. The woman comes in, takes up her place in the big wooden chair with the worn arms, and Agnes listens to her tales of aching joints, a phlegmy chest, a mind that skids and slips, forgetting names, days, tasks.
Agnes rises and goes to her worktable. She brings her pestle and mortar out of the cupboard. She does not allow herself to think that last time she used this it was for him; the last time she held this pestle in her fingers, felt its cold weight, was then, just before, and how useless it was, that it did no good. She doesn’t think these things at all, as she breaks up sharp stems of rosemary, for blood to the head, comfrey and hyssop.
She hands the old dairywoman the packet. Three times a day, she tells her: a sprinkling in hot water. Drink when cool.
She will not take the coins the woman tries to give her, fumblingly, hesitatingly, but she pretends not to see the wrapped cheese left on the table, the bowl of thick cream.
Her daughters show the woman out, saying goodbye. Their voices are like bright birds, taking wing, swooping around the room and out into the skies.
How is it these children, these young women came from her? What relation do they bear to the small beings she once nursed and dandled and washed? More and more, her own life seems strange and unrecognisable to her.
Sometime past midnight, Agnes stands in the street, a shawl around her. She was woken by footsteps, light, fast ones, with a familiar tittuping rhythm.
She was pulled from sleep by a sense of feet approaching her window, by a definite feeling that someone was outside. And so here she is, alone in the street, waiting.
‘I’m here,’ she says aloud, turning her head first one way, then the other. ‘Are you?’
At that very moment her husband is sitting under the same sky, in a skiff rounding a bend in the river. They are travelling upstream but he can sense that the tide is turning; the river seems confused, almost hesitant, trying to flow in two directions at once.
He shivers, pulling his cloak around himself more tightly （he will catch a chill, he hears a voice inside his head chide, a soft voice, a caring voice）。 The sweat from earlier has cooled, sitting uneasily and clammily between his skin and the wool of his clothes.
Most of the company are asleep, stretching themselves out in the bottom of the boat and lowering their hats over their faces. He does not sleep; he never can on these evenings, the blood still hurtling through his veins, his heart still galloping, his ears still hearing the sounds and roars and gasps and pauses. He longs for his bed, for the enclosed space of his room, for that moment when his mind will fall silent, when his body will realise it is over and that sleep must come.
He huddles into himself as he sits on the hard board of the boat, watching the river, the sliding by of the houses, the dip and sway of lights on other vessels, the shoulders of the boatman as he wrestles the craft through trickier currents, the dripping lift of the oars, the white scarf of breath that streams from his mouth.
The Thames has thawed now （he had told them it was frozen in his last letter）; they can reach the Palace once more. He sees, again, for a moment, the vista of eyes beyond the edge of the stage, beyond the world that encases him and his friends, blurred by candle flames. The faces watching him, at these moments, are colours smeared with a wet brush. Their shouts, their applause, their avid expressions, their open mouths, their rows of teeth, their gazes that would drink him up （if they could, but they cannot, for he is covered, protected in a costume, like a whelk in a shell – they may never see the real him）。
He and his friends have just performed a historical play, about a long-dead king, at the Palace. It has proved, he has found, a subject safe for him to grapple with. There are, in such a story, no pitfalls, no reminders, no unstable ground to stumble upon. When he is enacting old battles, ancient court scenes, when he is putting words into the mouths of distant rulers, there is nothing that will ambush him, tie him up and drag him back to look on things he cannot think about （a wrapped form, a chair of empty clothes, a woman weeping at a piggery wall, a child peeling apples in a doorway, a curl of yellow hair in a pot）。 He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind （and no one else on stage with him, not one of the other players, his closest friends, will know that he finds himself looking out, every evening, over the watching crowd, in search of a particular face, a boy with a slightly crooked smile and a perpetually surprised expression; he scans the audience minutely, carefully, because he still cannot fathom that his son could just have gone; he must be somewhere; all he has to do is find him）。