Then the receptionist says something else – a word so unexpected that Kate is sure she must have misheard.
Witch.
Outside, Kate takes deep, gulping breaths. Her brain feels disordered, fogged.
She can still hear it; the strange thrumming of her baby’s heartbeat. The way it filled the room. It was hard to believe that it had come from her own body. It sounded like something from the sky – a bird taking to the air. Or something not of this world at all.
It is 2 a.m. but Kate is awake, watching bats flutter past the window, dark against a pale slice of moon.
Her thoughts feel scattered, panicked – flitting away from her as though they, too, have wings. She rests a hand on her stomach, feeling the smooth heat of her own flesh. It seems impossible that, even now, the larval creature she saw onscreen floats inside her. Growing into a child.
Those things the women were saying about her family – they made it sound as though Kate was carrying some sort of faulty gene, an error code lurking in her cells, plotting her demise. Like the crow she found in the fireplace with the strange white pattern across its glossy feathers – a sign of leucism, she’d read, a genetic trait handed down over generations.
She remembers what the greengrocer said, about the viscount. How he’d lost his marbles.
Perhaps they were referring to some kind of mental health issue, running in the family? That wouldn’t surprise her. All those panic attacks she’d experienced over the years – the clawing in her chest, her throat tightening.
The feeling of something trying to get out.
After another hour of trying and failing to sleep, she gives up, pushing the bedcovers aside.
Switching on the light, she drags the hatboxes out from under the bed. There has to be something in here – something she missed the first time she looked.
Again, she rifles through the folder with its faded, dusty cover. But there’s nothing – nothing she hasn’t already seen before. Not a single mention of the Weywards.
Sighing in frustration, she picks up Violet’s old passport and opens it to the photo page, staring into the dark eyes that are so like Kate’s own. There’s a determination there that Kate didn’t notice before – the firm set of the mouth, the jut of the chin. As if Violet has fought something and won. She would never have ended up like Kate: soft and malleable, yielding as easily to Simon’s fingers as if she were clay.
Suddenly she wishes her great-aunt were still alive, that she could talk to her. That she could talk to someone. Anyone.
She is about to put the passport back when a slip of yellowed paper falls out of it.
It’s a birth certificate. Violet’s birth certificate.
Name: Violet Elizabeth Ayres
Date of Birth: 5 February 1926
Place of Birth: Orton Hall, near Crows Beck, Cumbria, England
Father’s occupation: Peer
Father’s name: Rupert William Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall
Mother’s name: Elizabeth Ayres, nee Weyward
She remembers the letters. Rupert and Elizabeth – they are Violet’s parents; Kate’s great-grandparents.
Which means that Kate – Kate is a Weyward.
When she does sleep, Kate has the same nightmare that haunted her throughout her childhood – her father’s large hand over her small one; the dark shadow of the crow in the trees. Wings thrashing the air; the shriek of rubber on tarmac. The wet thump of her father’s body hitting the ground.
Except that at the cottage, the dream is longer – the flapping of wings morphing into the gallop of her baby’s heartbeat. She sees the foetus: growing and growing, like a moon rising into the sky. Growing into a child. But not a boy, blond and blue-eyed like Simon. A girl, with dark hair, dark eyes. A child that looks like Aunt Violet. That looks like Kate.
A Weyward child.
In the morning, she takes the crumpled brochure from the bedside table and unfurls it. But she doesn’t dial the number. She can’t bring herself to. Every time she picks up the phone, she remembers the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, remembers the way it looked inside her, glimmering like a pearl. Remembers that dream-child, with hair and eyes the colour of jet, of richest earth.
She is still for a moment, thinking of what Simon would do if he knew she was pregnant. How he would treat their child.
Things will be different, this time. She will be different. She will be strong.
She remembers the way she appeared in the mirror, when she tried on Aunt Violet’s cape. That dark glitter in her eyes. For a second, she felt almost powerful.
She will keep her baby, her Weyward child. She knows, somehow, that she is carrying a girl.
She will keep her safe.
19
ALTHA
Even though they’d let me dress, I felt the pressure of a hundred eyes on my flesh as if I were still unclothed. The men stared with hunger, like I was a sweetmeat they wanted to devour. All except the man with the pitying eyes, who turned his gaze away.
After a time, I could not look at them: not the public sitting in the gallery, nor the judges, the prosecutor, or the doctor. Grace, in her white cap. I had wanted to bring the spider from the dungeons, a friend amidst foes. But I knew it was not safe, that it would only darken the cloud of suspicion that hung over me. Now, a sparkle caught my eye, and I saw that the spider had followed me, that it was spinning its web in the corner of the dock. Tears filled my eyes as I watched its legs dance over the shimmering strands of silk. I wished I could shrink myself as small, and scuttle away from this place.
I was born with the mole. The one I had scratched away, my first night in the castle. I should have thought to do it sooner, before they brought Doctor Smythson to the gaol, back in Crows Beck. But my wits were deadened, from lack of food and light, from resisting the questions of the prosecutors’ men. And it was a gamble, in any case: the wound is crusting over now; weeping and angry. Doctor Smythson might have seen it for what it was.
The witch’s mark, they call it. Or the devil’s. It serves as instant proof of guilt.
My mother had one too, in near enough the same place.
‘Matching,’ she used to say. ‘As befits a mother and daughter.’
It wasn’t the only thing we’d had in common. Everyone said I was the spit of her, with my oval face and shocking dark hair.
I used to be proud of this, especially after she first died. I would stare at my reflection on the surface of the beck, desperate for a trace of her in my features. The rippling water blurred my face so that it was just a pale moon. I imagined it was my mother, looking at me through the veil that separates this world from the next.
I wondered what she’d make of it. Of her only daughter, stripped naked in a courtroom, while men roamed their eyes over her. Searching for a sign that she had sold her soul to the devil.
What did they know of souls, these men who sat on bolsters all day, clothed in finery, and saw fit to condemn a woman to death?
I do not profess to know much of souls, myself. I am not a learned woman, other than in the ways my mother handed down to me, as her mother handed down to her. But I know goodness, evil, light and dark.
And I know the devil.
I have seen him. I have seen his mark. His real mark.
I have seen these things. And so has Grace.
I dreamed of him, sometimes, in the dungeon. The devil. The form he takes when he appears.