Swearing under her breath, she tries again.
‘Emergency, which service do you require?’
She opens her mouth to speak. The back door clicks again.
‘Hello? Which service do you require?’
The footsteps are in the hallway now. They stop. She hangs up the phone. There is no sound other than the beat of her heart in her ears. Kate thinks he must be directly beneath her. She is gulping at the air now, her breathing fast and ragged. What if he can hear it?
He must be looking at the trapdoor. Wondering what it leads to. Wondering if it leads to her. Tears sting her eyes as she remembers all the times he’s hurt her. She touches the scar on her arm. All those years she’s lost. Six years of cowering from him, of letting him tell her she is stupid, incompetent. Worthless. The fear is replaced by a hot bolt of fury.
He’s not going to hurt her again. He’s not. She won’t let him.
And she won’t let him anywhere near her child.
The footsteps start again. She hears him walk into the sitting room. There’s a faint creak as he settles onto the sofa. She can picture him, staring at the window, waiting for her to come home.
Kate shifts position, slowly and carefully. She looks at her phone: the reception bar flickers. She needs to get help – she should have dialled 999 as soon as she saw those messages, but her mind was too blurred by panic, by the need to hide. And now it’s too late for her to call. He’ll hear her, and discover her hiding spot.
She wipes her bloodied hand on her trousers, then types out a quick text to Emily.
Please can you call police. Abusive ex-boyfriend at cottage. Hiding in attic.
Kate holds her breath.
Message failed to send.
She tries to re-send it, greeted again and again by that cold, impersonal sentence.
She’s on her own.
There must be something in the attic she can use to defend herself. Something she can use as a weapon. If only she’d thought to grab the fire poker from the sitting room.
She lifts one of the candles and looks around, searching for a crowbar, a hockey stick … anything.
The candlelight passes over the bureau, catching on its golden handles.
She sees something that she didn’t notice before.
She crawls to the bureau, as slowly and quietly as she can, sucking in her breath.
There is a W carved onto the handle of the locked drawer.
She pulls the necklace out from under her shirt, slips it off. The engravings match.
Kate runs her fingers over the pendant. There is a tiny bump at the bottom of the pendant, barely visible. She presses it, holding her breath. Nothing happens.
She presses it again.
This time, the pendant springs open with a snap. Not a pendant after all. A locket. Inside is a rolled piece of paper. She lifts it out carefully, revealing the small golden key.
The paper looks white and fresh, as if it has been placed there recently. She unrolls it, heart thumping in her chest.
The handwriting has changed: become more refined, elegant, but still she recognises the spidery loops from the note she found in the Brothers Grimm book.
Aunt Violet.
I hope she can help you as she helped me. That is all it says. No reference to who the mysterious ‘she’ might be. But as she carefully turns the key in the lock, Kate thinks that she knows already.
She eases the drawer out, little by little, terrified that it will creak and alert Simon to her presence. She doesn’t breathe until the drawer is open enough for her to see inside.
A book.
She lifts it out of the drawer, inhaling the scent of age and must. As she holds the book in her hands, she hears the first drops of rain fall on the roof.
The leather cover is worn and soft. It looks old. Centuries old.
She opens it. The paper – it isn’t paper, she sees now, but parchment – is delicate. Diaphanous, like an insect’s wings.
The writing is faded and cramped, so that at first it is illegible. She holds the candle closer, watches the words form. Her heart beats faster as she reads the first line.
‘Ten days they’d held me there …’
45
ALTHA
I have not written this last day. Yesterday, I came to my parchment and ink, but the words could not come.
Last night, I dreamed of my mother, her words as she lay on her deathbed. Then, I dreamed that I was back in the dungeon at Lancaster, the shadow of death hanging over me. When I woke safe in my bed to the morning birdsong, I nearly cried with relief. Then I wrapped myself in my shawl and sat down to write.
To tell the story, as it really happened, I must put things down on this page that my mother would not have wanted me to. Things that she told me were not to be spoken of, with anyone, or they would risk our exposure. I must speak of the promise I made, and how I broke it.
I have decided that I will lock these papers away and see to it that they are not read until I have left this earth and joined my mother in the next life. Perhaps I will leave them to my daughter. I like the thought of that: a long line of Weyward women, stretching after me. For the first child born to a Weyward is always female, my mother told me. That is why she only had me, just as her mother only had her. There are enough men in the world already, she used to say.
I was fourteen, still weak from my first blood, when she told me what it really meant to be a Weyward. It was autumn, a twelvemonth since the couple had come in the middle of the night, since my mother had cast out her crow. Even longer since that last, precious summer with Grace.
My mother and I had been walking in the woods at dusk, gathering mushrooms, when we came across a rabbit in a trap. Its poor body was torn and bloodied, but it was still alive, the eyes flickering with pain. I knelt down, muddying the dress that my mother had laundered only the previous day, and brushed my little fingers against its flank. Its fur felt wet, the heartbeat faint and slow under its skin. I could feel that it feared death, but also welcomed it. The end to suffering. The natural way of things.
My mother looked about her, scanning the dark shapes of the trees as if to be sure we were alone. Then, she crouched next to me and put her hand over mine.
‘Be at peace,’ she said. I felt the heartbeat fade beneath our fingers, watched the light flicker from the eyes. The rabbit was gone, freed from this world. It had nothing to fear of traps and hunters now.
We walked home in silence. Already then, she was weakening: her back, which had always been straight, was curving inwards, her long plait of hair was dry as grass. I took her arm and rested it on my shoulders, so that I might support her weight.
When we were home, and night was falling over our garden outside, she sat me at the table while the stew warmed on the fire. I have set down the words she then spoke to me as best as I can recall them, though the memory grows dimmer with each passing year.
She said that there was something I needed to learn, now that I had passed into womanhood. But I must not speak of it to anyone.
I had nodded, hungry at the thought of sharing a secret with my mother. At the thought of understanding at last the pull I felt inside me, the golden thread that seemed to connect me to the spiders that climbed the walls of our cottage, the moths and damselflies that fluttered in the garden. To the crows that my mother had raised for as long as I could remember, the gleam of their eyes in the dark chasing away my childhood nightmares.
I had nature in my heart, she said. Like she did, and her mother before her. There was something about us – the Weyward women – that bonded us more tightly with the natural world. We can feel it, she said, the same way we feel rage, sorrow or joy. The animals, the birds, the plants – they let us in, recognising us as one of their own. That is why roots and leaves yield so easily under our fingers, to form tonics that bring comfort and healing. That is why animals welcome our embrace. Why the crows – the ones who carry the sign – watch over us and do our bidding, why their touch brings our abilities into sharpest relief. Our ancestors – the women who walked these paths before us, before there were words for who they were – did not lie in the barren soil of the churchyard, encased in rotting wood. Instead, the Weyward bones rested in the woods, in the fells, where our flesh fed plants and flowers, where trees wrapped their roots around our skeletons. We did not need stonemasons to carve our names into rock as proof we had existed.