Weyward(79)

What would become of her then? She thought of her mother, who had married the man who swooned over her dark eyes and blood-red lips. Who had ended up alone in a locked room, scratching her name into a wall so that there would be some evidence that she had existed, before suffering a gruesome, painful death.

Violet would not let that happen to her.

The child was the only reason for Frederick to marry her, surely. That was his obligation and interest, the rope that tied them together. A noose, shackling her from the inside.

Violet saw things clearly now. She had to cut the rope.

The manuscript. Bringing on the menses. Menses. The same strange word that Doctor Radcliffe had used for her monthly blood.

Outside, the garden shimmered with heat. She waded through the helleborine, its flowers leaving crimson smears on her dress. The air hummed with insects, the sun catching on the wings of a damselfly. Violet smiled, remembering the words from her mother’s letter.

Walls painted yellow as tansy flowers.

It was as if she was reaching out to her from beyond the grave, guiding her.

She found the plant under the sycamore: bobbing with yellow flowers, each one comprised of tiny buds clustered together like a beetle’s eggs.

It had worked for Grace. There was no reason why it wouldn’t work for her, too.





39


KATE


Kate draws her hood over her head as she steps into the woods. Here, the wind is quieter; the close-knit trees arching around to protect her from the elements.

But still she shivers, panting with fear – her breath a white cloud in front of her.

The silence is unnerving. She can hear nothing but the blizzard. Suddenly, she longs for the sight of an owl, or a robin – even the flutter of a moth. Anything but this white, deadened world.

Snowflakes swirl around her, landing in icy bursts on her exposed skin. She wishes she had some gloves. Instead, she draws the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands, winds her scarf around her nose and mouth. Her eyes water from the cold.

There is a crack in one of her boots – an old pair of Aunt Violet’s that she’s been meaning to get resoled – and now the snow seeps in, drenching her foot.

She pushes through the trees, all the while forcing herself not to think about the baby, about the stillness in her womb. She has to get to the village. She has to get help.

After a while, the trees all begin to look the same, with their branches quivering under matching lips of snow. She is no longer sure which is the right direction. A ladder of pink fungus creeps up a tree trunk in a way that looks horribly familiar, and she is seized by the fear that she has passed it before.

Is she walking in circles? Awful images flood her mind: her body, curled on the forest floor, barely visible under its shroud of snow. Her child frozen inside her, tiny bones calcifying in her womb. She stumbles over a tree root and cries out, her voice dying in the wind.

Something answers.

At first she thinks she must be dreaming, like a lost traveller hallucinating a mirage in the desert.

Then she hears it again. A bird, calling.

It’s real.

She looks up, breathing hard as she scans the canopy of trees. Something shimmers. A liquid eye. Blue-black feathers, dusted white.

A crow.

Panic flickers, but fades.

Something else is there, closer than ever, on the other side of her fear. That strange warmth she felt in Aunt Violet’s garden, when the insects rose from the earth. She pushes through her panic, breaches the wall to find the light, the spark she holds inside.

It reaches her veins, hums in her blood. Her nerves – in her ear canals, in the pads of her fingers, even the surface of her tongue – pulse and glow.

The knowledge comes from deep within her, some hidden place she has long buried.

If she wants to live, she has to follow the crow.

After a while, she sees a greyness ahead of her, feels wind on her face. The woods are almost like a tunnel, she thinks. A tunnel of trees. She is coming to the end of it.

Up ahead, there is a gap in the trunks. Beyond it, she can see the rise and slope of the fell, like the haunches of an enormous animal, furred pale with snow. Crouched and waiting.

She has done it. She has made it through the woods.

On the fell, she feels so exposed that she almost wishes for the claustrophobia of the woods. The wind whips her face and takes the sound from her ears. Her lips and nose sting with the cold.

The crow is still there. Flying above her in blue-black loops. She can barely hear its guttural call above the rush of the wind in her ears.

At the crest of the hill, she can see the orange glimmer of the village below. Coming down the fell is easier: she is sheltered from the wind, now. Her hands and face feel raw, and a blister throbs on one heel. But the snow is gentle on her face. And she is almost back at the cottage. Almost home.

She looks up. The clouds have parted to reveal a smattering of stars, bright in the dusk. She watches the crow and feels no fear – instead, she is struck by its beauty as it glides away, the light grey on its feathers.

She has been afraid of crows since the day of her father’s death. Since she saw the velvet flash of wings, dark in the summer sky.

Since the day she became a monster.

But she isn’t a monster, and never was. She was a child – just nine years old – with nothing in her heart but love and wonder. For the birds that made arrows in the sky, for the pink coils of earthworms in the soil, for the bees that hummed through the summer. Her throat aches as she reaches into her pocket, fingers closing around the bee brooch. She holds it up to the night and it is as radiant as the stars. Almost as if it had never been damaged at all.