Page 60 of The Women of Wild Hill

The Swimming Test

There was a symmetry to it that Brigid couldn’t help but appreciate.

One of the first deaths she’d ever seen had been her own.

She’d witnessed her own drowning the day she’d watched the little boy die at the beach.

She was as helpless now to save herself as she’d been to save anyone else over the last forty years.

Sometimes the only way to marvel at the order of the world is to step back from it.

And though she could feel the arms dragging her down to the beach, she was already far, far away.

Aunt Ivy had told them of the swimming test. The way accused witches—some Duncan women among them—would be tied up and tossed into the water. If they drowned, they were innocent. If they lived, they would be burned at the stake.

“That’s not fair!” Phoebe had protested.

“The world is not fair,” Ivy told her. “That’s why we must strive to balance the scales.”

Brigid had always known better than to expect fairness from this world. But somehow, she kept forgetting.

brIGID LOOKED FOR LIAM IN the crowd before they pushed her under the water.

When they lost hold of her and she came up gasping, she searched again.

She thought, maybe, he’d felt enough for her to be there when she died.

But no. She’d spared the man who’d betrayed her.

Now death had come, but she did not feel alone.

She’d saved her sister and her niece. That was all that mattered.

Given the same choice, she would make it again and again and again.

This time, when they held her under, Brigid opened her mouth and filled both lungs with water.

“YOUR FAITH IN ME WILL see you through.” It was her mother’s voice.

Brigid opened her eyes. She was back on Wild Hill, with the wind sweeping over the meadow and rippling the water in the pond. Her mother was there. So were Sadie and Rose and Ivy and Lilith. “I must be dead.”

“Yes,” Ivy told her. “Just for now.”

Brigid took in the news. “I don’t think I want to go back,” she told them.

“You must,” Flora said. “This is not the end that Bessie showed me.”

“What else do I need to do?” Brigid asked.

“You have done your part. Now your sister will do hers.”

“Afterward,” Sadie said, “it will be up to The Third to turn the tide.”