Weyward(80)

She remembers the strength in her father’s hands, pushing her to safety. The last time he ever touched her. He died for her, the same way she would die for her child. Hot tears stream down her cheeks. She isn’t sure who they are for – the little girl who watched her father die, or the woman who spent twenty long years blaming herself for his death.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she says out loud, acknowledging the truth of it for the first time. ‘It was an accident.’

The crow wheels right, disappearing into the distance, one final cry echoing.

‘The baby’s fine,’ says Dr Collins later, her open features creasing into a smile. She is crouched by Kate’s stomach, listening intently to her stethoscope.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Kate. She hasn’t felt her daughter move since the car accident, since stumbling into the GP surgery, shivering from cold. The awful image rears up again – her child frozen in the womb, tiny fingers curled closed.

‘Here, have a listen,’ says the doctor, passing her the stethoscope.

There it is, the thrum of her child’s heartbeat. Relief floods her body; tears burn behind her eyes.

‘Like I said before,’ says Dr Collins, ‘this one’s a fighter.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be OK until your mother gets here?’ Emily is loitering in the doorway of the cottage. Her husband Mike, waiting in the car, beeps the horn.

It is a bright day; the snow-topped hedges sparkle in the sun. Kate watches as a waxwing forages for rowan berries, its crest quivering. It chitters as it is joined by its mate. Starlings sweep overhead, making shapes in the sky.

‘Positive. Thanks so much for everything.’ Emily has stocked the fridge with all the food Kate could possibly need – microwaveable meals, bread, milk. She’s brought nappies, and a blow-up mattress for Kate’s mother to sleep on. She and her husband even arranged for her car to be towed to a garage in Beckside. Kate doesn’t know how to thank them enough.

‘All right, well you just let me know as soon as anything happens! Soon as there’s even the hint of a contraction, I want to know about it!’ Emily gets into her car and waves goodbye, and Kate feels a pang of sadness for her friend, as she remembers what Emily said to her on Bonfire Night.

I had a baby, once.

She still can’t quite believe that she – they – escaped the accident unscathed. Each day since, she’s braced herself for crisis: for pain in her gut, blooms of blood on her underwear. But everything has been fine: the baby is moving again, wriggling and fluttering inside her. In the evenings, Kate watches the surface of her stomach ripple, marvelling at a tiny foot protruding here, a little hand there.

That she will soon hold her child in her arms feels nothing short of miraculous. Kate wonders what colour her eyes will be, after they’ve changed from new-born blue. What she’ll smell like.

Her mother’s flight leaves tomorrow. Once she arrives, she’ll get the train from London, then hire a car so that they’ll be able to get to the hospital, when the baby comes.

She only has one more day to herself. As she drifts around the cottage, aimlessly touching surfaces, picking things up and putting them down again, she wonders what her mother will make of it. Of the framed sketches of insects; the centipede preserved behind glass. Of the corner of the bedroom she’s prepared for the baby; the second-hand cot, draped with Violet’s old shawls for blankets. The handmade mobile, twirling with leaves and feathers, the glittering bee brooch now the centrepiece.

And of Kate herself – her cropped hair; the strange outfits she pulls together from her great-aunt’s wardrobe. Today she has thrown the beaded cape around her shoulders – the twinkling of its beads reminds her of the time she met Aunt Violet. It helps her feel ready to bring her daughter into the world. Ready to protect her, at all costs. She will be strong, just like Violet was.

You remind me of her so much, Emily had said. You have her spirit.

Kate touches the W pendant around her neck. She thinks of the insects that rose from the soil of Aunt Violet’s garden. The birds that have flocked to the cottage since her arrival, as if to greet her. Even now, she can hear the hoarse cries of crows from the sycamore, where they throng its snow-covered branches, darkest jet against white. She thinks of her experience in the woods. That humming feeling in her blood; the crow that led her home.

She thinks, also, of the things she’s heard about Violet: of her fearlessness; her love of insects and other creatures. The infestation at Orton Hall.

Mother of beetles.

And of Altha Weyward, tried for witchcraft. Kate still doesn’t know what became of her – whether she was executed; where she was buried. But she’s been leaving sprigs of mistletoe and ivy by the cross under the sycamore tree. Just in case.

In the evening, Kate is heating one of Emily’s meals – homemade tomato soup – when the phone rings. She rushes to get it – thinking it’s her mother, maybe, or Emily. Or someone from the doctor’s surgery, calling to check up on her.

‘Hello?’

For a moment, Kate hears nothing – only her blood ringing in her ears. Then, that voice. The one she wishes she could forget.

‘I’ve found you.’

Simon.





40


ALTHA


Grace did not come to the cottage again. I saw her only from a distance, at church, where her husband sat close to her, afterwards holding her arm tight as if he had her on a yoke. Her face was empty under her cap, and if she felt my eyes on her, she did not look up. At least I knew she was alive.