Weyward, p.6
Weyward, page 6
She can’t stop looking at the cape, at the way it catches the light. Tentatively she brushes it with her fingertips, the glass beads cool against her skin. She plucks it from its hanger and slips it around her shoulders. In the mirror she looks different: the cape’s dark glitter brings out something in her eyes, a hardness she doesn’t recognise.
Shame flushes her cheeks. She’s acting like a child playing dress-up. She takes off the cape, hurriedly shoving it back on its hanger. Shutting the wardrobe doors, she catches another glimpse of herself in the mirror. There she is: clad in the clothes he has chosen. Her hair, bleached and perfectly layered, just the way he likes. The woman with the hardness in her eyes is gone.
She looks under Aunt Violet’s bed. Battered hatboxes yield sketchbooks, their mottled pages filled with annotated drawings of butterflies, beetles and – she grimaces – tarantulas. A heavy, square object wrapped in muslin turns out not to be a photo album, as she suspected, but a crumbling flank of stone. Turning it over, she sees the striated red imprint of a scorpion.
A folder pokes out from under one of the boxes. Grunting, she yanks it free.
The cover is faded and furred with dust, but the papers inside are neatly ordered: bank statements; utility bills. There are several old passports, their yellowed pages crowded with stamps. She flips through one from the 1960s, recording visits to Costa Rica, Nepal, Morocco.
There’s something familiar about the sepia-coloured photograph on the first page; about the young woman with dark waves of hair and wide-spaced eyes, the smudge of a birthmark on her forehead. She’s never seen any pictures of her great-aunt as a young woman before, and she shivers as she places the feeling of recognition. In the picture, Aunt Violet looks like … her. Kate.
10
ALTHA
Grace looked very young and small on the witness stand. Her skin was pale under her cap, her brown eyes wide. In that moment, I found it hard to believe that she was a grown woman of one and twenty.
It seemed like barely any time had passed since we were girls, chasing each other through the sunlight. The summer when we were thirteen was sharp in my memory as I looked at her.
It had been a hot summer: the hottest in decades, my mother said. We had roamed all over the village and splashed through the beck, and, once we tired of that, stolen away to the cooler air of the fells. There we’d found slopes and crags wreathed with heather and mist. We’d climbed so high that Grace said she could see all the way to France. I remember laughing, telling Grace that France was very far away, and across the sea, besides. One day, we’d go and look for it, I said. Together.
At that moment, an osprey screamed overhead. I looked up to watch it fly, the sun tipping its wings with silver. Grace took my hand in hers, and a feeling of lightness spread through me, as though I too was soaring through the clouds.
Even then, some of the villagers feared our touch, as if my mother and I carried some pestilence, some plague. But Grace was never afraid. She knew – then, at least – that I would never bring her harm.
On our way down, I lost my boot to a bog. I remember being so nervous about telling my mother that I barely said a word to Grace as we walked back. She wouldn’t understand, I thought. A yeoman’s daughter, she’d had new boots every twelvemonth. My mother had sold cheese and damson jam from dawn till dusk, and tended each sick villager who came to our door to pay the cobbler to repair mine.
But Grace had come in with me, when we’d got to the cottage, and had told my mother it was her fault the boot had been lost to the mud. She’d insisted on giving me her spare pair.
I’d worn them for years after, until they pinched my toes purple. I’d been saving them, thinking I’d give them to my own daughter one day.
There was another reason that this summer, of our thirteenth year, was so strong in my mind when I looked at her across the courtroom. It was the last of our friendship.
And the last of my innocence.
In the autumn, as the leaves fell from the beech trees, Grace’s mother fell sick.
My mother woke me well before dawn, candlelight chasing shadows from her face.
‘Grace is coming here. Something is wrong,’ she told me.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
She said nothing, but stroked the crow that perched on her shoulder, its feathers sparkling with rain.
It was the scarlatina, Grace said, as she sat at our table not long after, still trying to catch her breath. She’d run the whole 2 miles from the Metcalfe farm. Her mother had lain, pink-cheeked and sweating, in her bed for three days and two nights, she said. When she was awake, which was rare, she cried out for her long-dead babies.
Grace told us that her father had called for the doctor, who’d said that the patient had too much blood in her body. All that blood was boiling her from the inside out. I watched my mother’s face, her mouth set in a grim line, as Grace went on. The doctor had put leeches on her mother, Grace said, only it wasn’t helping. The leeches were growing fatter while she grew weaker.
My mother stood. I watched as she filled her basket with clean cloths, and jars of honey and elderberry tincture.
‘Altha, fetch our cloaks,’ she said. ‘We must make haste, girls. If the physician keeps bleeding her, I fear she will not last the night.’
The moon was obscured by cloud and drizzle, so that I could barely see as we walked. My mother strode on determined, gripping my hand tight. I could hear Grace breathing hard next to me.
In the darkness and the wet, I could not see my mother’s crow, but I knew that she flew on ahead through the trees, and that this gave my mother strength.
We were halfway there when the rain grew heavier. Water dripped from my hood into my eyes. In the rush to leave I had forgotten my gloves, and my hands were numb with cold. It seemed like an age until I saw the squat, sunken shape of the Metcalfe farmhouse in the distance, the windows yellow with candlelight.
We found William Metcalfe slumped over his wife’s sickbed. There was no sign of the physician. The bedchamber was filled with candles, a score of them at least: more than my mother and I used in a month.
‘Mama does not care for the dark,’ Grace whispered.
In the bed, Grace’s mother looked like she was asleep. Only, it was no kind of sleep that I had ever seen before. Anna Metcalfe’s chest rose and fell rapidly under her nightgown. In the leaping candlelight, I could see her eyelids flickering with movement. Then her eyes opened and she half rose from the bed, screaming and tearing at a leech at her temple, before sinking back down again.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ William Metcalfe murmured over his wife’s crumpled form, ‘pray for us sinners …’
He turned suddenly, having heard us come in at that moment. I saw he clutched a string of crimson beads to his lips: these he quickly stowed in the pouch of his breeches.
‘What the devil are you doing here?’ he asked. He looked hollowed out by exhaustion, his face almost as pale as his wife’s.
‘I brought them, Papa,’ said Grace. ‘Goodwife Weyward can help. She knows things …’
‘Naive child,’ he spat. ‘Those things she knows won’t save your mother. They’ll condemn her soul. Is that what you want for her?’
‘Please, William. Be reasonable,’ said my mother in a tight voice. ‘You can see that the leeches are just making her worse. Your wife is frightened and in pain. She needs cool cloths, and honey and elderberry, to soothe her.’
As she spoke, Anna let out a moan. Grace began to cry.
‘Please, Papa, please,’ she said.
William Metcalfe looked at his wife, then at his daughter. A vein throbbed at his temple.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘But you must stop if I say so. And if she dies, it will be on your head.’
My mother nodded. She set about removing the leeches from Anna’s skin, asked Grace to fetch a jug of water and a cup. When these arrived, she knelt by the bedside and tried to get Anna to drink, but the liquid just dribbled down her chin. She laid a damp cloth over her forehead. Anna muttered, and I saw her fists clenching and unclenching beneath the bedclothes.
I sat down next to my mother.
‘Will you try the elderberry tincture?’ I asked.
‘She is very far gone,’ my mother said, keeping her voice low. ‘I am not sure she will be able to take it in. We may be too late.’
She took the small bottle of purple liquid from her basket and un-stoppered it. She held the dropper over Anna’s mouth and squeezed. A dark splash fell on her lips, staining them.
As I watched, Anna’s whole body began to shake. Her eyes opened, flashing white. Foam collected at the corners of her mouth.
‘Anna!’ William rushed forward, pushing us out of the way. He tried to hold his wife’s body still. I turned around and saw Grace standing in the far corner of the room, her hands over her mouth.
‘Grace, do not watch,’ I said, crossing the room. I put my hands over her eyes. ‘Do not watch,’ I said again, my lips so close to her face that I could smell the sweetness of her skin.
The room was filled with the terrible sounds of the bedframe shaking, of William Metcalfe saying his wife’s name over and over.
Then it grew quiet.
I did not need to turn around to know that Anna Metcalfe was dead.
‘Why did you not save her?’ I asked my mother as we walked home. It was still raining. Cold mud seeped into my boots. The boots that Grace had given me.
‘I tried,’ my mother said. ‘She was too weak. If Grace had come to us sooner …’
We did not speak for the rest of the journey home. Once we arrived, my mother started the fire. Then we sat looking into the flames for hours, my mother with her crow at her shoulder, until the rain eased and we could hear the birds singing outside.
In the days that followed, I longed for Grace; longed to hold her close and comfort her for her loss. But my mother kept me inside, away from the square, the fields. Where I might hear the rumours that tore like flames through the village. It did not matter: I could guess at them, from the pale set of my mother’s face, the dark rings under her eyes. Later, I learned William Metcalfe had forbade his daughter from seeing me.
We did not speak again for seven years.
11
VIOLET
Violet woke the next day exhausted from lack of sleep. But she got straight out of bed, even though it was a Saturday, and she had no lessons.
She couldn’t get her discovery out of her head. That strange word, scratched into the wainscoting behind her bedside cabinet. Weyward.
She touched the gold pendant that hung from her neck, tracing her fingers over the W. What if the initial didn’t stand for her mother’s first name, as she’d thought for all these years? What if it stood for her last name, before she married Father and became Lady Ayres?
Longing swelled in Violet’s ribcage. She was struck with a sudden desire to push the cabinet aside again and run her fingers over the etchings, to feel something her mother might have touched. But why would her mother have put her own name there? Had she meant for Violet to discover it one day?
She threw back the covers, but quickly drew them up again when Mrs Kirkby knocked on her door with a tray of tea and porridge.
The housekeeper had a distracted look clouding her broad features, and a faint, meaty aroma. Her knuckles were dusted white with flour, and there was a dark smear of what looked to be gravy across her apron.
Violet supposed she was busy preparing for the impending arrival of this mysterious cousin Frederick. Violet imagined Mrs Kirkby rather had her work cut out for her, given that they never had guests at Orton Hall. Perhaps she could catch her off guard.
‘Mrs Kirkby,’ she said in between sips of tea, taking care to keep her tone indifferent. ‘What was my mother’s last name?’
‘Big questions for so early in the morning, pet,’ said Mrs Kirkby, stooping to inspect a stain on the coverlet. ‘Is this chocolate? I’ll have to get Penny to put it in to soak.’
Violet frowned. She had the distinct impression that Mrs Kirkby was reluctant to look her in the eye.
‘Was it Weyward?’
Mrs Kirkby stiffened. She was still for a moment, then hurriedly removed the tray from Violet’s lap, even though she’d yet to finish her porridge.
‘Can’t recall,’ she huffed. ‘But it doesn’t do to go ferreting around in the past, Violet. Plenty of children don’t have mothers. Still more don’t have mothers or fathers. You should count yourself lucky and leave it at that.’
‘Of course, Mrs Kirkby,’ Violet said, quickly formulating a plan. ‘I say – speaking of fathers, do you know what mine has planned for the day?’
‘He left early this morning’, she said, ‘to meet your young cousin off his train at Lancaster.’
This was excellent news. But she had to hurry, or she would miss her chance.
Violet dressed quickly. She was quite sure that Mrs Kirkby had been lying when she said she couldn’t recall if Weyward had been her mother’s last name. What was less certain was how it had come to be scratched onto the wainscoting of Violet’s bedroom.
She crept down the main staircase to the second floor. It was a brilliant day outside, and the multicoloured light flooding in through the stained-glass window made the Hall look ethereal.
As she turned down the corridor, she passed Graham, carrying an algebra textbook with a look of despair. She remembered the gift he had left for her.
‘Um – thank you for the present,’ she said quietly. It occurred to her that it must have been quite an ordeal for him to coax the damselfly into a jar, given his fear of insects. The bees shimmered in her mind.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Do you feel better now? You look a bit more – normal. Well – normal for you, anyway.’
He pulled a face and she laughed.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Well, ah – better get on with this.’ He motioned to the textbook and sighed.
‘Graham, wait,’ she said. ‘Um – you wouldn’t be a brick and do me a favour, would you?’
She saw him hesitate. It had been a long time since she’d asked him for a favour.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Father’s gone to get cousin whatshisname from Lancaster,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Graham, rolling his eyes. ‘The feted Frederick.’
‘Anyway, I’ve got to look for something in Father’s study,’ she said, hoping she could trust him. ‘Could you tell me if he comes back?’
Graham’s ginger eyebrows shot up.
‘Father’s study? Why on earth would you go in there? He’ll skin you alive if he finds out,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Which is why I need you to be my lookout. You can have my share of pudding for a week if you say yes.’
Violet watched Graham mull it over, hoping that the lure of extra custard would be too great for him to resist.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll knock on the door three times, as a signal. But if you renege on the pudding promise, I’ll tell Father.’
‘Deal,’ she said.
She turned towards the study.
‘Are you going to tell me what it is you’re looking for?’
‘The fewer people know,’ said Violet, adopting a low voice, ‘the better.’
Graham rolled his eyes again and kept walking.
Violet felt a rush of nerves as she came upon the study. Normally, Cecil could be found growling at the threshold, as if he were Cerberus guarding the entrance to the underworld. Thank heavens he had gone with Father to Lancaster.
She pushed open the heavy door. Violet tended to avoid the study – and not just because of Cecil. This was where Father had caned her after the incident with the bees.
The room was no less unsettling now that she was older. It looked as if it belonged to a different era. A different season, even – Father had the curtains pulled, and the air felt chilly and stale. She turned on the light, flinching as she made eye contact with the painting that hung behind the desk. It was yet another portrait of Father, and so realistically done – even down to the gleam of his bald pate – that for a moment she thought that he had been there all along, waiting to catch her out.
Pulse thudding, she crept inside, inhaling the scent of pipe tobacco. There had to be some record of her mother in here. How could a person have lived and died in a house yet leave only a necklace and a scratch of letters behind? It was as if Father had scrubbed her from the face of the earth.
She scanned the shelves, with their ancient spines labelled in faded blue ink. Ledgers. Dozens of them. She pulled out one marked 1925 and flipped through it. Could there be something in here about the May Day Festival where her parents had met? But no – it was just pages and pages of numbers, transcribed in Father’s cramped, terse hand (it took skill, Violet thought, to make even your handwriting look angry). She slammed the ledger shut in frustration.
She looked around the room. Father’s mahogany desk hulked beneath his portrait. Strange objects littered the surface. Some of them were interesting – like the faded globe that showed the countries of the British Empire in delicate pink – but others gave her the willies. Especially the yellowed ivory tusk mounted in brass, which spanned almost the entire length of the desk. It conjured images of Babar and Celeste, heroes of her favourite childhood books (which, like all the other nursery volumes, had originally been given to Graham) tuskless and bleeding.
It made her feel sad for another reason. As a child, Violet had assumed that Father’s ‘curios’ (as he called them) were signs that he shared her love of the natural world. But it was when Father was telling her and Graham the story of how he came to possess the tusk – on the same hunting trip to Southern Rhodesia that he’d acquired Cecil, skinny and cowering as a puppy – that she realised how wrong she was. Father didn’t care that elephants formed close-knit, matriarchal groups; that they mourned their dead like humans. Nor did he consider that the elephant he had killed – for the mere sake of an ornament on his desk – would have been bewildered by fear and pain at the moment of its death.
