Weyward

by Emilia Hart

Fiction became a friend as well as a safe harbor; a cocoon to protect her from the outside world and its dangers.

“Who could refrain, that had a heart to love, and in that heart courage to make love known?”

The physician spoke with confidence. He was a man, after all. He had no reason to think he would not be believed.

She had never met a mad person. She had an image of a waifish figure draped in white, speaking gibberish, like Ophelia from Hamlet.

Most of the novels are by female authors—Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf. In the last month, she has read Rebecca, The Bloody Chamber, Orlando.

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, turns breathing women into corpses.

“That she came from his rib. But you must remember, my girl, that this is a lie.” It was not that long after we’d attended Daniel Kirkby’s birth that she told me this. “Now you know the truth. Man is born of woman. Not the other way round.”

“It comes from the Bible,” she told me. “So the rector isn’t the first to tell that lie. As for the reason: it is my belief that people lie when they are afraid.”

Kate knows better than anyone how dangerous men can be.

“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.”

Perhaps one day, she said, there would be a safer time. When women could walk the earth, shining bright with power, and yet live.

Powerless, once she had robbed him of his only weapon: her fear.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet. —Adrienne Rich