Weyward

by Emilia Hart

one day she would leave Orton Hall and travel the world—as a scientist. A biologist, she hoped, or maybe an entomologist? Something to do with animals, anyway, which in her experience were far preferable to humans.

Had her mother been like this, too? Had nature pulled at her heart the same way it pulled at Violet’s now?

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

If I must depart this life, I thought, let me live on in the soil: let me feed the earthworms, nourish the roots of the trees,

One day, when Violet was grown up and had become a biologist (or a botanist, or an entomologist), she would eat only vegetables.

Violet had never much liked the idea of being married. She would have been quite happy to pursue her ambitions alone, like Elizabeth I—though Violet’s ambitions were rather more prosaic than victory against the Spanish and conversion of the nation to Anglicanism.

she does find a collection of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, dog-eared at a poem called “Witch Burning.” Two lines have been circled in pencil: Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand: I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.

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.

she has an urge to remove the gloves, to feel the soil against her skin. She pushes her fingers deep into the earth, relishing its softness. The smell of it is intoxicating:

She knew that when she died, her body would be broken down by worms and other insects, and then she’d provide nutrients for the life-sustaining plants aboveground. She thought of her beech tree. She’d rather like to be buried under it, to give it sustenance. And while the tree fed from her, she would feel … nothing. Oblivion. She imagined the nothingness, as heavy and dark as a blanket, or the night sky.

She was a child—just nine years old—with nothing in her heart but love and wonder. For the birds that made arrows in the sky, for the pink coils of earthworms in the soil, for the bees that hummed through the summer.

“Sight is a funny thing,” my mother used to say. “Sometimes it shows us what is before our eyes. But sometimes it shows us what has already happened, or will yet come to pass.”

Our ancestors—the women who walked these paths before us, before there were words for who they were—did not lie in the barren soil of the churchyard, encased in rotting wood. Instead, the Weyward bones rested in the woods, in the fells, where our flesh fed plants and flowers, where trees wrapped their roots around our skeletons. We did not need stonemasons to carve our names into rock as proof we had existed. All we needed was to be returned to the wild.

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