There was no tap in the cottage, but Violet saw an old water pump outside, like the one in the kitchen garden at the Hall. The pump was green and stiff with age, and she struggled to work the handle, the way she’d seen Dinsdale do. The first drops of water that trickled out were brown, but eventually she had a clear stream flowing, which she cupped in her hands and splashed at her face. She got a bucket from inside and filled it to the brim. The bucket was very heavy and she half dragged it back indoors, sloshing water over the sides.
Here, she paused, thinking of the pails of scalding water she’d watched Penny lug up the stairs, face pink from steam. She needed to heat the water. She lit the stove with a match, before fetching a dusty pan from a hook on the wall. She would bathe, then wash the windows, try to get some light in.
Violet saw that Father hadn’t left her any soap. She supposed he thought it was appropriate that she sit here in squalor. Reflect on your sins, he had said. She didn’t want to think about her sins, about the woods, Frederick, spermatophore. She wanted to scrub the house and her body until both were shiny and new.
Perhaps she could find some soap somewhere. The bigger room had very little in the way of storage; or, indeed, furniture at all: it was bare, other than the stove and the table and chair. She remembered the bureau in the other room.
Lifting the candle to it, she could see that it would have been a fine piece, once, before time and dirt had eaten away at it. Much of it was covered in grime, but the bits of wood she could see were warm and rich, the handles a heavy brass beneath the dirt. It was far nicer than the battered old table in the kitchen, almost as if it didn’t belong in the house. She tried one of the drawers, but it was locked. The other, too. She frowned. She hadn’t seen a key anywhere. Father had taken the front door key with him, she remembered. She had heard it turn in the lock.
In the kitchen, she stripped – taking care not to look down at her body, the places Frederick and the doctor had touched – and scrubbed herself as best she could with a wet handkerchief. Once she was dressed, she set about wiping down the table and the windows. Soon her handkerchief – a present from Miss Poole, she remembered, rather guiltily – was brown and stiff with dirt.
The rooms were a little brighter now that she had cleaned the windows. No matter what she did, she couldn’t get the one in the bedroom to open, but she flung the kitchen window wide, letting in the smells and sounds of the garden. She opened a tin of beans and ate it outside, feeling the warmth of the sun on her face. The garden was loud with bees and swallows, and the occasional caw of a crow from the sycamore tree. Violet thought she heard a note of approval in the crow’s voice, as though it had assessed her favourably. It made her feel a little less alone.
She could do something about the garden, she thought. She could see that it would have been neat and ordered, once: there were recognisable patches of violets, mint. It was waist-high with helleborine now, the crimson heads nodding in the breeze.
Her mother had sat in this garden, perhaps exactly where Violet was sitting now. It was obvious to Violet that her mother had been very poor – especially compared to Father. Was that why he was so secretive about her? Was he ashamed? Violet remembered what Frederick had said. That her mother had bewitched her father.
Bewitched. Everything she knew about witches came from books, and none of it was good. The witch who ate Hansel and Gretel, for instance. The three witches in Macbeth, raising the wind and the seas. But what about the witch in ‘The Robber Bridegroom’？ She had helped the heroine escape. Anyway, she was being ridiculous. Witches weren’t real. Her mother hadn’t been some sort of evil hag, brewing potions in a cauldron and zipping about on a broomstick.
Still, there had to be something of her mother’s somewhere in the house. Inside, Violet tried the old bureau in the bedroom again. She hadn’t noticed before, but each handle was carved with a W. She pulled her necklace out from under her dress and held it up against the bureau to check. No, she hadn’t imagined it … the exact same W as the one carved on her mother’s locket. Barely breathing, she opened the locket and put the tiny gold key into the lock. It stuck, and for a moment Violet thought it must have snapped off inside. She turned it gently again, and felt the mechanism give way with a soft click. She opened the first drawer, which was empty. The second drawer was filled with paper, old enough that it was almost transparent, the writing so faded that she could not make it out. A scrap of newsprint had been daubed with what looked like a hastily scrawled shopping list. Flour, it read, kidneys, milk thistle.
There was an invitation to a jumble sale at St Mary’s, dated September 1920. A crumpled letter from the Beckside branch of the Women’s Institute asking for volunteers to make socks and stockings for ‘our boys abroad’。 Violet looked at the date: 1916.
Something familiar caught her eye at the top of the pile. A bundle of thick, creamy paper stood out from the other scraps and tatters. The Ayres coat of arms: a gilded osprey, suspended in flight. Father’s writing paper.
They were letters, from Father to a woman named Elizabeth Weyward. E. W. Lizzie, he called her.
Violet’s mother. It had to be. Her hands were shaking.
I have not slept this past week for thoughts of you, read one missive. It then beseeched Lizzie to be brave, for the sake of our union. The paper was thin with creases, as if it had been continually folded and unfolded, read and reread.
Another letter, jumbled in with the rest of the pack, stood out. It was not written in her father’s elegant, Etonian script. Instead, the writing was rushed and slapdash, at one point almost veering off the page.
Ma
I am sorry it has taken so long to write but I have not been able to get out a message to you. I’ve had nothing to write with but today Rupert has gone out hunting – the butler Rainham, who takes pity on me, has brought me some paper and ink. He has said he will take you this note on his way to Lancaster to purchase new clothes for Rupert.
It has taken me too long but I see that you were right. I should never have left home. For some time, Rupert has not let me go outside and now I am to be locked in my room.
How I hate this room. It is small, like a cage, with walls painted yellow as tansy flowers. It makes me think of the tansy tea we used to prepare for the village women, and it pains me to think that Violet will not know the cures and treatments that have been our way for hundreds of years. When I shut my eyes, all I see is that bright yellow, reminding me of what I have forsaken. My past, and my daughter’s future.
I miss her so, Ma. They will bring the babe to me so that he can feed, but they have not let me see Violet in days. I hear her cries echoing through those yellow walls.
My only comfort was Morg, but I told her to go, Ma – this is no life for a bird. All I have left now is one of her feathers. Though I do not like to look at it.
It reminds me of what I did. What Rupert made me do.
I should have listened to you, that day we argued down by the beck. ‘He takes you for a dog that he can train to eat from his hand,’ you said.
I thought he loved me for myself. But you were right. To him I am but an animal, like those he hunts and puts on display.
That was another thing you told me. That if a man saw my gifts for what they truly were, he would only use them for his own ends. I told myself I was doing it for her, for Violet. As you guessed, she had already quickened in my belly, then. I began to dream of her, grown into a dark-haired beauty, but alone and bleeding in our cottage. Whether from sickness or injury I did not know, but it was clear: my daughter would not survive a life of poverty such as the one I could give her. In my terror, I told Rupert of the dream and asked him what would become of our child. His parents would never acknowledge her, he said. He would be ruined if he married me, being only a second son, with no title to smooth his path in the world. And worse – his parents already knew. They know about the child we’d made together that night in the woods, when only the moon saw my fear and heard my cries. They planned to drive us – the last Weyward women – away from Crows Beck, he said. From our home, where our forebears have lived for centuries.