There is a crack in one of her boots – an old pair of Aunt Violet’s that she’s been meaning to get resoled – and now the snow seeps in, drenching her foot.
She pushes through the trees, all the while forcing herself not to think about the baby, about the stillness in her womb. She has to get to the village. She has to get help.
After a while, the trees all begin to look the same, with their branches quivering under matching lips of snow. She is no longer sure which is the right direction. A ladder of pink fungus creeps up a tree trunk in a way that looks horribly familiar, and she is seized by the fear that she has passed it before.
Is she walking in circles? Awful images flood her mind: her body, curled on the forest floor, barely visible under its shroud of snow. Her child frozen inside her, tiny bones calcifying in her womb. She stumbles over a tree root and cries out, her voice dying in the wind.
Something answers.
At first she thinks she must be dreaming, like a lost traveller hallucinating a mirage in the desert.
Then she hears it again. A bird, calling.
It’s real.
She looks up, breathing hard as she scans the canopy of trees. Something shimmers. A liquid eye. Blue-black feathers, dusted white.
A crow.
Panic flickers, but fades.
Something else is there, closer than ever, on the other side of her fear. That strange warmth she felt in Aunt Violet’s garden, when the insects rose from the earth. She pushes through her panic, breaches the wall to find the light, the spark she holds inside.
It reaches her veins, hums in her blood. Her nerves – in her ear canals, in the pads of her fingers, even the surface of her tongue – pulse and glow.
The knowledge comes from deep within her, some hidden place she has long buried.
If she wants to live, she has to follow the crow.
After a while, she sees a greyness ahead of her, feels wind on her face. The woods are almost like a tunnel, she thinks. A tunnel of trees. She is coming to the end of it.
Up ahead, there is a gap in the trunks. Beyond it, she can see the rise and slope of the fell, like the haunches of an enormous animal, furred pale with snow. Crouched and waiting.
She has done it. She has made it through the woods.
On the fell, she feels so exposed that she almost wishes for the claustrophobia of the woods. The wind whips her face and takes the sound from her ears. Her lips and nose sting with the cold.
The crow is still there. Flying above her in blue-black loops. She can barely hear its guttural call above the rush of the wind in her ears.
At the crest of the hill, she can see the orange glimmer of the village below. Coming down the fell is easier: she is sheltered from the wind, now. Her hands and face feel raw, and a blister throbs on one heel. But the snow is gentle on her face. And she is almost back at the cottage. Almost home.
She looks up. The clouds have parted to reveal a smattering of stars, bright in the dusk. She watches the crow and feels no fear – instead, she is struck by its beauty as it glides away, the light grey on its feathers.
She has been afraid of crows since the day of her father’s death. Since she saw the velvet flash of wings, dark in the summer sky.
Since the day she became a monster.
But she isn’t a monster, and never was. She was a child – just nine years old – with nothing in her heart but love and wonder. For the birds that made arrows in the sky, for the pink coils of earthworms in the soil, for the bees that hummed through the summer. Her throat aches as she reaches into her pocket, fingers closing around the bee brooch. She holds it up to the night and it is as radiant as the stars. Almost as if it had never been damaged at all.
She remembers the strength in her father’s hands, pushing her to safety. The last time he ever touched her. He died for her, the same way she would die for her child. Hot tears stream down her cheeks. She isn’t sure who they are for – the little girl who watched her father die, or the woman who spent twenty long years blaming herself for his death.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she says out loud, acknowledging the truth of it for the first time. ‘It was an accident.’
The crow wheels right, disappearing into the distance, one final cry echoing.
‘The baby’s fine,’ says Dr Collins later, her open features creasing into a smile. She is crouched by Kate’s stomach, listening intently to her stethoscope.
‘Are you sure?’ asks Kate. She hasn’t felt her daughter move since the car accident, since stumbling into the GP surgery, shivering from cold. The awful image rears up again – her child frozen in the womb, tiny fingers curled closed.
‘Here, have a listen,’ says the doctor, passing her the stethoscope.
There it is, the thrum of her child’s heartbeat. Relief floods her body; tears burn behind her eyes.
‘Like I said before,’ says Dr Collins, ‘this one’s a fighter.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be OK until your mother gets here?’ Emily is loitering in the doorway of the cottage. Her husband Mike, waiting in the car, beeps the horn.
It is a bright day; the snow-topped hedges sparkle in the sun. Kate watches as a waxwing forages for rowan berries, its crest quivering. It chitters as it is joined by its mate. Starlings sweep overhead, making shapes in the sky.
‘Positive. Thanks so much for everything.’ Emily has stocked the fridge with all the food Kate could possibly need – microwaveable meals, bread, milk. She’s brought nappies, and a blow-up mattress for Kate’s mother to sleep on. She and her husband even arranged for her car to be towed to a garage in Beckside. Kate doesn’t know how to thank them enough.
‘All right, well you just let me know as soon as anything happens! Soon as there’s even the hint of a contraction, I want to know about it!’ Emily gets into her car and waves goodbye, and Kate feels a pang of sadness for her friend, as she remembers what Emily said to her on Bonfire Night.
I had a baby, once.
She still can’t quite believe that she – they – escaped the accident unscathed. Each day since, she’s braced herself for crisis: for pain in her gut, blooms of blood on her underwear. But everything has been fine: the baby is moving again, wriggling and fluttering inside her. In the evenings, Kate watches the surface of her stomach ripple, marvelling at a tiny foot protruding here, a little hand there.
That she will soon hold her child in her arms feels nothing short of miraculous. Kate wonders what colour her eyes will be, after they’ve changed from new-born blue. What she’ll smell like.
Her mother’s flight leaves tomorrow. Once she arrives, she’ll get the train from London, then hire a car so that they’ll be able to get to the hospital, when the baby comes.
She only has one more day to herself. As she drifts around the cottage, aimlessly touching surfaces, picking things up and putting them down again, she wonders what her mother will make of it. Of the framed sketches of insects; the centipede preserved behind glass. Of the corner of the bedroom she’s prepared for the baby; the second-hand cot, draped with Violet’s old shawls for blankets. The handmade mobile, twirling with leaves and feathers, the glittering bee brooch now the centrepiece.
And of Kate herself – her cropped hair; the strange outfits she pulls together from her great-aunt’s wardrobe. Today she has thrown the beaded cape around her shoulders – the twinkling of its beads reminds her of the time she met Aunt Violet. It helps her feel ready to bring her daughter into the world. Ready to protect her, at all costs. She will be strong, just like Violet was.