Page 56 of The Snow Witch

NOW

It was a shame Jake couldn’t join her, but it was fine; Violet would just have to do this on her own – whatever this was. And actually, a small part of her was glad he wasn’t there – because then she would have to explain why she’d suddenly decided to come to this old cowshed and start digging up the floor.

‘Oh yes,’ she muttered in a silly voice as she was thinking about what she might have said to Jake. ‘I saw a vision in the Sacred Well and then someone told me to come here because Coventina needed something. So yay! Here I am!’

It was bonkers. Purely bonkers.

But regardless, bonkers aside, she was here, in Newbrough. Still second-guessing herself to some extent, but here anyway. And so, she drove slowly up the lane again towards the cottage.

She sat in the car for a few minutes, gathering her thoughts. Yes, this was possibly one of the silliest things she’d done. She was coming to this derelict old cottage to find – something.

Violet took a deep breath and opened the car door, then she climbed over the snow-covered fence again and headed to the cottage. It looked no different to how it had done the first time she had been there. Just as grim and grey as it had been before; difficult, really, to imagine it as a home. She looked up at the chimney, half-expecting to see smoke begin to curl out of the top, but it didn’t.

That was fine – less chance of walking into a ghost-girl scenario.

Violet got to the door and stepped inside. So far, so good, ironically. Damp, dark and chilly as it was… at least there were no shadows moving in there today. No people knocking at the door and asking for help.

She looked around her, wrinkling her nose at the odour of damp animals and farmyard smells that lingered there, and her eyes settled on the middle of the room – it was the area where Meggie had been kneeling when she saw her cottage in that strange, dream-like visit, and it was where the Meg she had just seen in Coventina’s Well was kneeling.

It couldn’t be a coincidence; there was something in there that Meg was hiding or revisiting.

‘That’s where I need to be then,’ whispered Violet. She stepped towards it, then knelt in the same spot. She tried to ignore the smell and the cold floor and the absolutely freezing area that she now inhabited. She huffed out a breath, and the vapour drifted into the atmosphere. Ugh.

Carefully, she ran her fingers along the edge of the flagstone. Impossible, really, that this floor was the same floor that had been there all that time. And that led to a freak-out all of its own. If it was the same floor, then Meg had walked on these very flags…

Violet sat back on her knees, very close to hyperventilating. It was all a bit real. She was kneeling exactly where her seventeenth-century lookalike had been kneeling. Her seventeenth-century, pregnant lookalike had been kneeling. And she knew she had to do it. She had to be brave enough to do it: to help a woman who nobody else had helped.

From her research, she knew people had stood up for the so-called witches during the Newcastle Trials, protested their innocence and gone to gaol for that reason alone. But some of the women had been saved because others had helped them and believed in them. She hoped she would have been brave enough to do that back in the day.

Really, opening up an old floor was nothing compared to that, was it?

And if there was nothing there, then so be it. At least she’d tried. She moved back towards the flagstone, determined to do whatever she had to do. And this time, her fingertips found the edge of the stone easily. She eased it up and stared into what seemed like a fathomless gap.

She reached into the hole with a shaking hand, and her finger closed around something smooth and knobbly, all at the same time. She gasped, jumping at the unfamiliar object. She brought her hand out of the hole, and saw her skin was grubby and damp where she’d scraped against the side of the pit. She tutted in annoyance as she saw she’d caught her bracelet and snapped the thing. It slid off her wrist and puddled in the gap, and she grabbed at it with her other hand, the charms slithering down the chain as she lifted it.

She couldn’t think about that now – it would be easily repaired. More to the point was what she had discovered under that flagstone.

Because clutched in her fingers, was a small, mud-covered dagger that had been buried in there forever, it seemed. And it looked a helluva lot like the one Violet thought she had seen at the Well.

‘Is this what you wanted?’ Violet whispered, holding it as if it would bite her. ‘Meg? Or Coventina?’

And as she concentrated on the dagger, a strange feeling began to come over her. She was aware that the room began to change around her. Furniture began to come into focus; the fire glowed with its last dying embers. A figure lay on a bed – but it wasn’t Meggie. It was a man, unkempt and undone, dark-haired and fast asleep, his face buried in a pillow of sorts.

She stood up and, almost as if her feet didn’t belong to her, she walked towards him and leant over him.

Tentatively, she touched his cheek. It was warm and real and damp with tears and that shocked her more than anything.

Until, that was, he shifted position.

The man turned over in his sleep towards her, and her eyes widened when she saw his face.

She couldn’t help it: ‘Jake!’

The man on the bed was the image of the man she loved. What the hell was he doing here, asleep in Meg’s cottage? She knew that face better than her own, better than she knew herself. She had watched him sleep numerous times.

Emory… The name drifted in on the wind.

‘Emory? Is that your name?’ Violet whispered. Was this, then, the Emory who had refused payment to Ned Bell and inherited the Milburn wealth? Strangely, she was not scared; she was, instead, transfixed, looking at him. How could she be scared when someone who looked like Jake was with her?