Weyward(59)

‘The accused was not brought to touch the corpse; and thus we cannot know if it would have bled at her touch. The court, aided by the good Doctor Smythson, has examined the accused’s body for the witch’s mark.

‘None was found.

‘Having heard this evidence, I ask the gentlemen of the jury to deliver their verdict, bearing in mind their duty to God and their consciences.’

A hush fell over the court as the foreman stood. My breath caught in my chest. It did not matter what the judge had said. I could see the gallows. Could feel the noose rough against my neck. I thought of all the other women who had been put to death before me, the fate my mother had tried to shield me from. The women of North Berwick. Of Pendle Hill. Soon I would join them. I was sure of it.

‘Of the charge of murder by witchcraft,’ he said, ‘we find the accused … not guilty.’

Then, I was floating. Dreaming. I could hear the condemnation from the gallery, but it seemed to be sounding from miles away. My body was weightless, as though I were in water. I looked for Grace. Next to her, William Metcalfe had his head in his hands. So he did not see it. He did not see Grace look up at me. He did not see the expression on her face.





29


VIOLET


Violet spent the weeks after Frederick departed in her room.

‘Lovesick,’ she heard Nanny Metcalfe say to Graham one morning, who had come to ask if she’d seen his biology textbook.

‘Over whom?’ she heard him hiss. Then, louder, for her benefit: ‘Bloody hell, Violet, not you too.’

Later that day, he’d pushed a note under her door that read:

Forget about the old git. You’re as bad as Father, pining for his lapdog!

Violet didn’t write back.

She had decided that it would be easier to forget about what had happened in the woods if she never spoke of it to anyone. But it wasn’t. At night, she dreamed of Frederick, forcing his way inside her while the trees loomed overheard, spinning in circles. It was as if he had left a spore of himself in her brain, which was now multiplying and spreading through her neurons. She felt infected. She remembered the sticky substance he had left dribbling out of her.

This was the thing she wanted to forget most of all. Whenever she thought of it, something tugged at her brain, threatening to form a connection. It – the sticky thing – had reminded her of a word she had read in Graham’s biology textbook. Spermatophore. It was the substance that male insects used to fertilise the eggs of female insects. She refused to think about it further. She couldn’t bring herself to find the section of the textbook that covered it: she had hidden it under her mattress, along with the soiled underwear and stockings.

Most of the time, Violet lay cocooned in blankets, quite cold although it was past midsummer by now. She didn’t feel right in her body – the room continued to spin even when she wasn’t having nightmares, and there was a heaviness to her limbs, as if her bones had been threaded through with lead. She had a constant urge to bathe, to slough off the tainted skin in hope of finding a new, clean layer beneath.

She could still hear properly: starlings in the morning, the chirp of crickets in the evening. But there was a new edge of pain to these sounds, one that she hadn’t noticed before: an owlet in search of its mother, a bat lamenting its broken wing, a bee in its death throes.

Sometimes, it all seemed too much to bear, suffering weighting the air like gravity, pressing down on her skin. It was as if the sparkle had gone from life, as if the apple had withered and rotted.

At first, she managed to draw comfort from her mother’s things. The silky, speckled strands of Morg’s feather, the locket with the delicate W, the tiny key that had lain hidden inside it for years. But what was the key for? There were no longer any locked rooms in the Hall. She began to wonder if Frederick had lied about her mother – about that white-faced, desperate woman, needing to be locked away. She could almost believe that he had made it up, if it weren’t for the word scratched into the wainscoting. Weyward.

Crouching next to it one night, when the Hall was silent save for the mice that rustled in the walls, she wondered whether her mother had used the key to gouge those letters into the paint. She couldn’t bear to think of her like that. Instead, she tried desperately to conjure up the memories that had been triggered by the handkerchief: the scent of lavender, the dark fall of hair, the warm embrace … sometimes she even thought she could remember Morg, appraising her with a beady, glittering eye …

She didn’t even know where her mother was buried. When she was younger, she had spent long afternoons carefully examining the crooked headstones in the grounds, next to the old chapel they no longer used. She had knelt in cold soil, gently brushing away green threads of lichen, to no avail. The graves all belonged to long-dead Ayreses; even the most recently departed had been in the ground for a century.

Perhaps she was buried in the village graveyard. That was where she had been from, wasn’t it? Violet thought about running away, running to Crows Beck and looking for her mother’s grave. But what would that solve? She would still be dead.

And Violet would still be alone. Alone with what had happened, that day in the woods.

There was only one way to escape Frederick’s pollution of her mind, her body. Her very cells.

Violet wasn’t sure she believed in Heaven or Hell (though she doubted they’d let her into the former, after Frederick had sullied her so). She was a lover of science, after all. She knew that when she died, her body would be broken down by worms and other insects, and then she’d provide nutrients for the life-sustaining plants above ground. She thought of her beech tree. She’d rather like to be buried under it, to give it sustenance. And while the tree fed from her, she would feel … nothing. Oblivion. She imagined the nothingness, as heavy and dark as a blanket, or the night sky. Her mind and body would cease to exist, along with the spores Frederick had left behind. She would be free.