Chapter 27
NOW
Jake had pulled out all the blankets he had in the van’s storage compartments and made himself a comfy nest out of it all.
He lay in bed, knowing that outside the van, there was a blizzard going on.
He wasn’t usually one for worrying too much, but even he had felt a vague sense of unease as he prepared for the night.
He had heat, food and power, and he was on a proper campsite with showers and a toilet block and all that, so he would be fine, but he knew that a few miles along the road, Violet was in, presumably, a larger, softer and warmer bed.
He was hoping it was without this Ollie guy – but the more he thought about it, the more he decided he didn’t like or trust this man.
Which was crazy, as he didn’t even know him, right?
He’d seen him for the first time in Hexham, but he still couldn’t shake the idea that he knew him from somewhere, and he hadn’t really got along with him then…
Or maybe he was just jealous and a little cross that Violet had a dinner date with him, and not Jake.
She shouldn’t be spending time with that man…
The thought swam into Jake’s head and he shook it away.
Like he said, he didn’t even know the bastard.
He turned over and pulled the blankets up to his chin. He was probably overthinking. So, he closed his eyes and tried to put it out of his mind so he could drift off to sleep.
His dreams were confusing, though. They unravelled like a piece of string.
He might have guessed that he would have dreamed about Violet, considering they’d spent some time together this afternoon, and she was the very person he’d been thinking of as he dozed off.
What he hadn’t considered, though, was where and how she’d appear in the dream.
Where, was at Coventina’s Well.
She was half-kneeling, half-standing in the snow, her pink padded jacket standing out against the blank white landscape, her skin looking even paler than usual.
Jake was reaching out to her and calling her name but in the dream, he had the awful sense that she was watching him from somewhere else, standing apart from him, and that they weren’t the only people there.
Something formed out of nothing and all of a sudden, it was standing over her, indistinct but hovering just out of sight, and whatever it was, seemed to be waiting for her soul or her spirit or something, and then she turned around and saw it, and it rushed at her and she screamed and—
Jake woke himself up, hating the sights and muddled thoughts in his mind. The dream – or nightmare – simply had to be based on the other day when he’d found her there.
But it was wrong, wasn’t it? She was standing up when he’d found her, slipping towards the Well, but she was on her feet and her arms flailing as she tried to steady herself. She hadn’t been in that half-kneeling position!
He sat up, his heart thumping, and looked around the darkened van. He lifted the curtains and peered outside. Nothing but blackness greeted him.
He lay back down, telling himself to get a grip, when a huge clap of thunder echoed through the vehicle.
He shot back into a sitting position and threw the curtains wide open.
The sky lit up in shades of orange and purple and green, and whatever view he had of the campsite was obscured by a blizzard of snowflakes.
And it took a good while for him to settle back down again – especially because he was certain that he’d seen the shape of a woman lit up in the darkness, on the side of the hill outside the site, raising her arms heavenwards, and blotting out some of that blizzard.
She turned slowly to face him, and it was almost as if she was staring directly at him.
And when the second crash of thunder had come, and the night sky lit up like fireworks again, she vanished.
* * *
Violet had had a pretty unsettled night.
She had worked on her book probably later than she should have done, mainly because she knew she wasn’t sleepy in the slightest. Her intention had been to crack on with the book, and the exhibition in the Old Gaol should, in reality, have helped her to bring her research together a bit.
But all she could think about was that dagger and the dungeon incident and the Witch Trials, and she finally switched off the laptop at eleven.
As she lay in bed, her mind was whirring and she spent most of the next four hours just staring into the darkness of the room, tossing and turning, and getting cross with herself for not being able to drop off.
She dozed off around 3 a.m. and was awake again around four.
At four-thirty, she was wondering what was the point of trying to sleep any more.
So around five in the morning, she got up.
She didn’t want to go for breakfast quite so early, but similarly didn’t want to spend any longer in her room. So she decided to go outside. It was just before sunrise, and she liked that time of day – the world was just about waking up, and she loved being outside in nature, being part of it.
She tried to work out which way was east so she could see the sunrise over the vast, white wilderness, and she realised it was back towards Coventina’s Well.
A white mist was settled in the valley, obscuring it all from view, and Violet adored it.
No matter how strange that place had been over the last couple of days, she still felt a pull, directly to the Well.
‘Another low cloud. Almost like Coventina is hiding her secrets. How perfect,’ she said.
And she let herself outside, grabbing a couple of walking poles that the guest house allowed people to borrow, as she went out.
The cold air caught her breath as she began to trudge through the snow to the dip in the hillside.
As she approached, she saw that the mist was rising from the Burn itself, a white haze snaking down towards Newbrough, with some fog appearing to be settled right on top of the pool the Burn sprung from.
Utterly magical, really. And this was why she loved being outside and alone in the early morning.
There was nobody around and nobody to bother her, and she let her mind drift like the snowflakes that fell silently and steadily around her.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Violet’s thoughts strayed to the dagger she’d imagined lying beside the Well on her first day.
It had to have been there, didn’t it? Or was she genuinely seeing things? She was still baffled by what had happened at Meg’s cottage. Was the dagger another element of that? Some distorted reality?
It was no good.
She was starting to overthink and that was not what this peaceful walk to the Well was supposed to be about. It was supposed to ground her, give her some harmony in her head and let her feel at one with the space around her.
And so, Violet found herself on the grass next to Coventina’s Well, standing probably too close to it again; the walking poles were rammed in the snow and she was clinging onto them firmly, just to give herself a little extra purchase as she peered around the area where she thought she’d seen the dagger.
It was stupid, really. It was even more snowy than it had been the first time she was there, and she was inside a misty cloud, so if the dagger was still around, it was practically guaranteed to be invisible this morning.
Violet stood back. Realistically, she wasn’t going to find it here today, was she?
But thinking about Ollie and what he’d seen, she found herself, reluctantly almost, leaning forwards again.
At this early hour, the surface of the Well was dark and fathomless, reflecting the pre-dawn sky.
But it was also as still as glass. She could hear the rushing of the Burn to her right as the stream ran down towards Newbrough, swollen with the melt-off from the snow, and the wind tickled her cheek as it whipped into a whirlwind around her, lifting her fair hair into tendrils around her face.
She leant forwards some more, her heart pounding, even as she clutched the walking poles more securely, and finally, she could see herself reflected in the pool – just like Ollie had.
But it was her – Violet. Nothing unusual about the reflection at all.
Another whirlwind wrapped around her and rippled the surface of the water. And, in the depths of the sacred pool, she saw another scene taking place. Something that couldn’t possibly be reflected from Violet’s time in the twenty-first century.
A tall man in a black, swirling cloak was holding some sort of staff up to a woman, right in front of her at eye level. The woman had long, white-blonde hair which was blowing across her face, then a man held her shift up, exposing the bottom half of the woman’s body.
‘Oh God!’ Violet leant closer. What the hell was going on?
Then the man stabbed the staff into the woman’s naked thigh.
‘It’s a witch trial!’ Violet was horrified. She was watching a witch trial in real time – almost as if it was a movie reel scrolling through with no sound. It had to be Meggie; it just had to be.
The man dropped the woman’s shift, and she shook the hair out of her face; and Violet almost choked.
She now understood what Ollie had felt when he said he felt like he was looking in a mirror.
Meggie looked just like Violet did – the same hair, the same shaped face, the same eyes.
It was, she was convinced, the same woman she had seen at the cottage in Newbrough.
Violet squeezed her eyes shut. Surely, she was hallucinating. She opened her eyes and the scene had changed. Instead of seeing Meggie and that awful, awful man, she saw a fair-haired man sitting on a horse, watching the spectacle.
And the man looked just like Ollie – apart from Ollie had never, when he’d been in Violet’s company at least, looked so arrogant and so cruel.
It would not be a huge stretch of the imagination to assume he was the Milburn character that Ollie was related to.
He actually looked pleased with himself – as if this was all his doing and his reward was to watch it play out.
‘No.’ Violet blinked and the scene changed again. The woman who looked like Violet was being dragged away and the man raised the staff again. Violet couldn’t stand to see any more.
‘Oh God, just make it stop,’ she yelled.
Instinctively, she reached out her hand to Meggie. Meggie’s grey eyes met Violet’s now and they widened; she looked a desperate mix of grateful and terrified.
‘I want to help you,’ said Violet, ‘I really do—’ Her hands touched the icy water and her fingers dipped into it, sending gentle ripples to the edges of the pool.
And Meg’s hand almost, almost touched hers, the fingertips grazing, just as Violet heard a voice echoing through the valley.
‘Blessed Coventina!’ cried a voice she knew was Meggie’s ‘You came to save me, Merciful goddess, prove to these men I am not the witch they fear me to be.’
Then the Witch Pricker bellowed, ‘Demon! The witch has summoned a demon. Get thee back to Hell.’
Violet saw him raise the staff in the air and grasp it with both hands. She shouted out, but that, it seemed, was the point where her mind finally seemed to want to reconnect to the real world and the pictures in Coventina’s Well disappeared.
As she came back to normality, her heart thumping and her mind a mess, she could still hear that man’s voice.
Violet sobbed and tore her gaze away from the Well, forcing herself to clamber up the slope to higher ground, away from that way too creepy area.
It had been a mistake to come here. It really had.
She hadn’t found the dagger, but she’d stumbled on a whole lot more weird than she had wanted to engage with.
And she’d witnessed a fucking witch trial, which was a whole other level of immersive research. And she didn’t like it.