I touch the paper in my pocket. Creased, soft. ‘I had a letter from you,’ I say to Tom.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I must have sent a hundred.’
‘If you’ve anything to tell me,’ I say, ‘it’d best be now.’
‘All right,’ he says. The night wheels on. The shape of his head against the stars.
The skyline’s blue and burgeoning. Shapes are stronger by the moment. I can see him, just, in the silver light that comes before the sun. He’s tired, pale. Memory, surges through me. Afternoon heat, blue serge, his hand touching mine as we ride home. Hooves clipping the road, the song of bees, happiness so thick it’s a warm stupor, as if someone has taken our minds. I’m filled with simple knowledge. I touch his shoulder. Through the thin shirt it’s good and damp and real. ‘I thought it was my father,’ I say to him. ‘I thought I came back for Rawblood, for her … But after all, it wasn’t those things. In the end it wasn’t them I came for.’
Tom looks at me and I at him. The first reddish beam of day falls across us. Behind him the sun crests the hill, a blazing line. Above us, the tree is wreathed in light. Each winter branch is lacework against the sky.
I’m not ready. We’ve barely begun. I reach for his hands, he grasps mine tight. No, he says. Pest … The red disc of the sun rears up, the sky runs blood then orange then amber. The light strengthens. I say, No, wait, I hold to him. Warm, familiar. Wait. His fingers slip through mine. He’s gone.
I’m alone in burning light. I close my eyes but the sun is in them still; behind my lids there dance aeons, planets, stars. All the moments and beginnings and endings. The faces of the dead. Rustle of silk, the thud of a boot. Flash of my father’s eye blinking, great and brown. Centuries unroll, the colours are staggering. Indigo, white, yellow. Burning wheat fields, the light caught on battle blades, blood, blood, and everywhere the sound of trees growing.
The ground creeps up over my boots, my legs. Earth about my shoulders, my head. The ground closes above me like water. A grass snake winds smoothly past my cheek. Creatures and things move in the earth around me, it is so alive. I sink down, past the old stone foundations of Rawblood. The house by the bridge over flowing water. My fingers brush the stinking fur of a fox where it sleeps in its earth. It bares its teeth but doesn’t wake. Down through a cold river, bound deep in the rock.
A quick flash of a green shining cave, two children crouched on the rocky floor. They speak to one another, faces intent. I know her, of course, and him. How strange: how tender, distant. The candle stub flickers bravely, casts light and shadow. I yearn towards them. None of it had happened, yet, then … Although, of course, it had.
The little girl looks at me. Horror on her small white face, and fear. She puts her thin child’s body between me and him. The white worms crawl in my eyes. She pulls the boy up and runs, scattering shale and shards of brown glass.
The cave walls flicker. There’s a woman in a bloodstained dress. She weeps, her huge belly undulates. A knotted old man crouches by her, eyes milky. I want to touch her, to comfort her and be comforted … but they’re gone.
The shining green cave is shadowed, empty. A gold ring sits on the altar stone. Red and white gems gleam in the cool light.
I sink. Down.
Down through other caves where blind fish swim and calcified minerals bleed from the ceilings in glittering pointed spikes. Down into the deep inside of the land. To where nothing is, anymore. I come to rest. There are many arms about me in the dark, kind arms. They hold, their voices are in my ear, my family; I see their faces and their lives laid out like a road through the centuries, like a ribbon. I see my part in it and the choices which were their own, in the end. The sadness brims, fills me like a cup, I will drown in it, surely, and that will be welcome. They speak long and low and I see, like the crack of breaking bone, that I am so very small in the placement of earth and hill and rock, in the placement of things. And I see that I am forgiven.
They leave me. They slip away like smoke.
I am alone on a great plain. Fire leaps from deep holes. Scent of lilies, of rot. Something approaching. Dark, boiling, rolling closer, huge and terrible under the fiery sky. No. I’ve made a mistake. I turn to run. It rolls over me, hits me like a torrent. I am shattered in a slow explosion. The pain is beyond anything. It’s knowledge, time, all racing through me like horses, I am broken, disassembled. The brawling noise, high wind. I flow out into the little rivulets under the world.
* * *
The day rises through the bare tree. Tom pushes the last of the earth into the grave. Something stirs the air behind him. He throws the shovel aside. He turns quickly. A flock of starlings rises, iridescent in the morning light. They flow about the ruins of Rawblood. Shining, cackling. He makes fists of his hands to stop the shaking. He is alone.
* * *
Light, somewhere. It could be fire in a great hall. Sunshine in a blue nursery. Morning light, beneath a tree. Or something I have never known.
Acknowledgements
My parents, Christopher and Isabelle Ward, have all my thanks for their love, help and support through the years.
Heartfelt thanks go to my partner Edward McGown who is wonderful in ways too many to number.
I am deeply indebted to Sam Copeland for his guidance, enthusiasm and support, and to everyone at Rogers, Coleridge and White.
I am very grateful to Arzu Tahsin for gently steering me right, and to Jennifer Kerslake, Craig Lye and the wonderful team at Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
I am grateful to everyone who read and commented on the manuscript, including Kate Burdette, Emily Cavendish, Susan Civale, William St Clair, Natalie Dormer, Emma Healey, Alex Learmont, Andy Morwood, Eugene Noone, Catherine Shepherd, Alice Slater, Mike Walden, Philip Womack and Anna Wood.
Thank you to Henry Sutton, Giles Foden, Andrew Cowan and my tutors and classmates at UEA.
Thank you to my lovely sister Antonia Ward, and to Oriana Elia, Belinda Stewart-Wilson and Bianca Jagger for all their support.
About the Author
Catriona Ward was born in Washington DC and grew up in the US, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco. She lives in London where she works as a writer and researcher for Bianca Jagger’s human rights foundation. Rawblood is her first novel.
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Copyright
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2015 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © Catriona Ward 2015
The right of Catriona Ward to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 297 60966 7
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Family Tree
s
Contents
Iris, 1910
Charles Danforth, 3 October 1881
Iris, Autumn 1913
Charles Danforth, 7 October 1881
Iris, Summer 1914
Charles Danforth, 11 October 1881
Iris, 1915
Tom Gilmore, 2 January 1918
Meg Danforth, November 1881
Mary Hopewell and Hephzibah Brigstocke, 1839
1850
The Unknown Soldier, 1919
Meg Villarca, 1899
Ways of Escape, 1919
Iris, 1919
Acknowledgements
About the Author
More on W&N
Copyright
Rawblood Page 36