Agnes Bears Twins at Home

Agnes Bears Twins at Home is a birth marked by disrupted plans and reversals: Agnes goes into labor early, is prevented from reaching the forest where she wants to give birth, and discovers that her firstborn son has a twin sister. The girl appears lifeless, but Agnes’s insistence on holding her precedes the child’s first cry. The episode moves from Agnes’s confidence that she can prepare for the birth to a scene in which other people control her surroundings, while the outcome remains uncertain even after both infants are born.

Early labor and an interrupted plan

Agnes feels the first unmistakable pull in her lower abdomen while preparing to add chickweed tincture to honey. She expects the child at least another full moon later; her abdomen is more swollen than during her previous pregnancy, and the pain soon tightens into a force that she knows will continue until the child is delivered. There have been no warning signs. Her usual sense of foreknowledge offers no protection: she is caught off guard by a birth she had assumed was still weeks away.

The timing matters because Agnes had hoped to have William beside her. She has been considering asking Eliza to write to him, so that he might return before the birth; she wants to see his face and ask about the gloves described in his letter. Its detailed account of gloves for court scenes and young actors has made her alert to change in him, but, as labor advances, she reads the letter differently: he seems restored, more himself again. That recognition does not bring him home. She is left to face the birth without the conversation or companionship she had wanted.

Agnes decides that she will not give birth under her own roof. She means to reach the forest, and accepts the pain as something she must prepare to meet. Susanna is beside her, playing with a doll, when Agnes takes her hand and leads her out. At the washroom, Agnes asks a servant to take the crying child to Eliza, kisses Susanna several times, and promises to return soon. The separation is hurried and practical: Agnes needs to travel alone, and Susanna is entrusted to her aunt.

Taken to Mary’s house

Agnes reaches her own house as another contraction comes. She retrieves her bag, listens at the door until Susanna’s crying stops, and concludes that the child has reached Eliza. As she steps into the street, she waits for a horse to pass; Gilbert catches up with her and says he must stop her. Mary arrives breathless and takes Agnes by the arm, insisting that she return to a house where everything is ready. Agnes protests and asks to be released, but cannot make them understand why she cannot bear the child there.

Gilbert and Mary take Agnes not back into her narrow house but into theirs, carrying her through the doorway and upstairs. When the next pain comes, Agnes wants to rise and squat so she can meet it on her feet. Instead, she is pressed back onto the bed and held while the midwife examines her. The midwife orders the men out; only women may remain. Agnes longs for the forest’s green, its shifting light and sheltering trees, but there is no longer time to reach it. In her distress she thinks of William in London, occupied with theater negotiations, and regrets having sent him away. The scene makes the difference between her intended birth and the birth imposed on her concrete: she had wanted the trees and the freedom to move, but finds herself restrained indoors.

The boy and the discovery of a twin

The midwife eventually gets down low to examine Agnes and says the birth is imminent. Mary holds Agnes by the shoulder and arm. Agnes’s thoughts have contracted into fragments—her husband, gloves, actors, the theater, a jealous duke, death—and amid them she recognizes that William’s letter has reassured her about him. Then the baby emerges. Agnes watches the crown of the head turn and the shoulder and back follow; the midwife and Mary catch the child, and Mary identifies him as a boy.

Agnes sees William in the boy’s chin and mouth, his grandfather’s blond hair, and his grandmother’s long, delicate fingers. Once mother and child are in bed, she insists on feeding him before washing herself. She also directs Mary and the midwife to wrap the cord and placenta in cloth: Agnes plans to bury them beneath a tree when the child is a month old. Mary asks to put the baby in swaddling bands, as she did with her own children, but Agnes refuses. Even exhausted by labor, she asserts decisions about feeding, the treatment of the afterbirth, and how her infant is dressed.

When the midwife has finished and Mary asks for the child, Agnes refuses, suddenly frightened and perplexed by a new pain. The midwife examines her abdomen and finds the curve of a second head. She tells Mary that another baby is coming: Agnes has twins. The discovery changes the meaning of the first delivery, which had seemed complete, and leaves Agnes lying pale and spent, unable to support herself. The boy is carried to a cradle by the fire while Mary and the midwife prepare for the second birth.

The second birth and the girl’s first cry

The second labor is short but difficult. Contractions follow without rest, and Mary sees that Agnes cannot catch her breath between them. Mary holds her through the final, hoarse cries, fearing that Agnes herself may die. When the second baby arrives, however, it is the child who appears in danger: the girl is gray, with the cord wound around her neck. She is half the size of her brother and makes no sound. The midwife frees the cord, turns her upside down, and strikes her twice, but there is no cry or sign of life.

Agnes reaches out and orders the midwife to stop and give her the baby. The midwife urges her not to look, calls it bad luck, and offers to take the child away for a proper burial. Agnes insists again and tries to rise. Mary steps between them, takes the girl from the midwife, and sees that she has the same forehead, cheek and jaw as her brother. The child is still warm. Mary places her in Agnes’s arms, and the room falls silent.

The midwife is preparing to fetch the boy when she hears a weak cry behind her. Mary and the midwife turn: the girl in Agnes’s arms is crying, her rigid arms and reddening face showing that she is drawing breath. Agnes understands that she has two children, not one. The reversal does not settle their future. During the first days, no one knows whether the girl will survive, and Agnes reads the anxiety in Mary’s quiet visits and the way she touches the newborns’ chests. Mary asks John to take the babies to be baptized; the grandparents wrap them in blankets, dress them, and hurry them to the priest. Mary returns with the girl and hands her to Agnes, who has been waiting for her.

Significance of the episode

The birth joins a struggle over agency to a sequence of uncertain outcomes. Agnes knows what she wants—to reach the forest, meet labor upright, and keep decisions about her children in her own hands—but the family’s preparations and physical intervention redirect her into a bed in Mary’s house. Her resistance persists there in smaller choices, from feeding the boy before washing to refusing swaddling and demanding the apparently lifeless girl. The episode neither makes those choices equivalent nor treats them as sufficient to control what happens: Agnes is overruled about the place of birth, yet her refusal to surrender the girl becomes the occasion on which the newborn is held close as she begins to cry.

The scene also makes the birth’s emotional force bodily and collective. Agnes cannot recover her breath between contractions; Mary holds her with tears on her face and imagines having to tell her son that they could not save his wife. The midwife’s attempts to revive the girl, Mary’s decision to take her from the midwife, and the family’s later urgency to have both infants baptized carry the fear from one person to another. The outcome is not a clean release from danger: the daughter survives the first moment, but her survival remains uncertain in the days that follow.