Hamnet: Chapter 2  Summary & Analysis

In the 1580s, about 15 years before the day Judith falls ill, a Latin tutor looks out a window at Hewlands toward the forest. Absentmindedly, he twirls the silver earring in his left lobe and frowns a little, torn between the beckoning, wild beauty of the forest and his duty to teach the two boys droning their way through a Latin exercise behind him. He asked them to recite the conjugation of the verb “incarcerare.” Twice a week, he comes to oversee these lessons as part of an agreement to settle a debt or a dispute between the late yeoman farmer and his father, a glovemaker (John).

The tutor doesn’t fully understand the dispute, but it had to do with a consignment of sheepskins his glovemaker father (John) tried to purchase with the wool still on them. This aroused the farmer’s suspicion and created an issue between the two. The farmer subsequently died, but his widow has held John to the deal they struck beforehand. Thus, without warning, John summoned the tutor, his eldest son, into the workshop one evening and informed him that he would be going to Hewlands twice a week to “[drum] some education into the boys there.” In that moment, the tutor longed to run away or to strike his father with his fists. He hungers to repay just a handful of the myriad blows he and his six siblings have suffered all their lives.

John has always been prone to rages which seemingly arise out of nowhere. Thus, the tutor learned early on to pay attention to the smallest changes in his father’s moods. But recently, he’s grown taller and stronger than his father. Only a few months ago, he discovered he could fight back, and he warned his father to never hit him again. Now, standing at the window at Hewlands, the urge to rebel and to run away becomes almost overpowering.

As the tutor prepares to turn back to his pupils, a figure  (later revealed to be Agnes) emerges from the woods. Its calm self-possession and the bird on its gloved fist strike the tutor as masculine. But then he notices the long braid, the gentle sway of its hips, a beautiful, red-lipped face, and the skirts that she—clearly, the figure is a woman—untucks from around her waist. With a faint smile, he turns to the boys and asks, as innocently as possible, for the name of the serving-girl with the bird. The older, less intelligent brother is confused. The younger quickly—too quickly—names Hettie as the girl who looks after the pigs and chickens. But the tutor doubts he saw a chicken on the woman’s arm.

After the lesson ends, the tutor stalks the farmyard in search of the  tantalizing maid. He knows that if he gets caught, if the yeoman’s widow realizes what he’s up to, he may be dismissed and thus destroy John’s fragile agreement with her. But he’s too busy imagining sweet liaisons with the maid in the woods to care. He also keeps an eye out for the family’s oldest daughter. She has a reputation for a wildness, a touch of madness, and perhaps an inclination toward witchcraft. The tutor has heard many stories about her, stories that claim her mother was a witch or a wild spirit. He imagines her as a filthy, wild-looking crone. He’s so busy looking around lest she sneak up on him that it catches him by surprise when a door opens to disclose the figure from the forest.

The tutor wishes the girl (Agnes) a good day. She stares at him intently, as if she can read his thoughts. Then she asks him, with the voice and bearing of a lady, rather than a maid, what brings him to Hewlands. He explains that he is the Latin tutor, proudly telegraphing his learning. She remains unimpressed. Boldly, he asks to see her bird, confessing that he saw her coming in from the woods. She begs him not to tell anyone else; she took the restless and hungry animal out even though she had been forbidden to do so. He puts a soothing hand on her arm and promises. She raises her hand to his and pinches the skin between his thumb and forefinger tightly, making him wild with arousal and curiosity. All at once, she drops his hand and turns and unlocks the door.

Smells—some familiar, some intoxicating—fill the dim room. The kestrel sits on a pole at its far end. The bird strikes the tutor as utterly unearthly, belonging wholly to wind or sky or myth. When the girl (Agnes) promises that the bird will remember his voice forever, he believes it. In the gloom, he boldly places a hand around the girl’s waist and draws her into an embrace, asking her name. She promises to tell if he lets her go. He does, and he thinks she says “Anne”—the name of his sister who died two years earlier. Immediately, his mind flies back to the day of Anne’s burial and in his momentary distraction, the girl pushes him away. He stumbles into a shelf covered in small orbs and finally realizes what the familiar smell is: this is the family’s apple store.

The tutor seizes an apple and bites into its juicy flesh, saying the girl’s name: Anne. But she maintains that he misheard, and she refuses to correct him. He says she will, when they kiss. Once again, she grabs the flesh of his hand between thumb and forefinger, squeezing tightly as she searches his face. And then, unexpectedly, she pulls him toward her and kisses him fiercely. Releasing him, she says that her name is Agnes. And then she slips out the door. He is so stupefied by the experience he doesn’t remember that the family’s wild daughter is supposed to keep a hawk until he’s halfway back to town.

People tell stories about Agnes. They say that one day a woman (Agnes’s mother) emerged from the dense, dangerous forest. A local farmer fell in love with and married her. She never lost her wild ways, going about bare-headed and barefoot and cultivating a garden of strange, wild plants. She had a daughter (Agnes) and a son (Bartholomew), then died giving birth to her third baby. The women who prepared her for burial noticed the daughter’s wildness with disapproval. After a time, the farmer hired a young woman named Joan to help with the housekeeping. The little girl’s disconcerting ways drove Joan to distraction—at least until she married the farmer. As the girl grew, word of her unusual abilities spread. She could read your fortune by pinching the flesh of your hand, between your thumb and your index finger.

Agnes remembers her childhood differently. She remembers the sheep outside and the fire inside. She remembers her mother’s bare feet and her warm, firm hands. She remembers riding into the forest on her mother’s back, nestled under the veil of her hair. She remembers her mother teaching her the names of wild things: red squirrel, kingfisher, chestnuts. After Bartholomew was born, their mother would carry him bound to her chest and Agnes on her back. Agnes and Bartholomew would hold hands across their mother’s shoulders. Their mother wove dolls for them out of green rushes. Then she was gone.

A new mother, Joan, came. She had many rules. She cut off Agnes’s hair. She burned the rush dolls. She never took Agnes and Bartholomew to the forest. She beat them with one of her shoes if they went there alone, or if they said she wasn’t their real mother, or if they failed to accomplish their chores to her satisfaction. When Joan beat Agnes, Agnes would look into the rafters where her other mother once tied a stone with a hole through the center and a bundle of herbs as a good-luck charm. Over time, Agnes learned to be nimble and quick, to avoid Joan’s notice. People told her that she’d had no other mother, or at least that she couldn’t possibly remember her.

But Agnes did remember her other mother, the walks in the forest, the rush babies, and the herb charms. And then, one day, when she stumbled on her father slaughtering a lamb in the farmyard, the smell and sight of the blood brought the memory of that mother’s death flooding back. She remembered the narrow box in which her waxy mother lay, a priest coming late at night to swing a burning bowl over it and pray in “strange, song-like” words. Her father told her to keep this visit a secret. In the farmyard, she described these memories to her father, who tried to hush her. So, she ran to the woods and screamed to the silent trees. She renounced God.

Agnes remembers growing up as an unwanted, second-tier member of Joan’s household. She did the hardest chores and shouldered the blame when things went awry. Almost no one ever touched her kindly. She became starved for contact, and she developed a fascination for people’s hands, for the way they hold a person’s strength and experience. She learned that she could discover a person’s future by squeezing their hand just so. And when her predictions started coming true, her father and stepmother told her to hide her un-Christian gift. So Agnes grew up feeling wrong, dark, and unlovely. She clings to memories of her mother so that if she ever encounters proper love again, she will recognize it. And when she does, she plans to seize it immediately as her only means of escape.