Weyward, p.28
Weyward, page 28
‘There’s something else,’ he said, after I thanked him. ‘I stopped by the Milburn farm first this morning, to deliver my gift. John Milburn has long kept us in veal, you see, and my father bid me to take a token of our gratitude this new year.’ He paused, as though the act had made him uncomfortable. He knows, I thought. He knows how John treats her.
‘John was in the field, so it was Mistress Milburn who answered the door. Grace. She asked if I planned to give any other gifts that day. I said I was taking a gift to you, next, for the care you showed my grandfather when he passed this year. She bid me give you this.’
He pressed a bundle of cloth into my hands. I didn’t dare open it in front of Adam, and pretended the gift was a surprise – as far as the villagers knew, Grace had not uttered a kind word to me in public for seven years.
He looked at me for a moment, as if he had wanted to ask me a question but thought better of it.
‘Well, happy New Year, Altha,’ he said. ‘Blessings be upon you.’
He touched his cap and left.
I watched him disappear down the path, then went inside. Once I had shut the door behind me, I unwrapped the bundle. It was a fragrant, golden orb – an orange, I realised. I had only ever heard them spoken of, the fruit is so rare and precious. An expensive gift. The smell of it was sharp in my nostrils, mingled with another, woodier scent. Clove. I pulled at the clove; it was rough against my fingers. I saw that it had not been secured with a simple piece of twig, but a figure fashioned from twigs and twine. It was crude and looked hastily made, but I could see what she had intended it to be. The figure of a woman, with a curl of twine around her waist. A baby.
Grace was pregnant again. And she was asking for my help.
That night, I dreamed again of my mother, as she had been on her deathbed. Her features were waxen, and the pale lips barely moved as she spoke.
‘Altha,’ she said. ‘Remember your promise … you cannot break your promise … it is not safe. You must keep your gift hidden …’
I woke with a jolt and the dream fell away. I pushed my mother’s face from my mind. A sound had woken me, I realised. I heard it again. A cry that throbbed in the quiet. A crow. I looked outside. Night was only just beginning to lift from the valley. It was time.
I dressed quickly. In the looking glass, my hair shone bright as feathers. With my black cloak fastened around my shoulders, I looked as dark and powerful as if I were a crow myself.
49
VIOLET
The key turned in the lock. Violet pulled her nightdress on hurriedly, dizzy from the effort. She sat back down. The darkness was there still, at the edges of her vision. Perhaps it would be easiest to give into it, she thought. To let it take her away, before Father and Doctor Radcliffe did.
The creak of the front door, and then the wind roared into the cottage. She heard Father’s voice, raised above the storm.
‘Graham? What are you doing here?’
‘Father – I can explain—’
‘Where is the girl?’ She recognised Doctor Radcliffe’s voice, cold and clinical.
They were in the room, the rain glittering on their overcoats. Violet looked down at the floor, stained pink with her blood.
‘She’s lost the baby,’ Graham said quietly.
Father didn’t ask him how he knew about the baby. Violet felt his eyes on her and looked up. There was no concern, no tenderness in his gaze. His mouth curled in disgust.
‘I’ll need to examine her,’ said Doctor Radcliffe. ‘Take her to the bedroom and have her lie down.’
Graham slung Violet’s arm around his shoulders and lifted her to her feet. Neither Father nor Doctor Radcliffe made any effort to help. Violet closed her eyes, and imagined she was in the beech tree, feeling the summer breeze on her face. In the bedroom, the small window flared bright and the air crackled with electricity. A thunderclap. God moving his furniture, Nanny Metcalfe used to say. Nanny Metcalfe. She would be ashamed, Violet knew. God, too, perhaps. She had committed a sin.
After she lay down, Doctor Radcliffe asked Graham and Father to turn around, before lifting the skirt of her nightdress. His nostrils flared at the smell of blood. It hung in the air, sweet and metallic. Looking down, Violet saw that her thighs were ringed red, like the inside of a tree trunk. She suddenly felt very old, as if she’d lived a hundred years instead of sixteen.
‘Can you explain what happened?’ Doctor Radcliffe asked. It was the first time either he or Father had addressed her directly.
‘I felt a cramping, this morning,’ she said. ‘Like I get with my monthly curse, but stronger …’
‘I found her as it was starting,’ Graham interjected, still staring at the wall. ‘She began losing blood not long after I arrived. And then, with the blood … it …’
‘The baby,’ said Doctor Radcliffe.
‘Yes, the baby … the baby came out … there was so much blood …’ Graham retched, and Violet knew that he too was thinking of that mottled twist of flesh. The spore, the rot.
Violet felt tears sting her eyes, blurring her vision so that Doctor Radcliffe’s face swam before her.
‘Is that what happened?’ he asked her. ‘You did not do anything to bring about this miscarriage? You didn’t take anything?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Violet said softly, the tears wet on her cheeks. The darkness was there again, and she rolled towards it. Fragments of conversation drifted towards her as she fell, the air rushing at her.
‘Lost a lot of blood,’ Doctor Radcliffe was saying. ‘A week of bed rest, at least. Plenty of fluids, too.’
‘Can you be sure, Doctor?’ Father asked. ‘Can you be sure she didn’t bring it on herself?’
‘No,’ Doctor Radcliffe said. ‘We have only her word for that. And the boy’s.’
She was flying now, the wind singing on her skin. She slept.
Graham was there when she woke up, sitting on the bed opposite, watching her. Everything was quiet and still. The candle had burned down to the wick. She could hear a fly outside, buzzing past the window.
‘They’ve gone,’ Graham said, seeing that she was awake. ‘They left last night. You’ve been asleep since. Father said I could stay with you. He had to keep up appearances in front of Doctor Radcliffe, I suppose.’
Violet sat up. Her body felt hollow and light.
‘They’ll be back in a week, to see how you’ve recovered. Father’s writing to Frederick. I expect the wedding’s off.’
The feeling of lightness again. She heard a redstart sing and smiled. It was a beautiful sound.
‘I don’t think Father believed us,’ said Graham.
Violet nodded. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘As long as Doctor Radcliffe did.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Father would hardly go to the police of his own accord. The scandal.’
They were quiet for a moment. Violet watched a thin ray of sun dance on the wall.
‘Do you know what this place is, Violet?’
‘Yes. It was our mother’s house,’ she said. ‘Her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Weyward.’
Graham was quiet. It took Violet a moment to realise that he was crying, his hunched shoulders shaking, his face hidden in his hands. She hadn’t seen him cry since before he left for boarding school, years ago.
‘Graham?’
‘I thought …’ He took a deep, steadying breath. ‘I thought you were going to die, too. Just like she did. Our – our mother.’
They had never spoken of her before.
‘That’s why you hate me, isn’t it?’ Graham lifted his face from his hands as he spoke. His pale skin was mottled with tears. ‘Because I – because I killed her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She died having me.’
‘She didn’t.’
‘Don’t, Violet. I know. Father told me years ago.’
‘He lied,’ she said. And then she told him the truth – about what Father and Doctor Radcliffe had done to their mother. About the grandmother who had tried to reach them, the grandmother they had never known.
‘So you mustn’t think it’s your fault anymore,’ she said, afterwards. ‘And you mustn’t think I hate you. You’re my brother. We’re family.’
She touched her necklace as she spoke. The locket was warm against her fingers. She felt stronger, knowing that the key was safe inside. She considered telling him the rest: about Altha’s manuscript, locked away in the drawer. After all, the Weywards were Graham’s family too.
But Graham was – or would soon become – a man. A good man, but a man all the same. It wouldn’t be right, she knew.
‘How did you know to use the – what was it?’
‘Tansy.’ She paused. ‘Just something I read somewhere,’ she said.
Graham stayed with her for a week. He helped her mend the latch on the window of her bedroom, so that she could breathe clean air every night. Together they scrubbed her blood from the floor of the kitchen, until the wood glowed rich and brown. The cottage looked good as new.
There was a carrot plant in the garden, tangled up with the helleborine – though the carrots were misshapen and pale, unlike any she had seen before. There was rhubarb, too: she pulled the stems delicately from the soil, careful not to disturb the worms that lived nearby.
They ate the carrots with the eggs Father had brought. They no longer turned her stomach, now that the spore was gone.
Graham found a rusted axe in the attic. He chopped the branches that had been felled by the storm into firewood.
‘To keep you warm in winter,’ he said. They both knew she would never return to Orton Hall. Not after everything that had happened.
Graham used some of the wood to fashion a small cross and drove it into the soil where he had buried the spore, down by the beck. Violet thought about asking him to take it down, but she didn’t.
Father came back, with Doctor Radcliffe.
‘She seems to have recovered well,’ Doctor Radcliffe said to Father. ‘You can have her brought home, if you wish.’
Doctor Radcliffe left, and it was just Father, Graham and Violet in the cottage. They were silent as they listened to the sputter of Doctor Radcliffe’s car engine.
‘I am sure you understand’, Father began, looking past Violet at the wall, ‘that I cannot allow you back into my house after what you have done. I have arranged for you to be taken to a finishing school in Scotland. You will stay there for two years, and after that I will decide what is to be done with you.’
Violet heard Graham clear his throat.
‘No,’ she said, before her brother could open his mouth to speak. ‘That won’t be acceptable, I’m afraid, Father.’
His jowls slackened with shock. He looked as if she had slapped him.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I won’t be going to Scotland. In fact, I won’t be going anywhere. I’m staying right here.’ As she spoke, Violet became aware of a strange simmering sensation, as though electricity was humming beneath her skin. Images flashed in her mind – a crow cutting through the air, wings glittering with snow; the spokes of a wheel spinning. Briefly, she closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling until she could almost see it, glinting gold inside her.
‘That is not for you to decide,’ said Father. The window was open, and a bee flitted about the room, wings a silver blur. It flew near Father’s cheek and he jerked away from it.
‘It’s been decided.’ She stood up straight, her dark eyes boring into Father’s watery ones. He blinked. The bee hovered about his face, dancing away from his hands, and she saw sweat break out on his nose. Soon it was joined by another, and then another and another, until it seemed like Father – shouting and swearing – had been engulfed in a cloud of tawny, glistening bodies.
‘I think it would be best if you left now, Father,’ said Violet softly. ‘After all, as you said, I’m my mother’s daughter.’
‘Graham?’ Violet smiled at the note of panic in Father’s voice.
‘I’m staying, too,’ said Graham, folding his arms across his chest.
Violet heard Father’s shallow, rasping breaths. Several of the bees were dangerously close to his mouth now.
‘The front door key, please, Father,’ she said. It landed on the wooden floor with a dull clank.
‘Thank you,’ she called, as Father, pursued by the bees, slammed the door behind him.
Violet held out her hand, and a lone bee came to rest on her palm.
‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ she asked, turning to Graham. ‘They won’t hurt you this time.’
‘I know,’ said Graham.
He put his arm around her. They stood still for a moment, listening to the car rumble away.
50
KATE
In the corridor, Kate can hear what sounds like hailstones hitting the windows. But they are not hailstones, she sees, looking through the doorway at her bedroom window; they are beaks.
Outside, illuminated by the moon, are hundreds of birds. She sees the gunmetal sheen of a crow’s feathers, the yellow glare of an owl. A robin’s red breast. Their bodies writhe and flutter against the glass. Snow falls around them, drifting to the ground. Their cries echo in her ears. They are here, she knows, because of her.
The door to the sitting room is slightly ajar. Simon is yelling frantically. He can’t hear her as she approaches, cloaked by the sound of the birds.
She pushes open the door. Simon is standing in the centre of the room, facing the window. The poker quivers in one white-knuckled hand. She is still for a moment, watching the muscles of his back tense beneath the fine wool of his sweater. The skin on the nape of his neck is goose-pimpled with fear.
Birds clamour at the window. Kate can see cracks begin to form in the glass, glinting silver like the thread of a spider’s web. There’s a scratching sound coming from the chimney.
‘Simon,’ she says. He doesn’t hear her.
‘Simon,’ she says again, louder this time, trying to keep the fear from her voice.
His blond hair flashes as he turns around.
Her heart knocks in her chest. The handsome features are sharp with anger, the lips snarling away from the teeth. The shock on his face at the first sight of her. How different she must look to him, she thinks, with her huge belly and cropped hair, Aunt Violet’s beaded cape around her shoulders. Then his eyes narrow, glittering with rage.
‘You,’ he hisses.
Kate takes a gulp of air as he moves towards her. She tries to shift her body away from him, back to the doorway, but he is too quick.
He shoves her into the wall, so hard that plaster dust drifts into the air like the snow outside.
‘You thought you could leave?’ he shouts, spittle landing on her face. ‘You thought you could leave with my child?’
The poker clatters to the floor, and then his hand is around her neck, squeezing, crushing, like a vice.
Horror settles into her stomach, cold and hard.
Thoughts spark and die in her brain. The colours in the room look brighter, even as her vision grows hazy at the edges. She sees the flecks of gold in his blue irises. The whites of his eyes, with their red tracing of veins. His breath is hot and sour in her face.
So this is it, she thinks, as her lungs burn from lack of oxygen. The end. Even if he lets her live – for the sake of the child, he might – it will not be a life, but a cell. She thinks, suddenly, of the jail in the village: the cold grey stone, darkness closing over her.
He is saying something now, but she can barely hear him above the tapping on the windows and the scrabbling on the roof.
He says it again, louder and closer, tightening his grip on her throat. Aunt Violet’s necklace is digging into her neck.
‘You are nothing’, he says, the words tolling in her skull, ‘without me.’
The panic is rising. Except it isn’t panic, Kate knows now. It never was. The feeling of something trying to get out. Rage, hot and bright in her chest. Not panic. Power.
No. She is not nothing.
She is a Weyward. And she carries another Weyward inside her. She gathers herself together, every cell blazing, and thinks: Now.
The window breaks, a waterfall of sharp sounds. The room grows dark with feathered bodies, shooting through the broken window, the fireplace.
Beaks, claws and eyes flashing. Feathers brushing her skin. Simon yells, his hand loosening on her throat.
She sucks in the air, falling onto her knees, one hand cradling her stomach. Something touches her foot, and she sees a dark tide of spiders spreading across the floor. Birds continue to stream through the window. Insects, too: the azure flicker of damselflies, moths with orange eyes on their wings. Tiny, gossamer mayflies. Bees in a ferocious golden swarm.
She feels something sharp on her shoulder, its claws digging into her flesh. She looks up at blue-black feathers, streaked with white. A crow. The same crow that has watched over her since she arrived. Tears fill her eyes, and she knows in that moment that she is not alone in the cottage. Altha is there, in the spiders that dance across the floor. Violet is there, in the mayflies that glisten and undulate like some great silver snake. And all the other Weyward women, from the first of the line, are there too.
They have always been with her, and always will be.
Simon is curled on the floor, screaming. She can barely see him for the birds, swarming and pecking, their wings quivering; the insects forming patterns on his skin. His face is covered by the tawny wings of a sparrowhawk; a flock of starlings have landed on his chest, their crowns shimmering purple. A brown fieldfare nips at his ear, a spider circles his throat.
Feathers swirl in the air – small and white, gold and tapered. Opaline black.
She lifts her arm – the pink scar catching the light – and the creatures draw back. Dark drops splatter on the floor.
Simon’s hands, criss-crossed with red gashes, are pressed against his eyes. Slowly, he removes them, and she sees the pink flesh, oozing blood, where the left eye should be. He cowers as she stands tall above him, the crow on her shoulder.
