Weyward, p.11
Weyward, page 11
‘What did your father say?’ Violet asked, scarcely breathing.
‘That Uncle Rupert had been bewitched.’
She didn’t know whether or not to believe Frederick’s story. She couldn’t imagine why he would lie. And yet … it was hard to believe the horrible things he had said about her mother. It was awful to think of her mother ranting and raving, needing to be locked in a room – and, worst of all, being unkind to Frederick. Perhaps she hadn’t meant to scare him with the toad? Violet wouldn’t particularly mind finding a toad in her bed. In fact, she was rather fond of them.
But then she remembered Father’s words.
Perhaps they can stop you from turning out like her.
Was that why she had this sick, wrong feeling in her stomach?
The air was growing colder now. Violet could hear crickets, calling for their mates. She looked at Frederick, walking next to her. In the dim light, his dark features and long strides made her think of a panther.
They hadn’t spoken for a few minutes. Violet wondered if he thought she was ‘curious’ too, like her mother. She would need to take care that he didn’t catch her staring at him. She wished he would say something. He hadn’t commented on the beauty of the sun setting slowly over the valley at all, even though it had put more colours in the sky than she knew the names for.
‘Do you hear that?’ she asked. ‘It’s such a lovely sound.’
‘What is?’
‘The crickets.’
‘Oh. Yes, I suppose it is.’ She heard his laugh, rich and deep.
‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.
‘You’re an unusual girl. First the midges, now the crickets … never known a girl – or a chap, for that matter – to be so fond of insects.’
‘I just find them so very interesting,’ she said. ‘Beautiful, too. It’s sad, though – they have such short lives. For instance, did you know that the mayfly only lives for one day?’
She had seen a swarm of mayflies, once, down at the beck. A great, glittering cloud of them, pulsing above the surface of the water. They looked to Violet as if they were dancing – she had been quite disturbed when she learned from Dinsdale, the gardener, that they had in fact been mating. Now, her cheeks flushed at the image. Would Frederick be able to tell she was having such unseemly thoughts? She wished she hadn’t brought them up.
‘Imagine’, she continued, anxious to change the subject, ‘having only one day left on Earth. I don’t think I’d be able to decide between catching a train to London to see the Natural History Museum, or … lounging by the beck all day. One last afternoon with the birds, the insects and the flowers …’
‘I know what I would do,’ said Frederick. They were passing by a briar bush now. Violet realised that she didn’t know where Father and Graham had got to: perhaps they were already back at the house. The sound of Father lecturing Graham (‘You must aim the rifle, boy’) had long since faded.
‘And what would that be, Frederick?’ she asked, blushing at the sound of his name on her lips. A strange, quivery feeling bubbled inside her.
He laughed and moved closer: his arm brushed hers and her heart juddered.
‘I’ll show you, but only if you close your eyes.’
Violet did as she was told. Suddenly, there was a hand on her waist, large and rough through the fabric of her skirt. Opening her eyes a fraction, she saw that the pink glimmer of dusk was blocked out by Frederick’s face in front of hers. She could feel his breath tickling her nose. It felt hot and smelled of coffee and something else, a sour note that made Violet think – oddly, unseasonably – of Christmas pudding. Violet tried to remember the word for the thing that Mrs Kirkby soaked the pudding in before setting it alight, but then—
He was kissing her. Or, Violet supposed that was what he was doing. She knew that people kissed, from reading books (‘to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss’ – that was Shakespeare, wasn’t it?) and because she had once seen Penny kissing Neil, the ill-fated under-gardener. They had been pressed up against the stable, clinging onto each other as if they were drowning. It had looked rather unpleasant.
Violet was surprised that she was still thinking so much, even though her lips had been completely enveloped in his – rather wet – ones. She was finding it quite difficult to breathe. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to breathe, with her mouth covered by his (the taste of his mouth was very adult, as though he had seen things, been to places she couldn’t comprehend … again she was reminded of Christmas pudding, why was that?).
She was breathing through her nose now, Violet wondered if he could hear it, if she sounded like a cow … Her brain was a whirlpool. She thought of drowning, again. He was kissing her more fiercely now, pressing her against the briar bush; she felt twigs poking into her back and her hair – she would have to get them out before Father saw … Then he did something that made her almost stop thinking. He pushed something wet and slimy into her mouth – Violet thought of the toad – and she realised it was his tongue. She spluttered, and he pulled away. She took a deep breath, gulping at the clean evening air.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Got rather carried away there.’ He reached out a hand and traced the chain of her necklace with one finger.
She shivered. It was almost nicer than the kiss.
‘Best be getting back for dinner,’ he said. ‘We should do this again, though – same time tomorrow evening?’
She nodded, struck dumb. He turned to go, heading towards the Hall, which, with its yellow windows and high turrets looked to Violet like a scene from a book – a ship on a stormy sea, perhaps. She stayed for a while, waiting for her breathing to slow and picking out the twigs from her hair. As she walked back to the Hall (she tripped a couple of times, still reeling from the feel of his mouth on hers) she wondered if she looked changed, if anyone would be able to tell what had happened just by glancing at her. She certainly felt different. Her heart was beating as hard in her chest as if she had been running.
It wasn’t until she shut her bedroom door and her racing mind had settled that something Frederick had said, before he had kissed her so suddenly, returned to her.
She was a danger to herself. And the baby.
Violet had always believed that her mother died giving birth to Graham.
But Frederick had made it sound as though he had already been born.
18
KATE
Kate has been at the cottage for three weeks now. It’s late spring, and the year is ripening. It rained last night – hard enough that she feared the roof would buckle – but today the sky is low and blue, the air hot. Hot and thick to match her blood, which seems, in these last weeks, to have slowed its pace through her veins.
On the walk into the village this morning, she passes another row of moles, tied by their tails to a rusted gate. Flies hover about them, flitting between their damp fur and the clumps of dog violet that grow alongside the road. She’s learned that it’s a local tradition – the cashier at the greengrocer looked bemused when Kate shyly asked about it, explained that was how the mole-catcher proved his worth. But the shrivelled bodies still feel like a warning, especially for her.
By the time she reaches the medical centre, her shirt is sticky with exertion and anxiety. She was instructed to arrive with a full bladder, and her lower abdomen is tight and painful, straining against the waistband of her skirt. She checks her watch: ten past nine. She’s five minutes early.
Perhaps she won’t go in. Perhaps she’ll turn and walk back to the cottage without even knocking on the door, the same way she repeatedly dialled the number and hung up before anyone could answer. She did this five times before her nerve held and she managed to speak to the receptionist, to actually book this appointment.
She looks around her. This early, the square is empty and quiet, save for a cow’s distant lowing. There is no one to see her go in. She looks down at her feet, watching ants serpentine across the cobbles.
Taking a breath, Kate opens the door and is hit by the smell of disinfectant. The waiting room is cold and whitewashed, the plastic chairs and tired noticeboard a stark contrast to the building’s Tudor exterior. The space is dominated by a large desk, behind which a woman sits tapping away at a computer. The muffled sounds of conversation come from behind a heavy door: the consulting room, according to a gleaming brass plate.
‘Name?’ asks the receptionist, a thin woman with a vulpine face.
‘Kate,’ she says. ‘Kate Ayres.’
The receptionist’s eyebrows lift as she looks at Kate properly for the first time.
‘The niece,’ she says. It isn’t a question.
‘Um – yes. Did you know my great-aunt? Violet?’
But the woman is looking back at her computer screen.
‘If you could take a seat, please. The doctor will be with you in a minute.’
Kate sits heavily on one of the plastic chairs. She wishes she had some water; her stomach roils, and there is a strange taste in her mouth. Metallic, like blood, or even dirt. She’s been waking up with it. It reminds her of something, a childhood memory that she can’t quite hold on to.
The door of the consulting room opens.
‘Miss Ayres?’
The doctor is male – in his late sixties, perhaps; weathered cheeks shaded by white stubble. A stethoscope around his neck. Panic bubbles up in her.
She’d asked for a female doctor, hadn’t she? Yes – she’s sure of it. The receptionist – likely the same woman staring at her now – had assured her that there would be a female doctor. ‘Dr Collins is only available Tuesdays and Thursdays,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘So you’ll have to come in on one of those days if you want to see a woman, otherwise it’s Dr Radcliffe.’
‘Ah – sorry,’ she says now as she rises from the seat, wincing at the feel of her thighs unsticking from the plastic. ‘I think I was booked in to see Dr Collins?’
‘Couldn’t make it in,’ says the male doctor, gesturing for her to follow him into the consulting room. ‘Sick child. Always the way with that one, I’m afraid.’
She hesitates. Part of her wants to leave; to ask for an appointment with the female doctor another day. But she’s here now. And she’s not sure she trusts herself to come back.
She follows the doctor into the consulting room.
The gel is cold on her skin. Dr Radcliffe has already drawn volumes of blood from her arm, prodding and sticking her like a laboratory specimen.
‘Just relax,’ he says, running the ultrasound wand over her stomach. He moves closer and she smells his breath, stale with coffee. ‘Your husband couldn’t make it?’
She has an image of Simon’s face over hers, his hand resting on the base of her throat as he moves inside her. His cells travelling up into her body, ready to tether her to him forever.
‘I’m not married,’ she says, blinking the memory away.
‘Your boyfriend, then. He didn’t want to come?’ There is a strange whooshing sound in the room, almost like the beating of wings.
‘No, I don’t … what’s that noise?’
The doctor smiles, pressing the wand harder into her stomach.
‘That’, he says, ‘is the heartbeat. Your baby’s heartbeat.’
There is a plummeting sensation inside her.
‘Heartbeat? I thought it was … too early for that.’
‘Hmm, you’re between ten and twelve weeks along, I’d say. Here, take a look.’
He gestures to the blinking monitor, where her womb undulates in grey and white. For a moment she can’t make sense of the image, it’s like static. Then she sees it: a pearly glimmer, pupa-shaped, almost. The foetus.
Her mouth is so dry that it’s hard to get the words out.
‘Can you tell it … the baby’s sex?’
The doctor chuckles.
‘A bit too soon for that, I’m afraid. You’ll have to come back in a few weeks.’
There is something else she wanted – planned – to ask. But now, with the doctor’s liver-flecked hands on her stomach, the room filled with the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, it feels … impossible.
The question shrivels inside her.
The doctor looks at her strangely, as if he has read her thoughts.
‘All done,’ he says abruptly, handing her a piece of paper towel. ‘You can clean yourself up.’
He is silent as he enters information on a computer, carefully labels the ruby-red vials of her blood.
‘You look a bit like her,’ he says after a while. ‘Your great-aunt, I mean. Violet. Similar sort of eyes – just the hair that’s different. Hers was dark when she was younger.’
‘It’s dyed.’
‘You’ll have to stop doing that. Bad for the baby.’ He goes back to his labelling.
‘Did you treat her, then? My aunt.’
The doctor pauses, fiddles with the stethoscope around his neck.
‘Once or twice, when Dr Collins wasn’t in – she was her patient, really. Only in recent years, though. Before that I think she went to a surgery out of town – she only started coming here when my father died. The first Dr Radcliffe. He started the practice.’
Finished with his labelling, the doctor gets up to usher her out of the consulting room.
‘See Mrs Dinsdale on your way out, please, so you can book in for the next appointment. We’ll want you back in eight weeks.’
Back in the waiting room, Kate looks at the noticeboard again, at the pamphlets on display at the receptionist’s desk. But there’s none of the information she is looking for.
‘Will you book in for the next appointment today?’ asks the receptionist.
‘Um. Actually, I was wondering’, Kate lowers her voice, glancing over at an elderly woman in the waiting room, ‘if you have any information about … termination services.’
The receptionist slides a leaflet across the counter, her eyes narrowed.
‘Thank you,’ says Kate. She pauses. She wants to leave, to get away from the woman’s cold stare, but her bladder is tugging at her painfully. ‘Is there a toilet I can use?’
A nod at the corridor to the left.
She washes her hands, grimacing at the chemical smell of the soap. As she cups water from the tap and drinks, snatches of conversation from the waiting room float back to her.
‘Did she ask for what I think she did?’ An unfamiliar voice – the elderly female patient.
Kate freezes. She doesn’t want to hear this. Her cheeks sting with shame.
‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ the receptionist is saying. ‘Being from that family.’
‘Who is she?’
‘That’s Violet’s great-niece.’
‘Really?’ says the old woman. ‘Didn’t know Violet had any family, save for himself up at the big house. Though not sure he counts for much.’
‘I wonder if she has it, too.’
‘They all do, don’t they? That Weyward lot. Ever since the first one.’
Then the receptionist says something else – a word so unexpected that Kate is sure she must have misheard.
Witch.
Outside, Kate takes deep, gulping breaths. Her brain feels disordered, fogged.
She can still hear it; the strange thrumming of her baby’s heartbeat. The way it filled the room. It was hard to believe that it had come from her own body. It sounded like something from the sky – a bird taking to the air. Or something not of this world at all.
It is 2 a.m. but Kate is awake, watching bats flutter past the window, dark against a pale slice of moon.
Her thoughts feel scattered, panicked – flitting away from her as though they, too, have wings. She rests a hand on her stomach, feeling the smooth heat of her own flesh. It seems impossible that, even now, the larval creature she saw onscreen floats inside her. Growing into a child.
Those things the women were saying about her family – they made it sound as though Kate was carrying some sort of faulty gene, an error code lurking in her cells, plotting her demise. Like the crow she found in the fireplace with the strange white pattern across its glossy feathers – a sign of leucism, she’d read, a genetic trait handed down over generations.
She remembers what the greengrocer said, about the viscount. How he’d lost his marbles.
Perhaps they were referring to some kind of mental health issue, running in the family? That wouldn’t surprise her. All those panic attacks she’d experienced over the years – the clawing in her chest, her throat tightening.
The feeling of something trying to get out.
After another hour of trying and failing to sleep, she gives up, pushing the bedcovers aside.
Switching on the light, she drags the hatboxes out from under the bed. There has to be something in here – something she missed the first time she looked.
Again, she rifles through the folder with its faded, dusty cover. But there’s nothing – nothing she hasn’t already seen before. Not a single mention of the Weywards.
Sighing in frustration, she picks up Violet’s old passport and opens it to the photo page, staring into the dark eyes that are so like Kate’s own. There’s a determination there that Kate didn’t notice before – the firm set of the mouth, the jut of the chin. As if Violet has fought something and won. She would never have ended up like Kate: soft and malleable, yielding as easily to Simon’s fingers as if she were clay.
Suddenly she wishes her great-aunt were still alive, that she could talk to her. That she could talk to someone. Anyone.
She is about to put the passport back when a slip of yellowed paper falls out of it.
It’s a birth certificate. Violet’s birth certificate.
Name: Violet Elizabeth Ayres
Date of Birth: 5 February 1926
Place of Birth: Orton Hall, near Crows Beck, Cumbria, England
Father’s occupation: Peer
Father’s name: Rupert William Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall
Mother’s name: Elizabeth Ayres, nee Weyward
She remembers the letters. Rupert and Elizabeth – they are Violet’s parents; Kate’s great-grandparents.
