VIOLET
Graham stayed until September, when he went back to Harrow. Father had written to say that he would pay for the remainder of Graham’s schooling, but after that he was on his own. The letter didn’t mention Violet. It was as if Father had decided that she had never existed.
‘I’m not sure about leaving you here,’ Graham said before he set off on the long walk to the bus station. There had been frost that morning, sparkling on the sycamore tree. The first sign of winter’s approach. ‘Will you be all right, all by yourself?’
‘I’ll be grand,’ said Violet. She planned to spend the day in the garden, sowing seeds she had been given by the village greengrocer. She had thought about asking Graham to cut down the helleborine but in the end she decided to leave it. It was a good source of pollen for the bees, she thought. There seemed to be even more insects in the garden than ever, now: their constant thrum lulled her to sleep each night, an arthropod lullaby.
‘See you at Christmas,’ Graham waved as he set off down the lane. ‘I’ll bring you some new books!’
As she shut the front door, she wondered whether anyone had found the biology textbook she had hidden under her bed back at Orton Hall, along with the bloodied clothes from the woods.
She still dreamed about Frederick. The dull weight of him on top of her, squeezing out her breath. All of that blood, seeping out of her.
She would wake up and stare at the ceiling, a line from Altha’s manuscript echoing in her head.
The first child born to a Weyward is always female.
She had killed her daughter. The next Weyward girl. Violet knew, then, that she would never have her own baby. She would never teach her daughter about insects, birds and flowers. About what it meant to be a Weyward.
‘But you weren’t supposed to be born yet,’ she would whisper into the darkness, thinking of the tiny curl of bones buried under the sycamore tree. ‘You were meant to come later, when I was ready.’
It was all because of Frederick, and what he did to her. What he made her do. That sun-spangled afternoon in the woods, the trees circling above. Blood, staining her thighs pink.
He had taken away her choice. Her future.
For that, she would never forgive him.
The problem was that she wasn’t sure she could forgive herself, either.
Another letter arrived in November. Addressed to Violet, this time. According to the back of the envelope, it had been sent from Orton Hall. She didn’t recognise the handwriting.
Violet’s heart thudded as she unfolded the letter and saw the name at the bottom. It was from Frederick.
He was on bereavement leave, he wrote. Father was dead. A heart attack while hunting. Before his death, he had declared that neither Graham nor Violet were his biological children. Father had managed to produce documents – no doubt falsified – demonstrating that he was in Southern Rhodesia at the time of Graham’s conception. Violet, he said, had been conceived before her parents’ marriage, and so could not be proved to be his daughter.
Gripping the letter in her hands, she wished that it were indeed true – that none of Father’s blood ran through her veins, that her cells weren’t ghosts of his own. Tears blurred her vision, and the rest of the letter swam before her eyes.
Father had left everything to Frederick, who was now the Tenth Viscount Kendall. Enclosed with the letter was a deed, transferring Weyward Cottage into Violet’s name. At this, her tears gave way to fury. She was tempted, for a moment, to throw the letter in the fire.
Did Frederick really think a piece of paper could make up for what he did to her?
And anyway, Weyward Cottage wasn’t his to give. It was Violet’s, and always had been – before she even knew it existed. Frederick couldn’t lay claim to the land any more than Father had.
In the days after the letter, sadness stole like a shadow into the cottage. But Violet wasn’t mourning Father – how could she, after what he had done? It was her mother and grandmother that she longed for. She hadn’t known either of them, not really, and yet she felt their loss as keenly as a missing limb. For she had managed to confirm her suspicion: Elinor had died. Cancer, the villagers said. Only four years ago. She had lain alone on her deathbed, the grandchildren she’d never met just a few miles away.
Graham visited at Christmas, and they said goodbye to their mother and grandmother together. Back in the summer, Violet had dried a bouquet of lavender, and it was this that they placed on the Ayres family mausoleum, a spot of brightness in the snow. Violet hated to think of her mother encased in that cold stone. Even worse was the thought of her grandmother, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
She preferred to think of Lizzie and Elinor in the garden that they had loved. In the fells, the beck.
She preferred not to think of Father at all.
‘Frederick has offered me an allowance until I finish university,’ Graham said later. ‘I’m not going to take it, though. My form master thinks I could get a scholarship. Law at Oxford or Cambridge. Durham, maybe. It’d be nice to stay up north. Besides, I don’t want his money.’
‘It’s not really Frederick’s money though, is it?’ said Violet. ‘It’s—’ She couldn’t bring herself to say her father’s name. ‘It should be yours.’
‘All the same.’ There was a crackling sound as Graham put another log on the fire. It was snowing outside. In the moonlight, the drifting flakes looked like falling stars. The garden was still and muffled; the insects quiet. Violet knew that some insects hibernated in winter – diapause, it was called.
Last week, she had crouched next to the wooden cross and looked at the beck, which glittered with a thin layer of ice. Underneath the surface, she knew, thousands of tiny, glowing spheres clung to twigs and pebbles. Mayfly eggs. Frozen until the warmer months, when they would continue to grow, cells splitting and changing into nymphs and then, when they were ready, rising up into an undulating, breeding swarm.
It had given her an idea.
The next night had been a full moon. She’d climbed the sycamore tree in the garden, the moonlight silver on the branches, until she could see for miles all around. In the distance, she could just make out the fells, crouched below the star-studded sky. Beyond, she knew, was Orton Hall. Frederick. She closed her eyes and pictured him sleeping in Father’s bedchamber. Then, she focused as hard as she could, until her whole body pulsed with energy. There it was again, that gold glint. It had always been there, she now realised, shimmering under her skin, brightening every cell of her body. She just hadn’t known how to use it.
In the summer, it would begin. She pictured the Hall, her father’s things – his precious furniture, scarred and black with rot, the globe on his desk eaten away. The air shimmering with insects, in a swarm that grew and grew each year, until there was no escaping it.
And Frederick. Trapped there alone.
He would never forget what he had done.
‘Oh! Almost forgot. Presents,’ Graham was saying, unbuckling his school rucksack. ‘All the way from Harrow library.’
‘Did you steal these?’ she asked, as he handed her two heavy books: a great tome on insects, and another on botany.
‘They haven’t been borrowed since before the war,’ he said. ‘No one is going to miss them. Trust me.’