Page 26 of The Women of Wild Hill

He lay down among the wildflowers. As his hair began to dry, it revealed itself to be a dark blond.

She imagined his face with glasses and decided he looked very intelligent.

The corona that surrounded him was a color she’d never encountered before—the rich, velvety red of lips and hearts and living tissue.

“Should I go for help?” she asked.

“I think I’ll be fine if you stay with me,” he said.

That was exactly what she was hoping he’d say. At some point between the wreck and the meadow, Rose had fallen hopelessly in love with him.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

“Henry Jansson.”

The name didn’t ring a bell. She sat down beside him and he reached out for her hand. As his fingers wove between hers, the sun slid behind a cloud and the world as she knew it vanished.

The flowers in the meadow were suddenly gone.

The grass, too. All around her, the earth lay dead and barren.

Even the soil beneath her was a sickly gray.

Rose spun around to see the mansion. There was no sign of the roses or ivy that had long clung to the walls.

Bessie stood at the window, sending a silent warning.

Then Rose blinked and that world vanished.

The sun was shining and the flowers swayed in the wind, sending out wave after wave of delightful fragrance.

Rose had never experienced such a powerful premonition.

Prophesy wasn’t her primary gift and she had no idea how to interpret what she’d seen.

Her gift was peering into other people’s hearts, and when Henry had reached out for her hand, she knew that the love he felt for her was entirely real.

Ignoring her vision, she lay down beside him in the flowers and happily gave him everything all the other men had wanted so badly.

Afterward, Rose drove Henry home to the lovely house his father had purchased at the beginning of the summer.

His charming little sister ran up to his room and brought down his spare pair of glasses.

Nothing changed when Henry saw her face.

A month later, they were married. Rose was already pregnant.

THEY LIVED TOGETHER IN A little house in town.

From the start, Henry was an excellent husband.

He charmed Sadie and spent hours in the garden with Ivy, though he was less interested in the plants than the bugs that nibbled at them.

He’d been working as a chemist at the company his father had started.

The firm specialized in cosmetics, but Henry thought it was time to expand their offerings.

A month before Rose was due to give birth, Henry announced over dinner that he’d made a remarkable breakthrough.

He had developed a pesticide that he believed would revolutionize agriculture, making it possible for farmers to grow more crops and feed more hungry people.

Perhaps the light in the dining room was too dim for Henry to see the horror on his wife’s face.

She’d never forgotten the dying world she’d seen on the first day they met.

She knew the Old One wouldn’t send a vision for no reason.

Rose was expected to take action. But until that very moment, she hadn’t known how.

Henry loved to discuss his work, and he was usually more than happy to entertain Rose’s questions.

Thanks to her strange upbringing, she was far better educated than most women of the day.

That evening he wanted to talk about all the good his pesticide could do for humanity.

But there seemed to be topics he took pains to avoid.

Their tests showed the chemical worked, but was it safe?

Rose asked. The benefits of the compound far outweighed any negatives, she was told.

When she inquired what those negatives might be, her husband implied they were not her concern.

Which, as any woman would have known, meant an investigation was in order.

That evening, Rose added two drops of Ivy’s sleeping tonic into Henry’s nightcap.

As soon as he was snoring, she made her way to the laboratory he’d built in their home.

She jimmied the lock on the only desk drawer that wasn’t left open.

Inside she found folders with profit estimates, marketing plans, and more.

The only thing she couldn’t find were test results.

Their absence was finally explained when she discovered correspondence between her husband and the company’s chief scientist. His breakthrough product hadn’t been tested for safety at all.

In the morning, Rose made Henry’s coffee and took it up to their room.

When he was awake and properly caffeinated, she sat on the side of the bed and told him (almost) everything.

Rose confessed that she had been born with the gift of sight.

She’d always known she could see into hearts, but she had recently learned she could also see into the future.

Henry listened quietly as she told him about the vision she’d had the first day they met.

The compound he’d invented was dangerous, she warned him.

It wouldn’t just kill bugs. It would destroy every living thing that it touched.

Rose begged him to discontinue the project.

His father’s company was successful, and she was rich.

The last thing they needed was more money.

When she finished, Henry pulled her into his arms and held her as she cried. She could feel how much he loved her.

“Silly girl.” He smiled so sweetly as he wiped the tears from her face. “There’s no need for you to get so upset.”

“There isn’t?” She managed to mirror his smile. Everything would be alright. All she’d needed to do was tell him the truth. He would fix things. He’d do it for her.

“No, sweetheart. I know you were raised in an unusual family. Mother warned me you might be eccentric. Truth be told, she was quite worried. I don’t know what she was expecting. I knew even your eccentricities would be charming.”

“Eccentricities?” Rose asked.

“Imagining you’re clairvoyant.” Henry paused to chuckle and pinch her cheek. “How delightful.”

Rose felt her body go cold. “You don’t believe me?”

He cupped her chin and looked deep into her eyes. “Darling, my sight is far better than yours. I knew the moment I first saw you in Mattauk that we would fall madly in love and be married.”

“We met at Wild Hill,” Rose corrected him. “The day your boat crashed into the rocks.”

“Yes, but that isn’t the first time I saw you.

I watched you fending off suitors. You’re the only woman I’d ever encountered who seemed to despise being praised for her beauty, and I realized I would need to take a different approach.

” He plucked his glasses off the bedside table and passed them to her. “Put them on,” he told her.

She slid the glasses onto her face. The lenses were perfectly clear. His vision had never needed correction. He had known exactly who she was and what she looked like when she rescued him.

“So you lied?”

“I hardly said a word about my eyesight. I just pretended to be blind,” he said, amused by the memory of his brazenness. “Because I could see what was best for us then. Just as I can see what’s best for us now.”

He took her hand. His palm against hers felt warm and safe. She could sense his sincerity—his absolute earnestness. She could feel his love. And for the first time, none of those things made a bit of difference. She’d been betrayed—not just by the man she’d married, but by her own gift.

“Henry, for my sake—for the sake of our child—please don’t go forward with this chemical. I beg of you.”

“My darling, you and the baby are the reasons I must!”

Rose knew then that she would never convince him. “Have you shared the news of your breakthrough with your father?”

“Not yet,” Henry said. “As of this moment, you and I are the only ones who know how much our lives are going to change.”

THE NEXT MORNING ROSE RETURNED to Wild Hill. Sadie spent most of her time in the city in those days, sowing her seemingly inexhaustible wild oats. But Ivy, as always, was there in the garden, harvesting castor beans. Ivy set aside her wicker basket the moment she laid eyes on her sister.

“What’s happened?” Ivy demanded. Rose looked pale and the dark circles under her eyes said she hadn’t slept. “Is it the baby?”

“No,” Rose told her. “I need a poison. Whatever you used to kill Uncle Charles should work well.”

Ivy was alarmed. “Did someone hurt you?”

“No,” Rose said. “I had a vision of the future. The world will suffer unless we take action.”

Ivy knew her sister was not prone to hyperbole. “There’s someone who must die?” She didn’t ask who.

“Yes,” Rose said without elaborating. “Do you have what we need?”

“I’ve developed something much better than cyanide,” Ivy told her.

“It’s a poison made from mushrooms Bessie showed me.

As far as I can tell, the fungi are unknown to science.

The poison should be difficult to trace.

But have you thought it all through? How will we administer the poison? What will we do with the body?”

“Mother won’t be back this week?”

It was an odd question. “No,” Ivy told her.

“Then Henry and I will join you for lunch tomorrow. We’ll come by boat. I’ll run into the rocks and we’ll swim to shore. Do you think you can be ready by noon?”

“We’re going to kill Henry?” It hadn’t occurred to Ivy that her brother-in-law might be their intended victim. “Are you certain this is necessary?”

Her sister answered with a nod, and Ivy let the information sink in. She could tell by the look on Rose’s face that it wasn’t time for questions. “I’ll dig another hole in the basement,” Ivy said.

THE FOLLOWING DAY AT NOON, Rose was at the wheel of the Jansson family boat when it hit a rock off the coast of Wild Hill. Henry and Rose had no trouble swimming to the beach, where Ivy happened to be waiting with towels and blankets.

Once they were back at the cottage, Ivy gave Henry a drink and took Rose upstairs and tucked her into a warm bed.

When she returned downstairs, Henry’s body lay on the floor by the fire.

She checked his pulse before dragging him by the heels across the floor and rolling him down the stairs to the cellar.

Once he was buried beside Uncle Charles, she phoned the police to report the boat wreck.

Henry Jansson’s body was never recovered. Two weeks after the tragedy, Rose went into labor with their baby.

“I’ll do the hard work,” Rose joked weakly when the contractions began. “All you’ll have to do is raise her.”

When she realized what Rose was saying, Ivy put her foot down. “Absolutely not,” she ordered. “I forbid it. You are not leaving this child without a mother.”

“She’ll have one,” Rose said. “You and I are twins, Ivy. She’s as much you as she is me.”

Ivy used every bit of her magic trying to save her sister.

She knew how to bring babies into the world, and she knew exactly what to do when it looked like the mothers’ lives were in danger.

But Rose didn’t hemorrhage, nor did she come down with a fever.

She simply grew colder and colder as the child emerged, as though she was expending the last bit of her energy.

As Ivy pulled the baby out, she brushed against her sister’s icy thigh.

She passed the child to Sadie, but it was already too late for Rose. Even Bessie was powerless to save her.

ROSE DUNCAN WAS THE FIRST of the Duncan family to be buried on Wild Hill.

Ivy and Sadie wrapped her body in a linen shroud and lowered it into a hole they’d dug themselves.

The infant she’d given birth to lay in a wicker bassinet on the grass, with Bessie keeping her company.

Ivy cried the entire time, but the baby never once made a peep during her mother’s burial.

She would be a force to be reckoned with, that much was clear. Ivy named her Lilith.

It wasn’t the last time Ivy saw her sister.

Throughout Lilith’s childhood, whenever the little girl seemed far too quiet, Ivy would peek into her room and spy the mother and daughter together—one slightly less solid than the other.

Their backs were always turned toward the door, but their heads were close like they were in deep conversation.

What they discussed Ivy never knew. She didn’t dare ask.

But Lilith was always wise in the ways of the world.

From an early age, she knew things that Ivy couldn’t have taught her.

And she had no intention of following in her mother’s footsteps.