Hearing Honor’s distaste at the murders – even at twelve, the curl of her lip made her look as though she’d trodden in something unpleasant – confirmed Catherine’s instinct: she’d been right to shield her husband and daughter from the bloodied truth of her past.
She’d do almost anything to keep it that way.
The cottage was sleeping, the draught of winter blowing through the gaps in its windows with determined breath. The blizzard had stopped. A pause in the darkness.
The street outside was deserted apart from a fox that picked her way across the frozen front gardens, stopping only to sniff the air. Parked cars were covered with a layer of ice. Nimbostratus clouds gathered overhead, laden with snow that would begin to fall again in an hour or so.
The village slumbered on in the way that country villages do.
Honor was lying in bed, one arm flung behind her head, the other wrapped around a cuddly giraffe. A strip of moonlight seeped through the curtains, pooling silver on the carpet. Her face was a pale blur against the night.
She murmured and moved beneath her duvet, restless. Her breathing sharpened. A cloud covered the moon and the bedroom was steeped in shadows. The walls looked black in the thick of the night and seemed to undulate in the darkness, as if they were leaking history – or something more distasteful – through the brickwork. The air was cold.
Honor sat up in bed.
She screamed.
The noise was so sudden it broke open the night-time stillness of the house. It was the scream of a thousand terrors. The sound of fear made real. It was tarry with shame and sorrow and loss, of unexplained secrets, crouching in the darkness.
For Catherine, who was asleep in a room across the landing, it was enough to wake her. Her eyes opened, the thunder of blood in her ears. The house was silent for now, but her body was tensed. She knew what her wakefulness meant and she waited for its reason to reveal itself.
Honor screamed again.
Catherine threw off her duvet and ran to her daughter’s bedroom. She did not stop to pull on her dressing gown or push her feet into slippers, and the chill stung her skin. But she barely noticed, intent on chasing the shadows that stalked her child’s sleep.
At first, she couldn’t see her. But the cloud cleared the moon, and by its gleam, she found her, cowering by the bookcase. Her daughter’s eyes were fixed on the wall.
‘Sweetheart,’ she said, reaching for her. ‘You’re dreaming.’
Honor did not acknowledge her mother. She was looking at something that Catherine could not see.
Catherine bit her lip. The GP had warned them that the sudden onset of Honor’s night terrors could be down to the stress or worry of starting secondary school. He’d advised them not to interact or try to wake her, unless she was in danger of hurting herself. ‘It’s likely she won’t recognize you and will become more agitated,’ he’d explained. But maternal instinct kicked in. She wanted to rescue Honor from the darkest reaches of herself.
Honor began to whisper. Catherine shook her gently. Spoke her name. But the whispering continued, like an incantation. She sat on the carpet next to her daughter to wait it out.
Honor’s sentences were indistinct, rolling from one to the other, a slurry of vowels and consonants. Every now and then, Catherine recognized a word, but the meaning was lost inside the confusion of sounds. She shivered, her pyjamas scant protection against the freezing temperature.
Her daughter’s back was pressed against the spines of her books, as if disappearing into the pages of childhood comfort might save her from her nightmares, and her arms were outstretched, a shield to ward off the unseen. The girl flinched, knocking Aesop’s Fables from the shelf, tipping over a potted cactus and breaking one of the Murano glass fish she’d lovingly collected since her father had brought her first one back from a work trip to Italy.
The thud of the falling book seemed to have an effect on Honor. Her murmurings slowed into song and Catherine picked out the rhythm of a long-forgotten favourite. The hairs on her arm lifted in response. Honor’s voice was the scratch of teeth against glass.
‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,
Your house is on fire, your children will burn,
All but one, that lies under a stone,
Fly thee home, ladybird, ’ere she be gone.’
The girl smiled vacantly at her mother and silence stretched between them, thin as ice.
Somewhere in the cottage, a toilet flushed. Edward was awake. And as quickly as it started, Honor relaxed into herself again. Dimples and apple-cheeks. Blinking. Sleepy-eyed.
She allowed Catherine to guide her back into bed and tuck the covers around her. She reached for her giraffe, and she was twelve again. Within seconds, her eyes were closed and she was breathing evenly. Catherine’s precious girl. Her mother kissed her forehead and stroked her fringe. For a minute, she watched her sleep.
Through a gap in the curtains, the moon was high and bright. Catherine held back the fabric and looked into the garden below. Ice crystals glinted in the wash of light. The world was still again. A winter tableau.
Catherine gathered up the pieces of broken glass and put them on the windowsill, out of harm’s way. She used her fingers to sweep dirt from the fallen cactus into her palm.
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children will burn.
As the doctor had said, these night terrors could be a manifestation of anxiety, of hidden concerns or stresses, the subconscious flexing its muscles. But terrifying as it was to witness her daughter in the grip of an attack, they were a recent affliction, most likely caused by surging hormones or friendship worries. Honor didn’t mean anything by it. She couldn’t know the truth about Catherine’s past. She was asleep and had no sense of what she was saying.
On the carpet, the book of fables lay open, its pages spread out like a fan. She had bought it for Honor on her eighth birthday, when her daughter was still pleading for bedtime stories.
She picked it up, feeling the heft of it in her hands, the moon spotlighting the printed ink. ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’. Another of Honor’s childhood favourites.
She read a sentence or two, the opening lines as comforting as a warm blanket, and it calmed her.
These night-time episodes left Catherine feeling bruised and worn-down, emotion sucked from her until she was paper-dry inside. The events of earlier that day – Honor’s truancy, Edward’s snappiness and the shocking and unexpected reappearance of her sister – had heightened that feeling. She yawned. Time for bed. Tomorrow was a new day.
She closed the book, but not before she had read the last line, the moral of the story. The words made her heart thump with guilt and shame.
‘For none believes the liar, even when they speak the truth.’
You like the idea of a secret code? Well, I’ll let you into a secret if you promise not to tell. Beatrice is not my real name. Names, I’ve discovered, can be a burden. I expect you can guess why I chose it as my avatar, knowing our shared love of a certain Shakespeare play.
Like you, I live down south. It’s a simple existence. It took me many years to find my place in the world and preserving it has become the purpose of my life. I would fight with everything I have to protect it.
I don’t have much family – it’s a long and complicated story for another time – but I’ve learned to accept it, although it still breaks my heart. Even when life is full in other ways, it is possible to be lonely. Empty days and hollow nights. Plays tricks on you, the silence.