Weyward Quotes

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

Perhaps one day (...) there will be a safer time, when women could walk the Earth, shining bright with power, and yet live.

Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.

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

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 that speak it, not those that it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.

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.

A great many things look different from a distance. Truth is like ugliness: you need to be close to see it.

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.

Fiction became a friend as well as a safe harbor; a cocoon to protect her from the outside world and its dangers. She could read about Robin Redbreast but she must avoid at all costs the robins that tittered in the back garden.

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

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

I had nature in my heart, she said. Like she did, and her mother before her. There was something about us---the Weyward women---that bonded us more tightly with the natural world. We can feel it, she said, the same way we feel rage, sorrow, or joy. The animals, the birds, the plants---they let us in, recognizing us as one of their own. That is why roots and leaves yield so easily under our fingers, to form tonics that bring comfort and healing. That is why animals welcome our embrace. Why the crows---the ones who carry the sign---watch over us and do our bidding, why their touch brings our abilities into sharpest relief. 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. 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.

There were bees somewhere---calling out to her, beckoning. She had wandered over to the tree and found the hive, hanging from a branch like a nugget of gold. The bees glimmering, circling. She drew closer, stretched out her arms and grinned as she felt them land, the tickle of their tiny legs against her skin.

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

She hadn’t expected that love—if this was what she felt—to be so similar to 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

The Weyward Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go, about, about, Thrice to thine, thrice to mine, And thrice again to make up nine. Peace, the charm's wound up.

Bewitched. Everything she knew about witches came from books, and none of it was good. The witch who ate Hansel and Gretel, for instance. The three witches in Macbeth, raising the wind and the seas. But what about the witch in "The Robber Bridegroom"? She had helped the heroine escape.

But the sun shone, bright as gold, through my window. I could smell spring on the air: the garden is crowded with daffodils and bluebells now. Even as I write, lambs are being born wet and bewildered, nuzzling at their mothers to get back to that dark, warm place where nothing can hurt them.

She had thought, for a while, that she’d lost the magic of it: the ability to immerse herself in another time, another place. It had felt like forgetting to breathe. But she needn’t have worried. Now, worlds, characters, even sentences linger—burning like beacons in her brain. Reminding her that she’s not alone.

Only then did I allow myself to think of home: my little rooms, neat and bright with jars and vials; the moths that danced round my candles at night. And outside, my garden. My heart ached at the thought of my plants and flowers, my dear nanny goat who kept me in milk and comfort, the sycamore that sheltered me with its boughs.

Outside, the garden shimmered with heat. She waded through the helleborine, its flowers leaving crimson smears on her dress. The air hummed with insects, the sun catching on the wings of a damselfly. Violet smiled, remembering the words from her mother's letter. Walls painted yellow as tansy flowers. It was as if she was reaching out to her from beyond the grave, guiding her. She found the plant under the sycamore, bobbing with yellow flowers, each one comprised of tiny buds clustered together like a beetle's eggs.

She named me Altha, after all. Not Alice, meaning noble woman, nor Agnes, lamb of God. Altha. Healer.

Might it be possible to have both things? Love and insects?

You realize, when you see a person die, that there’s nothing special about humans. We’re just flesh and blood and organs, no different to the pig that gave us this bacon.

I thought he loved me for myself. But you were right. To him I am but an animal, like those he hunts and puts on display

The panic is rising. Except it isn’t panic, Kate knows now. It never was. The feeling of something trying to get out. Rage, hot and bright in her chest. Not panic. Power.

She remembered the bee brooch—gold, the wings set with crystals—he had given her before she went off to university to take her first degree in biology.

They were halfway across the road when a birdcall tugged her back, pulling at some strange, secret part of her. A crow, she thought, from its husky caw---she had already learned to recognize most of the birds that sang in her parents' garden, and crows were her favorite. There was something intelligent---almost human---about their sly voices and dark, luminous eyes. Kate turned, scanning the trees that lined the road behind them. And there it was: a velvet flash of black, shocking against the lurid green and blue of the June day. A crow, just as she'd thought.

she just went to the library to read, to escape into other people's imaginations. Often, she reread books she'd loved as a child, their familiarity a balm--- Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Chronicles of Narnia, and her favorite, The Secret Garden. Sometimes, she would close her eyes and find herself not in bed with Simon, but amongst the tangled plants at Misselthwaite Manor, watching roses nod in the breeze.

She is a Weyward. And she carries another Weyward inside her. She gathers herself together, every cell blazing, and thinks: Now. The window breaks, a waterfall of sharp sounds. The room grows dark with feathered bodies, shooting through the broken window, the fireplace. Beaks, claws, and eyes flashing. Feathers brushing her skin. Simon yells, his hand loosening on her throat. She sucks in the air, falling to her knees, one hand cradling her stomach. Something touches her foot, and she sees a dark tide of spiders spreading across the floor. Birds continue to stream through the window. Insects, too: the azure flicker of damselflies, moths with orange eyes on their wings. Tiny, gossamer mayflies. Bees in a ferocious golden swarm. She feels something sharp on her shoulder, its claws digging into her flesh. She looks up at blue-black feathers, streaked with white. A crow. The same crow that has watched over her since she arrived. Tears fill her eyes, and she knows in that moment that she is not alone in the cottage. Altha is there, in the spiders that dance across the floor. Violet is there, in the mayflies that glisten and undulate like some great silver snake. And all the other Weyward women, from the first of the line, are there, too. They have always been with her, and always will be.

It is a bright day; the snow-topped hedges sparkle in the sun. Kate watches as a waxwing forages for rowan berries, its crest quivering. It chirps as it is joined by its mate. Starlings sweep overhead, making shapes in the sky.

December. The days begin white and glittering with snow---on the roof, the branches of the sycamore, where a robin has taken up residence. 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 favorite passage, memorized 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." Often, before she leaves for work, she stand outside to watch the sun catch on the white-frosted plants, searching for the robin's red breast. A spot of color against the stark morning. Sometimes, while she watches it flutter, she feels a tugging inside her womb, as if her daughter is responding to its song, anxious to breach the membrane between her mother's body and the outside world. The robin is not alone in the garden. Starlings skip over the snow, the winter sun varnishing their necks. At the front of the cottage, fieldfares---distinctive with their tawny feathers---chatter in the hedgerows. And of course, crows. So many that they form their own dark canopy of the sycamore, hooded figures watching.

Though she wonders now if friends was ever the right word for the women she met at university. She never managed to match her speech to the cadence of theirs, never quite correctly timed a joke or a laugh. It’s a feeling she’s had since childhood: that she is somehow separate, closed off from everyone else.

Even her senses seem to have sharpened; sometimes, she thinks she can hear the most incredible sounds: the click of a beetle’s antennae on the ground, the whirr of a moth’s wings. A bird clamping its beak around a worm. It’s strange, how she feels attuned to things happening at such a great distance, and yet all the while her child’s heartbeat thrums in her ears.

They say that the first woman was born of man, Altha,” she said to me once when I was a child, for this was what we had heard the rector say in church that Sunday. “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.

What she actually wanted was to see the world, the way Father had when he was a young man. She had found all sorts of geography books and atlases in the library---books about the Orient, full of steaming rain forests and moths the size of dinner plates ("ghastly things," according to Father), and about Africa, where scorpions glittered like jewels in the sand. Yes, 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. Nanny Metcalfe often spoke of the terrible fright Violet had given her when she was little: she had walked into the nursery one night to find a weasel, of all things, in Violet's cot. "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.

I am sure you understand," Father began, looking past Violet at the wall, "that I cannot allow you back into my house after what you have done. I have arranged for you to be taken to a finishing school in Scotland. You will stay there for two years, and after that I will decide what is to be done with you." Violet heard Graham clear his throat. "No," she said, before her brother could open his mouth to speak. "That won't be acceptable, I'm afraid, Father." His jowls slackened with shock. He looked as if she had slapped him. "I beg your pardon?" "I won't be going to Scotland. In fact, I won't be going anywhere. I'm staying right here." As she spoke, Violet became aware of a strange simmering sensation, as though electricity was humming beneath her skin. Images flashed in her mind---a crow cutting through the air, wings glittered with snow; the spokes of a wheel spinning. Briefly, she closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling until she could almost see it, glinting gold inside her. "That is not for you to decide," said Father. The window was open, and a bee flitted about the room, wings a silver blur. It flew near Father's cheek and he jerked away from it. "It's been decided." She stood up straight, her dark eyes boring into Father's watery ones. He blinked. The bee hovered about his face, dancing away from his hands, and she saw sweat break out on his nose. Soon it was joined by another, and then another and another, until it seemed like Father---shouting and swearing---had been engulfed in a cloud of tawny, glistening bodies. "I think it would be best if you left now, Father," said Violet softly. "After all, as you said, I'm my mother's daughter.

She looked happy, hand in hand with her husband. Perhaps she was, then. Or perhaps I was standing too far away. A great many things look different from a distance. Truth is like ugliness: you need to be close to see it.

She had reached her special tree: a silver beech that Dinsdale, the gardener, said was hundreds of years old. Violet could hear it humming with life behind her: the weevils searching for its cool sap; the ladybug trembling on its leaves; the damselflies, moths, and finches flitting through its branches. She held out her hand and a damselfly came to rest on her palm, its wings glittering in the sunlight. Golden warmth spread through her.

In the hollow between two branches, she found the hairy seed of a beechnut. It would be perfect for her collection---the windowsill of her bedroom was lined with such treasures: the gold spiral of a snail's shell, the silken remains of a butterfly's cocoon.

She feels a tickling sensation against her hand, different from the silky touch of soil. Looking down, she sees the pink glimmer of a worm---and then another, and another. As she watches, spellbound, other insects emerge from the earth, glowing like jewels in the summer sun. The copper glint of a beetle's shell. The pale, segmented bodies of larvae. There is a buzzing in her ears, and she's not sure if it's from the roar of her pulse or the bees that have begun to circle nearby. 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.

Altha. A strange name. Soft and yet powerful. Like an incantation.

My wife," he said eventually, slowly, as if it pained him to speak the words. "She nearly died in childbed, delivering our son. A wise woman in our village saved both their lives. Beatrice, she was called. I said nothing, when they accused her. She was hanged." He took a velvet pouch from his breeches and pressed it into my hands, before melting away into the throng. I looked inside the pouch and saw gold coins. I understood, then, that I had this man---or the woman who saved his family---to thank for my life.

The walk to the village is peaceful, and she tests her growing knowledge of the local plant life---there, by the side of the road curl green fronds of stinging nettle, from the hedgerows peer creamy sprouts of meadowsweet. Silver flashes amongst the green: the silky strands of old-man's beard.

Outside, the valley was hazy with the afternoon sun. Midges shimmered in the sweet-smelling air. "Ugh," said Frederick, swatting at his face. "Don't care much for midges, I must say. Not quite sure there's any point to them, the blasted things." "Oh, but there is," Violet said, excitedly. "A point to them, I mean. They're a very important food source for toads and swallows, actually. You could say the whole valley depends on them, in the summer. And I think they're rather pretty---they look a bit like fairy dust, in this light, don't you think?

An insect hovers nearby. She can't remember what it's called: smaller than a dragonfly, with delicate mother-of-pearl wings. It skims the surface of the beck. She stays like that for a long time, listening to the birds, the water, the insects. She shuts her eyes, opening them again when she feels something brush her hand. The dragonfly-like creature with the iridescent wings. The word swims up from the depths of her brain: a damselfly. Tears well in her eyes, surprising her. She was fascinated by insects as a child. She remembers begging her mother to spare the moths that fluttered out from wardrobes, the gauzy spider's webs that clung to the ceiling. She'd collected vividly illustrated books about them. About birds, too. She would hide under the covers reading, in the small, silent hours of the morning while her parents slept in the next room. It hurts now, to think of that little girl, her innocent wonder: flashlight in hand, turning the glossy pages and marveling at the wild and wonderful creatures. Butterflies with eyes on their wings, parrots in candy-colored plumage.

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

The Weyward Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go, about, about, Thrice to thine, thrice to mine, And thrice again to make up nine. Peace, the charm’s wound up. —Macbeth

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Kate names her Violet. Violet Altha.

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

It took skill, Violet thought, to make even your handwriting look angry

But she didn't know any of this that night, as she looked into his eyes -so blue- and opened herself up to him in a way she couldn't remember doing with anyone before. The glass wall she'd built around herself was disintegrating - she could almost see it happening; the fragments winking in the light like tiny mirrors. Really, it was just that the glass wall was being replaced with another kind of cage. One that Simon spun from charm and flattery, as binding and delicate as spider silk. Now, she wonders if she'd known this, even then. 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.

I wanted to be buried. 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, like my mother and her mother before her.

CHAPTER

speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic,

Weyward is used in the First Folio edition of Macbeth. In later versions, Weyward was replaced by Weird.

Forse un giorno, aggiunse, sarebbe arrivato un tempo più sicuro. Quando le donne avrebbero potuto percorrere la terra, esercitando il loro potere, eppure continuare a vivere. Fino a quel momento, però, io avrei dovuto tenere nascosto il mio dono, muovermi solo negli angoli più bui del mondo, come uno scarabeo nel terreno.

She had thought, for a while, that she’d lost the magic of it: the ability to immerse herself in another time, another place. It had felt like forgetting to breathe.

En la primera publicación de 1623 de la colección de treinta y seis obras teatrales de William Shakespeare, en Macbeth se lee la palabra «Weyward». En posteriores versiones, «Weyward» fue sustituida por «Weird Sisters», las «hermanas extrañas».

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to read, to escape into other people’s imaginations. Often, she reread books she’d loved as a child, their familiarity a balm—Grimms’ Fairy Tales, The Chronicles of Narnia, and her favorite, The Secret Garden. Sometimes, she would close her eyes and find herself not in bed with Simon, but amongst the tangled plants at Misselthwaite Manor, watching roses nod in the breeze.

As if it were a good-luck charm rather than a reminder of what she’d done, who she was. A monster.

I felt their eyes on me; heard the hiss again. Witch. Whore.

There’s something about the garden that feels crowded, overwhelming. It’s as if there is no longer any barrier between the outside world and her nerves.

Her skin feels raw and open, like a newborn animal’s. There’s a feeling, in her stomach and in her veins, of something wanting to get in. Or wanting to get out.

Now, worlds, characters, even sentences linger—burning like beacons in her brain. Reminding her that she’s not alone.

It’s a feeling she’s had since childhood: that she is somehow separate, closed off from everyone else.

No había esperado que el amor, si era eso lo que sentía, se pareciera tanto al miedo.

Those dark, wild eyes. Each night I fall deeper into dreams, like a man drowning. I must have you.

It’s been a long time since she’s derived such pleasure from it, from the stories spun of other people’s dreams. Those last days at the library, before she left Simon, had felt furtive, dangerous; she’d flinched at the tick of the clock on the wall, at every shadow that fell over the page. She had thought, for a while, that she’d lost the magic of it: the ability to immerse herself in another time, another place. It had felt like forgetting to breathe. But she needn’t have worried. Now, worlds, characters, even sentences linger—burning like beacons in her brain. Reminding her that she’s not alone.

Perhaps I was too quick to judge. I had never felt a child grow in my womb, only to lose it in childbed. I remembered the Merrywether woman I had attended to and the small, dead coil of flesh she had labored over for hours. Had given her life for. What if Grace carried the baby to term and bringing it forth killed her? What if Grace were to die for the sake of a child that would never open its eyes, never take its first breath?

She pushes through her panic, breaches the wall to find the light, the spark she holds inside.

Truth is like ugliness: you need to be close to see it.

«La vista es muy curiosa. A veces nos muestra lo que está ante nuestros ojos. Pero a veces nos muestra lo que ya ha pasado o lo que

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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.

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, turns breathing women into corpses.

He was a man, after all. He had no reason to think he would not be believed.

Kate knows better than anyone how dangerous men can be. The thought sparks fury in her. She’s not sure if it’s a new feeling, or if it was always there, smothered by fear. But now it burns bright in her blood. Fury. For herself. And for the women that came before.

For the first child born to a Weyward is always female, my mother told me. That is why she only had me, just as her mother only had her. There are enough men in the world already, she used to say.

Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as far. (..) 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 never managed to match her speech to the cadence of theirs, never quite correctly timed a joke or a laugh. It’s a feeling she’s had since childhood: that she is somehow separate, closed off from everyone else.

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