Weyward — Chapter 4: Kate

4

KATE

Kate’s stomach is still oily with fear, even though she’s on the A66 now, near enough to Crows Beck. Just over 200 miles from London. 200 miles from him.

She’s driven through the night. She’s used to getting by without much sleep, but even so, she’s surprised at how alert she is, the fatigue only beginning to show itself now in a cottony feeling behind her eyeballs, a thudding at her temples. She switches on the radio, for voices, company.

A jaunty pop song fills the silence, and she grimaces before switching it off.

She winds down the car window. The dawn air floods in, clean and grassy, with a tang of dung. So different to the damp, sulphuric smell of the city. Unfamiliar.

It’s been over twenty years since she was last in Crows Beck, where her great-aunt lived. Her grandfather’s sister – Kate barely remembers her – died last August, leaving her entire estate to Kate. Though estate seems the wrong word for the small cottage. Barely bigger than two rooms, if she remembers correctly.

Outside, the rising sun turns the hills pink. Her phone tells her that she’s five minutes away from Crows Beck. Five minutes away from sleep, she thinks. Five minutes away from safety.

She turns off the main road down a lane thick with trees. In the distance, she sees turrets gleam in the morning light. Could this be the Hall, she wonders, where her family once had their seat? Her grandfather and his sister grew up there – but then they were disinherited. She doesn’t know why. And now, there’s no one left to ask.

The turrets disappear, and then she glimpses something else. Something that makes her heart thud sharply in her chest.

A row of animals – rats, she thinks, or maybe moles – strung up on a fence, tied by their tails. The car rolls on and they slip mercifully from view. Just some harmless Cumbrian custom. She shudders and shakes her head, but she can’t forget the image. The little bodies, twisting in the breeze.

The cottage is slung low to the ground, like an anxious animal. The stone walls are blurred with age, ivy-covered. Ornate letters carved into the lintel spell its name: Weyward. A strange name for a house. The familiar word with the odd spelling, as if it’s been twisted away from itself.

The front door looks done-in, the dark green paint peeling from the bottom in ribbons. The old-fashioned lock is large and cobwebbed. She fumbles for the keys in her handbag. The jangling sound cuts through the morning quiet and something rustles in the shrubbery next to the house, making her jump. Kate hasn’t set foot inside since she was a child – way back, when her father was still alive. Her memories of the cottage – and her great-aunt – are dim, shadowy. Still, she’s surprised by the fear in her gut.

It’s just a house, after all. And she’s got nowhere else to go.

She takes a breath, goes inside.

The hallway is narrow and low-ceilinged. A cloud of dust rises from the floor with each step, as if in greeting. The walls are lined with pale green wallpaper, almost hidden by framed sketches of insects and animals. She flinches at a particularly lifelike rendition of a giant hornet. Her great-aunt had been an entomologist. Kate can’t quite see the appeal, herself – she’s not exactly fond of insects, or anything that flies. Not anymore.

She finds, at the back of the house, a threadbare living room, a wall of which comprises the kitchen. Blackened copper pots and twists of dried herbs hang above a range that looks centuries old. The furniture is handsome but weathered: a buckling green sofa, an oak table surrounded by a motley of mismatched chairs. Above a crumbling fireplace, the mantelpiece is littered with strange artefacts: a withered husk of honeycomb; the jewelled wings of a butterfly, preserved in glass. One corner of the ceiling is shrouded in cobwebs so thick they look intentionally cultivated.

She fills the rusted kettle with water and puts it on the hob while she searches through the cupboards for supplies. Behind tinned beans and jars of pale, pickled mysteries, she finds some teabags and an unopened packet of chocolate bourbons. She eats over the sink, looking out of the window to the bottom of the garden, where the beck glints gold in the dawn. The kettle sings. Clutching her mug of tea, she tracks back up the corridor to the bedroom, floorboards creaking underfoot.

The ceiling is even lower here than in the rest of the house: Kate needs to stoop. Through the window she can see the hills that ring the valley, dappled by clouds. The room is crowded with bookcases and furniture. A four-poster bed, piled high with ancient cushions. It occurs to her that this is probably the bed her great-aunt died in. She passed away in her sleep, the solicitor said – found by a local girl the next day. Briefly, she wonders if the bedding has been changed since, considers sleeping on the sagging sofa in the other room. But fatigue pulls at her, and she collapses on top of the covers.

When she wakes, she is confused by the unfamiliar shapes in the room. For a moment, she thinks she is back in the sterile bedroom of their London flat: that any minute Simon will be on top of her, inside her … then she remembers. Her pulse settles. The windows are blue with dusk. She checks the time on the Motorola: 6.33 p.m.

She thinks, with an acid wave of fear, of the iPhone she left behind. He could be looking through it right now … but she’d had no choice. And anyway, he’ll find nothing he hasn’t already seen before.

She isn’t sure when he started monitoring her phone. Perhaps he’s been doing it for years, without her realising. He’d always known the passcode, and she offered it up to him to inspect whenever he asked. But even so, last year, he’d become convinced she was having an affair. ‘You’re meeting someone, aren’t you?’ he’d snarled as he took her from behind, his fingers tight in her hair. ‘At the fucking library.’ At first, she thought he’d hired a private investigator to follow her, but that didn’t make sense. Because then he would know that she wasn’t meeting anyone – she just went to the library to read, to escape into other people’s imaginations. Often, she reread books she’d loved as a child, their familiarity a balm – Grimms’ Fairy Tales, The Chronicles of Narnia, and her favourite, The Secret Garden. Sometimes, she would close her eyes and

find herself not in bed with Simon, but among the tangled plants at Misselthwaite Manor, watching roses nod in the breeze.

Perhaps that was what he really had a problem with. That he could control her body, but not her mind.

Then there were other signs – like the row they’d had before Christmas.

He knew, somehow, that she’d been looking at flights to Toronto, to see her mother. She realised that he’d installed spyware on her iPhone, something that allowed him to track not only her whereabouts, but her search history, her emails and texts. So when the solicitor called her last August about the cottage – her inheritance – she’d deleted the call log from her history and resolved to somehow get a second phone. A secret phone, that Simon would never know about.

It had taken her weeks to scrounge enough cash – Simon gave her an allowance, but she was only supposed to spend this on make-up and lingerie – to buy the Motorola. Only then had she been able to start planning. She’d had the solicitor deliver the keys to a PO box in Islington. Began hiding her allowance in the lining of her handbag, depositing it weekly into the bank account she’d opened in secret.

Even then, she wasn’t sure whether she’d go through with it, whether she deserved it. Freedom.

Until Simon announced that he wanted a child. He was expecting a lucrative promotion at work – starting a family was the natural next step. ‘You’re not getting any younger,’ he’d said. And then, with a sneer, ‘Besides, it’s not as if you have anything better to do.’ A chill had spread through her as she listened to him speak. It was one thing for her to endure this – to endure him. Spittle flying in her face, the burn of his hand against her skin. The ceaseless, brutal nights.

But a child?

She couldn’t – wouldn’t – be responsible for that.

For a while, she’d kept taking contraception, hiding the sheath of pink tablets inside a balled-up sock in her bedside table. Until Simon found it.

He made her watch as he popped each pill from its blister pack, one by one, before flushing them down the toilet.

After that, it became more difficult. Waiting until he had fallen asleep to slip from the bed, crouching silent in the bathroom over the blue glow of her secret phone, she researched the old methods. The ones he wouldn’t

suspect. Lemon juice, which she stored in an old perfume bottle. The sting of it was almost pleasurable; it left her feeling clean. Pure.

As she planned her escape, greeting the monthly petals of blood in her underwear with relief, his rule tightened. He interrogated her endlessly about her daily movements and activities: had she taken a detour, spoken to anyone else, when she collected his shirts from the dry cleaner? Had she flirted with the man who delivered their groceries? He even monitored what she ate, stocking the kitchen with kale and supplements, as if she were a prize ewe being fattened up for lambing.

It didn’t stop him from hurting her, though – from twisting her hair around his knuckles, from biting her breasts. She doubted he wanted a baby for its own sake. His need to possess her had grown so insatiable that it was no longer enough to mark her body on the outside.

Swelling her womb with his seed would be the ultimate form of dominance. The ultimate control.

And so she found a grim satisfaction in watching a green swirl of kale disappear down the toilet, the same way her birth control pills had. In smiling slyly at a delivery man. But these small acts of rebellion were dangerous. He tried to catch her in a deceit, laying verbal traps as deftly as if he were a lawyer questioning a witness in court. ‘You said you would collect the dry cleaning at 2 p.m.,’ he’d say, his breath hot on her face. ‘But the receipt is time-stamped for 3 p.m. Why did you lie to me?’ Sometimes his cross-examinations lasted an hour, sometimes even longer.

Lately, he’d threatened to confiscate her keys, declaring that she couldn’t be trusted during the long hours when she was alone in the gleaming prison of their flat.

The net was closing. And a baby would bind her to him forever.

Which was why yesterday, the future – with its distant promise of freedom – seemed to drain away as she huddled in the bathroom, watching dye spread across a pregnancy test. The tiles were cold against her skin. The whirr of a fly batting itself against the window mingled with her own ragged breaths to form an unreal music. ‘This can’t be happening,’ she said out loud. There was no one to answer.

Twenty minutes later, she ripped a second test from its packaging, but the result was the same.

Positive.

Don’t think about that now, she tells herself. But she still can’t believe it – the whole drive up, she itched to pull over and open the cardboard box she’d stowed in her bag, just to check that she hadn’t imagined those two blurred lines.

She had tried so hard. But in the end, none of it mattered. He had got his way.

Nausea roils in her, furs the roof of her mouth. She shivers, swallows.

Tries to focus on the here and now. She’s safe. That’s all that matters. Safe, but freezing. She heads for the other room, wondering if the fireplace is functional. There’s a stack of firewood next to it, and a box of matches on the mantelpiece. The first match refuses to light. So does the second. Even though she’s hundreds of miles away from him, his voice is loud in her head: Pathetic. Can’t do anything right. Her fingers tremble, but she tries again. She grins at the sight of the small blue flame, the orange sparks.

The sparks grow into flames, and Kate stretches out her hands to warm them, before thick smoke billows into the room. Chest heaving, she grabs the kettle from the range and flings water on top of the fire. Once it is out, her insides grow cold. Perhaps the voice is right. Perhaps she is pathetic.

But she’s come this far, hasn’t she? She can do this. Rationally, she knows, now that her breathing has slowed, that something must be blocking the chimney. A fire poker leans against the fireplace. Perfect. On all fours, eyes stinging from smoke, she shoves the poker up the chimney and feels it connect with something, something soft … She screams when the dark bundle tumbles down, screams again when she sees it’s the body of a bird. Ash quivers on feathers the colour of petrol.

A crow. The bright bead of its eye follows her as she recoils. She doesn’t like birds, with their flapping wings and sharp beaks. Has avoided them since childhood. For a moment, she resents her great-aunt for having lived in – of all the places on God’s green earth – Crows Beck.

But this crow is dead. It can’t hurt her. She needs a bag, some newspaper or something, to dispose of it. She’s almost out of the door when she feels a shiver of movement in the room. Turning, she watches in horror as the bird takes flight, risen like some sort of corvine Lazarus. Kate opens the window and frantically brandishes the poker at the crow until it flies out. She slams

the window shut and runs from the room. The sound of its beak tapping on the windowpane follows her down the corridor.

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