Weyward

The story shifts to 2019. Kate Ayres is a 29-year-old Londoner who lives with an abusive boyfriend named Simon. When he arrives home from work, he strikes her and accuses her of cheating on him. Kate has been planning to leave him for some time. That night, she slips away to her great-aunt’s cottage: “For months, she’s repeated the words in her head like a mantra. Weyward Cottage, Crows Beck. Cumbria” (7).

The story turns to 16-year-old Violet. She lives in Cumbia in 1942. Violet’s father is Lord Rupert, a stern disciplinarian who won’t allow his daughter to travel away from their estate of Orton Hall. Violet has a younger brother named Graham, who is getting a better education than she is and is also allowed to go to the nearby village of Crows Beck.

Violet dreams of traveling the world one day as an entomologist. She loves the study of insects and nature, feeling that she can communicate with the woodland creatures that surround the estate. She would also love to know more about her deceased mother, but no one is allowed to speak of her. Violet doesn’t even know her mother’s name. She overhears the servants gossiping, and they say she looks exactly like her mother and has her strange ways.

Back in 1619, Altha is bundled into a cart and travels with her jailers for days until they reach Lancaster Castle. This is where her trial will take place. She is led into the courtroom and confronted with two judges and a jury. She is accused of practicing witchcraft and causing the death of a farmer named John Milburn. Without hesitation, Altha declares herself not guilty.

Kate drives tensely through the night until she reaches Crows Beck, which is 200 miles away from London and her abusive boyfriend. She thinks of her great-aunt Violet, who died the previous August and left Weyward Cottage to Kate, her only living relative. The sun is rising by the time Kate enters the old hut. She is so tired that she collapses on the musty bed and sleeps through the day until the following dusk. Upon awakening, she feels disoriented and panic-stricken, fearing that Simon might find her.

She flashes back to his controlling behavior. He placed a tracker on her phone, but she bought a second one with the meager allowance he gave her. A few months before she left, he announced that he wanted a baby and flushed all her birth control pills down the toilet to try to ensure a pregnancy. Kate had no money to buy more, and Simon would also know if she visited a doctor without his permission. A few months later, Kate discovered that she was pregnant and knew that she had to leave before it was too late.

Back in the present, Kate goes to the first floor of the cottage. She lights a fire, only to find the body of a dead crow stuck in the flue. When she clears the flue, the bird revives and flies about the room. Kate has been frightened of birds since she was a child. She opens a window to scare it outside, but the bird keeps tapping at the glass to get back in.

After dinner one evening, Violet’s father calls her into his study for a chat. He says that a cousin named Frederick, who is a young soldier, will be visiting them. Violet is instructed to be pleasant to the visitor. If not, her father threatens to send her away to finishing school. Lord Rupert takes a dim view of Violet’s love of nature and comments that a finishing school might “stop [her] from turning out like […] her’” (29). Violet is horrified at the idea of being separated from nature, so she vows to be a perfect lady during her cousin’s visit.

Kate tries to ignore the unnerving sound of the bird tapping on the window. She goes into the kitchen for a glass of water, where she discovers that her great-aunt kept bird feathers. One came from a crow whose wings were streaked white, like the bird that dropped from the fireplace. When Kate looks out the window, she sees a huge flock of crows gathering nearby.

She thinks about how quiet the country is, yet she can hear the sound of every living thing in the forest. She remembers loving nature as a child. It always called her. That was how her father got killed. One day, she stood in the middle of a road, enthralled by the sight of a flying crow. As a car bore down on her, her father pushed her out of the way and was struck himself. Blaming herself for the accident, Kate has avoided nature ever since. When her mother later remarried, Kate withdrew even further, fearful that she might cause her stepfather’s death too. Kate built a wall around herself until Simon entered her life. He completed the job of isolating her from the world through his controlling behavior.

Altha is taken to the dungeon in Lancaster Castle until the trial begins the following day. That night, she uses her bare nails to dig a mole out of her skin: “Gritting my teeth I began to scratch, fingernails tearing at the tiny bauble of flesh below my rib cage. Below my heart” (37). The following morning, Altha is led back to the court to hear the witness testimony. The first person called will be her childhood friend, Grace Milburn.

Violet complies with her father’s demands to stop playing outside and behave like a lady. For two weeks, she closes the windows and draws the drapes to block out the call of her beloved forest outside. Violet overhears the servants fretting about her wasted condition. They speculate that she is suffering from a nervous disorder, just like her mother did. That evening, her father says that Frederick will arrive the following day. He is on leave from the army and has just returned from the fighting in Tobruk, Libya. Violet agrees to be cheerful and pleasant when he arrives.

That night, she removes an old pendant from her neck, the only memento from her mother. When it slips behind the bed, Violet gropes around to retrieve it and discovers letters etched into the wainscotting: “Together, the letters formed a word, which was somehow familiar, like a long-lost friend, though she had no recollection of ever seeing it before. Weyward” (47).

Kate is so unnerved by the swarming crows that she climbs into her car and starts heading back to London. As she drives, she recalls her first fruitless attempt to leave Simon. He had thrown a cup of hot coffee at her, burning her arm. Afterward, he apologized in tears. She packed and went to a motel when Simon phoned again, saying that he had taken an overdose of pills. Kate rushed back, but Simon hadn’t taken the pills. Kate felt pity and promised she would never leave him. Simon then insisted that she quit her job as a children’s book editor. They fought again, and he shoved her into a wall. After recalling all these grim memories, Kate resolves never to go back to Simon and turns her car around.

The next morning, she goes into the village for supplies. The clerk at the grocery store informs her that her aunt Violet was a Weyward as well as a member of the Ayres family, but Kate doesn’t recognize the name. Back at the cottage, Kate rummages through Violet’s papers and finds a picture of Violet as a young girl. She looks strikingly similar to Kate, and they both have a birthmark on their foreheads.

Altha sees her childhood friend Grace in the courtroom for the first time in years. They are both 21 now. Altha vividly recalls an incident when they were 13 that ended their friendship. Altha’s mother, Jennet, was the local healer, and Grace’s mother was suffering from scarlatina. The village physician had been bleeding her with leeches, but Jennet believed this was the wrong remedy. The Weywards went to Grace’s house to try to save her mother. They removed the leeches and gave the patient elderberry tincture, but she was beyond help and soon died. Grace’s father blamed the Weywards for her death and “forbade” Grace from seeing Altha.