Kate had said no, insisted that she wanted to stay in England for university. But really, she just didn’t want to ruin her mother’s second chance at happiness. Their infrequent conversations – eventually dwindling from weekly to monthly – felt stilted, awkward. It was for the best, Kate told herself. Her mother was better off without her.
‘Away from what?’ her mother is asking now. ‘Please, Kate – I’m your mum. Just tell me what’s going on.’
He abused me.
‘It’s – complicated. It just … wasn’t working. So I wanted to get away for a bit.’
‘Right. OK, darling.’ Kate hears the resignation in her voice. ‘So where have you gone, then? Are you staying with a friend?’
‘No – do you remember Dad’s Aunt Violet? The one who lived up in Cumbria, near Orton Hall?’
‘Oh, yes, vaguely. A bit eccentric, I always thought … I didn’t know you’d become close.’
‘We weren’t,’ says Kate. ‘Close, I mean. She’s – dead, actually. She died last year, left me her house. I guess she didn’t have any other family.’
‘You never told me that.’ She hears the wound in her mother’s voice. ‘I should have stayed in touch with her, your dad would have liked that.’
Kate’s insides clench with guilt. This is why it’s better that they don’t speak. She has hurt her mother again, like she always does.
‘Sorry, Mum … I should have said something.’
‘It’s OK. Anyway, how long are you planning to stay up there? You can always come here, you know. Or – maybe I could come there?’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Kate says quickly. ‘It’s OK. I’m OK. Anyway – sorry again, about Aunt Violet. I should go, Mum. I’ll call you in a few days, OK?’
‘OK, darling.’
‘Wait – Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t tell him. Simon. Don’t tell him where I am. Please.’
She hangs up quickly, cutting off her mother’s questions.
Tears blur her vision. She gropes blindly for the box of tissues on the bedside table – perched precariously atop a towering stack of New Scientist magazines – and knocks it over. Items topple onto the floor.
‘Fuck,’ she says, bending down to pick them up. She needs to pull herself together.
Something else has been knocked to the ground – an enamel jewellery box, patterned with butterflies. Its contents are splayed out on the floorboards, glowing in the sun. Mismatched earrings, a couple of rusted rings, a dirty necklace with a battered-looking pendant. Flustered, she puts them back in the box, tidies the surface of the bedside table.
There’s a photograph of her grandfather, Graham, behind the stack of magazines. Younger than she’s ever seen him: his hair still red, wisps of it lifting in a breeze. He died when she was six and her memories of him are shadowy, fragmented. He used to read to her – Grimms’ Fairy Tales, mainly, the rich resonance of his voice transporting her into another world.
Though now, as she looks at the photograph, another memory flickers at the edge of her brain. His funeral, here in Crows Beck.
Gripping her mother’s hand, looking up at the clouds that hung low in the sky. Thinking that it was going to rain. The graveyard was all moss and stone and trees, full of birds and insects, and Kate remembers it being loud. So loud she’d barely been able to hear the vicar talking.
Afterwards, she and her parents had gone back to Weyward Cottage for afternoon tea. The only other time she has set foot inside the house. The only time she met Aunt Violet.
She has a vague impression of green. The green door, the green wallpaper inside the house, Aunt Violet wearing an odd, flowing outfit. She remembers the smell of her perfume – lavender, the scent that still lingers in the bedroom. She tries to conjure more details but she can’t; the memory is too hazy, as though its edges are frayed.
Really, she’d half forgotten that she had a great-aunt, until the call from the solicitor.
Not for the first time, she wonders why Violet left her cottage to a great-niece she hadn’t seen for over twenty years.
‘You’re her only living relative,’ the solicitor had said when she’d asked him that same question, his northern accent gravelly on the phone. But this sparked more questions than it answered. For instance: why had her great-aunt never contacted her while she was still alive?
Later, Kate decides to explore the garden, while it’s still light.
It is overgrown and heavy with the scent of plants she doesn’t recognise. Green, furred leaves brush her shoes, trailing silvery lines of sap. Ferns rustle in the breeze.
She hesitates when she comes to the ancient sycamore tree, remembering the crows from her first night. She looks skyward, at the reaching branches, red with the setting sun. The tree must be hundreds of years old. She imagines it standing sentinel for generations, keeping the little cottage safe in its shadow. She reaches out her hand and presses her palm against the bark.
It feels warm. Alive.
The air shifts. Suddenly, she wants to go back inside. There’s something about the garden that feels crowded, overwhelming. It’s as if there is no longer any barrier between the outside world and her nerves.
She reminds herself she is safe. She won’t go back inside. Not yet.
She walks deeper into the garden, listening to the hum of insects, water running over pebbles. The beck glimmers below. She climbs down to its banks, holding the twisted roots of the sycamore to steady herself. The water is so clear that she can see tiny fish, their little bodies shimmering in the light. An insect hovers nearby. She can’t remember what it’s called: smaller than a dragonfly, with delicate mother-of-pearl wings. It skims the surface of the beck. She stays like that for a long time, listening to the birds, the water, the insects. She shuts her eyes, opening them again when she feels something brush her hand. The dragonfly-like creature with the iridescent wings. The word swims up from the depths of her brain: a damselfly.
Tears well in her eyes, surprising her.
She was fascinated by insects, as a child. She remembers begging her mother to spare the moths that fluttered out from wardrobes, the gauzy spider’s webs that clung to the ceiling. She’d collected vividly illustrated books about them. About birds, too. She would hide under the covers reading, in the small, silent hours of the morning while her parents slept in the next room. It hurts now, to think of that little girl, her innocent wonder: torch in hand, turning the glossy pages and marvelling at the wild and wonderful creatures. Butterflies with eyes on their wings, parrots in candy-coloured plumage.
After her father died, Kate had collected the books into a shiny, colourful stack and put them on the pavement outside the house. She’d woken in the night, heart swollen with regret, and crept outside to retrieve them. But they were already gone.
Kate took this to be a sign, confirmation of what she already knew. It was too dangerous for her to be around the insects, animals and birds she loved. She’d already caused her father’s death. What if she hurt her mother, too?
She kept her other books – Grimms’ Fairy Tales; The Secret Garden – the stories that became a salve during those long nights when the only sign of life from her mother’s bedroom was the neon glow of the television under the door. Fiction became a friend as well as a safe harbour; a cocoon to protect her from the outside world and its dangers. She could read about Robin Redbreast but she must avoid at all costs the robins that tittered in the back garden.