Weyward(36)

‘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.

Which means that Kate – Kate is a Weyward.

When she does sleep, Kate has the same nightmare that haunted her throughout her childhood – her father’s large hand over her small one; the dark shadow of the crow in the trees. Wings thrashing the air; the shriek of rubber on tarmac. The wet thump of her father’s body hitting the ground.

Except that at the cottage, the dream is longer – the flapping of wings morphing into the gallop of her baby’s heartbeat. She sees the foetus: growing and growing, like a moon rising into the sky. Growing into a child. But not a boy, blond and blue-eyed like Simon. A girl, with dark hair, dark eyes. A child that looks like Aunt Violet. That looks like Kate.

A Weyward child.

In the morning, she takes the crumpled brochure from the bedside table and unfurls it. But she doesn’t dial the number. She can’t bring herself to. Every time she picks up the phone, she remembers the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, remembers the way it looked inside her, glimmering like a pearl. Remembers that dream-child, with hair and eyes the colour of jet, of richest earth.