Weyward — Chapter 35: Violet

35

VIOLET

Her mother. This house belonged to her mother. Violet touched her necklace, tracing the W engraved on the pendant.

The Weywards. Her mother’s family, she could be sure of it now.

Violet looked around the dingy room for some record of them. There was barely anything to suggest it had ever been lived in at all. She sat down at the creaky kitchen table, which was covered with a thick patina of dust. She wiped some away with her finger and coughed. Underneath, the wood was scored and gouged, as if someone had taken a knife to it. The roof was leaking, and the far wall of the kitchen shone with rain. She was cold and it was dark. There was no clock anywhere in the house, and the small square of violet sky visible through the filmy window gave no clue as to the time.

She looked at the provisions that Father had left. Tinned peas, corned beef hash, sardines. One of the eggs still had a soft curl of feather clinging to it. The eggs made her think of spermatophore and she pushed them to one side, stomach queasy. She ate some peas, cold from the tin. She struggled to light an ancient-looking candle with one of the matches Father had left behind, flinching at the small blue flame. She sat for a long time, watching the wax bubble and melt.

It was strange to imagine her mother living here. It was a hovel, Violet thought. Like something from a fairy tale without a happy ending. She walked over to the small door that led to the back garden and opened it, sheltering the candle flame from the wind. The garden – if it could be called that – was wild and rampant: strange-looking plants shivered in the rain. A large sycamore loomed over the house, and Violet could see nests in its

upper branches, the glimmer of black feathers. Crows. She felt their eyes on her, watching. Assessing.

She shut the door, letting darkness fall. She took the candle into the next room and sat on one of the beds. It gave a great creak of protest. In the bedroom, the air was thick from dust and it moved through her lungs like treacle. She lay down on the bed and watched the candle throw shadows onto the wall. Violet felt tears well up in her eyes. She was here, in her mother’s house, closer to her than she had been in years, and yet she had never felt so alone in her life. She shut her eyes and waited for sleep. When it came, it was blank and dreamless.

Violet was woken by a wave of nausea. She retched into a basin she found next to the bed. Her head pulsed with pain and her mouth was dry and sour. She needed water. The candle had long since gone out, and the room was very dark. She drew back the threadbare curtains to look outside.

The windowpane seemed to have thickened from years of grime, so that the outside world was just a murk of brown. She tried to open it, but the latch had rusted shut.

She felt her way into the next room, fumbling on the kitchen table for the box of matches. She knocked one of the tins onto the floor and it rolled to the other side. Violet lit a candle and left it on the table before going outside.

The garden was red with dawn, and she could hear the chatter of thrushes and wood pigeons. The wind whispered through the leaves of the sycamore and Violet detected another layer of sound – the gurgle of the beck. She could see it from here, shining in the morning sun; the garden sloped down to it. The same beck that curved through the valley and around the fells, all the way to Orton Hall. Connecting Violet to this place – to her mother – without her even knowing.

There was no tap in the cottage, but Violet saw an old water pump outside, like the one in the kitchen garden at the Hall. The pump was green and stiff with age, and she struggled to work the handle, the way she’d seen Dinsdale do. The first drops of water that trickled out were brown, but eventually she had a clear stream flowing, which she cupped in her hands and splashed at her face. She got a bucket from inside and filled it to the brim. The bucket was very heavy and she half dragged it back indoors, sloshing water over the sides.

Here, she paused, thinking of the pails of scalding water she’d watched Penny lug up the stairs, face pink from steam. She needed to heat the water.

She lit the stove with a match, before fetching a dusty pan from a hook on the wall. She would bathe, then wash the windows, try to get some light in.

Violet saw that Father hadn’t left her any soap. She supposed he thought it was appropriate that she sit here in squalor. Reflect on your sins, he had said. She didn’t want to think about her sins, about the woods, Frederick, spermatophore. She wanted to scrub the house and her body until both were shiny and new.

Perhaps she could find some soap somewhere. The bigger room had very little in the way of storage; or, indeed, furniture at all: it was bare, other than the stove and the table and chair. She remembered the bureau in the other room.

Lifting the candle to it, she could see that it would have been a fine piece, once, before time and dirt had eaten away at it. Much of it was covered in grime, but the bits of wood she could see were warm and rich, the handles a heavy brass beneath the dirt. It was far nicer than the battered old table in the kitchen, almost as if it didn’t belong in the house. She tried one of the drawers, but it was locked. The other, too. She frowned. She hadn’t seen a key anywhere. Father had taken the front door key with him, she remembered. She had heard it turn in the lock.

In the kitchen, she stripped – taking care not to look down at her body, the places Frederick and the doctor had touched – and scrubbed herself as best she could with a wet handkerchief. Once she was dressed, she set about wiping down the table and the windows. Soon her handkerchief – a present from Miss Poole, she remembered, rather guiltily – was brown and stiff with dirt.

The rooms were a little brighter now that she had cleaned the windows.

No matter what she did, she couldn’t get the one in the bedroom to open, but she flung the kitchen window wide, letting in the smells and sounds of the garden. She opened a tin of beans and ate it outside, feeling the warmth of the sun on her face. The garden was loud with bees and swallows, and the occasional caw of a crow from the sycamore tree. Violet thought she heard a note of approval in the crow’s voice, as though it had assessed her favourably. It made her feel a little less alone.

She could do something about the garden, she thought. She could see that it would have been neat and ordered, once: there were recognisable patches

of violets, mint. It was waist-high with helleborine now, the crimson heads nodding in the breeze.

Her mother had sat in this garden, perhaps exactly where Violet was sitting now. It was obvious to Violet that her mother had been very poor – especially compared to Father. Was that why he was so secretive about her?

Was he ashamed? Violet remembered what Frederick had said. That her mother had bewitched her father.

Bewitched. Everything she knew about witches came from books, and none of it was good. The witch who ate Hansel and Gretel, for instance. The three witches in Macbeth, raising the wind and the seas. But what about the witch in ‘The Robber Bridegroom’? She had helped the heroine escape.

Anyway, she was being ridiculous. Witches weren’t real. Her mother hadn’t been some sort of evil hag, brewing potions in a cauldron and zipping about on a broomstick.

Still, there had to be something of her mother’s somewhere in the house.

Inside, Violet tried the old bureau in the bedroom again. She hadn’t noticed before, but each handle was carved with a W. She pulled her necklace out from under her dress and held it up against the bureau to check. No, she hadn’t imagined it … the exact same W as the one carved on her mother’s locket. Barely breathing, she opened the locket and put the tiny gold key into the lock. It stuck, and for a moment Violet thought it must have snapped off inside. She turned it gently again, and felt the mechanism give way with a soft click. She opened the first drawer, which was empty. The second drawer was filled with paper, old enough that it was almost transparent, the writing so faded that she could not make it out. A scrap of newsprint had been daubed with what looked like a hastily scrawled shopping list. Flour, it read, kidneys, milk thistle.

There was an invitation to a jumble sale at St Mary’s, dated September 1920. A crumpled letter from the Beckside branch of the Women’s Institute asking for volunteers to make socks and stockings for ‘our boys abroad’.

Violet looked at the date: 1916.

Something familiar caught her eye at the top of the pile. A bundle of thick, creamy paper stood out from the other scraps and tatters. The Ayres coat of arms: a gilded osprey, suspended in flight. Father’s writing paper.

They were letters, from Father to a woman named Elizabeth Weyward. E.

W. Lizzie, he called her.

Violet’s mother. It had to be. Her hands were shaking.

I have not slept this past week for thoughts of you, read one missive. It then beseeched Lizzie to be brave, for the sake of our union. The paper was thin with creases, as if it had been continually folded and unfolded, read and reread.

Another letter, jumbled in with the rest of the pack, stood out. It was not written in her father’s elegant, Etonian script. Instead, the writing was rushed and slapdash, at one point almost veering off the page.

Ma I am sorry it has taken so long to write but I have not been able to get out a message to you. I’ve had nothing to write with but today Rupert has gone out hunting – the butler Rainham, who takes pity on me, has brought me some paper and ink. He has said he will take you this note on his way to Lancaster to purchase new clothes for Rupert.

It has taken me too long but I see that you were right. I should never have left home. For some time, Rupert has not let me go outside and now I am to be locked in my room.

How I hate this room. It is small, like a cage, with walls painted yellow as tansy flowers. It makes me think of the tansy tea we used to prepare for the village women, and it pains me to think that Violet will not know the cures and treatments that have been our way for hundreds of years. When I shut my eyes, all I see is that bright yellow, reminding me of what I have forsaken. My past, and my daughter’s future.

I miss her so, Ma. They will bring the babe to me so that he can feed, but they have not let me see Violet in days. I hear her cries echoing through those yellow walls.

My only comfort was Morg, but I told her to go, Ma – this is no life for a bird. All I have left now is one of her feathers. Though I do not like to look at it.

It reminds me of what I did. What Rupert made me do.

I should have listened to you, that day we argued down by the beck. ‘He takes you for a dog that he can train to eat from his hand,’ you said.

I thought he loved me for myself. But you were right. To him I am but an animal, like those he hunts and puts on display.

That was another thing you told me. That if a man saw my gifts for what they truly were, he would only use them for his own ends. I told myself I was doing it for her, for Violet. As you guessed, she had already quickened in my belly, then. I began to dream of her, grown into a dark-haired beauty, but alone and bleeding in our cottage.

Whether from sickness or injury I did not know, but it was clear: my daughter would not survive a life of poverty such as the one I could give her. In my terror, I told Rupert of the dream and asked him what would become of our child. His parents would never acknowledge her, he said. He would be ruined if he married me, being only a second son, with no title to smooth his path in the world. And worse – his parents already knew. They know about the child we’d made together that night in the woods, when only the moon saw my fear and heard my cries. They planned to drive us – the last Weyward women – away from Crows Beck, he said. From our home, where our forebears have lived for centuries.

But, he said, I had the power to give us all a chance of happiness.

He would have his title, and my daughter would have a life of safety, riches. Acceptance.

I liked the idea of that. I was never strong like you, Ma. The things the villagers said, the looks they gave us – I never could stand it. I yearned for a life free from stares and whispers.

And so I did the terrible thing he asked.

I lay in wait, hidden by gorse and heather, as dusk spread over the fells. Morg dug her claws into my shoulder. I heard them before I saw them – the whinnying of the horses, the clatter of hooves. I waited until they were close enough to the edge of the hill, where the ground cut away sharply into a ravine. When Morg took flight, I shut my eyes, opening them only when the screams had stopped, when all that remained was the twisted shape of the carriage on the rocks below, the spokes of one wheel still spinning. Something sparkled on the ground near my feet – a pocket watch, a family heirloom that Rupert had spoken of with great envy. Its face was cracked and sharp, so that when I picked it up, drops of blood welled along my finger.

I stood for a while, looking. Ignoring the horror in my heart.

I thought I was like Altha, our fearless ancestor, that our deeds linked us across time. I thought I was good and brave, made strong by

her blood.

But I was wrong.

We took three lives that day, Morg and I. I told myself that they deserved it – Rupert’s parents, his older brother too. That they had been cruel to the man I loved; that they would hurt you, hurt my child, without remorse. But truthfully, Ma, I didn’t know them – or what they might have done – at all. Rupert has lied about so many things. I suspect now that his parents never knew of our child, never planned to drive us from our home.

I wish I had seen it before – that his words held as much truth as a fairy story. That he never loved me at all.

Sometimes I wonder if he planned this from the first. He’d been watching me, he said, even before we danced at the May Day Festival.

He saw how I was special, and wanted me for his wife. I believed him, from the way he looked at me. A blaze in his eyes that I took for love.

But I am familiar with that look, now. It is the same way he looks at a gun dog or a rifle, a mere instrument to deliver his wants.

I do not ask, nor expect, forgiveness. I write this because I want you to know the truth. And I am running out of time to do so. The doctor is coming: Rupert says I am to have a new treatment. I do not know if I will survive it. Shut in this tiny room, and without even Morg’s presence to sustain me, I grow weaker each day.

I take a strange comfort from this – have almost willed it. For I am become like a rifle without bullets, and useless in his schemes. I will never harm another for his sake.

Ma, I beg of you, please be there for the babe – and for Violet. Keep

our legacy safe for her.

I hope she has your strength.

All my love Lizzie

Heart pounding, Violet rifled through the rest of the pack, searching for more of her mother’s handwriting. But the remaining letters were from Father, to a woman whose name she did not recognise.

1 September 1927 Dear Elinor,

Thank you for your letter to Lizzie, which I am afraid she was not well enough to receive, her health having declined significantly in recent weeks.

I have discussed your request to visit with Doctor Radcliffe. Given the marked decline in Lizzie’s physical and mental state, Doctor Radcliffe does not feel a visit would be appropriate at the present time.

Elinor, your daughter has become – there is no other word for it – hysterical. She has conspired to bring that ghastly crow into the house – Morg, she calls it, ridiculous name – and speaks to it as if it is human. This is, I suppose, exactly the kind of behaviour you encouraged in her. Violet may be a lost cause. She has already begun to mimic her mother; befriending flies and spiders, for heaven’s sake.

But I will not have this madness infect my son. My heir.

And it is not good for Lizzie, Elinor. It is not good for Lizzie to tear around the house in such a state, engaging in such fantasies. Last week she told me she could predict the weather – or rather, that Morg, that foul bird, could. I live in, I am ashamed to say, constant dread of her.

I do fear – and Doctor Radcliffe shares my concerns – that, should she lose her remaining grip on reality, she will pose an even greater danger to herself. And to the children.

In fact – and I shudder to even relate this incident to you – the housekeeper came upon her attempting to climb out of her window, which a feckless maid had neglected to lock. Most horrifyingly, she was carrying the baby. She put the life of my son – my heir, Elinor – in danger.

Fortunately, Doctor Radcliffe was able to come at once. Given the recent developments, he has suggested a treatment that may help: hysterectomy, removal of the womb. It may seem an extreme course of action, but the doctor is of the view that it is warranted in such rare circumstances, when the state of the sexual organs begins to pollute the mind.

It is my fervent hope that Doctor Radcliffe’s treatment will be effective in returning Lizzie’s sanity. I shall keep you abreast of

developments.

Yours sincerely, Rupert Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall

10 September 1927 Elinor, Your unannounced visit yesterday was most irregular.

I regret that Rainham was unable to admit you to the Hall, but I was tied up dealing with some urgent correspondence relating to the estate.

As I think Rainham explained to you, Lizzie is currently preparing for treatment. You need have no concerns for her wellbeing: Doctor Radcliffe and his small team of highly trained attendants have installed themselves at the Hall in readiness for the surgery.

Doctor Radcliffe has the utmost confidence that the treatment will work. We must allow the good doctor to do his work in peace.

In the meantime I ask that you refrain from engaging in further correspondence. I will let you know when there is news.

Yours Rupert Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall

25 September 1927 Dear Elinor, It is with sincere regret that I write to inform you of Elizabeth’s death.

She departed this earthly realm in the early hours of this morning.

Doctor Radcliffe believes that a weakened heart was the culprit, no doubt exacerbated by the strain of her recent delusions.

While I am sure that Doctor Radcliffe used his best endeavours to save her, I gather that by the time it became clear that something was amiss, it was too late.

I have made arrangements for her to be interred in the Ayres family mausoleum at St Mary’s church next Tuesday.

I trust that will be satisfactory.

Yours, Rupert Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall

30 September 1927 Elinor, Given your display on Tuesday, I think it best that you have no further relationship with the children. It is my priority that they recover as quickly as possible from this regrettable episode. As such I

think it best that they are not subjected to discussion of Elizabeth; Doctor Radcliffe’s view is that this would do more harm than good.

And as for your absurd request to take Elizabeth’s remains to your slum of a cottage for burial – I can’t imagine that you ever thought I could agree to such a thing. Elizabeth was my wife and it is thus appropriate that she be interred in the Ayres family plot.

However, I will do as you ask and give Violet the necklace you are so concerned with – I can make arrangements for Rainham to collect it next week. I may need to revisit this decision, should you attempt to

contact me again.

Yours, Rupert Ayres, Ninth Viscount Kendall

Violet’s cheeks were wet with tears.

Now she knew the truth. Her mother had not – as she’d been led to believe – died giving birth to Graham. She had died because a doctor – the same doctor who had slid his cold fingers inside Violet – had mutilated her.

Killed her.

She reread Lizzie’s letter, tracing the loops and curves of her mother’s handwriting. At first, she didn’t understand the section about the carriage, but then she remembered. Her grandparents and an uncle had died, not long

before her parents’ marriage.

Coach accident, it was. Very sudden.

All that remained was the twisted shape of the carriage.

Had her mother somehow been responsible? The letter made no reference to anything that might be used to engineer an accident – Violet pictured a trap hidden in the gorse, something to make the horses spook. But Lizzie had written only of Morg.

In any case, it was Father who was to blame. Who had – her stomach turned at the thought – wished for his own family members to die. She thought of the broken pocket watch she’d found in Father’s desk. She wondered if it had belonged to Edward – that was the name of the uncle who had been killed, she remembered. The eldest of the three Ayres sons.

That must have been why Father wanted him out of the way. With his parents and older brother deceased, he would have been free to inherit the

title of viscount, and Orton Hall.

His greatest conquest of all.

Her mother must have been the only person who knew of his guilt. And so he had locked her away – pretended she was mad – to cover up what he had done.

She hadn’t even been allowed to see her own mother, Violet’s grandmother. What had become of Elinor? Violet supposed she must have died, which would explain why Father owned the cottage. But where were their things – Elinor’s, and Lizzie’s? If not for the contents of the bureau, one might think they had never existed in the first place.

The last sentence of her mother’s letter came back to her.

Keep our legacy safe.

What had she meant by ‘legacy’?

Blinking away her tears, she rifled through the remaining sheafs of paper in the second drawer, sending dust sparkling into the air. At the bottom of the drawer was a thick book, clumsily bound in calfskin and mottled with age. Her heart skipped a beat. The parchment was worn, barely readable.

She had to squint to make out the writing: the hand was tight and cramped, the ink faded. She held it up to her candle to get a better look. There was a name … Altha: the ancestor her mother had spoken of in her letter.

Her fingers traced the first line.

Ten days they’d held me there. Ten days, with only the stink of my own flesh for company …

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