Weyward — Chapter 38: Violet

38

VIOLET

Violet was roused by the sound of footsteps. She had stayed up until dawn reading Altha Weyward’s manuscript. The candle had burned right down, leaving a moon of wax on the floor. She felt as if something had shifted inside her. As if she had been told something about herself that she had always known. One by one, memories fell into place, revealing their true form. The day of the bees. The click of Goldie’s pincers in her ear. The way she had felt the first time she had touched Morg’s feather.

Her legacy.

Father was in the kitchen, bearing provisions and a tight expression.

Violet felt as if she were seeing him clearly for the first time in her life.

The treasured picture of her parents’ wedding day – their faces shining with love, the air bright with flower petals – dissolved.

He had never loved her mother. Not properly.

Deep down, Violet had known this all along. She’d only let herself be fooled by the fact that he’d held on to those things of her mother’s – the feather and the handkerchief – since her death.

But she had been wrong. They weren’t treasured mementoes of a beloved wife much mourned. They were trophies. Like the tusk, the ibex head … even Percy the peacock.

Her mother had been little better than a fox, to be discarded after the hunt, broken and bloodied.

She remembered the look on her father’s face the day of the bees, when his cane split her palm in two. At the time she had thought it was fury. But now she knew better. It was fear. All along, he’d recognised that she was her mother’s daughter, had known what she was capable of. That was why

he had hidden her away, forbidden her from learning about Elizabeth and

Elinor. About who she really was.

And as for Father himself?

He was a murderer.

Violet watched him as he lined new tins up on the table. It was a warm day, and his forehead was pearled with sweat. The blood vessel on his cheek had burst into a red spider’s web. He spoke and Violet watched his jowls tremble. ‘Frederick has sent a telegram,’ he said. ‘He has agreed to marry you. He has been granted a week of leave in September. We’ll have the wedding breakfast at the Hall. You’ll be able to stay for a while, afterwards. The engagement will be announced in The Times next week.’ Violet said nothing. The sight of him was making her ill. He was her only surviving parent, but she would have been happy never to see him again for as long as she lived.

Thankfully, after delivering the news, Father didn’t linger. He left without saying goodbye. She closed her eyes in relief at the sound of the

key turning in the lock.

Now she could think.

She pictured a life with Frederick. The memory of the woods – the crushed primrose flower, the searing pain – came back to her.

I trust you enjoyed yourself?

She wouldn’t – couldn’t – marry him. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to, she thought desperately. Perhaps he would die in the war. But Violet had the awful feeling that he’d survive, like a cockroach clinging to the underside of a rock. Meanwhile, his spore would continue to grow inside her. The thought of his flesh mingled with her own made her want to retch. And then, once it – the child, though she refused to think of it in those terms – had slithered out of her and into the world, Frederick would come to claim them both.

What would become of her then? She thought of her mother, who had married the man who swooned over her dark eyes and blood-red lips. Who had ended up alone in a locked room, scratching her name into a wall so that there would be some evidence that she had existed, before suffering a gruesome, painful death.

Violet would not let that happen to her.

The child was the only reason for Frederick to marry her, surely. That was his obligation and interest, the rope that tied them together. A noose, shackling her from the inside.

Violet saw things clearly now. She had to cut the rope.

The manuscript. Bringing on the menses. Menses. The same strange word that Doctor Radcliffe had used for her monthly blood.

Outside, the garden shimmered with heat. She waded through the helleborine, its flowers leaving crimson smears on her dress. The air hummed with insects, the sun catching on the wings of a damselfly. Violet smiled, remembering the words from her mother’s letter.

Walls painted yellow as tansy flowers.

It was as if she was reaching out to her from beyond the grave, guiding her.

She found the plant under the sycamore: bobbing with yellow flowers, each one comprised of tiny buds clustered together like a beetle’s eggs.

It had worked for Grace. There was no reason why it wouldn’t work for her, too.

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