Agnes Leaves Hewlands

Agnes Leaves Hewlands is the turning point at which a pregnancy discovered inside her stepmother’s household becomes an expulsion—and then a departure Agnes makes herself. Joan’s attempt to identify and punish the pregnant girl ends in physical confrontation, but Bartholomew’s claim to the inherited house briefly gives Agnes a place to stay. She nevertheless shoulders her bundle, takes the kestrel, and walks away without farewell.

Discovery and confrontation

Joan’s suspicions first send her searching the house and laundry. She checks the piles of clothing and counts the thick cloths in the cupboard, confirming that the household’s supplies are where they should be. In the yard, she examines her daughters, pressing their bellies as she tries to determine which of them is pregnant. The scene makes her suspicion bodily and urgent: she is not content to ask what has happened but searches for its evidence by touch.

Joan then finds Agnes in the warm stable, her head resting against the flank of the cow she is milking. With James in the adjoining stall, Joan pulls Agnes from her stool and searches beneath her clothes. Her hand finds a swelling that she recognizes as the unmistakable sign of pregnancy. She calls Agnes a whore and a dog; Agnes shoves her into the cow and escapes the stall, but Joan catches her near the yard and strikes her.

The confrontation reverses when Agnes strikes Joan back. Joan is stunned by the blow and protests that her stepdaughter has dared to raise a hand against her. But the physical resistance does not erase the imbalance between them: Joan is the household authority, and Agnes is still living under her roof. The question Joan begins to demand—who is responsible—remains unfinished as the conflict shifts from accusation to the future of Agnes’s place in the house.

Expulsion and the claim to the house

When Agnes identifies the Latin tutor, Joan remembers him asking for her hand and rejects him as an idle, impoverished boy. The recognition makes clear that the pregnancy is connected to the courtship Joan had already refused. Joan’s response is decisive: she goes into the house, gathers Agnes’s belongings, and throws the bundle at her feet. It contains only a few shirts, a spare hood, an apron, a wooden comb, a Hole-pierced stone, and a belt.

Joan declares that Agnes is expelled forever. Bartholomew challenges her authority, saying that the house belongs to him because their father left it to him and that Agnes may stay. His claim changes the immediate stakes: Joan can order Agnes out, but she cannot simply speak for the owner of the house. Joan invokes the terms of the will and appeals to what their father would have wanted, trying to make Bartholomew withdraw his support.

Bartholomew repeats that Agnes can stay, then leaves the possibility of a condition unfinished. Agnes puts a hand on her brother’s sleeve, and the two look at one another without speaking. After spitting on the ground, Bartholomew puts his hand on her shoulder. Agnes smiles crookedly, her lip split and bleeding; he nods, and she wipes her face with her sleeve. She unties and reties the bundle twice before putting it over her shoulder. The exchange gives their decision physical form, but the scene does not state the terms of the unfinished condition.

Bartholomew’s support and Agnes’s departure

Bartholomew tells Agnes that he will handle matters and that she need not worry. Agnes answers that she is not worried. His assurance establishes that she is not being abandoned by her brother, even as she prepares to leave the house he has just said she may occupy. The distinction matters: her departure follows a defense of her right to remain, not a failure by Bartholomew to speak for her.

Agnes crosses the yard, enters the Despensa de las manzanas, and comes back carrying the kestrel on her gloved hand. The bird is hooded, its wings folded, but its head moves in every direction, registering the altered circumstances. Agnes takes the bundle onto her shoulder and leaves the farm by the path that curves around the house. She does not say goodbye. The account gives no further explanation for that silence; its force lies in the contrast between the intimate, wordless exchange with Bartholomew and her unannounced exit from Hewlands.

Significance of the turning point

The departure joins coercion and choice without making them identical. Joan has exposed Agnes’s pregnancy, struck her, and attempted to expel her; Bartholomew has asserted Agnes’s right to stay. Yet after this brief opening, Agnes takes her things and leaves. The scene therefore turns on more than who holds authority in the house: it records Agnes acting at the moment when her place there has become a contest between Joan’s command and her brother’s protection.

The bundle and the kestrel distinguish what Agnes carries away. The bundle holds ordinary personal necessities and the Hole-pierced stone; the hooded bird, brought from the Despensa de las manzanas, accompanies her beyond the farm. Against the shouting and blows, her final actions are quiet and deliberate: she reties the bundle, accepts Bartholomew’s reassurance, and goes without farewell. Her exit closes the immediate confrontation at Hewlands while marking a new separation from the household where the pregnancy has been discovered.