Weyward, p.24
Weyward, page 24
In her gut, panic blooms. She shouldn’t have come. What if she’s put the baby in danger?
She is driving past the woods, the trees sugared with ice. The woods. Where she’d felt such unease, before her unsettling visit to Orton Hall. Fear bubbles in her chest, the steering wheel suddenly slick under her hands. She remembers the claustrophobia of those tightly packed trees, the way they’d blocked out the light.
Kate forces herself to look straight ahead, at the reflective lines of the road curving ahead of her, away from the wood, disappearing into a haze of white. The wind roars. She needs to turn the fog lights on so that she can see better, but in her terror, she can’t remember how. Her fingers slip and fumble on the wheel and the dashboard, and she takes her eyes off the road briefly. There. She’s found the button. She lifts her eyes back to the road and the twin beams illuminate the remains of an animal – matted, bloodied fur; pale limbs – strewn across the road. The blood impossibly bright against the snow.
She screams. She loses control of the wheel. The car careens forward, and the noise of the trees scraping against the roof and smacking the windshield is deafening.
Everything goes white.
Kate’s heart pounds in her chest. It takes her a moment to realise that she has crashed into the woods, that the front seat of the car is littered with ice, with glass from the windscreen.
The wind howls through the jagged edges of the windscreen. Kate shivers. She is so cold.
Oh God. The baby.
She places her hands over her stomach, willing her child to show her some sign of life.
Please. Kick. Let me know you’re OK.
But there is nothing.
She needs to get help. Wincing at a bolt of pain in her shoulder, she twists to reach for her phone on the passenger seat. Please God, don’t let it be broken.
She exhales with relief when she sees that the screen is intact. Relief turns to horror when, unlocking it, she sees only one bar of reception: it flickers for a moment, then disappears.
Shit.
She thinks she’s about 5 miles from the cottage: the road loops around the fells in long, lazy circles, adding extra distance. The direct route, across the fells, is shorter. Two miles, no more, she thinks.
At this hour, while the light dims in the sky, the woods seem so black and thick that it feels as if the car has been swallowed up by a beast and has come to rest in its ribcage. She imagines the dark stretch of trees, a spine running across the land.
She could wait by the side of the road, see if someone drives past. Then she remembers how quiet it is here, how she hasn’t seen a single other car for the entire journey back from Ivy Gate. And no one is going to take to the roads in a blizzard. She could be waiting till morning. It’s already so cold in the car with the broken windscreen. People die of exposure in situations like this, don’t they?
She doesn’t have a choice. If she wants to get home before night falls, she’ll have to walk.
She pushes the car door open, scraping against branches, gasping as the cold hits her.
Snowflakes sting her face as she makes her way back to the road, stumbling over icy tree roots and clogs of mud. The tarmac is dusted white. There is the body of the animal – it is a hare, she sees now – splayed out and flattened. She can’t take the road, not unless she wants to risk sharing its fate.
She turns back to the woods, the leaves hissing with the wind.
There’s only one way home.
37
ALTHA
When five days had passed, I collected the mixture from the attic and strained it. As I bottled it, I saw that it was a clear amber colour, like the waters of the beck.
Two nights later, Grace came, as she had said she would. I remember it was a clear night, and the moon hung bright in the sky. This time, Grace wore a shawl wound tight around her neck and chin, so that only her eyes were visible, flashing beneath her cap.
She would not come in.
‘Are you quite well?’ I asked, for she was a strange sight, with her face half covered like a bandit.
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice muffled by the shawl. ‘Do you have the tincture?’
‘It will be painful,’ I said as I gave it to her. ‘It will bring on cramps and blood. And with the blood, the beginnings of the babe. Will you tell John it is a miscarriage?’
‘I will burn the remains. John cannot know,’ she said. ‘How soon will it take effect?’
‘In a matter of hours, I should think,’ I said. ‘But I cannot be sure.’
‘Thank you. I will take it tomorrow night, while he is at the alehouse. His sleep is restless tonight – I must be getting back quickly.’
She turned to go.
‘Will you – will you let me know that you are well?’ I asked. ‘That it has worked?’
‘I will try to come another night and tell you.’
She walked away quickly, taking care to open the gate so that it did not creak, although there was no one around for miles.
I passed the next days and nights in a state of distraction. In the evenings, I flinched at the slightest of sounds, then lay restless on my pallet until the night sky paled with dawn.
On the Wednesday, Mary Dinsdale, the baker’s wife, came to see me about a cut on her hand.
‘Have you heard the news from the village?’ she asked, as I dressed the wound with honey.
My heart jolted. I was sure she was going to tell me that Grace had died, but it was just that the Merrywether widower was engaged to be married.
The following night, there was a knock on my door.
It was Grace. This time, her face was uncovered – she wasn’t even wearing her cap – and when I raised my candle, I flinched at the sight of it. The skin around her right eye was swollen pink and shiny, her bottom lip bruised and torn. There was a smear of blood on her chin, and bright flecks of it on her collar. I noticed faint yellow marks on her neck.
I led her inside and she sat slowly at the table. I put a pot of water on the fire and gathered some rags, so that I could clean the cut on her lip and soothe the swelling of her eye. When the water had warmed, I combined it with ground cloves and sage for a poultice. Once this was ready I knelt next to her and applied it to her wounds, as gently as I could.
‘Grace. What has happened?’ I said quietly.
‘I took the draught last night,’ she said, her eyes on the floor. ‘As soon as he had set off for the alehouse. Some nights, when he drinks, he comes home early and falls asleep by the kitchen fire. Other times, he is out much later, and when he comes home he is … without his senses.
‘It would have been easier if he had come home early and fallen asleep until morning. I could have stayed up in the bedchamber and, when it was over, burned my shift. I have two others so perhaps he would not have noticed. I would have just needed to take care not to bloody the bedclothes.
‘But he didn’t come home. Not for hours. The pain was so much worse than I thought it would be, so early. You should have warned me. It felt as if the babe was gripping at me from the inside, fighting the draught … so much pain caused by such a small thing. When it came out, it didn’t even look like a baby at all, or anything living that I have ever seen. Just a mass of flesh, like something one might buy from the butcher …’ She was crying now.
‘I was getting ready to throw it on the fire when he returned. I thought that maybe he would be too drunk to know what he was looking at. But he was not. I told him that I had lost it – I had hidden the tincture bottle – and he was angry. As I knew he would be. He hit me, as you can see. Though compared to the other times, he was almost merciful.’
She laughed that dry, crackling laugh again, but her eyes shone with tears.
‘Grace,’ I said. ‘Do you mean to say that he has – he has been even rougher with you than this?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘After I laboured – twice – and gave him a blue corpse instead of a bonny, bouncing son.’
I was silent. She looked up and saw the shock in my face.
‘I made sure no one knew I was pregnant, the second time,’ she said. ‘I tightened my stays over the bump and, when I got bigger, took care to see as few people as I could. In case it happened again. Then – afterwards – Doctor Smythson was sworn to secrecy. John didn’t want anyone to know that his wife had a poison womb.’
‘I am so sorry, Grace. I wish you had come to me. Perhaps I could have helped.’
She laughed again.
‘There’s no helping it,’ she said. ‘Doctor Smythson says he cannot find the reason. But it makes sense to me – God could not mean for a living child to be brought into the world by such an ugly act.’
She looked away, staring into the fire.
‘That is why I came to you,’ she said. ‘I thought that if it happened again – if this baby were dead like the others – he might kill me.’
I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her as she watched the fire. Without her cap, I could see that her hair, which had been bright as poppies when we were young, had darkened into a deep auburn.
‘I am sorry about the baby,’ she said softly. ‘It was innocent. I tried not to let it get to that stage. Each night, after he – after he has been in me, I wait until he has fallen asleep and take care to wash away his seed. But it was not enough.’
‘It is not your fault,’ I said. I knew the words sounded hollow. Really, I did not know how to bring her comfort. I had never lain with a man. In church, the rector said that the physical union between a husband and wife was sacred and holy. There was nothing sacred about what Grace had described.
‘I do not want to talk anymore,’ she said. ‘I am tired. May I sleep here?’
‘Of course,’ I said, reaching over to take her hand in mine. She flinched at my touch and her grasp was limp, defeated.
We lay curled together on my pallet like kittens. On the pillow, my dark hair mingled with her reddish strands. I could tell from the rhythm of her breathing that she was close to sleep. I drank in the smell of her – milk and tallow – as if I could keep it with me always.
I remembered, then, a sun-warmed day from childhood. We had been very small, so small that we were not allowed to wander far alone. My mother had been watching us, but we crept out of the garden when her back was turned, and followed the beck all the way to a green meadow, bright and soft with wildflowers. Weary from play, we had curled up together on the grass. There, with the bees droning gently and the air sweet with pollen, we had fallen asleep in each other’s arms.
I thought of the bruises on my friend’s skin and tears wet my cheeks.
‘Grace,’ I whispered. ‘There could be another way.’
I wasn’t sure that she heard what I said next, but I felt her hand reach for mine in the darkness.
When I woke the next morning, she was gone.
38
VIOLET
Violet was roused by the sound of footsteps. She had stayed up until dawn reading Altha Weyward’s manuscript. The candle had burned right down, leaving a moon of wax on the floor. She felt as if something had shifted inside her. As if she had been told something about herself that she had always known. One by one, memories fell into place, revealing their true form. The day of the bees. The click of Goldie’s pincers in her ear. The way she had felt the first time she had touched Morg’s feather.
Her legacy.
Father was in the kitchen, bearing provisions and a tight expression. Violet felt as if she were seeing him clearly for the first time in her life.
The treasured picture of her parents’ wedding day – their faces shining with love, the air bright with flower petals – dissolved.
He had never loved her mother. Not properly.
Deep down, Violet had known this all along. She’d only let herself be fooled by the fact that he’d held on to those things of her mother’s – the feather and the handkerchief – since her death.
But she had been wrong. They weren’t treasured mementoes of a beloved wife much mourned. They were trophies. Like the tusk, the ibex head … even Percy the peacock.
Her mother had been little better than a fox, to be discarded after the hunt, broken and bloodied.
She remembered the look on her father’s face the day of the bees, when his cane split her palm in two. At the time she had thought it was fury. But now she knew better. It was fear. All along, he’d recognised that she was her mother’s daughter, had known what she was capable of. That was why he had hidden her away, forbidden her from learning about Elizabeth and Elinor. About who she really was.
And as for Father himself?
He was a murderer.
Violet watched him as he lined new tins up on the table. It was a warm day, and his forehead was pearled with sweat. The blood vessel on his cheek had burst into a red spider’s web. He spoke and Violet watched his jowls tremble.
‘Frederick has sent a telegram,’ he said. ‘He has agreed to marry you. He has been granted a week of leave in September. We’ll have the wedding breakfast at the Hall. You’ll be able to stay for a while, afterwards. The engagement will be announced in The Times next week.’
Violet said nothing. The sight of him was making her ill. He was her only surviving parent, but she would have been happy never to see him again for as long as she lived.
Thankfully, after delivering the news, Father didn’t linger. He left without saying goodbye. She closed her eyes in relief at the sound of the key turning in the lock.
Now she could think.
She pictured a life with Frederick. The memory of the woods – the crushed primrose flower, the searing pain – came back to her.
I trust you enjoyed yourself?
She wouldn’t – couldn’t – marry him. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to, she thought desperately. Perhaps he would die in the war. But Violet had the awful feeling that he’d survive, like a cockroach clinging to the underside of a rock. Meanwhile, his spore would continue to grow inside her. The thought of his flesh mingled with her own made her want to retch. And then, once it – the child, though she refused to think of it in those terms – had slithered out of her and into the world, Frederick would come to claim them both.
What would become of her then? She thought of her mother, who had married the man who swooned over her dark eyes and blood-red lips. Who had ended up alone in a locked room, scratching her name into a wall so that there would be some evidence that she had existed, before suffering a gruesome, painful death.
Violet would not let that happen to her.
The child was the only reason for Frederick to marry her, surely. That was his obligation and interest, the rope that tied them together. A noose, shackling her from the inside.
Violet saw things clearly now. She had to cut the rope.
The manuscript. Bringing on the menses. Menses. The same strange word that Doctor Radcliffe had used for her monthly blood.
Outside, the garden shimmered with heat. She waded through the helleborine, its flowers leaving crimson smears on her dress. The air hummed with insects, the sun catching on the wings of a damselfly. Violet smiled, remembering the words from her mother’s letter.
Walls painted yellow as tansy flowers.
It was as if she was reaching out to her from beyond the grave, guiding her.
She found the plant under the sycamore: bobbing with yellow flowers, each one comprised of tiny buds clustered together like a beetle’s eggs.
It had worked for Grace. There was no reason why it wouldn’t work for her, too.
39
KATE
Kate draws her hood over her head as she steps into the woods. Here, the wind is quieter; the close-knit trees arching around to protect her from the elements.
But still she shivers, panting with fear – her breath a white cloud in front of her.
The silence is unnerving. She can hear nothing but the blizzard. Suddenly, she longs for the sight of an owl, or a robin – even the flutter of a moth. Anything but this white, deadened world.
Snowflakes swirl around her, landing in icy bursts on her exposed skin. She wishes she had some gloves. Instead, she draws the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands, winds her scarf around her nose and mouth. Her eyes water from the cold.
There is a crack in one of her boots – an old pair of Aunt Violet’s that she’s been meaning to get resoled – and now the snow seeps in, drenching her foot.
She pushes through the trees, all the while forcing herself not to think about the baby, about the stillness in her womb. She has to get to the village. She has to get help.
After a while, the trees all begin to look the same, with their branches quivering under matching lips of snow. She is no longer sure which is the right direction. A ladder of pink fungus creeps up a tree trunk in a way that looks horribly familiar, and she is seized by the fear that she has passed it before.
Is she walking in circles? Awful images flood her mind: her body, curled on the forest floor, barely visible under its shroud of snow. Her child frozen inside her, tiny bones calcifying in her womb. She stumbles over a tree root and cries out, her voice dying in the wind.
Something answers.
At first she thinks she must be dreaming, like a lost traveller hallucinating a mirage in the desert.
Then she hears it again. A bird, calling.
It’s real.
She looks up, breathing hard as she scans the canopy of trees. Something shimmers. A liquid eye. Blue-black feathers, dusted white.
A crow.
Panic flickers, but fades.
Something else is there, closer than ever, on the other side of her fear. That strange warmth she felt in Aunt Violet’s garden, when the insects rose from the earth. She pushes through her panic, breaches the wall to find the light, the spark she holds inside.
It reaches her veins, hums in her blood. Her nerves – in her ear canals, in the pads of her fingers, even the surface of her tongue – pulse and glow.
