The Father Buys a New Home for Agnes and Her Daughters

The purchase of a new home in Stratford is an attempt by Agnes’s husband to give her and their daughters a life removed from the place where grief has fixed its hold. He arranges the purchase through Bartholomew, keeping his father out of the matter, and the result is far grander than the small cottage Agnes imagines. Yet a house can change where the family lives without answering Agnes’s search for Hamnet: when her husband asks whether she can leave, she says that Hamnet is not there, wherever she has looked.

The Decision to Leave

In the darkness, Agnes’s husband tells her that he has been thinking of buying a house. He specifies that it is for her and for their family, then rules out London: the house will be in Stratford because Agnes has said she would rather remain there with the girls. The decision responds to her stated preference, but it is also an effort to remove them from the place they currently inhabit. He wants Agnes and the daughters taken away from all of this and planted somewhere new.

His request is made amid Agnes’s continuing search for Hamnet. She has looked and waited and kept watch, but cannot say where he is; she can only say that he is not here. The distinction matters. Her husband proposes relocation as a change of surroundings, while Agnes’s answer reveals that the absence she is living with cannot be located and left behind like a particular room or house. His promise to take care of everything offers practical help, not proof that a new home can resolve her loss.

Agnes briefly imagines what such a home might be: perhaps a cottage outside the town, with one or two rooms, a little ground for a garden, and windows looking onto it. That modest picture gives the proposed move a domestic shape. It is not an ambition for a grander life so much as an imagined place where she and her daughters might live apart from the immediate burden of the present house.

Bartholomew Acts on the Request

Her husband asks Bartholomew to represent him in making the purchase. He does not want his brothers told, explaining in a letter that their father might interfere, and asks Bartholomew for help. The request gives the transaction a family complication: the husband needs his brother-in-law’s cooperation, but wants to avoid involving his own father. Bartholomew considers the letter over lunch before answering. Joan, who is anxious about the message, wants to know what it says and suspects that the husband may be asking for money after failing in London. She objects to the possibility of lending anything, invoking the farm and the family’s other responsibilities.

The letter passes from hand to hand at Hewlands, but Joan and Bartholomew’s wife cannot read it, and the children who can read are unable to make out the uncle’s handwriting. Bartholomew does not answer the women’s questions. Instead, he takes paper and a pen and, with evident effort, writes back that he will help. His agreement makes the house possible through a chain of private communication and practical assistance, not through a family discussion in which everyone shares the plan.

Weeks later, Bartholomew goes to find Agnes. He looks for her first at the house, then at the market, and finally at a dark cottage on Mill Lane, directed there by the baker’s wife. Agnes is tending an elderly sick man, applying a poultice to his chest. The scene places her in a cramped, dark room and among the work of caring for the ill when Bartholomew arrives with news of the house. It also gives a concrete setting to the wish to get her and the girls out of their current circumstances, without suggesting that the purchase will end her care for others or her grief.

A House Larger Than Agnes Imagines

Bartholomew tells Agnes that her husband has written to him and asked him to buy a house. Agnes asks why she was not told earlier; Bartholomew answers that he is telling her now. Before disclosing the choice, he points across the street to a building that is the largest in the town. It has a broad central entrance and three storeys, stands on a corner, and continues around a side that Agnes cannot see from where they are. The scale of the building sharply exceeds her picture of a small cottage with a garden.

Agnes studies the house, looking at both sides and frowning, then asks which part is meant for her. She wants to know which rooms she is to have. Bartholomew sets down his basket, turns, and tells her that she is to have all of it: the whole house is hers. The answer transforms the proposed purchase from the provision of a few rooms into the gift of the entire substantial building. Its size is not presented as Agnes’s own request; the contrast between her modest imagining and Bartholomew’s revelation makes the extent of the provision a surprise.

A New Home, Not a Recovery

The house changes Agnes’s surroundings, but its arrival does not produce silence or immediate ease. At night she walks barefoot through its passages, stairs, rooms, and corridors, listening. The windows creak in their frames; wind turns the chimney into a long, sad note; the wooden panelling crackles as the house settles. Dogs shift and sigh in their basket, mice run unseen along the walls, and branches move in the large garden behind the house. The building is full of sounds rather than empty quiet.

That nocturnal attention links the new home to Agnes’s habit of waiting and keeping watch. The move gives her and her daughters a different place to inhabit, and the garden and rooms provide the material setting she had imagined in smaller form. But the house does not serve as a replacement for Hamnet or as a guarantee that he will be found. The purchase can carry the family away from one location; it cannot make Agnes’s loss local, visible, or finished.