Weyward(85)

She wipes her bloodied hand on her trousers, then types out a quick text to Emily.

Please can you call police. Abusive ex-boyfriend at cottage. Hiding in attic.

Kate holds her breath.

Message failed to send.

She tries to re-send it, greeted again and again by that cold, impersonal sentence.

She’s on her own.

There must be something in the attic she can use to defend herself. Something she can use as a weapon. If only she’d thought to grab the fire poker from the sitting room.

She lifts one of the candles and looks around, searching for a crowbar, a hockey stick … anything.

The candlelight passes over the bureau, catching on its golden handles.

She sees something that she didn’t notice before.

She crawls to the bureau, as slowly and quietly as she can, sucking in her breath.

There is a W carved onto the handle of the locked drawer.

She pulls the necklace out from under her shirt, slips it off. The engravings match.

Kate runs her fingers over the pendant. There is a tiny bump at the bottom of the pendant, barely visible. She presses it, holding her breath. Nothing happens.

She presses it again.

This time, the pendant springs open with a snap. Not a pendant after all. A locket. Inside is a rolled piece of paper. She lifts it out carefully, revealing the small golden key.

The paper looks white and fresh, as if it has been placed there recently. She unrolls it, heart thumping in her chest.

The handwriting has changed: become more refined, elegant, but still she recognises the spidery loops from the note she found in the Brothers Grimm book.

Aunt Violet.

I hope she can help you as she helped me. That is all it says. No reference to who the mysterious ‘she’ might be. But as she carefully turns the key in the lock, Kate thinks that she knows already.

She eases the drawer out, little by little, terrified that it will creak and alert Simon to her presence. She doesn’t breathe until the drawer is open enough for her to see inside.

A book.

She lifts it out of the drawer, inhaling the scent of age and must. As she holds the book in her hands, she hears the first drops of rain fall on the roof.

The leather cover is worn and soft. It looks old. Centuries old.

She opens it. The paper – it isn’t paper, she sees now, but parchment – is delicate. Diaphanous, like an insect’s wings.

The writing is faded and cramped, so that at first it is illegible. She holds the candle closer, watches the words form. Her heart beats faster as she reads the first line.

‘Ten days they’d held me there …’





45


ALTHA


I have not written this last day. Yesterday, I came to my parchment and ink, but the words could not come.

Last night, I dreamed of my mother, her words as she lay on her deathbed. Then, I dreamed that I was back in the dungeon at Lancaster, the shadow of death hanging over me. When I woke safe in my bed to the morning birdsong, I nearly cried with relief. Then I wrapped myself in my shawl and sat down to write.

To tell the story, as it really happened, I must put things down on this page that my mother would not have wanted me to. Things that she told me were not to be spoken of, with anyone, or they would risk our exposure. I must speak of the promise I made, and how I broke it.

I have decided that I will lock these papers away and see to it that they are not read until I have left this earth and joined my mother in the next life. Perhaps I will leave them to my daughter. I like the thought of that: a long line of Weyward women, stretching after me. For the first child born to a Weyward is always female, my mother told me. That is why she only had me, just as her mother only had her. There are enough men in the world already, she used to say.

I was fourteen, still weak from my first blood, when she told me what it really meant to be a Weyward. It was autumn, a twelvemonth since the couple had come in the middle of the night, since my mother had cast out her crow. Even longer since that last, precious summer with Grace.

My mother and I had been walking in the woods at dusk, gathering mushrooms, when we came across a rabbit in a trap. Its poor body was torn and bloodied, but it was still alive, the eyes flickering with pain. I knelt down, muddying the dress that my mother had laundered only the previous day, and brushed my little fingers against its flank. Its fur felt wet, the heartbeat faint and slow under its skin. I could feel that it feared death, but also welcomed it. The end to suffering. The natural way of things.

My mother looked about her, scanning the dark shapes of the trees as if to be sure we were alone. Then, she crouched next to me and put her hand over mine.

‘Be at peace,’ she said. I felt the heartbeat fade beneath our fingers, watched the light flicker from the eyes. The rabbit was gone, freed from this world. It had nothing to fear of traps and hunters now.

We walked home in silence. Already then, she was weakening: her back, which had always been straight, was curving inwards, her long plait of hair was dry as grass. I took her arm and rested it on my shoulders, so that I might support her weight.

When we were home, and night was falling over our garden outside, she sat me at the table while the stew warmed on the fire. I have set down the words she then spoke to me as best as I can recall them, though the memory grows dimmer with each passing year.

She said that there was something I needed to learn, now that I had passed into womanhood. But I must not speak of it to anyone.