Agnes’s birth of Susanna in the forest is both a dangerous delivery and a deliberate departure from the ordinary protections of home: instead of using the prepared birthing room, Agnes goes to a place she knows from childhood and gives birth beneath the roots of a fallen tree. The forest shelters her from the people searching for her, but labor leaves her exposed to pain and uncertainty. When Bartholomew finds her, the child is alive and nursing; he gathers Agnes up and brings her back, turning her solitary ordeal into a family reunion.

The journey away from home

The scene takes place in mid-May. Agnes walks with a basket along a river path, having spoken to the baker’s wife, and notices the plants flowering at the margins: valerian, campion, wild rose, sorrel, wild garlic, and lilies. Their abundance recalls the foraging she might ordinarily do, but she does not stop to gather them. Her attention is fixed on reaching the forest while labor pains grow more frequent.

She circles the enclosure at Hewlands because she does not want to encounter Joan, Bartholomew, or her other relatives. If they saw her, she feared they would raise the alarm, fetch someone, tell her husband, and force her back inside. That is precisely where she does not want to be for the birth. Her mother’s words about the forest branches guide her instead. The choice is not a casual walk away from assistance: Agnes actively avoids the people who might intervene, even as the pains make it harder to keep moving.

On the way she sees her brother Thomas going from the house to the yard and hears Bartholomew’s whistle for the dogs. The thatched roof, the pigsty, and the back of the apple storehouse come into view. These familiar sights make her smile, even as she continues away from the household. The forest is close enough to remain connected to home, yet secluded enough to serve as the place she has chosen for what is about to happen.

The forest refuge and the labor

Agnes enters the forest about a kilometre from Hewlands. When a contraction takes hold, she braces herself against the rough bark of a large elm. She continues once she can, pushing through a dense tangle of branches, brambles, and juniper. She crosses the river and passes a stand of holly before reaching a clearing where sunlight falls across green grass and curved fern fronds.

A great fir lies almost horizontally, its exposed roots lifted from the ground and its reddish trunk caught among the branches of neighboring trees. Beneath the place where it once stood is a dry, sheltered hollow large enough for several people. Agnes and Bartholomew used to hide there as children when Joan shouted at them or gave them too many tasks. They brought bread and cheese, crawled beneath the roots, and imagined that they could live in the woods like elves and never return. A refuge from childhood becomes a shelter for childbirth.

Agnes crouches on the ground among the dry fir needles, holding a root as the next contraction passes. The pain is more relentless than anything she has known: it leaves almost no time to breathe or recover, and she recognizes that it is intensifying. Her previous strength—carrying water and firewood, lifting children, handling a cow or a heavy load of laundry—cannot give her control over this labor. She fears it will overwhelm her. The scene makes the body’s power and vulnerability inseparable: the force that she cannot master is also the force by which her child must be born.

She is not wholly without preparation. She has watched women give birth, remembers seeing her mother in labor, and has attended Joan’s deliveries, receiving her siblings and cleaning blood and grease from their mouths and noses. She has also been called to help when livestock struggled to deliver their young, using her slender fingers to free lambs and other animals. This practical knowledge informs her confidence that both she and her daughter will survive, although it cannot make the present labor less punishing.

The birth and first care

Across the clearing Agnes sees a rowan tree and smiles. She repeats its name to herself and recalls its berries as a remedy, the belief that a rowan planted by a doorway keeps evil spirits away, and the story that its branches made the first woman. The tree’s associations connect birth, protection, and her own mother, whose name her father never spoke. In the midst of pain, the rowan gives Agnes a point of recognition and a link to the words about forest branches that helped direct her there.

After the delivery, Agnes discovers that the baby is alive. The child moves her head, scrunches her face, and gives a forceful cry. Agnes turns her onto her side, as her father did with lambs, and watches fluid leave the baby’s mouth. The newborn’s face changes from damp and greyish to pink, and color comes into her cheeks, chin, eyes, and forehead. Her features also make her likeness legible: she has her father’s high forehead and lower lip, alongside Agnes’s marked cheekbones and large eyes.

Agnes takes a blanket and scissors from her basket, lays the baby down, and cuts the thick, still-living cord. She then bares a breast and brings the child close. The baby opens and closes her mouth, begins to suck, and feeds. Agnes laughs as nursing begins: the child knows what to do. The delivery has moved from the frightening uncertainty of labor to the concrete work of keeping the newborn alive and close.

Discovery and return

At home, Eliza cries out, Mary runs up and down the narrow house calling for Agnes, and John moves between the workshop and the commotion. Mary insists that everything had been prepared for Agnes in the birthing room. Their distress reflects the contrast between the care arranged at home and Agnes’s disappearance from it. Ned, the apprentice, is sent to Hewlands, but no one knows where Bartholomew has gone. Joan, Agnes’s sisters, neighbors, and men from the household set out to search; Gilbert and Richard are sent through the streets to ask whether anyone has seen her. The baker’s wife is the one person who can report that Agnes headed towards Shottery, and she reproaches herself for letting Agnes go.

Bartholomew eventually finds Agnes between sleep and wakefulness, with the baby wrapped against her chest. He has crossed the fields with the dogs following and William Shakespeare trailing behind him, still distressed. Bartholomew recognizes the place as the one where Agnes might have gone. He tells her she cannot stay there and bends to lift her; she protests faintly, then rests her head against her brother’s chest. He sees the baby’s cheeks moving as she nurses and understands that she is alive.

William arrives with questions and gestures of alarm, wanting to carry Agnes and asking whether the child is a boy or a girl. He has been searching without knowing where she went. He tries to take Agnes from Bartholomew, who waves him aside and restrains an impulse to knock him down. Bartholomew gives the basket to the young servant to carry and sets off with Agnes in his arms. The return is practical rather than ceremonial: Agnes is borne out of the forest, the baby remains with her, and the basket is handed to someone else.

Significance of the chosen place

The birth binds a present crisis to Agnes’s remembered childhood. The hollow had once offered her and Bartholomew an imagined escape from Joan’s commands; now it shelters Agnes through the labor that she has chosen to face away from her family’s prepared room. The forest is neither merely a picturesque setting nor a guarantee of safety. Its paths and trees provide cover, while the distance from other people leaves Agnes to meet each contraction herself.

The sequence also gives her accumulated knowledge a precise, bodily use. Agnes has witnessed human deliveries and helped animals give birth; she applies what she knows in positioning the infant, clearing her mouth, cutting the cord, and beginning to nurse her. Yet the ordeal remains beyond her control. The outcome changes from fear for the child’s survival to the sight of a living infant feeding against her, and then to Bartholomew’s discovery of mother and daughter together. The family search closes the immediate separation, but it cannot undo Agnes’s decision to make the forest, rather than the home, the place where Susanna begins her life.