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“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.” Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. “The way you did before?” she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years.
“Yes,” I said after a minute, “the way I did before.”

At the end of Chapter 8, Merricat tells Constance she wishes to kill the villagers who just destroyed their home. Merricat has expressed many such thoughts about the villagers prior to this, and Constance might have simply let the matter go as she usually does. Instead, she asks if Merricat is going to poison them the way she poisoned their family, marking the first time either sister has mentioned the incident since it happened. Merricat’s subsequent confession confirms that it was she who poisoned them, a conclusion the reader has likely already come to. However, such explicit confirmation is still jarring—Merricat has never admitted to it outright, not even within the privacy of her inner monologue, and compounding the suddenness of the reveal is the knowledge that Constance wasn’t involved but knew all along. 

Jackson has carefully constructed an unsettling tone in We Have Always Lived in the Castle by making Merricat an unreliable narrator, one who omits acknowledgment of any wrongdoing on her part but is nonetheless so obsessed with death, so given to violent impulses, that it feels inevitable she will be revealed to be the killer. This moment marks the height of the narrative tension that has been building throughout, while still leaving a sense of unease in its wake. Notably, Constance does not ask why, and although the reader might be able to guess, Merricat never explains. Jackson chooses to leave the matter ambiguous, contributing to the novel’s eerie, gothic atmosphere.

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