Nanny Metcalfe was frowning at her.
‘She didn’t ask me for any rags last month, mind,’ she was saying to the doctor. Violet wished they would stop talking about her as if she weren’t lying right there. Her cheeks grew hot at the mention of these private subjects to a complete stranger.
‘Hmm,’ said the doctor again. There was more prodding, and then he asked a question so bizarre that Violet thought she must have misheard.
‘Is she intact?’
Violet thought of the pictures from Father’s newspaper, of soldiers wounded in the war, arms ending at elbows or legs ending at the knee.
‘As far as I know, Doctor,’ said Nanny Metcalfe. There was a slight quaver to her voice, as if she were afraid.
Then, without warning, the doctor had slid his fingers between her legs, to that place that had felt like a bruise since the day in the woods. She winced from pain and shock.
‘She is not,’ he said, looking at her with mild disgust. Nanny Metcalfe gasped, clapping her hands to her mouth. Violet felt cold shame spreading through her. Somehow, he had known exactly what had happened between her and Frederick, almost as if he had looked inside her brain.
The doctor had her urinate into a humiliatingly clear vial, which he held up to the light and inspected briefly before putting it in the pocket of his jacket. Violet turned her face away.
‘I’ll telephone in a few days with the results,’ he said.
Nanny Metcalfe nodded, barely able to force out a ‘Good day, Doctor,’ as he went down the stairs. They sat together in silence as they listened to Father’s study door opening, a low murmur of conversation, followed by the heavy clink of the front door and the sputter of the doctor’s motor car.
A moment of stillness hung in the air, like a raindrop threatening to fall from a leaf. Then there was a great crash, and the sound of glass breaking. A high-pitched whine from Cecil. Later, Nanny Metcalfe would report that Father was so angry that he had swept the Jacobean side table in the hall clear of its ornaments in one fluid movement.
‘What have you done?’ said Nanny Metcalfe, who had still not explained to Violet what was happening. But she didn’t need to, not really. Violet thought of the word that had lingered on the edge of her consciousness for weeks, no matter how hard she tried not to think about it. Spermatophore.
Violet barely slept, for fear of dreaming about the woods. About Frederick. She passed the days between the doctor’s visit and his telephone call in fog, halfway between sleep and wakefulness. She tried her hardest not to succumb to her drooping eyelids and heavy limbs, but often she found herself in a terrifying kaleidoscope of dreams: Frederick on top of her, under a tree-veined sky; her stomach distended and dark, rotting from the inside out. Mayflies, pulsing all around.
Not even Morg’s feather brought her any solace.
Graham and the servants had been told that she was ill again, with the same ‘condition of the nerves’ that had kept her bedbound earlier. Only Father and Nanny Metcalfe knew the truth.
When the telephone rang, five days after the doctor’s visit, Violet lay under the coverlet and waited for Nanny Metcalfe to come and tell her the news. But the footsteps that sounded up the stairs and down the corridor were too heavy to belong to Nanny Metcalfe.
Father opened the door. Violet sat up in bed, wondering if her appearance would shock him. He had not been to see her in weeks, and she had lost a lot of weight from the constant vomiting. Her bones felt sharp in her face; her eyes were shadowed by lack of sleep. Perhaps he would ask her how she was feeling.
He looked at her for a moment with an expression of distaste, as though she were a piece of spoiled food on his plate.
‘I have spoken to Doctor Radcliffe,’ he said, his voice chill with fury. ‘He has informed me that you are with child, and have been for several weeks.’
Violet’s pulse flickered. She thought she might faint.
‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ he asked, taking a step closer. The anger made his face larger and redder, so that his blue eyes almost disappeared. A blood vessel on his cheek was swollen and purple, like a fattened slug. Violet wondered if it would burst.
‘Nothing,’ she said softly.
‘Nothing? Nothing? Who do you think you are, the bloody Virgin Mary?’
She had never heard him speak like this before.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Who is the father?’ he asked, though surely he must have known all along. For whom else could it be? She remembered what Graham had said, about when he and Father had woken from their nap that day to find Violet and Frederick gone. Father seemed quite pleased.
‘Cousin Frederick,’ she said.
He turned on his heel and slammed her bedroom door behind him, sending dust motes flying. For a moment they hung suspended in the shaft of sunlight from the window, reminding Violet of the midges she had seen with Frederick, the day he had kissed her. She had thought they looked like fairy dust.
What a child she had been.
That day, Nanny Metcalfe came into her bedroom with a large, worn-looking suitcase that Violet had never seen before. She had never been anywhere, had never had need of a suitcase. Without looking at her, Nanny Metcalfe began piling things into it.
‘Am I going somewhere?’ Violet asked, though she wasn’t particularly interested. Everything had felt muted and colourless since the doctor’s visit. She knew that she was heading inexorably towards something, something terrible, and there was little point in resisting. She thought of the dreams, the flesh of her stomach dark and soft beneath her fingers. Rotten.
‘Your father will explain,’ said Nanny Metcalfe. ‘The others think you’re going to a sanatorium in Windermere, for your nerves. You’re not to tell them different.’
Violet added nothing to the suitcase, apart from Morg’s feather, which she wrapped carefully in an old scarf. Everything else – her books, her green dress, her sketching things – she left behind. She didn’t even take Goldie the spider – Nanny Metcalfe had agreed to release him into the garden when Father wasn’t looking.
Graham and the other servants were lined up in the hall to say farewell. Nanny Metcalfe had dressed her in one of Father’s old trench coats and a wide-brimmed hat, to hide the weight she’d lost and the shadows in her face. Violet felt like a scarecrow, and she saw Graham blanch when she appeared on the staircase.
Miss Poole and Mrs Kirkby said goodbye and told her to get well soon. Graham said nothing, watching in shocked silence as Father took her by the elbow and marched her out of the front door to where his Daimler waited in the drive. Violet had never been in Father’s motor car before. The chrome green exterior reminded her of the shiny casing of a pupa. Perhaps she would emerge from it a butterfly and fly away, miles and miles away, to a place where she would be safe and free. One could dream.
There was a lingering smell of cologne. It occurred to Violet that the last occupant of the passenger seat, where she was sitting now, must have been Frederick. The thought of it made her want to open the door and hurl herself out onto the road. Instead she just looked out of the window, at Orton Hall disappearing behind them.
‘Where are we going?’ Violet asked. Father didn’t answer. Rain began to splatter on the roof of the car in fat, loud drops. Father turned a dial and mechanical arms unfolded themselves across the windscreen to wipe the rain away. For a while, there was no sound in the car but their rhythmic scraping.