Agnes Meets the Latin Tutor and Begins a Courtship

The meeting at Hewlands between Agnes and the Latin tutor turns an encounter shaped by rumor and secrecy into the beginning of a courtship. He has imagined Agnes as a sinister, half-animal daughter of a forest witch; instead, she appears before him as the woman with the hawk, speaks with measured clarity, and meets his gaze. A request to keep her disobedience secret becomes the first confidence between them, and a later walk together makes their attachment visible to Joan, who opposes their marriage on grounds of age, debt, and status.

The Meeting at Hewlands

Before seeing Agnes, the tutor imagines her through the stories and fears surrounding her: a witch’s daughter, bent, gray-haired, and muddy, muttering over charms and remedies. He looks uneasily around the farm, scanning the pigsty’s shadow, the bare branches of an apple tree, the house windows, and the cattle in the byre as he wonders where she might be. The contrast is immediate when a door opens and a woman emerges from a small outbuilding. He recognizes her as the girl with the bird, appearing just when he had been thinking about her. She turns to him and studies him from head to boots, raising her eyebrows only slightly. Her composed response to his greeting unsettles the tutor’s fearful imaginings: her voice is clear, well-modulated, and articulate. She asks what has brought him to Hewlands. He introduces himself as the boys’ tutor in Latin, establishing the ordinary purpose of his visit even as the encounter takes on a more charged significance for him. The scene’s shift is not from strangeness to familiarity so much as from an imagined, monstrous Agnes to a particular person who watches and answers him.

A Confidence and a First Kiss

The tutor raises the subject of the hawk he saw Agnes carrying out of the woods. Concern and a trace of fear appear on her face. She explains that the household had forbidden her to take the bird out that day, but it was agitated and hungry, and she could not bear to leave it shut in all afternoon. She asks him not to tell the people at the farm that he saw her leave. Her appeal gives their meeting a secret to keep: the tutor responds with reassurance and puts a hand on her arm. Their attraction develops through bodily contact before it is fully articulated. Agnes’s first impression of his hand, when she pressed it on the day they met, is described as an encounter with something vast and intricate: a landscape of dense places and hollows, with an unseen knot holding him back from inhabiting it completely. The impression exceeds her ability to understand it. This intuitive response makes the hand more than a casual point of contact; it offers Agnes a sense of depth in the young man even as the tutor himself remains bound by circumstances he has not yet overcome. Later, in the apple storehouse, his unease grows when Agnes holds his hand in silence and the hawk sits motionless on its perch. She releases him, leaving his hand feeling exposed and hurt, then kisses him without warning. The tutor registers the pressure of her lips and the softness of her skin; Agnes then withdraws and gives him her name. The naming follows the kiss rather than preceding it. He turns the sound of Agnes over in his mind, attending to the way it is spoken rather than simply read, while she slips past him, opens the door to the bright outdoors, and leaves him alone among the apples, the bird, and the stored scents of wood and autumn.

Intimacy Made Visible

The courtship does not remain confined to stolen meetings. On a later visit to the farm, after the tutor has given a lesson, Agnes and he walk together toward the farthest field as evening falls. Joan is among the sheep, supervising Bartholomew’s work—or making sure Bartholomew knows that she is supervising it. Agnes sees Joan turn to look at them as they approach along the path. The two are holding hands, so their intimacy is visible before either has to explain it. Joan’s presence changes the meaning of that gesture. The tutor’s fingers grow cold and begin to tremble when Agnes senses his worry. She squeezes his hand twice, then lets him go ahead through the gate. The small, deliberate pressure is a response to his fear, but it cannot prevent the confrontation that follows. Their attachment has moved from private touch to a relationship observed and judged by the household.

Joan’s Opposition and the Stakes of Marriage

Joan rejects the possibility of marriage before the tutor can establish his case. She says he is too young and invokes the disgrace brought on his family by his father’s business dealings. His father, she reminds him, once held the office of bailiff and wore red robes, but has since fallen from that position. Joan emphasizes the extent of the debts he owes throughout the town, including debts to her household. In her view, the tutor’s work teaching her sons would not come close to repaying what his father owes. Her argument is also directed at Agnes’s future. Joan says that Agnes will marry a prosperous farmer who can maintain her properly, pointing to the dowry left to Agnes by her father. She dismisses the tutor as a young man without a trade or means. The opposition therefore rests on more than personal dislike: family debt, social standing, age, livelihood, and Agnes’s inheritance all become conditions imposed on the couple’s prospects. Their first meeting begins with a request to conceal a forbidden outing; their later handholding brings them within the household’s scrutiny. The courtship is established through attraction and mutual reassurance, but the prospect of marriage is immediately contested by the practical power of family obligation.