"Weyward"

[fiefoe]

A preditable and ultimately disappointing read. The only way generations of Weyward women could fight against male subjugation was by claiming their magical powers, and that doesn't speak well for the rest of us muggles. I wonder if Emilia Hart feels grateful for whoever that drew the wonderful book cover.

• to avoid the wrath of Father, who thoroughly disapproved of female exertion
• Soon she was high enough to see the whole of Orton Hall, which with its sprawling stone buildings rather reminded her of a majestic spider, lurking on the hillside. Higher still, and she could see the village, Crows Beck, on the other side of the fells. It was beautiful. But something about it made her feel sad. It was like looking out over a prison. A green, beautiful prison, with birdsong and damselflies
• ‘I screamed blue murder,’ Nanny Metcalfe would say, ‘but there you were, right as rain, and that weasel curled up next to you, purring like a kitten.’
• (‘Was she called Wallis?’ she asked Father once, having seen the name on the front page of his newspaper. He sent a bewildered Violet to her room without any dinner.)
• The same beck that curves bright around my cottage. Where my mother had pointed out the minnows shooting out from under pebbles, the tight buds of angelica growing along the banks.
• I knew without needing to ask that it was the castle, where they held the assizes. It had the look of a place where lives were weighed up.
• The two judges were seated on a high bench, as if they were heavenly beings, rather than meat and bone like the rest of us. They put me in mind of two fat beetles, with their black gowns, fur-trimmed mantles and curious dark caps.
• Weyward. A strange name for a house. The familiar word with the odd spelling, as if it’s been twisted away from itself.
• One corner of the ceiling is shrouded in cobwebs so thick they look intentionally cultivated.
• she researched the old methods. The ones he wouldn’t suspect. Lemon juice, which she stored in an old perfume bottle. The sting of it was almost pleasurable; it left her feeling clean. Pure.
• Father had seemed almost gleeful when war was again declared in 1939. He had immediately commanded that Graham and Violet set about gathering conkers from the horse chestnut trees that lined the drive. Apparently, the round seeds, glossy as rubies, were bound to be indispensable in the production of the bombs
• The thick silence makes her dizzy. Sick, almost, with the unfamiliar feeling of freedom. It sits uneasily, like rough cloth against her skin.
• I killed my father, she thought. I am the monster.
  She picked up the brooch and turned it over in her hand. There were ugly gaps like missing teeth where it had lost some of its crystals. One wing was dented.
  She put it back in her pocket as a reminder of what she had done.
• Then, gritting my teeth I began to scratch; fingernails tearing at the tiny bauble of flesh below my ribcage. Below my heart. <> Just when I was sure that I could bear the pain no longer, I felt flesh come away, then the thick wetness of blood, its sweet tang filling the air.
• Violet sometimes wondered if Father was capable of loving anything – apart from hunting, and the Empire – but she also knew that he had defied tradition and his dead parents’ wishes to marry her mother. And he had held on to these keepsakes, things that reminded him of her, for all these years.
• She was heady with looking – at the sharp line of his jaw; the square, golden hands with their dark smattering of hair across the knuckles.
• The dragonfly-like creature with the iridescent wings. The word swims up from the depths of her brain: a damselfly.
• It is as Macbeth said:  ‘Who could refrain, that had a heart to love, and in that heart courage to make love known?’
• Perhaps it had been part of the allure – the thought that, after all those exhausting years of locking herself away, here was someone who could do it for her.
• In the early days of their relationship, she returned to that memory again and again, smoothing its rough edges into a lie she almost believed.
• I wondered what she’d make of it. Of her only daughter, stripped naked in a courtroom, while men roamed their eyes over her. Searching for a sign that she had sold her soul to the devil. <> What did they know of souls, these men who sat on bolsters all day, clothed in finery, and saw fit to condemn a woman to death?
• She was still very thirsty after the kiss (how was it that something so wet could make one so parched?) and a little faint. <> She had the queer feeling that she was looking at something so closely that she could not yet make out its full shape.
• her reference points for drunkenness also came from literature – Falstaff being ‘drunk out of his five senses’ at the start of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• Might it be possible to have both things? Love and insects?
• There was that feeling again, of being pulled by a tide. Her lungs tightened. She hadn’t expected that love – if this was what she felt – to be so similar to fear.
• it seemed that all he cared about was whether or not he could mould her into something pretty and agreeable, a present to be given away to some other man.
• She’s just finished a slim novel called Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, about a spinster who moves to the countryside to take up witchcraft.
• Perhaps a woman accused of witchcraft wouldn’t have been buried in a church graveyard. It is – what’s the word for it again? – hallowed ground.
• The valley was always at its most beautiful in the morning. I remember thinking that it was as if it had been made so on purpose, to remind us to keep living.
• Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres
• Kate finds the contrast between his cut-glass accent and shabby appearance jarring – unsettling, even. She notices that his hands are shaking, that his gaze flickers repeatedly to the edges of the room. He’s looking for them, she realises. The insects.
• A great many things look different from a distance. Truth is like ugliness: you need to be close to see it.
• Something glimmered in the greenery: looking down, she saw that her pendant appeared to be cracked into two halves, like rusted wings. It was this, rather than anything else, that brought the first hot pricks of tears to her eyes.
  Her mother’s necklace. He had broken it.
  It looked like a smaller piece of the pendant had snapped off and fallen onto the ground. Picking it up, she realised it was a tiny key with jagged edges. It dawned on her that her mother’s necklace wasn’t a pendant at all, but a locket;
• They’re getting closer. It’s as if something – as if Kate – is drawing them. A beetle climbs her wrist, a worm brushes against the bare skin of her knee, a bee lands on her earlobe. She is gasping, now, overwhelmed by the heat that blooms in her chest, surges up her throat. Her vision blurs like snow, then goes dark.
• She’s not sure what she expected, really. That it would be easy to draw her family’s history from the murk of the past, the way she’d somehow drawn insects from the soil. That doing so would help her understand herself.
• On her way out of the building, she turns the fragment over and over in her mind, as if it is some precious heirloom.
  Altha Weyward. Aged 21. 1619. Tried for witchcraft.
• Spermatophore. It was the substance that male insects used to fertilise the eggs of female insects. She refused to think about it further. She couldn’t bring herself to find the section of the textbook that covered it: she had hidden it under her mattress, along with the soiled underwear and stockings.
• Just as she prepared to propel herself forward into that empty horizon, she felt something brush her hand. It was a damselfly, its diaphanous wings golden with the sun. Just like the one that Graham had given her, all those weeks ago.
• It reminds Kate of Robin Redbreast from The Secret Garden – for so many years, her only safe portal to the natural world. Only now does she truly understand her favourite passage, memorised since childhood: <> ‘Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.’
• ‘Is she intact?’
  Violet thought of the pictures from Father’s newspaper, of soldiers wounded in the war, arms ending at elbows or legs ending at the knee.
• Kate wonders if Violet ever told anyone, in the end. She knows what it’s like, wanting to tell: to no longer be alone with the awful, secret knowledge, poisoning your cells like a disease. Wanting to speak but being choked into silence by the shame of it.
• But truthfully, Ma, I didn’t know them – or what they might have done – at all. Rupert has lied about so many things. I suspect now that his parents never knew of our child, never planned to drive us from our home.
• All we needed was to be returned to the wild.
  This wildness inside gives us our name. It was men who marked us so, in the time when language was but a shoot curling from the earth. Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.
  For it has always been a gift, she said. Until now.
• And so she made me promise: I was not to use this gift, this wildness inside. I could use my healing skills to put food in my belly, but I must stay away from living creatures, from moths and spiders and crows. Doing otherwise would risk my life.
  Perhaps one day, she said, there would be a safer time. When women could walk the earth, shining bright with power, and yet live. But until then I should keep my gift hidden, move through only the darkest corners of the world, like a beetle through soil.
• The creatures leave after Simon.
  Kate’s hair moves in the wind created by their wings. The insects first, then the birds. As if by agreement.
  She looks at the floor. It is strewn with glass, feathers and snow, glittering like jewels. It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.
• as I got closer I could smell the body. The sweet meaty stink of blood, of guts and other inside things: things that were not meant to be exposed to the world.
• 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.