Weyward(72)

There was an invitation to a jumble sale at St Mary’s, dated September 1920. A crumpled letter from the Beckside branch of the Women’s Institute asking for volunteers to make socks and stockings for ‘our boys abroad’. Violet looked at the date: 1916.

Something familiar caught her eye at the top of the pile. A bundle of thick, creamy paper stood out from the other scraps and tatters. The Ayres coat of arms: a gilded osprey, suspended in flight. Father’s writing paper.

They were letters, from Father to a woman named Elizabeth Weyward. E. W. Lizzie, he called her.

Violet’s mother. It had to be. Her hands were shaking.

I have not slept this past week for thoughts of you, read one missive. It then beseeched Lizzie to be brave, for the sake of our union. The paper was thin with creases, as if it had been continually folded and unfolded, read and reread.

Another letter, jumbled in with the rest of the pack, stood out. It was not written in her father’s elegant, Etonian script. Instead, the writing was rushed and slapdash, at one point almost veering off the page.

Ma

I am sorry it has taken so long to write but I have not been able to get out a message to you. I’ve had nothing to write with but today Rupert has gone out hunting – the butler Rainham, who takes pity on me, has brought me some paper and ink. He has said he will take you this note on his way to Lancaster to purchase new clothes for Rupert.

It has taken me too long but I see that you were right. I should never have left home. For some time, Rupert has not let me go outside and now I am to be locked in my room.

How I hate this room. It is small, like a cage, with walls painted yellow as tansy flowers. It makes me think of the tansy tea we used to prepare for the village women, and it pains me to think that Violet will not know the cures and treatments that have been our way for hundreds of years. When I shut my eyes, all I see is that bright yellow, reminding me of what I have forsaken. My past, and my daughter’s future.

I miss her so, Ma. They will bring the babe to me so that he can feed, but they have not let me see Violet in days. I hear her cries echoing through those yellow walls.

My only comfort was Morg, but I told her to go, Ma – this is no life for a bird. All I have left now is one of her feathers. Though I do not like to look at it.

It reminds me of what I did. What Rupert made me do.

I should have listened to you, that day we argued down by the beck. ‘He takes you for a dog that he can train to eat from his hand,’ you said.

I thought he loved me for myself. But you were right. To him I am but an animal, like those he hunts and puts on display.

That was another thing you told me. That if a man saw my gifts for what they truly were, he would only use them for his own ends. I told myself I was doing it for her, for Violet. As you guessed, she had already quickened in my belly, then. I began to dream of her, grown into a dark-haired beauty, but alone and bleeding in our cottage. Whether from sickness or injury I did not know, but it was clear: my daughter would not survive a life of poverty such as the one I could give her. In my terror, I told Rupert of the dream and asked him what would become of our child. His parents would never acknowledge her, he said. He would be ruined if he married me, being only a second son, with no title to smooth his path in the world. And worse – his parents already knew. They know about the child we’d made together that night in the woods, when only the moon saw my fear and heard my cries. They planned to drive us – the last Weyward women – away from Crows Beck, he said. From our home, where our forebears have lived for centuries.

But, he said, I had the power to give us all a chance of happiness. He would have his title, and my daughter would have a life of safety, riches. Acceptance.

I liked the idea of that. I was never strong like you, Ma. The things the villagers said, the looks they gave us – I never could stand it. I yearned for a life free from stares and whispers.

And so I did the terrible thing he asked.

I lay in wait, hidden by gorse and heather, as dusk spread over the fells. Morg dug her claws into my shoulder. I heard them before I saw them – the whinnying of the horses, the clatter of hooves. I waited until they were close enough to the edge of the hill, where the ground cut away sharply into a ravine. When Morg took flight, I shut my eyes, opening them only when the screams had stopped, when all that remained was the twisted shape of the carriage on the rocks below, the spokes of one wheel still spinning. Something sparkled on the ground near my feet – a pocket watch, a family heirloom that Rupert had spoken of with great envy. Its face was cracked and sharp, so that when I picked it up, drops of blood welled along my finger.

I stood for a while, looking. Ignoring the horror in my heart.

I thought I was like Altha, our fearless ancestor, that our deeds linked us across time. I thought I was good and brave, made strong by her blood.

But I was wrong.

We took three lives that day, Morg and I. I told myself that they deserved it – Rupert’s parents, his older brother too. That they had been cruel to the man I loved; that they would hurt you, hurt my child, without remorse. But truthfully, Ma, I didn’t know them – or what they might have done – at all. Rupert has lied about so many things. I suspect now that his parents never knew of our child, never planned to drive us from our home.

I wish I had seen it before – that his words held as much truth as a fairy story. That he never loved me at all.

Sometimes I wonder if he planned this from the first. He’d been watching me, he said, even before we danced at the May Day Festival. He saw how I was special, and wanted me for his wife. I believed him, from the way he looked at me. A blaze in his eyes that I took for love.