Weyward — Chapter 18: Kate

18

KATE

Kate has been at the cottage for three weeks now. It’s late spring, and the year is ripening. It rained last night – hard enough that she feared the roof would buckle – but today the sky is low and blue, the air hot. Hot and thick to match her blood, which seems, in these last weeks, to have slowed its pace through her veins.

On the walk into the village this morning, she passes another row of moles, tied by their tails to a rusted gate. Flies hover about them, flitting between their damp fur and the clumps of dog violet that grow alongside the road. She’s learned that it’s a local tradition – the cashier at the greengrocer looked bemused when Kate shyly asked about it, explained that was how the mole-catcher proved his worth. But the shrivelled bodies still feel like a warning, especially for her.

By the time she reaches the medical centre, her shirt is sticky with exertion and anxiety. She was instructed to arrive with a full bladder, and her lower abdomen is tight and painful, straining against the waistband of her skirt. She checks her watch: ten past nine. She’s five minutes early.

Perhaps she won’t go in. Perhaps she’ll turn and walk back to the cottage without even knocking on the door, the same way she repeatedly dialled the number and hung up before anyone could answer. She did this five times before her nerve held and she managed to speak to the receptionist, to actually book this appointment.

She looks around her. This early, the square is empty and quiet, save for a cow’s distant lowing. There is no one to see her go in. She looks down at her feet, watching ants serpentine across the cobbles.

Taking a breath, Kate opens the door and is hit by the smell of disinfectant. The waiting room is cold and whitewashed, the plastic chairs and tired noticeboard a stark contrast to the building’s Tudor exterior. The space is dominated by a large desk, behind which a woman sits tapping away at a computer. The muffled sounds of conversation come from behind a heavy door: the consulting room, according to a gleaming brass plate. ‘Name?’ asks the receptionist, a thin woman with a vulpine face. ‘Kate,’ she says. ‘Kate Ayres.’ The receptionist’s eyebrows lift as she looks at Kate properly for the first time. ‘The niece,’ she says. It isn’t a question. ‘Um – yes. Did you know my great-aunt? Violet?’ But the woman is looking back at her computer screen. ‘If you could take a seat, please. The doctor will be with you in a minute.’ Kate sits heavily on one of the plastic chairs. She wishes she had some water; her stomach roils, and there is a strange taste in her mouth. Metallic, like blood, or even dirt. She’s been waking up with it. It reminds her of something, a childhood memory that she can’t quite hold on to.

The door of the consulting room opens. ‘Miss Ayres?’ The doctor is male – in his late sixties, perhaps; weathered cheeks shaded by white stubble. A stethoscope around his neck. Panic bubbles up in her.

She’d asked for a female doctor, hadn’t she? Yes – she’s sure of it. The receptionist – likely the same woman staring at her now – had assured her that there would be a female doctor. ‘Dr Collins is only available Tuesdays and Thursdays,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘So you’ll have to come in on one of those days if you want to see a woman, otherwise it’s Dr Radcliffe.’ ‘Ah – sorry,’ she says now as she rises from the seat, wincing at the feel of her thighs unsticking from the plastic. ‘I think I was booked in to see Dr Collins?’ ‘Couldn’t make it in,’ says the male doctor, gesturing for her to follow him into the consulting room. ‘Sick child. Always the way with that one, I’m afraid.’ She hesitates. Part of her wants to leave; to ask for an appointment with the female doctor another day. But she’s here now. And she’s not sure she trusts herself to come back.

She follows the doctor into the consulting room.

The gel is cold on her skin. Dr Radcliffe has already drawn volumes of blood from her arm, prodding and sticking her like a laboratory specimen. ‘Just relax,’ he says, running the ultrasound wand over her stomach. He moves closer and she smells his breath, stale with coffee. ‘Your husband couldn’t make it?’ She has an image of Simon’s face over hers, his hand resting on the base of her throat as he moves inside her. His cells travelling up into her body, ready to tether her to him forever. ‘I’m not married,’ she says, blinking the memory away. ‘Your boyfriend, then. He didn’t want to come?’ There is a strange whooshing sound in the room, almost like the beating of wings. ‘No, I don’t … what’s that noise?’ The doctor smiles, pressing the wand harder into her stomach. ‘That’, he says, ‘is the heartbeat. Your baby’s heartbeat.’ There is a plummeting sensation inside her. ‘Heartbeat? I thought it was … too early for that.’ ‘Hmm, you’re between ten and twelve weeks along, I’d say. Here, take a look.’ He gestures to the blinking monitor, where her womb undulates in grey and white. For a moment she can’t make sense of the image, it’s like static.

Then she sees it: a pearly glimmer, pupa-shaped, almost. The foetus.

Her mouth is so dry that it’s hard to get the words out.

‘Can you tell it … the baby’s sex?’ The doctor chuckles. ‘A bit too soon for that, I’m afraid. You’ll have to come back in a few weeks.’ There is something else she wanted – planned – to ask. But now, with the doctor’s liver-flecked hands on her stomach, the room filled with the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, it feels … impossible.

The question shrivels inside her.

The doctor looks at her strangely, as if he has read her thoughts. ‘All done,’ he says abruptly, handing her a piece of paper towel. ‘You can clean yourself up.’ He is silent as he enters information on a computer, carefully labels the ruby-red vials of her blood.

‘You look a bit like her,’ he says after a while. ‘Your great-aunt, I mean.

Violet. Similar sort of eyes – just the hair that’s different. Hers was dark

when she was younger.’ ‘It’s dyed.’ ‘You’ll have to stop doing that. Bad for the baby.’ He goes back to his

labelling. ‘Did you treat her, then? My aunt.’ The doctor pauses, fiddles with the stethoscope around his neck. ‘Once or twice, when Dr Collins wasn’t in – she was her patient, really.

Only in recent years, though. Before that I think she went to a surgery out of town – she only started coming here when my father died. The first Dr Radcliffe. He started the practice.’ Finished with his labelling, the doctor gets up to usher her out of the consulting room. ‘See Mrs Dinsdale on your way out, please, so you can book in for the next appointment. We’ll want you back in eight weeks.’ Back in the waiting room, Kate looks at the noticeboard again, at the pamphlets on display at the receptionist’s desk. But there’s none of the information she is looking for. ‘Will you book in for the next appointment today?’ asks the receptionist. ‘Um. Actually, I was wondering’, Kate lowers her voice, glancing over at an elderly woman in the waiting room, ‘if you have any information about … termination services.’ The receptionist slides a leaflet across the counter, her eyes narrowed. ‘Thank you,’ says Kate. She pauses. She wants to leave, to get away from the woman’s cold stare, but her bladder is tugging at her painfully. ‘Is there

a toilet I can use?’ A nod at the corridor to the left.

She washes her hands, grimacing at the chemical smell of the soap. As she cups water from the tap and drinks, snatches of conversation from the waiting room float back to her. ‘Did she ask for what I think she did?’ An unfamiliar voice – the elderly female patient.

Kate freezes. She doesn’t want to hear this. Her cheeks sting with shame. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ the receptionist is saying. ‘Being from that

family.’ ‘Who is she?’

‘That’s Violet’s great-niece.’ ‘Really?’ says the old woman. ‘Didn’t know Violet had any family, save for himself up at the big house. Though not sure he counts for much.’ ‘I wonder if she has it, too.’ ‘They all do, don’t they? That Weyward lot. Ever since the first one.’ Then the receptionist says something else – a word so unexpected that

Kate is sure she must have misheard.

Witch.

Outside, Kate takes deep, gulping breaths. Her brain feels disordered, fogged.

She can still hear it; the strange thrumming of her baby’s heartbeat. The way it filled the room. It was hard to believe that it had come from her own body. It sounded like something from the sky – a bird taking to the air. Or something not of this world at all.

It is 2 a.m. but Kate is awake, watching bats flutter past the window, dark against a pale slice of moon.

Her thoughts feel scattered, panicked – flitting away from her as though they, too, have wings. She rests a hand on her stomach, feeling the smooth heat of her own flesh. It seems impossible that, even now, the larval creature she saw onscreen floats inside her. Growing into a child.

Those things the women were saying about her family – they made it sound as though Kate was carrying some sort of faulty gene, an error code lurking in her cells, plotting her demise. Like the crow she found in the fireplace with the strange white pattern across its glossy feathers – a sign of leucism, she’d read, a genetic trait handed down over generations.

She remembers what the greengrocer said, about the viscount. How he’d lost his marbles.

Perhaps they were referring to some kind of mental health issue, running in the family? That wouldn’t surprise her. All those panic attacks she’d experienced over the years – the clawing in her chest, her throat tightening.

The feeling of something trying to get out.

After another hour of trying and failing to sleep, she gives up, pushing the bedcovers aside.

Switching on the light, she drags the hatboxes out from under the bed.

There has to be something in here – something she missed the first time she

looked.

Again, she rifles through the folder with its faded, dusty cover. But there’s nothing – nothing she hasn’t already seen before. Not a single mention of the Weywards.

Sighing in frustration, she picks up Violet’s old passport and opens it to the photo page, staring into the dark eyes that are so like Kate’s own.

There’s a determination there that Kate didn’t notice before – the firm set of the mouth, the jut of the chin. As if Violet has fought something and won.

She would never have ended up like Kate: soft and malleable, yielding as easily to Simon’s fingers as if she were clay.

Suddenly she wishes her great-aunt were still alive, that she could talk to her. That she could talk to someone. Anyone.

She is about to put the passport back when a slip of yellowed paper falls out of it.

It’s a birth certificate. Violet’s birth certificate.

Name: Violet Elizabeth Ayres Date of Birth: 5 February 1926 Place of Birth: Orton Hall, near Crows Beck, Cumbria, England Father’s occupation: Peer Father’s name: Rupert William Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall Mother’s name: Elizabeth Ayres, nee Weyward She remembers the letters. Rupert and Elizabeth – they are Violet’s parents; Kate’s great-grandparents.

Which means that Kate – Kate is a Weyward.

When she does sleep, Kate has the same nightmare that haunted her throughout her childhood – her father’s large hand over her small one; the dark shadow of the crow in the trees. Wings thrashing the air; the shriek of rubber on tarmac. The wet thump of her father’s body hitting the ground.

Except that at the cottage, the dream is longer – the flapping of wings morphing into the gallop of her baby’s heartbeat. She sees the foetus: growing and growing, like a moon rising into the sky. Growing into a child.

But not a boy, blond and blue-eyed like Simon. A girl, with dark hair, dark eyes. A child that looks like Aunt Violet. That looks like Kate.

A Weyward child.

In the morning, she takes the crumpled brochure from the bedside table and unfurls it. But she doesn’t dial the number. She can’t bring herself to.

Every time she picks up the phone, she remembers the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, remembers the way it looked inside her, glimmering like a pearl.

Remembers that dream-child, with hair and eyes the colour of jet, of richest earth.

She is still for a moment, thinking of what Simon would do if he knew she was pregnant. How he would treat their child.

Things will be different, this time. She will be different. She will be strong.

She remembers the way she appeared in the mirror, when she tried on Aunt Violet’s cape. That dark glitter in her eyes. For a second, she felt almost powerful.

She will keep her baby, her Weyward child. She knows, somehow, that

she is carrying a girl.

She will keep her safe.

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