‘Thank you,’ she said. They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the logs spitting on the fire.
‘Have you thought any more about what you might do?’ Graham asked. A couple of the villagers had paid her to help with their farm animals. One of them kept bees, and was aghast when she insisted on tending to the hive without a beekeeping suit. So far, she’d been able to make enough to keep herself in bread and milk. Winter would be difficult, though. The greengrocer was looking for a shop girl. She’d thought about applying. Her dreams of becoming an entomologist seemed very distant indeed.
‘A little,’ she said, fingering the cover of the book on insects. From Arthropods to Arachnids, it was called.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Graham. ‘Once I’m a rich lawyer, I’ll pay for you to learn all about your blasted bugs. Promise.’
Violet laughed.
‘In the meantime, I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. She went over to light the stove, pausing to look out of the small window. A crow was watching her from the sycamore, the moon lighting on the white feathers in its coat. It made her think of Morg.
She smiled.
Somehow, she felt certain that everything would be all right.
53
KATE
Kate looks out at the garden while she waits for her mother to arrive.
The winter sun gilds the branches of the sycamore tree. The tree is like its own village, Kate is learning. Home to robins, finches, blackbirds and redwings.
And, of course, the crows – a comforting presence, with their familiar dark capes. The one with the speckled feathers often comes to the window to accept some titbit from the kitchen. At those moments, when she feels the glossy beak nudge against her palm, Kate has the overwhelming feeling that she is exactly where she is supposed to be.
The sycamore hosts insects, too, although many of them have burrowed away from the cold, sheltering in the ridged cracks of the sycamore’s trunk, the warm soil beneath its roots.
She is still for a moment, listening. It is strange, to think she’s spent all her life cringing away from nature. From who she really is. It is as if she had been in hiding – like the insects – dormant and docile, until she came to Weyward Cottage.
There could be others like her, in need of waking.
She told me of other women, across the land, Altha had written. The Devices and the Whittles.
Perhaps one day, after the baby is born, Kate will find them. She will go south, to Pendle Hill, where the land curves up to meet the sky. Where women were ripped from their homes, centuries ago. Perhaps something has survived, in the dark, hidden places where men dare not look. But for now, she is grateful – for her mother, for Emily.
And for Violet.
Snowflakes are falling onto the little wooden cross underneath the sycamore. She isn’t sure what is buried there, though she has a suspicion the grave is more recent than she originally thought.
She thinks of Altha’s friend, Grace. And of Violet’s note. I hope she can help you as she helped me. Some secrets, she’s decided, can stay just that – secret.
Kate feels the locket under her shirt, warm against her skin. The key is safe inside, along with a small curl of a feather that she retrieved from the floor that night, spangled with broken glass.
The police arrested Simon in London, charging him with assault. There is to be a hearing next year, at the courthouse in Lancaster. The police have warned her that even if he’s found guilty, Simon could be out in two years. Sooner, probably, with good behaviour. She is working on a victim personal statement for the trial, though she dislikes that label. She is not a victim, but a survivor.
‘Are you worried he’ll come back here? When he gets out?’ Emily asked her.
Kate had thought of how he looked that night, clutching his ruined face while feathers swirled in the air. Powerless, once she had robbed him of his only weapon: her fear.
‘No,’ she had told Emily. ‘He can’t hurt me anymore.’
Tyres crunch on snow. Then, the soft chime of the doorbell.
Her mother is smaller than she remembers: there are creases around her eyes and her hair is threaded with silver. She is wearing a striped beanie Kate gave her one Christmas years ago, when she was a teenager. Along with her luggage she holds a bouquet of pink roses, crisp from the airport.
There is a moment when neither of them speak. Her eyes go to the wreath of bruises at Kate’s throat; the dome of her stomach.
Together, they begin to cry.
Two days later. The first, searing clench of her womb.
‘I can’t do this,’ she gasps, curled on her side. ‘I can’t.’
‘Yes,’ says her mother, as she calls for an ambulance. ‘You can.’
And then, she is doing it. Her muscles tensing, her blood surging.
There is the warm flood of her waters breaking, then the contractions – bright waves of pain. She has the feeling, as she crouches on her hands and knees in Aunt Violet’s kitchen, that the animal part of her brain has taken over.
Her daughter moves quickly through her body, ready to leave the dark sea of the womb behind. Ready to feel sunlight, to hear birdsong. As she slips in and out of lucidity, her body humming with pain and power, Kate thinks of these things, and more, that she will show her daughter. The crows that call from the sycamore tree. The insects that skim the surface of the beck. The world and all its wild ways.
The next Weyward girl is born on Aunt Violet’s floor, the same floor that sparkled with snow and feathers and broken glass, in a rush of blood and mucus.
She smells of the earth, of damp leaves and rich clods of soil, of rain, of the beck’s iron tang.
Kate cries as she touches the tiny fingers, the silky strands of hair. The glowing curve of her cheek. Her eyes, dark as a crow’s. The cottage is loud with her cries. With life.
Kate names her Violet.
Violet Altha.
EPILOGUE
August 2018
Violet switched off the television in her bedroom. She’d been watching a David Attenborough programme on the BBC. A rerun. Life in the Undergrowth, it was called. This episode had been about insect mating rituals. Not her favourite topic, really. The act always seemed quite brutal, even in the insect world. She decided to read, instead. She still had a stack of New Scientist magazines sitting on her bedside table, gathering dust.
First, she really had to open the window, get some air in. The cottage was absolutely boiling in hot weather – and yet Graham had still been on at her to get the windows double-glazed. Fat chance of that. She could already barely hear a damn thing when they were shut.
Poor Graham. He’d been dead for nearly twenty years now. Heart attack, like their father. She supposed all those long hours of writing affidavits in an airless, high-rise office hadn’t helped. She was always telling him he needed more nature in his life.
She remembered the bee brooch – gold, the wings set with crystals – he had given her before she went off to university to take her first degree in biology. She had been nervous, fearing that, at the age of twenty-six, she’d be too different to fit in with the other students.
But, as Graham said when he handed her the brooch in its pretty green box, perhaps being different wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Perhaps it was something to be proud of.
At first, the prospect of being away from Weyward Cottage terrified her: she’d taken a room in a ladies’ boarding house run by a formidable woman by the name of Basset （‘Her bite’s even worse than her bark,’ the residents used to joke） who charged her thirty shillings a week for a damp room with an unreliable tap. She would lie awake in her rickety single bed, listening to the pipes groan in the wall, and clasp the brooch tight in her hand, imagining she was in her garden, watching bees dance through the helleborine.