She turns the car around.
The next morning, Kate walks to the village for supplies.
The early spring air is cool against her skin, with a smell of damp leaves and things growing. Kate shuts the front door and swallows burst from the old oak in the front garden. She flinches, then watches them pinwheel through the blue sky while she collects herself. The village is just 2 miles away. The walk will be invigorating, she tells herself. Maybe she’ll even enjoy it.
She sets off down the lane, which is bordered by hedgerows fringed with unfamiliar white flowers that remind her of seafoam. There’s the squawk of a crow, and her heart quickens. She looks up, craning her neck until she grows dizzy. Nothing. Just branches patterning an empty sky, their tiny green leaves quivering in the breeze. She walks on, passing an old farmhouse with a sunken roof. Sheep bleat in the surrounding fields.
Crows Beck looks as though it’s barely changed for centuries: the only signs of modernisation are a BT phone box and a bus shelter. She passes the green, with its ancient well and another stone structure, a small hut with a heavy iron door. Perhaps it was the village jail, once upon a time. She shudders at the thought of being confined in such a small space, doom closing in.
Beyond the green is a cobbled square, hemmed in by buildings – a mishmash of stone and timber, some hunched beneath jutting Tudor gables. A few of them are shops: there’s a greengrocer and a butcher, a post office. A medical centre, too. In the distance she sees the spire of the church, glowing red in the sun.
She hesitates in front of the greengrocer. Nerves jostle in her stomach: she hasn’t been grocery shopping alone since … she can’t remember when. Simon had arranged for their food to be delivered by a high-end grocery supplier on Sunday evenings. She tries to calm her rapid breathing with the thought that this time, she can buy anything she likes.
The trestle tables out the front of the shop heave with fresh produce. Rows and rows of apples, the air thick with their woody scent. Carrots, half hidden beneath great green fronds, pale mounds of cabbages.
Inside, the only other customer is a woman – middle-aged and flame-haired, a pink sweater clashing luridly. Kate smiles as she shuffles past her, stifles a cough at the strong smell of patchouli oil. She smiles back and Kate turns quickly, scrutinising a box of cereal. She is relieved when the woman leaves the shop, singing out a cheery goodbye to the cashier.
Kate pulls things from the shelves: bread, butter, coffee. She looks down at her basket. Automatically, she has selected Simon’s favourite brand of coffee. She puts it back on the shelf, swaps it for another.
She mumbles hello to the raw-boned cashier. This, she knows, is an interaction she can’t avoid.
‘Not seen you here before,’ the woman says as she scans the jar of instant coffee. Kate sees that there is a single hair sprouting from her chin, and suddenly doesn’t know where to look. Her skin prickles. She feels horribly conscious of what she’s wearing: her top and trousers too tight, too revealing. Simon had liked her to be on display like this. Exposed.
‘Um – I’ve just moved,’ says Kate. ‘From London.’
The woman frowns, so Kate explains that she’s inherited a cottage from a relative. ‘Oh, you mean Weyward Cottage? Violet Ayres’ place?’
‘Yes – I’m her great-niece.’
‘Didn’t know she had any family living,’ the cashier says. ‘Thought all the Ayreses and Weywards were gone. Save the old viscount of course, losing his marbles up at the big house.’
‘Not me,’ says Kate, offering a tight smile. ‘I’m an Ayres. Sorry – Weywards, did you say? I didn’t realise it was a family name. I thought it was just the name of the cottage.’
‘It was, and an old one, too,’ she says, inspecting the carton of milk. ‘Went back centuries, that name did.’
The cashier seems to think the Ayreses and the Weywards are related in some way. She must have it wrong. Aunt Violet had been an Ayres, too, and born in Orton Hall. She would have bought Weyward Cottage after she left home. After she’d been disowned.
‘Card or cash?’
‘Cash.’ Kate feels the woman’s eyes on her as she pulls notes from a hole in the lining of her handbag. Again, she has the feeling of being exposed. She flushes, wondering if it’s obvious. That she’s running away from something. Someone.
‘You’ll be all right, pet,’ says the cashier now, as if she has seen Kate’s thoughts through her skull. She hands over the change. ‘It’s in your blood, after all.’
Walking back to the cottage, Kate wonders what she meant.
Kate looks everywhere for Violet’s papers, for some connection to the Weywards. In the drawers of the bedside table, inside the cavernous wardrobe. There, she pauses for a moment, inhaling the scent of mothballs and lavender. Her great-aunt’s clothes are odd; the sort of things one might find in a charity shop – kaftans, linen tunics, a beaded cape with the gunmetal sheen of a beetle’s shell. Chunky necklaces cascade down the inside of the door, clinking against an age-spotted mirror.
She can’t stop looking at the cape, at the way it catches the light. Tentatively she brushes it with her fingertips, the glass beads cool against her skin. She plucks it from its hanger and slips it around her shoulders. In the mirror she looks different: the cape’s dark glitter brings out something in her eyes, a hardness she doesn’t recognise.
Shame flushes her cheeks. She’s acting like a child playing dress-up. She takes off the cape, hurriedly shoving it back on its hanger. Shutting the wardrobe doors, she catches another glimpse of herself in the mirror. There she is: clad in the clothes he has chosen. Her hair, bleached and perfectly layered, just the way he likes. The woman with the hardness in her eyes is gone.
She looks under Aunt Violet’s bed. Battered hatboxes yield sketchbooks, their mottled pages filled with annotated drawings of butterflies, beetles and – she grimaces – tarantulas. A heavy, square object wrapped in muslin turns out not to be a photo album, as she suspected, but a crumbling flank of stone. Turning it over, she sees the striated red imprint of a scorpion.
A folder pokes out from under one of the boxes. Grunting, she yanks it free.
The cover is faded and furred with dust, but the papers inside are neatly ordered: bank statements; utility bills. There are several old passports, their yellowed pages crowded with stamps. She flips through one from the 1960s, recording visits to Costa Rica, Nepal, Morocco.
There’s something familiar about the sepia-coloured photograph on the first page; about the young woman with dark waves of hair and wide-spaced eyes, the smudge of a birthmark on her forehead. She’s never seen any pictures of her great-aunt as a young woman before, and she shivers as she places the feeling of recognition. In the picture, Aunt Violet looks like … her. Kate.
10
ALTHA
Grace looked very young and small on the witness stand. Her skin was pale under her cap, her brown eyes wide. In that moment, I found it hard to believe that she was a grown woman of one and twenty.
It seemed like barely any time had passed since we were girls, chasing each other through the sunlight. The summer when we were thirteen was sharp in my memory as I looked at her.