On the Fourth Night

 

28th of December, 1601

 

IT IS RAINING, as it has been raining for the past fifteen hours, hard and unmercifully and without respite. The downpour hurls itself at the windows, hammering at the glass, clawing at the walls of your home as if trying to gain entry, as if it wishes to tear down all that you have with such careful love built up.

You are sitting in the parlour, the room a little smoky from the fire, watching the dark water pound the sodden earth. Your son is with you, his demeanour on the border between watchfulness and sullenness, his head angled away from you, his attention (although you suspect his true thoughts to be far away, in some other place, with the man who sired him) seemingly riveted upon the intersection of the elements, the conjoining of sky with earth. His twin is upstairs, at work upon her embroidery; and his elder sister is elsewhere—sheltering, supposedly, from the deluge at the home of a friend.

You find that you do not wish to think too hard about her true whereabouts or of the identity of that acquaintance, or of how she might be engaged, for all that her sweetheart—a polite enough fellow named John—strikes you as being a just and decent man. You have spoken often to Susanna of the perils of maturity, of the lure of menfolk, of their musk and rigidities, their unexpected tenderness, but you have understood also that your words may not have carried as much weight as they ought to have done, coming from you, at one time the epicentre of gossip, your belly already swollen with your first-born on the day that you signed the parish register. And so you sit and you say nothing and you listen to the unrelenting rhythm of the rain.

It is, in the end, the boy who breaks the silence between you, interrupting your own bleak thoughts about the future, with words that are oddly—and, you tell yourself, surely coincidentally—pertinent to your strange, shifting state of mind in these last, curious few days.

“Mother? Do you dream?”

You are slightly startled by the question, seeing perhaps a perspicacity, even a cunning, of which there has been no previous symptom in the guileless, open-hearted boy.

“Of course,” you say. “Well, naturally, I dream.”

“Oh.” At this announcement, Hamnet seems momentarily disconsolate. “I thought... I wondered...”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I have almost forgotten what it is like.”

“Why do you say such a thing?”

“For I have not dreamed in years. Not since I was... eleven, I think. Yes. Eleven.”

He smiles crookedly, but it is a melancholic and too adult a smile, at which you feel a surge of instinctive sadness.

“My sweet one?” you say, speaking to him in softer terms than any you have used for many years, speaking as you have not spoken to him since his infancy. “They will come back to you. I have heard of similar instances. It is very common, I think, with boys. Your father was no different.”

The white lie leaves you easily with only a trace of guilt.

“Darkness,” he says. “Every night now, for so long. Only emptiness and darkness and quiet.”

“Oh, Hamnet...” you begin. Then, stopping yourself, not wanting to alarm him any further in this time of profound uncertainty, you say, as conversationally as you are able, “Your last... that is, your most recent dream... Do you remember? What it was you dreamed of then?”

He seems puzzled for a moment and withdrawn, then, speaking carefully like some old divine bringing together the threads of a complicated argument, your beautiful, fragile boy says: “I dreamed of the people who dwell in the forest. Those people who are not people. The fair ones who have, it is said, upon our souls... designs.”

He stops then and he looks at you with a gravity and candour which makes him seem again like a very much older man. No reply that you can summon seems adequate to this and so, for a long minute, nothing at all is said, and there is to be heard only the rough, insistent beating of the rain.

Something jolts you out of this weird lull, fraught as it is with inexplicable significance. Something forces you to confront the real world.

A hand hits the windowpane, a forceful interruption and, through the seething curtain of rain, segmented by the leading, you spy a face and a figure which are familiar to you.

Your first thought? William. It is William who has returned.

But that hope is almost immediately dispelled. For this is the lumpen, pox-ridden face of a beggarman, one who is well known in this place, a wayfarer whose comings and goings have become as predictable and inevitable as the seasons.

He bangs once more upon the window, this man, wild-eyed, exhausted and with something theatrical in his evidently drunken lunacy as if he learnt well long ago the part that life had written for him and so had decided to play it to the hilt.

“Turn away,” you say to your boy, whose face looks drawn and drained of blood. “You know it’s only old Tom again. And you know that he’s too fond—too fond by far—of wine and ale. You know that he is fallen.”

“He seems distracted, mother. He seems unwell.”

“That is only his manner. That is only his way. We have all in our time tried our best to offer aid, but always he has spurned our charity. Always has he bitten the hand that feeds. Often with unnecessary violence and spite.”

The vagabond strikes the glass again—for, you think, the last time, your attention having now been achieved—and he brings his face close to the pane.

He shouts above the storm and although you cannot make out every word of it, you hear a good deal of the rant. You understand its structure and its theme even if the rain necessitates certain ellipses.

“I have seen it... yes... between worlds... the blankness approaching... insatiate... unswerving... appetite... and without mercy...”

“Mother?”

“Don’t be afraid,” you say. “You know that he is quite harmless.”

He peers in at the both of you, mad knowledge dancing in his eyes, and then, wordless now, his message delivered, he turns and he flees, back into the bosom of the tempest. He capers into the rain, lost to the world. You and your doomed child watch his departing figure, poor mad Tom, as it dwindles, fades and is, at last, swallowed by the storm.