That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free.

Love is not changed by death and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest.

And we forget because we must.

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

I find,′ he says, his voice still muffled, ’that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can’t have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That’s what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.

But there is nothing. A high whine of nothing, like the absence of noise when a church bell falls silent.

She would try anything, she would do anything. She would open her own veins, her own body cavity, and give him her blood, her heart, her organs, if it would do the slightest good.

She is like no one you have ever met. She cares not what people may think of her. She follows entirely her own course.” He sits forward, placing his elbows on his knees, dropping his voice to a whisper. “She can look at a person and see right into their very soul. There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.” He glances at Eliza. “Those are rare qualities, are they not?

She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him.