Weyward — Chapter 21: Kate

21

KATE

As the days grow warmer, Kate opens the windows and the doors, so that the cottage is filled with the scent of the garden. Sometimes, she sits for hours on Aunt Violet’s sofa, enjoying the sun on her skin as she reads. The fresh air helps with the nausea that still pulses in her gut, and she finds the distant murmur of the beck soothing. Outside, the otherworldly plants look almost beautiful, the ragged stems curling towards the sky. She rests one hand on her stomach, thinking of her daughter, blooming inside.

Violet’s bookshelves burst with tomes on science – insects, botany, even astronomy. One of them – a guide to local insect life called Secrets of the Valley – seems to have been written by Violet herself. Kate was relieved to find some fiction, too – even a few volumes of poetry.

Most of the novels are by female authors – Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf. In the last month, she has read Rebecca, The Bloody Chamber, Orlando. It’s been a long time since she’s derived such pleasure from it, from the stories spun of other people’s dreams. Those last days at the library, before she left Simon, had felt furtive, dangerous: she’d flinched at the tick of the clock on the wall, at every shadow that fell over the page.

She had thought, for a while, that she’d lost the magic of it: the ability to immerse herself in another time, another place. It had felt like forgetting to breathe.

But she needn’t have worried. Now, worlds, characters, even sentences linger – burning like beacons in her brain. Reminding her that she’s not alone.

She’s just finished a slim novel called Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, about a spinster who moves to the countryside to take up

witchcraft. A stamp on the flyleaf reads Kirkby’s Books and Gifts, Crows Beck. The bookshop next to the church. There is a handwritten message

next to the stamp: Made me think of you! Emily x Looking through Violet’s collection, Kate sees that some of the others bear the same stamp. There are no other books about witches – although she does find a collection of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, dog-eared at a poem called ‘Witch Burning’. Two lines have been circled in pencil: Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand: I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth She remembers what she’d overheard the receptionist hiss at the medical centre. That one of the Weywards had been a witch.

Kirkby’s Books and Gifts is a red-brick building attached to the village church, St Mary’s. Small and squat, it nestles close to the church, as if trying to hide behind it. A bell chimes as Kate opens the door, welcomed by the comforting smell of dust and old leather bindings. Original floorboards are almost hidden by brightly coloured Turkish rugs, dusted here and there with glimmering strands of what seems to be cat hair. ‘Hello,’ calls a voice, its owner hidden by a maze of bookshelves. Kate peers around a sparsely populated shelf labelled ‘St Mary’s History’ and sees a woman in her fifties, standing behind a desk stacked high with new releases. The woman is wearing a sweet, woody perfume – patchouli oil. In her arms she cradles an enormous orange cat, which swats at the glasses that dangle from a chain around her neck. ‘Get off,’ she says to the cat, who meows and leaps to the floor. And, to Kate: ‘Can I help you?’ There is something familiar about her, about the way her eyes crinkle as she smiles. The greying auburn curls. Kate flushes when she realises: it’s the same woman she saw at the greengrocer, all those weeks ago.

Could this be Emily? ‘Are you all right, love?’ the woman asks, when Kate doesn’t answer. ‘Yes, sorry.’ She wipes her sweaty palms on her trousers. ‘My name’s Kate … Kate Ayres. I’m looking for Emily?’ ‘Oh!’ The woman’s smile widens. Kate is embarrassed to see a sheen of emotion in her eyes. ‘Violet’s great-niece. I should have known – you have

her eyes. I’m Emily – your great-aunt and I were friends. I’m so sorry for your loss. She was a wonderful woman.’ ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ She colours. ‘I mean – I didn’t really know her. I didn’t even know she had died until her solicitor contacted me – she left me her house.’ ‘We should get together sometime,’ Emily says brightly. ‘Me and Mike – that’s my husband – live out at Oakfield Farm. We’d love to have you round. Then I can tell you all about her.’ ‘Oh,’ Kate falters. ‘That’s really kind. Maybe I could let you know?’ ‘Of course.’ There is a pause, and she feels Emily’s eyes on her. She wishes, suddenly, that she was wearing something else: her T-shirt is cut too low, and her jeans stick uncomfortably to her thighs. Even her hair feels wrong. She lifts a self-conscious hand to the coarse, bleached strands of it. ‘Anyway, is there anything else I can help you with?’ Emily asks. ‘Book recommendations?’ ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I was wondering if you had anything on local history. Or if …’ She pauses, nerves ticking in her stomach. ‘You could tell me about the Weywards?’ ‘Ah,’ Emily grins. ‘Heard the rumours already, then?’ Kate thinks of the receptionist at the doctor’s surgery, the word she had spat from her mouth as though it was something rotten.

Witch. ‘Something like that, yeah.’ ‘The villagers do like to gossip. Well … the story goes that a Weyward was tried as a witch, back in the 1600s.’ She thinks of the cross under the sycamore tree. Those carved letters.

RIP. ‘Really? What happened to her?’ ‘I don’t know the details I’m afraid, pet. But there was a lot of that going on around here then, sadly. Women being accused left, right and centre.’ ‘Did Aunt Violet ever talk about them? About the Weywards?’ Emily pauses, frowns. She fiddles with the chain of her glasses, so that the lenses blink in the light. ‘She didn’t like to talk about her family much. I got the impression it was too painful. Something to do with leaving Orton Hall.’ Kate thinks of the turrets she passed on the drive up, gilded by the dawn.

‘Anyway,’ Emily blinks and turns to look up at the clock, which is shaped like a cat’s face. One of its whiskers – the shorter one – hovers close to 5. ‘I’ll be closing up soon, I’m afraid, pet. Do come back another time, though, let me know how you get on. And the offer stands.’ Kate feels heat rising in her cheeks as she says goodbye. There is something else she wants to ask, too, but she hasn’t been able to work up the nerve. Her bank balance is dwindling rapidly – soon she’ll be down to the emergency stash of notes hidden in her handbag. She’d developed a silly fantasy, when she’d found the note in Aunt Violet’s copy of Lolly Willowes, that perhaps she could work here, in the bookshop. She’d almost convinced herself of it, that she could slip on that old professional persona the way one would a coat.

But now that she’s standing here, her skin prickles with self-doubt. She hasn’t worked for years – not since Simon made her quit, after she tried to leave him the first time. Her memories of work seem so distant that they might have happened to someone else. Even at the time, she’d known the job wouldn’t last. She didn’t deserve it.

It was a silly fantasy. Nothing more.

Not ready to face the walk back to the cottage, Kate tries the front door of the church. It’s locked. But the gate of the little graveyard is open, swinging on its hinges. She looks behind her to see if anyone is watching, and then slips inside.

The graveyard is bordered by high stone walls, green with moss and lichen. Ancient trees line the walls, their branches threatening to brush against the tops of the headstones.

She has been here before, she realises with a start. Of course. Her grandfather’s funeral. She remembers the other mourners, black as crows in their sombre raincoats, the drone of the priest. And the noise.

There is a rustle of movement. She looks up: a dark shadow flits from one tree branch to another, and her heart jolts. She runs her fingers over the reassuring shape of the brooch in her pocket as she walks through the graveyard.

The headstones are a motley of different ages: some of them are new, sparkling granite, surrounded by tiny terracotta pots of bright flowers.

Others are so worn by time and weather that the inscriptions are barely readable. She sees the same names again and again: Kirkby, Metcalfe,

Dinsdale, Ridgeway. As if the same cast of actors has been brought out to play each generation of villagers.

She weaves her way through the lanes of headstones in search of her family. At first, she makes towards a gloomy-looking mausoleum in the centre of the graveyard. It is ornately carved from marble; topped by a cross and a crouching bird of prey. But the marble is stained green with age, half covered by some creeping plant. The little door, set into the centre of the tomb, is padlocked shut – to keep something in or out, she isn’t sure. There is a sad bouquet of wilted lavender at the entrance. Kate, seeing a little card attached with mouldering ribbon, crouches down to get a look, but the writing is blurred, illegible.

Eventually, she finds her relatives in the far corner, protected from the elements by the heavy boughs of a large elm. Graham, her grandfather, and Violet, his sister. Side by side, beneath a starry quilt of wildflowers. She crouches down next to the headstones to read their inscriptions. Graham is described as a loving husband and father. A loyal brother. There is a quote from Proverbs 17:17 – A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.

Violet’s headstone – a hunk of granite, still in its natural shape – is simpler. There is just her name, Violet Elizabeth Ayres, and the dates of her birth and death. And something else – faint, inscribed so delicately that she

doesn’t notice it straight away.

The letter W.

W for Weyward? There is something familiar about the look of it. A hot breeze blows through the graveyard, rustling the leaves of the trees.

She stays like that for a while, looking at Violet’s headstone. Her great- aunt had left explicit instructions for it, according to the solicitor. She wonders who attended her funeral: she hadn’t been able to go without rousing Simon’s suspicion. Kate feels an ache of regret at not being there.

She’ll come back another day, she decides, with some flowers. Violet would have liked that, she’s sure.

She gets to her feet and decides to see if she can find any Weyward graves. She wanders up and down the graveyard a few times, but sees none, though some of the headstones are blank from age. Perhaps a woman accused of witchcraft wouldn’t have been buried in a church graveyard. It is – what’s the word for it again? – hallowed ground. But surely, if the family

does go back centuries, other Weywards must have lived and died in Crows Beck? If not in the graveyard, then where could they be buried?

A vague unease fills her as she thinks of the weathered cross under the sycamore tree. Could it – surely it doesn’t – mark a human burial site?

She distracts herself by taking the scenic route home, the path that follows the beck, which is the colour of burnt sugar in the afternoon light.

She looks at the clumps of vegetation on the banks: ferns, nettle, a plant she doesn’t know the name of with tiny buds of white flowers.

Something makes her look up at the sky: there is a dark shape against the pink clouds. A crow.

Later, Kate opens Aunt Violet’s jewellery box.

In the dim light, she sees that the necklace is tangled. She lifts it out gently. She sits down on the bed, switching on the bedside lamp to take a closer look. She wonders how old the necklace is. It looks at least a century old, if not older: the gold is dull and tarnished. It feels cool in her palm, reassuring.

The engraving on the oval pendant is dark with grime and dust, but it is unmistakeable: the same W that is carved onto Violet’s headstone.

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