Page 46 of The Women of Wild Hill

The mansion was my home for over one hundred years.

Never in all my days had I seen anything like it.

The house I grew up in could have fit in the parlor with room to spare.

In the land of my youth, only the richest families ever knew such luxury.

Most were granted their lands and castles in return for an ancestor’s prowess at war.

Killing with swords was noble then. Real men hacked their enemies into bloody bits.

Only cowards, witches, and women turned to poison.

When I roamed the rooms of the mansion, its beautiful beds were no use to me.

The dead have little need for sleep. I never grew hungry, so I had no need of a kitchen.

I could not feel the cold, so the fireplaces remained unlit.

During the hours that the Duncan family was active, I watched and listened.

There was so much to learn from them. New words, new ideas, new developments beyond Wild Hill’s walls.

In my time, change came slowly. Their world never seemed to pause.

I was able pick out patterns they were too close to, to see.

The disasters taking place with increasing frequency.

The wars that spanned the entire globe. The blighting of the Old One’s lands.

And I saw the concentration of the wealthy men responsible for so much of it right here on this Island—or on that other island just a bit to the west. Ivy found my mushrooms, but Lilith was the first to catch a glimpse of what I saw.

She began to pick out the men, one by one, from the newspaper. By then I knew how to help her.

DURING THE DARK, QUIET HOURS of the night, the library here was my refuge.

When I first entered, I could read only a few words.

I taught myself over the years that followed and cracked open many a book.

One thing immediately struck me as strange.

If you had judged by the history books, you might have come to believe that women were the rarest of species.

Even tomes with accounts of the very times I had lived through treated us as though we barely existed.

It seemed the only way for a woman to work her way into history was to be born with a crown on her head—or to lose her head for some form of treachery.

You either gave birth to kings or attempted to kill them.

It was the witches and poisoners who kept me reading.

To be honest, I quite liked the company.

They certainly made for a thrilling story.

But any woman could have guessed the true tales behind them.

Anne Boleyn, beheaded for witchcraft, was just a clever young woman who outsmarted herself.

Lucrezia Borgia, the poisonous femme fatale, was a convenient scapegoat who likely never murdered a soul.

Then I happened upon Giulia Tofana, a woman born in Sicily shortly before I made my way across the Atlantic.

Her trade, the history books would tell you, was poison.

Sicily’s most notorious murderess, Giulia happily killed men whose wives wanted them dead.

Her weapon of choice was a clear liquid known as Aqua Tofana.

Just a few drops were more than enough. It killed slowly, mimicking the symptoms of other disorders.

Even the most skilled physicians were unable to detect the substance in the bodies of its victims. It reminded me, as you might have guessed, of my mushrooms.

Of course, none of the histories asked why so many women in Sicily wanted poison—or questioned whether the men deserved the fates they were dealt.

It never occurred to the authors that Giulia might not have been villainous but rather a hero.

And none of them ever wondered why she chose poison over the sword.

Women choose poison because swords are heavy and we are not taught to use them.

We choose it because we have children who need us, and we cannot be careless with our limbs and lives.

We choose poison because we have been denied all other forms of redress.

It is for these reasons and more that the Old One gave us this gift.

It is a testament to women’s essential goodness that we haven’t turned to poison more often, for it is all around us.

Or perhaps we’ve just been biding our time.