Weyward(9)

‘Away?’

‘To finishing school. You’ll need to learn to behave properly if you’re to have any chance of making a match. If you can’t show me that you’re capable of comporting yourself like the young lady you are, there are several institutions that may be suitable for the task. And where none of this gallivanting around outdoors, collecting grubby leaves and twigs like some sort of savage will be permitted.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Perhaps they can stop you from turning out like … her.’

‘Her?’ Violet’s heart fluttered. Did he mean her mother?

But Father ignored her question. ‘That’s all,’ he said, looking up at her for the first time. ‘Good night.’

There was a strange expression on his face. As if he were looking at her but seeing someone else.

Violet waited until she was safely alone in her bedroom before she let the tears fall. She wept quietly as she changed into her nightdress and got into bed. After a while, she tried to steady her breathing, but it was no good. The air in her little room tasted stale, and – not for the first time – she had the feeling that she was as out of place in the Hall as a fish would be in the clouds. She longed for the sturdy embrace of the beech tree, for the night breeze on her skin.

The snippet of conversation she’d overheard when she was younger rang in her ears.

So much like the young lady, not just in looks.

Had her mother been like this, too? Had nature pulled at her heart the same way it pulled at Violet’s now?

And what could possibly be so wrong with that?

Sighing, she kicked off the coverlet. After turning out the lamp, she crept over to the window, pushed aside the horrid black-out curtain and opened the sash.

The moon shone like a pearl in the dusky sky, lighting up the cragged hills. There was a gentle wind, and Violet heard the trees shift and murmur. She closed her eyes, listening to the hoot of an owl, the flap of a bat’s wings, a badger rustling on the way to its burrow.

This was home. Not the Hall, with its dingy corridors and endless tartan and the threat of Father hulking around every corner.

But if she were sent away … she might never see any of it again. The owls, the bats, the badgers. The old beech that she loved, and its village of insects.

Instead, she’d be cloistered indoors, and forced to learn all manner of useless conversational skills and rules of etiquette. All so that Father could offer her up to some grizzled old baron or another – as if she were something to be bartered with for favours.

Or something to be rid of.

But no – he wouldn’t send her away. She wouldn’t let him. When she left Orton Hall – she imagined herself moving deftly through a jungle; brushing against ferns dripping with beetles – it would be on her own terms. Not Father’s, nor anyone else’s.

She’d be here, she vowed to herself, not at some horrible finishing school, when winter came to take the leaves from the trees. She would even stay inside, if that was what it took. Just until the visit from the dullard relative was over. That would show Father how well behaved she could be.





6


KATE


Kate burrows under the duvet to muffle the clink of beak on glass, waiting for the crow to give up its assault on the window. She takes deep, shuddering breaths, gagging on the musty scent of the bedding. Eventually, the sound fades, and she imagines that she can hear the cut of wings through air as the crow flies away. Her breathing settles, the thrum of her pulse slows.

She lifts her head and looks about the room: the stooped ceiling, the green-painted walls that are almost convex with age, closing in. Framed photographs stare down at her, along with sketches – all of animals, insects, birds. One image looks three-dimensional; sculptural, almost: a tawny snake, gleaming beneath its glass frame. Struck by its russet glimmer, she takes a closer look. It isn’t a snake at all, she sees, but the preserved body of a centipede: shining wetly in thick segments, caught forever in glass.

She shudders as she reads aloud the curling script on the frame, the words strange as a spell.

‘Scolopendra gigantea.’

The thick silence makes her dizzy. Sick, almost, with the unfamiliar feeling of freedom. It sits uneasily, like rough cloth against her skin. It needs adjusting to.

This is the longest she’s gone without speaking to Simon since they met six years ago, when she was twenty-three. Thinking of that first night makes something in her stomach hurt. She can see herself clearly: impossibly young and shy, standing with her friends in a pub in London. Though she wonders now if ‘friends’ was ever the right word for the women she met at university. She never managed to match her speech to the cadence of theirs, never quite correctly timed a joke or a laugh. It’s a feeling she’s had since childhood: that she is somehow separate, closed off from everyone else.

The feeling of separateness had been particularly strong that night, because her mother had just moved to Canada with her new husband, leaving Kate all alone. It was no more than she deserved, but it still hurt. She remembers looking down into her pint glass, full of the heavy, sour ale she pretended to like, trying to think of an excuse for leaving early.

She’d looked up, with the idea of heading to the toilets for a reprieve, when she’d seen him. It was his posture she’d first admired. The easy, leonine grace with which he leaned against the bar as he surveyed the room. Flushing with surprise and pleasure, she had realised that he was looking at her. A deep, primal part of her had recognised something in his slow, sensuous smile when their eyes met. Had known what would happen, even then.