The Witch of Willow Hall

Read the book, and add what you learn from your own trials. Never stop learning. A lifetime is not long enough to gather up all the knowledge of our kind. That is why we pass it down.

Yet at the same time I want to untether my heart, toss it up into the sky and let it take wing. There's a wildness here that, if nothing else, holds promise, possibility. Who needs society? What has it ever done for us?

A place from away from society and all its ugly gossip and clicking tongues.

In the day everything is laid bare, the truth naked and ugly for what it is. But in the darkness everything is possible. It is pure, forgiving. I can forget.

it’s these tiny, empty slivers of life, pockets of time, into which she had fit so perfectly and is now so conspicuously absent that leave me rattled and aching.

He has the face of a classical statue, all strong angles rendered soft and besutiful as if by a practiced sculptor. His eyes are the misty green of shipwreck glass, and indeed I fear they could lure me to a stormy fate.

I’ve nearly forgotten about my sodden shoes and the stinging from my cut. The fresh, resinuous smell of the woods fills me with renewed energy. We’re Lancelot and Guinevere, fleeing through the forest from a jealous King Arthur. Any moment we’ll come upon a white steed and Lancelot will swing me up upon its jeweled saddle and we’ll gallop off together.

I test my smile the way she always does in the mirror, but the result is strained, and instead of looking pretty and lighthearted, I look like a bee just flew up my skirt.

We put our feet on the hard ground, take in the night air and look around as if this whole place has sprung up for us and us alone. Not just the house, but the ancient trees, the watching insects, the stars and even the moon. But they have all lived without us for lifetimes that make our own look like the blink of the eye. The house, with its strict walls and severe lines, is shamefully out of place, something modern dropped down somewhere as soft as feathers, as twisty and spreading as willow roots. How do the trees and the insects and the stars and the moon like it, I wonder? How do they like to have to share their secret lives with us now?

More than anything else I was frightened of what would happen to me. Would she tell Father? Would I be sent away? Catherine had told me that bad children were often sent to Australia, a desert land where they were forced to build their own prisons out of sunbaked mud bricks. The only food was rats roasted on spits, and there wasn’t a book on the whole island.