As it turned out, Maud and Agnes were both in hospital for a week and sent messages to each other, via one of the support staff in a pretty pink apron, who reported back to Agnes that Mrs Campion was surrounded by flowers and eating well.
The doctors ran numerous tests on Agnes, including a scan. The technician had been kind and pointed out where the obscure grey shadows made sense. Agnes had puzzled and frowned but, under the technician’s tuition, pieced together a fluttering, pulsing shape.
‘Look,’ invited the technician. Agnes obeyed, and peered through a gateway presented by science into a mystery enacted and re-enacted since the first cell assembled itself in the primordial fluid. The observer could watch through the camera lens. ‘Ah,’ she breathed, and her own heart leaped in greeting. What she was seeing flowed in from the river of time. The indistinct beating shape strung on to a necklace of bones was being built out of genetic information passed on hundreds and thousands of years ago.
She gave a little cry.
‘Please keep still,’ admonished the technician. ‘Look.’
And Agnes finally stepped out from behind the lens and looked deep into another human being. Into its heart, and through its heart to beyond. Beyond the image, beyond the genetic assembly, into another dimension for which she had no explanation.
‘We can see the foetal heart,’ said the technician. ‘And everything looks fine. Do you want to know the sex?’
‘No. No, thank you.’
The experience left Agnes weak and shaky, but with a burning determination that this baby would be born.
During her week’s stay in hospital, she swam back up to the surface. The sickness lessened and she grew stronger and felt better. Of course she would manage the clutter and muddle that had been thrown into her path. A full, rich life absorbed the unpredictable, and did not throw it away. The house, baby, unsuccessful love affairs must not be wasted on mean, niggardly regret. Now that she had struggled to this point, her power would grow. She would cope, drawing on strengths
She pictured growing fonder and fonder of Andrew, with the real, solid affection she had witnessed between couples who relied on the steady beat of trust and liking, not the great, gusting emotions of passionate love. Between them they would work out a division of labour and locations. They had many things in common, a shared purpose. She felt Andrew to be a man she could trust with the baby and with herself.
For long hours, she lay and looked at the ceiling. What a challenge and labour it was to be the woman that she wished, requiring an interweaving of maternity, creativity, practicality, which were all constantly altering and progressing. And she wanted, she very much wanted, to achieve this state of mind and hold it with grace. No anger. No looking back.
Yes. With the sickness gone, her body more biddable, it was time to plan and schedule commitments. Agnes’s certainties had returned.
As she lay quiet and dreaming, her thoughts returned to the other Agnes. Petticoats wadded around her feet against the draughts – often complained about in contemporary letters – the other Agnes had sewn samplers, one for each of her children with their names and birthdates. Rupert, Charles after the King, Henrietta, Margaret, Henry… But not the one who killed its mother. That child had remained nameless. In hushed moments, she must have told her children stories. Of battles and kings, of witches and demons. And, leaning over and speaking directly to little Henry, of younger sons winning fortune.
In a few months’ time, Agnes would assume her place in the circle of story-tellers. She, too, would be easing a child into its context, settling it into it with tenderness, and with colours and banners of imagination and history.
She rang up Bel and discussed fixing up a couple of schedules, to book in Jed, and to set up a meeting with Dickie.
First she needed to talk over things with Andrew. It was at this point that Penny phoned.
When Andrew finally opened his eyes after the sedation had worn off, his body was on fire with pain and hot, swollen tissue. Anxious and rumpled, Penny was sitting by the bed, a handkerchief between her fingers, her eyes trained on him.
‘Am I dead?’ he muttered.
‘No, but you had a bad reaction.’
He digested this information. ‘I was stung once too often.’ He managed the half-joke, and watched her expression clear miraculously. If it was possible to feel pleasure at such a moment, it gave him pleasure.
Poor Penny.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why hurt the bees? They did no harm.’ She moistened his lips with a sponge and he sucked at it gratefully.
‘Penny. Could you do one thing?’
In the act of dipping the sponge into the water for a second time, she paused. ‘If I can.’
‘I know this is a difficult. But could you get hold of Agnes for me?’
The sponge dropped on to the floor with a dull sound.
Penny’s phone call to Agnes left the latter in no doubt how much effort it had cost the other woman to make. ‘The reason I’m ringing is because Andrew’s had this accident,’ Penny explained, in a voice wrung out with tension and nerves.
Agnes had only that morning arrived back from hospital. She sat down on the tenants’ chair in the hall. ‘Is he hurt? Badly?’
‘A little.’ Penny doled out the information with reluctance. ‘But he’s asking for you. The doctor thinks it might help if you came. After we got the news about the farm, he had a bit of a breakdown.’
‘You’ve lost the farm?’
‘Yes, we have.’ Agnes noted the ‘we’. There was a hint of triumphalism that the worst had come to the worst, a brand of I
Agnes agreed she would come.
Penny continued, ‘There’s one thing you should know. I moved back into Tithings yesterday, for the time being. Andrew will be staying in hospital.’ She added, ‘I wanted the situation to be quite clear.’
‘Oh,’ said Agnes, the careful future that she had plotted and planned dimming dramatically in her mind’s eye. ‘Perhaps we can talk about that.’
She drove sedately past a misty moor, whose uplands had once been home to the Bronze and Iron Age settlers. In the watery sun, the stones appeared less monolithic and important. The wildness of the plain had been tamed by the road, and the mysterious connection between land and human, earth and sun was obscured by the mist, as the Iron Age settlements had been subsumed under a shroud of chalky soil.
Agnes gripped the wheel and drove on.
At the sight of Agnes hovering at the entrance to the ward, Penny’s mouth tightened, but she got up at once to greet her.
Agnes said warily, ‘It was very nice of you to contact me, Penny. Under the circumstances… which I am not quite clear about.’
‘Who is?’ said Penny, brusque to the point of rudeness. ‘But that’s Andrew. I never know with him.’ She folded her arms. ‘At least, he’s stable.’
‘Good.’
‘I can’t believe – I mean. His bees…’
Greatly daring, Agnes touched Penny’s arm. A gesture intended to be reassuring, friendly. Unthreatening.
‘It was… so odd… mad,’ continued Penny, and described haltingly, but intelligibly, the dark, unpredictable force that had been unleashed in Andrew, which had rocked Penny to her foundations. ‘Lighting bonfires I can understand – to make a gesture – but…’ The revelation of this side of her husband had been a terrible shock for Penny, and her
