Weyward(67)

There’s one last book in there. Kate fishes it out. It is very handsome – it looks as though it could be more valuable than all the others. She should tell Emily, she knows; ask her what sort of price it could fetch. But for some reason she doesn’t want anyone else to see it. She wants to keep it for herself.

She runs her fingers over the front cover. The book is bound in soft red leather, the title embossed in gilt:

Children’s and Household Tales

The Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm. She’d had her own copy as a child, she remembers – though her newer edition had been titled Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Some of the stories, she recalls, had been rather frightening, the characters – no matter how innocent and pure – meeting grisly ends. Hansel and Gretel, eaten by a witch. Good preparation for the real world, she supposes.

Could the book be a first edition? She opens it, looking for a publication date on the first page.

A crumple of yellowed paper falls onto her lap. Unfurling it, she sees it’s a handwritten letter, but before she has time to read it, Emily opens the storeroom door, dustpan and broom in hand.

She slips the letter into the pocket of her jacket before Emily can see.

Toffee creeps in, climbing over her, his claws digging into her legs. He settles into her lap and begins purring. The baby kicks in response.

‘I think she likes you,’ she says to the cat.

‘And he’s smitten with the pair of you,’ Emily laughs. Her feathered earrings quiver as she bends down to sweep up the wings. ‘I can only get him to purr by leaving the room. What have you got there?’

‘Fairy tales,’ says Kate quietly. ‘I wonder if it belonged to Violet,’ Emily says. ‘Though it’s odd, isn’t it – that she didn’t take her things with her, when she moved out of the Big House.’

‘Yes,’ Kate says, struggling to reconcile what she knows of Aunt Violet – her love of green dresses, the insect drawings, the strange collection of artefacts under her bed – with dark and horrible Orton Hall. She can’t picture her ever having lived there. ‘Perhaps she left in a hurry?’

Emily brings her a plate of chocolate digestives before heading back to the front of the shop to deal with a customer. Though she desperately wants to, Kate doesn’t dare open the letter in her pocket. She doesn’t want to risk Emily coming back and seeing it. It feels private, somehow. Secret.

At half past three, after they’ve closed up for the day, Emily offers her a lift home.

‘You shouldn’t be carrying heavy things, you know,’ she says. ‘Not now, in your condition.’

Kate looks down at her stomach, swaddled in layers of wool. She eases herself into an old coat of Violet’s, pulls a velvet green beret over her head.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘Anyway, I want to see the snow.’ It’s funny, now, to think of her early walks into the village, back when she’d first arrived at Crows Beck. How she’d flinched at the rustle of leaves, startled by a sparrow. Now, her amble home is something to look forward to; something to savour. She loves noticing the little seasonal changes of the landscape – how now, in winter, the trees reach bare and graceful towards the sky; the hedgerows are jewelled red with rowan berries.

She hoists the box onto her hip and pushes open the door, leaving behind the musty warmth of the bookshop. Outside, she inhales the wintry air, savouring its crispness. The cold prickles her cheeks, and she grins at the sight of the village: the buildings half hidden under great lips of snow; windows glowing orange. Someone has strung Christmas lights from the street-lamps, and as the sun sets pink in the sky, they twinkle into life.

For the first time in years, she has been looking forward to Christmas – her daughter is due a few days before. With only weeks to go, she can feel her body preparing for the birth: her breasts have swelled, and she’s begun to notice streaks of golden fluid on the inside of her bra. Colostrum, Dr Collins calls it.

Even her senses seem to have sharpened: sometimes, she thinks she can hear the most incredible sounds: the click of a beetle’s antennae on the ground; the whirr of a moth’s wings. A bird clamping its beak around a worm. It’s strange, how she feels attuned to things happening at such a great distance, and yet all the while her child’s heartbeat thrums in her ears.

But now, as she walks home, the countryside is still and silent, muffled by snow. It is so still, in a way that unsettles her: she has the sense that the land, and the creatures in it, are waiting for something. As she strides on, the only sounds are her own footsteps crunching in the snow, and the rustle of the letter in her pocket. The letter. Something about it doesn’t feel right. Foreboding creeps across her skin, setting the hairs on end.

When she does get home, she is almost afraid to look at it. She takes her time lighting the fire, boiling water for her tea, chopping vegetables for the stew that she’ll prepare later.

Finally, everything is done. She can no longer put it off.

She sits down at the kitchen table and unfurls the piece of paper.

The note is very yellow, almost translucent in places. Lined, as though it was torn from a school exercise book. There is no date.

Dear Father, Graham, Nanny Metcalfe, Mrs Kirkby and Miss Poole,

I am very sorry about what I have done, especially to whomever it was who found me.

Father, I know that you think taking one’s own life to be a mortal sin, and that you will be shocked – and perhaps ashamed – by what I have done. But please understand that I truly felt I had no other choice after what happened.