Weyward(64)

But I promised to set things down as they happened and this I will do. The act of it brings me comfort. Perhaps if someone reads this, if someone speaks my name after my body has rotted in the earth, I will live on.

I am trying to think of where the beginning is. Who decides where things begin and end? I do not know if time moves in a straight line, or a circle. Here, the years do not pass so much as loop back on themselves: winter becomes spring becomes summer becomes autumn becomes winter again. Sometimes I think that all of time is happening at once. So you could say that this story begins now, as I sit down to write it, or you could say that it began when the first Weyward woman was born, so many moons ago.

Or you could say it began a twelvemonth ago today.

Last winter was a cold one, stretching its fingers well into spring. On this particular night early in 1618, there was a storm, and so when I heard the pounding, I thought it was only the wind at the door. But the goat, who I keep near me in the winter months, looked up with eyes of liquid fear.

A high female voice called my name.

When you have grown up with someone, as close as sisters, you come to know her voice even better than your own. Even if you have not heard it call your name for seven years.

So I knew before I opened the door and saw her, standing there with shadows ringing her eyes, that it was Grace.





32


VIOLET


The doctor’s hands were cold on Violet’s abdomen.

‘Hmm,’ he said. Violet could see white specks of dandruff clinging to his brilliantined hair. He turned to Nanny Metcalfe, who hovered next to Violet like an anxious moth, her hands wrung red.

‘Are her menses regular?’ he asked.

Menses? Whatever were those? Violet wondered if the doctor had meant her mens, Latin for mind. Well, that certainly wasn’t regular. Far from it. For instance, although she knew that it was the doctor who was touching her, not Frederick, and that she was lying comfortable and safe in her bed rather than in the woods, her heart fluttered in her throat. The smell of brandy and crushed flowers returned and she fought the impulse to retch. She wanted desperately for the doctor to take his hands away, for him to stop poking and prodding at her stomach. It was taking all her willpower not to scream.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Nanny Metcalfe, flushing. ‘Always on the fifteenth, like clockwork.’

Violet thought of the clots and clumps of blood that came out of her every month, accompanied by days of cramping pain. So that was what he meant. She’d never heard the medical term for it before – Nanny Metcalfe always referred to it as her curse. It had barely occurred to Violet that it was something that happened to other girls, too. Last month was the first time it had let her alone in years. She hadn’t missed it one bit.

Nanny Metcalfe was frowning at her.

‘She didn’t ask me for any rags last month, mind,’ she was saying to the doctor. Violet wished they would stop talking about her as if she weren’t lying right there. Her cheeks grew hot at the mention of these private subjects to a complete stranger.

‘Hmm,’ said the doctor again. There was more prodding, and then he asked a question so bizarre that Violet thought she must have misheard.

‘Is she intact?’

Violet thought of the pictures from Father’s newspaper, of soldiers wounded in the war, arms ending at elbows or legs ending at the knee.

‘As far as I know, Doctor,’ said Nanny Metcalfe. There was a slight quaver to her voice, as if she were afraid.

Then, without warning, the doctor had slid his fingers between her legs, to that place that had felt like a bruise since the day in the woods. She winced from pain and shock.

‘She is not,’ he said, looking at her with mild disgust. Nanny Metcalfe gasped, clapping her hands to her mouth. Violet felt cold shame spreading through her. Somehow, he had known exactly what had happened between her and Frederick, almost as if he had looked inside her brain.

The doctor had her urinate into a humiliatingly clear vial, which he held up to the light and inspected briefly before putting it in the pocket of his jacket. Violet turned her face away.

‘I’ll telephone in a few days with the results,’ he said.

Nanny Metcalfe nodded, barely able to force out a ‘Good day, Doctor,’ as he went down the stairs. They sat together in silence as they listened to Father’s study door opening, a low murmur of conversation, followed by the heavy clink of the front door and the sputter of the doctor’s motor car.

A moment of stillness hung in the air, like a raindrop threatening to fall from a leaf. Then there was a great crash, and the sound of glass breaking. A high-pitched whine from Cecil. Later, Nanny Metcalfe would report that Father was so angry that he had swept the Jacobean side table in the hall clear of its ornaments in one fluid movement.

‘What have you done?’ said Nanny Metcalfe, who had still not explained to Violet what was happening. But she didn’t need to, not really. Violet thought of the word that had lingered on the edge of her consciousness for weeks, no matter how hard she tried not to think about it. Spermatophore.

Violet barely slept, for fear of dreaming about the woods. About Frederick. She passed the days between the doctor’s visit and his telephone call in fog, halfway between sleep and wakefulness. She tried her hardest not to succumb to her drooping eyelids and heavy limbs, but often she found herself in a terrifying kaleidoscope of dreams: Frederick on top of her, under a tree-veined sky; her stomach distended and dark, rotting from the inside out. Mayflies, pulsing all around.