How it pained me, to hear that hate in her voice. My mind ran over her speech, remembering the coldness of it, and my eyes burned with tears. As children, we had learned each other before we could speak. I had once known the meaning of her raised brow, the curve of her mouth, as though they were words in a book. Now she was a stranger.
The following morning was calm and sunny, and, as I listened to the robins sing, I wondered if I hadn’t dreamed up Grace’s visit. Then I went into the other room and I saw the second mug and plate and knew it had been real. Grace really had come. She really had asked this terrible thing of me. She wanted me to atone for one wrong by committing another.
I would look through my mother’s papers as she had suggested, I decided. If there was no recipe for the kind of draught that Grace wanted, then I could tell her that I could not do it, did not know how.
I opened the bureau that had been my grandmother’s – the handle inscribed with a W, much finer than anything else we owned. She had been given it by the First Viscount Kendall for nursing his son through milk fever. It was where my mother and I stored all our notes and recipes, our cures and remedies, for relieving ailments and suffering. My mother always kept the drawers locked and wore the key around her neck. She gave it to me when she died, bade me do the same.
‘To save things getting into the wrong hands,’ she said.
I rifled through handwritten recipes for all manner of salves and tinctures: elderflower for fever, belladonna for gout, agrimony for back pain and headache. And then I saw it, in my mother’s fine hand.
For bringing on the menses
Crush together three handfuls tansy petals
Steep in water for five days before administration
My heart sank. I had no excuse, now.
I could not be sure that it would work if the baby had quickened. Perhaps I could strengthen the dose of tansy, I thought. Just slightly, so that it would still be safe.
I caught myself. Did I even want it to work? Why would Grace want to harm an innocent babe, which had not yet had its chance at life?
I remembered her eyes, glittering and hard with fury and pain. ‘You would be doing it a kindness,’ she had said.
Perhaps I was too quick to judge. I had never felt a child grow in my womb, only to lose it in childbed. I remembered the Merrywether woman I had attended to and the small, dead coil of flesh she had laboured over for hours. Had given her life for.
What if Grace carried the baby to term and bringing it forth killed her? What if Grace were to die for the sake of a child that would never open its eyes, never take its first breath?
I couldn’t lose her. She may still hate me, blame me. But it didn’t change the love I felt for my friend then, and always would. I had to keep her safe.
I waited until nightfall to gather the tight yellow buds of the tansy from the garden. It was still a time when villagers came to my door frequently enough in the daylight, to seek treatment for some complaint or other. I did not want anyone to know what I was doing.
I liked being in the garden. It was where I felt my mother’s presence most strongly: in the furred leaves of the plants she had tended; the strong, tall sycamore she had loved; the creatures that rustled in the undergrowth. I felt as if she were still there, watching over me. I wondered what my mother would make of Grace’s visit.
I knew my mother had felt a great deal of guilt over Anna Metcalfe’s death. She never liked to speak of it afterwards. I could see that the end of my friendship with Grace pained her. She was afraid to leave me, friendless and alone in the world, I think. As I write this and think of everything that has happened, I know she was right to be afraid.
When I had got enough tansy, I went inside and crushed it with our old mortar and pestle. I added the water and put the mixture in a covered bowl to steep. I hid it in the attic in case I had visitors over the next five days.
Its scent was so strong – like fouled mint – that I could still smell it when I laid my head on my pallet for sleep.
35
VIOLET
Her mother. This house belonged to her mother. Violet touched her necklace, tracing the W engraved on the pendant.
The Weywards. Her mother’s family, she could be sure of it now.
Violet looked around the dingy room for some record of them. There was barely anything to suggest it had ever been lived in at all. She sat down at the creaky kitchen table, which was covered with a thick patina of dust. She wiped some away with her finger and coughed. Underneath, the wood was scored and gouged, as if someone had taken a knife to it. The roof was leaking, and the far wall of the kitchen shone with rain. She was cold and it was dark. There was no clock anywhere in the house, and the small square of violet sky visible through the filmy window gave no clue as to the time.
She looked at the provisions that Father had left. Tinned peas, corned beef hash, sardines. One of the eggs still had a soft curl of feather clinging to it. The eggs made her think of spermatophore and she pushed them to one side, stomach queasy. She ate some peas, cold from the tin. She struggled to light an ancient-looking candle with one of the matches Father had left behind, flinching at the small blue flame. She sat for a long time, watching the wax bubble and melt.
It was strange to imagine her mother living here. It was a hovel, Violet thought. Like something from a fairy tale without a happy ending. She walked over to the small door that led to the back garden and opened it, sheltering the candle flame from the wind. The garden – if it could be called that – was wild and rampant: strange-looking plants shivered in the rain. A large sycamore loomed over the house, and Violet could see nests in its upper branches, the glimmer of black feathers. Crows. She felt their eyes on her, watching. Assessing.
She shut the door, letting darkness fall. She took the candle into the next room and sat on one of the beds. It gave a great creak of protest. In the bedroom, the air was thick from dust and it moved through her lungs like treacle. She lay down on the bed and watched the candle throw shadows onto the wall. Violet felt tears well up in her eyes. She was here, in her mother’s house, closer to her than she had been in years, and yet she had never felt so alone in her life. She shut her eyes and waited for sleep. When it came, it was blank and dreamless.
Violet was woken by a wave of nausea. She retched into a basin she found next to the bed. Her head pulsed with pain and her mouth was dry and sour. She needed water. The candle had long since gone out, and the room was very dark. She drew back the threadbare curtains to look outside. The windowpane seemed to have thickened from years of grime, so that the outside world was just a murk of brown. She tried to open it, but the latch had rusted shut.
She felt her way into the next room, fumbling on the kitchen table for the box of matches. She knocked one of the tins onto the floor and it rolled to the other side. Violet lit a candle and left it on the table before going outside.
The garden was red with dawn, and she could hear the chatter of thrushes and wood pigeons. The wind whispered through the leaves of the sycamore and Violet detected another layer of sound – the gurgle of the beck. She could see it from here, shining in the morning sun; the garden sloped down to it. The same beck that curved through the valley and around the fells, all the way to Orton Hall. Connecting Violet to this place – to her mother – without her even knowing.