Weyward — Epilogue

EPILOGUE

August 2018

Violet switched off the television in her bedroom. She’d been watching a David Attenborough programme on the BBC. A rerun. Life in the Undergrowth, it was called. This episode had been about insect mating rituals. Not her favourite topic, really. The act always seemed quite brutal, even in the insect world. She decided to read, instead. She still had a stack of New Scientist magazines sitting on her bedside table, gathering dust.

First, she really had to open the window, get some air in. The cottage was absolutely boiling in hot weather – and yet Graham had still been on at her to get the windows double-glazed. Fat chance of that. She could already barely hear a damn thing when they were shut.

Poor Graham. He’d been dead for nearly twenty years now. Heart attack, like their father. She supposed all those long hours of writing affidavits in an airless, high-rise office hadn’t helped. She was always telling him he needed more nature in his life.

She remembered the bee brooch – gold, the wings set with crystals – he had given her before she went off to university to take her first degree in biology. She had been nervous, fearing that, at the age of twenty-six, she’d be too different to fit in with the other students.

But, as Graham said when he handed her the brooch in its pretty green box, perhaps being different wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Perhaps it was something to be proud of.

At first, the prospect of being away from Weyward Cottage terrified her: she’d taken a room in a ladies’ boarding house run by a formidable woman by the name of Basset (‘Her bite’s even worse than her bark,’ the residents used to joke) who charged her thirty shillings a week for a damp room with an unreliable tap. She would lie awake in her rickety single bed, listening to the pipes groan in the wall, and clasp the brooch tight in her hand,

imagining she was in her garden, watching bees dance through the helleborine.

Later, she took the brooch with her everywhere. This way, no matter where she was – in Botswana, tracking the Transvaal thick-tailed scorpion, or in the Khao Sok rainforest in Thailand studying Atlas moths – she was never far from home.

She opened the window, a task that seemed to take an inordinately long time. Afterwards, Violet’s arms shook from the effort. They really were quite pathetic, now. She still got a shock, sometimes, when she looked in the mirror. With her thin, weedy limbs and her stooped back, she rather resembled a praying mantis.

She heaved herself back into bed. She looked for her reading glasses, which she normally left perched on top of the tower of reading material on her bedside table. They weren’t there. Damn. The girl from the council must have moved them. It was ridiculous, really – Violet didn’t need some stranger in her house, fetching her cups of tea and wanting to tidy up. Last week, she’d asked if she might help ‘Mrs Ayres’ out by cleaning out the attic. ‘Absolutely not,’ Violet had barked, touching the necklace under her shirt.

No reading tonight, then. Well, that was all right. She might just look out of the window. It was half past nine, but the sun was only just beginning to sink in the sky, turning the clouds rosy. She could hear the birds, singing at the top of the sycamore. The insects, too: crickets, bumblebees. They made her think of Kate, Graham’s granddaughter. Her great-niece.

She remembered the first time she saw Kate, at Graham’s funeral. Violet had been so consumed by grief that she was barely aware of Graham’s son and his wife, their little daughter. She’d have been about six, then. A tiny thing, with watchful eyes under her mop of dark hair. There was something familiar about her; the coltish legs, the sharp angles of her face. The prim white socks streaked with mud, the leaf quivering in her hair.

Even then she didn’t see it.

Violet had long accepted that the Weyward line would end with her death. The only daughter she would ever have – or the feeble beginnings of her – lay buried under the sycamore tree. Frederick was paying for what he had done – she felt a dark flush of delight every time she thought of him at

Orton Hall, besieged by mayflies – but she couldn’t change what really mattered. The line that had continued for centuries, flowing as surely as the gold waters of the beck, was coming to an end. And there was nothing Violet could do about it.

But after the wake, Graham’s son, Henry, and his wife had come to Violet’s for tea. Henry was so like Graham: even the way he leaned forward as he listened to her, face furrowed with concentration. He enjoyed her story about travelling to India in the 1960s, to undertake a field study of Asian giant hornets (she still held the record for the only person who had held one without being stung).

She’d rather forgotten about the child, who was playing outside, until she heard her murmuring through the window. ‘There you go,’ the girl was saying. ‘See, told you I wouldn’t bite.’ Who on earth was she talking to? Violet opened the window and poked her head out. Kate was sitting cross-legged in the garden, looking down at something she was holding in her hand. A bumblebee.

Violet felt tears spring to her eyes, a lightness in her chest. She had been wrong, for all these years. Later, when neither Henry nor his wife were looking, she had unpinned the bee brooch from her kaftan and pressed it into the girl’s hand. ‘Our little secret,’ she’d said, staring into the wide, dark eyes that matched her own.

Violet liked to think that one day, it would lead Kate back to the cottage.

To who she really was.

After everyone left and the cottage was quiet again, Violet sat by her window, gazing out at her garden. Joy twisted into pain as she thought of the young girl she had been when she had first arrived here: motherless and afraid, thighs bright with blood. She looked at the cross under the sycamore tree, now crooked with age.

She let it go. The guilt that had grown, like a weed around her heart.

Two years after Graham’s death, Violet had woken from a terrifying nightmare. Her heart drummed in her chest and her skin was filmed with sweat. She clutched desperately at the dream, but only fragments remained: the red streak of a car approaching her nephew and his daughter, a scream tearing the air. A man, tall and lion-haired, eyes slitted with rage.

A man who wanted to hurt Kate.

The old words, traced by her fingers countless times, hummed in her blood.

Sight is a funny thing. Sometimes it shows us what is before our eyes. But sometimes it shows us what has already happened, or will yet come to pass.

It was as if Altha was speaking to her across centuries. Telling her that Kate was in danger.

It was 2 a.m. – dawn just a hint of silver at the horizon – but Violet got up and dressed immediately. She drove through the morning, all the way down to London, accompanied by one of the crows – the one that carried the sign – flying ahead like a lodestar.

She reached East Finchley, where her nephew and his family lived, just before 8 a.m. No one answered the door when she rang the bell.

Violet got back in the car, for the first time wondering if it hadn’t been a little mad, tearing across the country like this. But then she thought of the cross under the sycamore. She had already lost her daughter. Kate was her second chance – she couldn’t let anything happen to her.

Where were they? It was a Thursday. Of course – on the way to school.

She parked near the house and sent the crow ahead, to be her eyes and ears in the sky. Her heart thudded with relief when the bird found her nephew and his little girl a few streets away, approaching a zebra crossing.

But then she saw a car turning onto the street and ice brushed her spine.

It was the same red car from her dream.

Henry and Kate were already crossing the road. The car was getting

closer.

Violet had to do something.

She closed her eyes, focusing on the gold glint she’d discovered inside herself, all those years ago.

As the crow called to her great-niece, Violet felt its cry in every beat of her heart, in every cell. Her only hope was that Kate did, too. She had to pull her away from that car, from the cruel-faced man she was certain was inside.

At first it seemed like it would work. The girl stopped and turned, gazing at the trees overhanging the road. But the car wasn’t slowing down.

Get off the road. Hurry!

The crow took flight, and Violet saw Henry run back to his daughter. She saw him shout, then shove Kate out of the way. Rubber sang on metal as the driver hit the brakes.

But it was too late.

The sun lit on Henry’s face for one brief moment, before his body crumpled underneath the car. The trees and the road swam together, a blur of green, white and red.

After the peal of the sirens had died away, Violet started the engine and drove back to Cumbria. For the whole journey back, the accident played itself across her vision, again and again. Henry, risking his life to keep his daughter safe.

He was a good man, not like Violet’s own father.

Even if Violet hadn’t been there, he would have done anything to defend his child. He would have kept her away from the cruel-faced man. But Violet had never imagined such a possibility, that a father could be capable of such love.

So she interfered, and in trying to save Kate, had instead put Henry in

harm’s way.

And now he was dead.

A strange, animal keening filled her ears. It took her a moment to realise that it was the sound of her own weeping.

Violet didn’t go to Henry’s funeral. How could she face his wife and daughter, after what she had done?

The years rolled on, and it was easier not to put pen to paper, not to pick up the phone. Violet comforted herself by picturing her great-niece growing up. She imagined the skinny child maturing into a young woman, with the dark hair and glittering eyes of her forebears. A strong young woman, Violet told herself, in spite of her loss – reaching for life the way a plant reaches for the sun.

She’ll be eleven now, starting secondary school.

Eighteen. Headed to university. Science, perhaps, like me. Or English, if she likes to read.

She still dreamed of the cruel-faced man, the driver of the car. Perhaps, she told herself, she really had spared the girl a fate worse than the loss of her father. Perhaps she had been right to intervene.

Henry had loved his daughter. Maybe he’d have understood what Violet had done.

Recently, Violet had had the disturbing realisation that she was old. In fact – both her parents having died relatively young – she was the oldest person she’d ever known. (Apart, of course, from Frederick. He really was like a cockroach clinging to the underside of a rock.) Her skin and muscles seemed to be loosening from her bones, preparing to abandon ship. Before falling asleep each night, in that strange half-light between waking and dreaming, she had begun to wonder if she would still be there come morning.

Like a once bright fire burning to embers, her life was coming to an end.

She was running out of time to see her great-niece.

She’d hired a private investigator to track Kate down. He’d found an address, and Violet had been so thrilled that she’d braved the long drive down to London the next day. It was raining, and as the countryside passed in a green blur, her heart ached at the thought of a similar journey made so many years before.

But this would be different. A happy occasion.

She imagined embracing her great-niece, admiring the life she’d created. (A brilliant career, a beautiful home – filled with plants and animals, perhaps children, a kind man to share her bed. Two crickets, singing in harmony.) Sunshine broke through the clouds, making crystals of the raindrops on her windscreen. She touched the locket under her shirt and her heart swelled.

But her excitement faltered as she pulled up outside Kate’s address. A block of flats.

Later, Violet would pinpoint this as the moment she knew something was very wrong. How could Kate be happy in this soot-stained place, the air warm with rubbish and exhaust? There wasn’t a single note of birdsong, a single blade of grass.

But she hobbled carefully out of the car, forcing a smile.

A happy occasion. ‘Hello – is Kate here?’ There was something familiar about the man who answered the door. He wore an expensive-looking bathrobe, and Violet flushed at the realisation that she’d interrupted her great-niece on a Sunday.

Was this man her husband, boyfriend? She looked at him more closely. His hair was a tawny sort of gold, rather like a lion’s pelt. His narrowed eyes were faintly pink, as if he’d had too much to drink the previous evening.

‘No. There’s no Kate living here,’ he said, though the set of his mouth told Violet he was lying. There was something cold in his voice. It made her think of Frederick.

She began to apologise, flustered – but he shut the door before she could get the words out.

Later, in the car, Violet realised why he looked familiar.

He was the cruel-faced man from her dream long ago, with the golden

hair and livid eyes.

The world fell away as she realised.

She’d glimpsed two events from Kate’s future, not one – the car accident that killed her father and then, many years later, the meeting of this man.

The man who wanted to – perhaps already had – hurt her.

Just like her mother before her, Violet had thought she could change the course of the future as easily as tearing out the pages of a book. She’d

thought she could save her great-niece.

She’d been wrong.

She hadn’t saved Kate from anything.

But Violet was determined to make things right, while she still had breath in her body.

The day after her trip to London, she made an appointment to see a solicitor. It was past time she made a will.

At the solicitor’s office, she remembered the bee brooch she had given to Kate when she was small. Perhaps Kate had lost it; perhaps she didn’t even remember Violet – the eccentric old woman she’d met only once. The woman who had disappeared from her life, all those years ago.

But now Violet could make amends. She would give Kate her legacy.

She would give her a new life. Away from him. ‘When the time comes,’ she instructed her solicitor. ‘Make sure you speak to my great-niece directly.’

The light was fading outside. She squinted at her watch: it was half past ten already. Who knew where the last hour had gone. Time was funny like that, Violet thought. Speeding up and slowing down at the strangest of moments.

Sometimes, she had the odd sensation that her whole life was happening at once.

Violet took off her necklace and put it on the bedside table. She rolled over onto her side, facing the window. The sun was disappearing behind the sycamore tree now, turning the garden red and gold. She closed her eyes and listened to the chatter of the crows. She was so tired. Darkness pulled at her, gentle as a lover.

She felt something brush her hand and opened her eyes. It was a damselfly, its wings fiery with the sunset. How pretty.

Her eyelids drooped. But something was tugging at her, keeping her awake.

Sighing, she sat up in bed. Reaching over to the bedside table, she tore a piece of paper out from her notebook. She hesitated for a while, thinking of what to write. Best keep it simple, she thought. To the point.

She scrawled the sentence down quickly, then rolled up the paper and put it inside the locket of her necklace.

She stowed the necklace safely in her jewellery box. Just in case.

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