Weyward(19)

‘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.