Weyward(97)

At first, the prospect of being away from Weyward Cottage terrified her: she’d taken a room in a ladies’ boarding house run by a formidable woman by the name of Basset (‘Her bite’s even worse than her bark,’ the residents used to joke) who charged her thirty shillings a week for a damp room with an unreliable tap. She would lie awake in her rickety single bed, listening to the pipes groan in the wall, and clasp the brooch tight in her hand, imagining she was in her garden, watching bees dance through the helleborine.

Later, she took the brooch with her everywhere. This way, no matter where she was – in Botswana, tracking the Transvaal thick-tailed scorpion, or in the Khao Sok rainforest in Thailand studying Atlas moths – she was never far from home.

She opened the window, a task that seemed to take an inordinately long time. Afterwards, Violet’s arms shook from the effort. They really were quite pathetic, now. She still got a shock, sometimes, when she looked in the mirror. With her thin, weedy limbs and her stooped back, she rather resembled a praying mantis.

She heaved herself back into bed. She looked for her reading glasses, which she normally left perched on top of the tower of reading material on her bedside table. They weren’t there. Damn. The girl from the council must have moved them. It was ridiculous, really – Violet didn’t need some stranger in her house, fetching her cups of tea and wanting to tidy up. Last week, she’d asked if she might help ‘Mrs Ayres’ out by cleaning out the attic.

‘Absolutely not,’ Violet had barked, touching the necklace under her shirt.

No reading tonight, then. Well, that was all right. She might just look out of the window. It was half past nine, but the sun was only just beginning to sink in the sky, turning the clouds rosy. She could hear the birds, singing at the top of the sycamore. The insects, too: crickets, bumblebees. They made her think of Kate, Graham’s granddaughter. Her great-niece.

She remembered the first time she saw Kate, at Graham’s funeral. Violet had been so consumed by grief that she was barely aware of Graham’s son and his wife, their little daughter. She’d have been about six, then. A tiny thing, with watchful eyes under her mop of dark hair. There was something familiar about her; the coltish legs, the sharp angles of her face. The prim white socks streaked with mud, the leaf quivering in her hair.

Even then she didn’t see it.

Violet had long accepted that the Weyward line would end with her death. The only daughter she would ever have – or the feeble beginnings of her – lay buried under the sycamore tree. Frederick was paying for what he had done – she felt a dark flush of delight every time she thought of him at Orton Hall, besieged by mayflies – but she couldn’t change what really mattered. The line that had continued for centuries, flowing as surely as the gold waters of the beck, was coming to an end. And there was nothing Violet could do about it.

But after the wake, Graham’s son, Henry, and his wife had come to Violet’s for tea. Henry was so like Graham: even the way he leaned forward as he listened to her, face furrowed with concentration. He enjoyed her story about travelling to India in the 1960s, to undertake a field study of Asian giant hornets (she still held the record for the only person who had held one without being stung).

She’d rather forgotten about the child, who was playing outside, until she heard her murmuring through the window.

‘There you go,’ the girl was saying. ‘See, told you I wouldn’t bite.’

Who on earth was she talking to? Violet opened the window and poked her head out. Kate was sitting cross-legged in the garden, looking down at something she was holding in her hand. A bumblebee.

Violet felt tears spring to her eyes, a lightness in her chest. She had been wrong, for all these years. Later, when neither Henry nor his wife were looking, she had unpinned the bee brooch from her kaftan and pressed it into the girl’s hand.

‘Our little secret,’ she’d said, staring into the wide, dark eyes that matched her own.

Violet liked to think that one day, it would lead Kate back to the cottage. To who she really was.

After everyone left and the cottage was quiet again, Violet sat by her window, gazing out at her garden. Joy twisted into pain as she thought of the young girl she had been when she had first arrived here: motherless and afraid, thighs bright with blood. She looked at the cross under the sycamore tree, now crooked with age.

She let it go. The guilt that had grown, like a weed around her heart.

Two years after Graham’s death, Violet had woken from a terrifying nightmare. Her heart drummed in her chest and her skin was filmed with sweat. She clutched desperately at the dream, but only fragments remained: the red streak of a car approaching her nephew and his daughter, a scream tearing the air. A man, tall and lion-haired, eyes slitted with rage.

A man who wanted to hurt Kate.

The old words, traced by her fingers countless times, hummed in her blood.

Sight is a funny thing. Sometimes it shows us what is before our eyes. But sometimes it shows us what has already happened, or will yet come to pass.

It was as if Altha was speaking to her across centuries. Telling her that Kate was in danger.

It was 2 a.m. – dawn just a hint of silver at the horizon – but Violet got up and dressed immediately. She drove through the morning, all the way down to London, accompanied by one of the crows – the one that carried the sign – flying ahead like a lodestar.