Agnes and Rowan: mother and daughter

Rowan and Agnes’s mother–daughter relationship is defined by closeness that persists after death: Rowan carries Agnes through the forest, teaches her to see its creatures and plants, and remains vivid in her memory even when the household insists she never existed. The bond is also marked by an absence Agnes cannot explain. She recalls Rowan’s death and the secret rites around it, but not why her mother is gone; the adults’ denials turn that gap into a struggle over memory and truth.

Identity and Origins

Rowan’s origins reach Agnes through a local story rather than a settled account. The oldest people in the village believe Agnes’s mother came out of the forest, though nobody knows where she was born or whether she was a forest-dweller separated from her own kind. In the tale, she parts the brambles and steps from the green darkness. A farmer watching his sheep finds her there and, unable to stop looking at her, removes leaves from her hair and snails from her skirts, brushes twigs and moss from her sleeves, and cleans the mud from her feet. He takes her home, feeds and clothes her, marries her, and Agnes is born soon afterward.

The story also preserves how little Rowan conformed to the village’s expectations of a wife and mother. She keeps Agnes with her constantly, tying the child to her back and taking her across the farm barefoot, even in winter. She does not put Agnes in a cradle at night. She spends long hours in the forest with her, sometimes returning after dark to a cold house without food prepared for her husband. The neighboring women gossip about this arrangement, then come to teach Rowan housework, childcare, sewing, ways to prevent illness, and the custom of covering her hair after marriage. Rowan listens with a distant smile, but is often seen with her hair loose. Outside the farm she plants ferns, climbing herbs, sharp-smelling flowers, and low shrubs; her closest company appears to be an elderly widow at the other end of the village.

Care and Shared Life

Agnes remembers Rowan through touch and movement as much as through stories. Rowan’s hand is warm and firm as it steadies the child; when she lifts Agnes from the forest floor and carries her on her back, Agnes shelters beneath her mother’s hair. From there the trees seem bright with movement. Rowan points out a squirrel vanishing up a trunk, a kingfisher flashing over a stream, and hazelnuts; she climbs into the branches and shakes them until the nuts fall. The remembered scenes make the forest a place Agnes experiences in her mother’s company, not merely a landscape beyond the farm.

Rowan’s care also encompasses Bartholomew. She carries him against her chest, where he and Agnes can look at each other and touch fingers over her shoulders. She cuts green reeds, dries them, and makes two matching dolls. Agnes and Bartholomew lay the figures side by side in a box, their small green faces turned toward the ceiling. The paired dolls preserve a domestic image of Rowan’s care for both children, and of the children sharing a world made by her hands.

The contrast with Joan makes the loss concrete. Joan, who takes Rowan’s place by the hearth, is broader, wears a coif over her fair hair, and keeps her feet in shoes; Agnes associates her with cooking smells and household commands. Joan cuts Agnes’s hair with a knife, calls the reed dolls devil’s figures, and throws them into the fire. When Agnes burns her fingers trying to rescue them, Joan laughs and says she got what she deserved. Rowan’s remembered tenderness is therefore set against a new household in which the objects and habits associated with her are rejected. Agnes’s longing for Rowan takes shape not only as recollection but as the felt difference between the two women’s treatment of her.

Death and the Disputed Memory

Agnes is repeatedly told that she never had another mother. When she insists that she remembers, the family answers that she cannot remember her real mother and that such a memory is impossible. Agnes responds with anger, stamping and striking the table, but her certainty finds little welcome. She tells an elderly widow who spins wool for the family; the widow acknowledges Rowan’s goodness, describing her as exceptionally kind. That recognition confirms the value of Agnes’s memory, but cannot answer its central unanswered question: Agnes remembers almost everything about Rowan except where she went or why she left.

A later memory supplies the terrible event the household has concealed. Seeing her father kill a lamb behind the pigsty brings back a bed soaked red, a narrow box, and Rowan lying cold and silent with a dead infant in her arms. Agnes remembers a priest arriving at night because the burial was secret. He wears a cross, carries a smoking bowl over Rowan and the child, and repeatedly speaks Rowan’s name during his prayers. The recollection links Rowan’s absence to death in childbirth, while showing why Agnes’s memory is entangled with secrecy: the funeral was hidden, and she was not meant to speak of it.

When Agnes tells her father what she remembers, he denies that a priest came and warns her not to say such things where anyone can hear. His reference to her mother leaves Agnes unsure whether he means Joan in the house or her own mother in heaven. The denial unsettles her sense of the world, but does not dislodge the details she remembers: the cross, the smoke, the prayers, and Rowan’s name. Agnes runs into the forest and cries out there, then tells the widow, who warns her never to repeat the account. The warning adds fear to a memory already made painful by family silence.

Memory and Significance

Rowan remains present in Agnes’s life as a remembered bond that others try to erase. Agnes tells Bartholomew quietly about the woman who took them into the forest, hung a hole-pierced stone with herbs, made reed dolls, and tended a garden of forest plants. Her recollections are not complete, and the missing explanation for Rowan’s absence remains unresolved for her. Yet the details of care survive: a hand preventing a fall, hair sheltering a child, a mother carrying both children, and two handmade figures placed together.

The relationship also establishes a contrast between knowledge preserved in the body and the official account imposed by the household. Agnes remembers Rowan’s feet moving between the house and the woods, and she remembers the physical scene of the secret funeral; her father’s denial and the widow’s warning make speaking those memories dangerous without making them disappear. Rowan’s significance in Agnes’s story thus lies both in the tenderness she gave her daughter and in the daughter’s insistence that this tenderness, and the death that ended it, were real.