Hamnet

With Hamnet’s guidance, Agnes surveys Judith and observes that she has the plague. Hamnet berates Agnes for not returning home sooner. While Agnes is privately guilt-stricken and terrified, the medicine woman in her takes over, as she seeks to make a poultice to bring down the fever. Her sympathetic mother-in-law Mary, who lost her daughter Anne to the plague, cooperates with Agnes to save Judith.

Both Susanna and Mary observe that Hamnet is exceptionally pale, and the image will return to haunt them after his death.

On her wedding night Agnes is struck by the difference between the countryside home where she grew up and the city dwelling which she shares with her husband and his family. The newlyweds have the attic room in a house which slopes like Agnes’ first initial, the letter A. Her kestrel now lives with the priest who married the couple.

Agnes adapts quickly to the ways of the house, even adding a personal touch to the trimming of candle-wicks and the baking of bread. She notices that her husband has a fractious relationship with his father, and that he seems “split in two”—relaxed in their apartment yet argumentative and defensive in the family home (122).