Weyward(4)

It was just as well that Father never learned of this incident. As far as he was concerned, animals belonged on one’s plate or mounted on one’s wall. The only exception to this rule was Cecil, his Rhodesian ridgeback: a fearsome beast he had beaten into viciousness over the years. Violet was forever rescuing all manner of small creatures from his slobbering jaws. Most recently, a jumping spider that now resided in a hatbox under her bed, lined with an old petticoat. She had named him – or her, it was rather hard to tell – Goldie, for the colourful stripes on his legs.

Nanny Metcalfe was sworn to secrecy.

Though there were lots of things Nanny Metcalfe hadn’t told her either, Violet reflected later, as she dressed for dinner. After she’d changed into a soft linen frock – the offending wool skirt discarded on the floor – she turned to the looking glass. Her eyes were deep and dark, quite unlike Father and Graham’s watery blue ones. Violet thought her face quite strange-looking, what with the unsightly red mole on her forehead, but she was proud of those eyes. And of her hair, which was dark too, with an opalescent sheen not unlike the feathers of the crows that lived in the trees surrounding the Hall.

‘Do I look like my mother?’ Violet had been asking for as long as she could remember. There were no pictures of her mother. All she had of her was an old necklace with a dented oval pendant. The pendant had a W engraved on it, and she asked anyone who’d listen if her mother’s name had been Winifred or Wilhelmina. (‘Was she called Wallis?’ she asked Father once, having seen the name on the front page of his newspaper. He sent a bewildered Violet to her room without any dinner.)

Nanny Metcalfe was just as unhelpful.

‘Can’t quite recall your ma,’ she’d say. ‘I was not long arrived when she passed.’

‘They met at the May Day Festival in 1925,’ Mrs Kirkby would offer, nodding sagely. ‘She were the May Queen, being so pretty. They were very much in love. But don’t ask your father about it again, or you’ll get a right whipping.’

These crumbs of information were hardly satisfactory. As a child, Violet wanted to know so much more – where did her parents marry? Did her mother wear a veil, a flower crown (she pictured white stars of hawthorn, to match a delicate lace dress)? And did Father blink away tears as he promised to have and to hold, until death did them part?

In the absence of any real facts, Violet clung to this image until she became certain that it had really happened. Yes – her father had loved her mother desperately, and death had done them part (she had a shadowy idea that her mother had died giving birth to Graham). That was why he couldn’t bear to talk about it.

But occasionally, something would blur the image in Violet’s head, like a ripple disturbing the surface of a pond.

One night, when she was twelve, she’d been foraging for jam and bread in the pantry when Nanny Metcalfe and Mrs Kirkby walked into the kitchens with the newly employed Miss Poole.

She’d heard the scraping of chairs on stone and the great creak of the ancient kitchen table as they sat down, then the pop and clink of Mrs Kirkby opening a bottle of sherry and filling their glasses. Violet had frozen mid-chew.

‘How are you finding it so far, dear?’ Nanny Metcalfe had asked Miss Poole.

‘Well – Lord knows I’m trying, but she seems such a difficult child,’ Miss Poole had said. ‘I spend half the day looking for her as she tears around the grounds, getting grass stains all over her clothes. And she – she …’

Here, Miss Poole took an audibly deep breath.

‘She talks to the animals! Even the insects!’

There was a pause.

‘I suppose you think I’m ridiculous,’ Miss Poole had said.

‘Oh no, dear,’ said Mrs Kirkby. ‘Well, we’d be the first to tell you that there’s something different about the child. She’s quite … how did you put it, Ruth?’

‘Uncanny,’ Nanny Metcalfe said.

‘No wonder,’ Mrs Kirkby continued, ‘what with the mother, being how she was.’

‘The mother?’ Miss Poole asked. ‘She died, didn’t she?’

‘Yes. Awful business,’ said Nanny Metcalfe. ‘Just after I arrived. Didn’t have much chance to know her before that, though.’

‘She were a local lass,’ Mrs Kirkby said. ‘From Crows Beck way. The master’s parents would’ve been furious … but they’d passed, just the month before the wedding. His older brother, too. Coach accident, it was. Very sudden.’

There was a sharp intake of breath from Miss Poole.

‘What – and they still went ahead with the wedding? Was Lady Ayres … in the family way?’

Mrs Kirkby made a noncommittal noise before continuing.

‘He was very taken with her, I’ll say that much. At first, anyway. A rare beauty, she were. And so much like the young lady, not just in looks.’

‘How do you mean?’

Another pause.

‘Well, she were – what Ruth said. Uncanny. Strange.’





3


ALTHA


The men took me from the gaol through the village square. I tried to twist my body away, to hide my face, but one of them pinned my arms behind my back and pushed me forward. My hair swung in front of me, as loose and soiled as a whore’s.