He opens the file, takes out two documents.
‘Both of these records concern an Elizabeth Ayres, nee Weyward.’
Kate nods.
‘Yes – my great-grandmother, I think.’
‘We have a record here of her marriage to a Rupert Ayres in August 1925.’
Kate nods again. She knows this already.
‘And a death certificate. From September 1927.’
She leans across the table, heart pounding.
‘What does it say? How did she die?’
‘The cause of death is quite vague – “shock and blood loss”， it says. Childbirth, perhaps? Quite common in those days, of course, though unusual that it hasn’t been explicitly referenced. The certificate was made out by a Doctor Radcliffe, place of death listed as Orton Hall, near Crows Beck.’
‘I think my grandfather was born that year. Maybe she died giving birth to him?’
Something else the man said snags in her brain.
Doctor Radcliffe.
With a start, she thinks of the doctor in the village, who performed her first ultrasound. His liver-flecked hands, cold on her skin. He’d mentioned inheriting the practice from his father, hadn’t he?
How strange, to think that his father might have been present for Elizabeth’s death. For her own grandfather’s birth. Though she supposes that is the way of small villages – of rural life. She remembers the weathered headstones in the graveyard. The same names, again and again. And yet not a single Weyward. If it weren’t for the cottage, it would be easy to imagine they’d never existed; that they were merely the stuff of local legend.
She turns her attention back to the man across from her. How is it that he has only found four records? Can that really be all there is?
‘Next, we have a death certificate for an Elinor Weyward. Died aged sixty-three, in 1938. Liver cancer. Given a pauper’s funeral.’
‘A pauper’s funeral? What does that mean?’
The man frowned. ‘It means that there was no one to cover funeral expenses. She would have been buried in an unmarked grave.’
Kate feels a throb of pain that this woman – her relative – had been so neglected in death. And yet she’d had family living just a few miles away, at Orton Hall.
The man takes the last sheet of paper from his file. She notices that the skin of his hands is moist, with a pearlescent webbing between the fingers. Again, she thinks of frogs.
‘This last one is much older,’ he explains. ‘One result for the surname Weyward in the records of the assizes for the Northern Circuit, from 1619. An Altha Weyward, aged twenty-one, indicted for witchcraft and tried at Lancaster Castle.’
Her heart jumps. Prickles sweep her skin, like the tracings of phantom insects.
So the rumours are true.
‘Was she found guilty?’ she asks, her mouth dry. ‘Executed?’
The man frowns.
‘I’m afraid we don’t have that information,’ he says. ‘We only have the record of the indictment – not the outcome of the trial. Sorry not to be of more help.’
‘Do you know’， Kate begins, thinking of the cross under the sycamore tree, ‘where she would have been buried? If … if she had been executed, I mean.’
‘Again … that’s not something we know. There aren’t records. At least, not anymore.’
‘And – there’s really nothing else? No other records of the Weywards between 1619 and 1925? For three hundred years?’
The man shakes his head. ‘Nothing I could find. But official registration of births, deaths and marriages only began in 1837. And a lot of parish records haven’t survived. So it was quite easy to fall through the cracks – especially if you were from a poorer family.’
Kate thanks him, trying to ward off the disappointment that spreads through her. She’s not sure what she expected, really. That it would be easy to draw her family’s history from the murk of the past, the way she’d somehow drawn insects from the soil. That doing so would help her understand herself.
But at least she isn’t leaving empty-handed.
On her way out of the building, she turns the fragment over and over in her mind, as if it is some precious heirloom.
Altha Weyward. Aged 21. 1619. Tried for witchcraft.
Altha. A strange name. Soft and yet powerful. Like an incantation.
On the drive home, the afternoon sun settles pink on the hills. The landscape is so ancient – the sweeping meadows, the rocky crags. The slate-coloured tarns. Altha Weyward – whoever she was – would have looked out at these same hills, once.
Kate has an image of a young woman, wan-faced in the dawn, dragged to a pyre, or gallows … She shudders, pushes it from her mind.
Twenty-one. Almost ten years younger than she is now. She remembers herself at that age – tense and watchful, the spark of her childhood long snuffed out. But she’d been free, really, in comparison to the women who had come before her. She thinks of Elizabeth, her great-grandmother, dying in childbirth, and one hand goes automatically to her stomach. The twenty-first century afforded a degree of protection. But it hadn’t protected her from Simon. She remembers his face; his expressions fluid, mercurial. How he’d look at her sometimes, as tenderly as he had in those early days, when she’d believed in their love. When the slightest touch of his hand on hers was enough to set her pulse thrumming. But then she’d do something – say something – he didn’t like, and the look would sour into disgust. The scar on her arm throbs.
All those years. Caught in a brutal dance, with steps she never knew how to follow.
Perhaps things haven’t changed so much, after all.
It was quite easy to fall through the cracks, the man at the archives had said. But wasn’t it also possible that Kate’s ancestors – the Weywards – had wanted to hide, given what had happened to Altha? After all, it was Elizabeth’s marriage to Rupert that had earned her a place in the record books. A relationship with a man.
I must have you.
Kate knows better than anyone how dangerous men can be.
The thought sparks fury in her. She’s not sure if it’s a new feeling, or if it was always there, smothered by fear. But now it burns bright in her blood. Fury. For herself. And for the women that came before.
Things will be different for her daughter. She’ll make sure of it.
And that means she has to be brave.
It is 3 p.m. Kate doesn’t have long until Kirkby’s Books and Gifts closes for the day.
She stands in Aunt Violet’s chilly bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror. Sunlight falls across her body, washed green by the creeping ivy on the outside of the cottage.
It’s been a long time since she looked at herself properly. For years, she hasn’t been able to bear the sight of her own nakedness. All of those evenings, moulding her flesh into whichever lingerie Simon wanted her to wear. Lying back and letting him arrange her limbs how he liked. She had become a vessel. Nothing more.
Perhaps this was why she had hated the idea of being pregnant before, when she still lived with him. She already felt like a means to an end.
But. She hadn’t known it would be like this.
Now, in the mirror, Kate assesses herself. The strong lines of her limbs, the new spread of her hips. Her belly, with its growing curve. Her breasts amaze her – the darkening of the nipples, the veins that glow blue and bright beneath her skin. The mole on her breastbone has darkened, too: ruby deepening to crimson.