Page 102 of The Book of Magic

It was well known that Margaret Wright did not care for comforts, let alone luxuries. She believed in a simple way of life, one that didn’t differ very much from the lives of her grandmother and great grandmother, and she still used a pump for her water and an outbuilding for her toilet. These were among the reasons Ian had despised his home when he was young. Back then, he thought what he wanted most in the world was a fast car and a flat in London.

“They’ll be at the Hedges,” Ian told Matt. “I called ahead.” He turned to Sally then. “I’ll come by for you in the morning and we’ll find her.”

“You’re not staying there with us?”

Ian looked at her. His pulse was too fast. This cannot be it. A man such as himself should have as little to do with a witch as possible.

“Is there something you need him for?” Franny asked, amused when she overheard Sally’s question. The historian was such a good-looking man, after all, and they’d seen every bit of him.

“We all need him to look for Kylie,” Sally replied. She turned to Ian then, though she did her best not to look at him directly. “I thought we would start the search as early in the morning as possible. That was the only reason I thought you would be staying at the inn.”

“If I didn’t go visit my mother, she’d have my head,” Ian explained to Sally. And I wouldn’t trust myself being under the same roof as you, and I have no idea what I’m doing here in the dark in the town that I couldn’t wait to leave, nor do I understand why I don’t want to move on from the place where I’m standing right now.

“Of course,” Sally deferred. “You must go.”

Ian said his good nights and headed off down the High Street, turning onto Littlefields Road, which led toward the fens. His mother lived on the far side of town, down a rutted dirt lane. She’d never had a car and preferred her bicycle. When she’d gone to see Ian in prison, she’d taken the bus, and she hadn’t traveled since. Anyway, it would do him good to walk and clear his head, although once he’d set off he realized it was the season of the toads, and there they were, littering the road, calling to one another in the green heat of their mating season, the males puffed up and glowing faintly, paying no heed to the fact that they were sending out their mating call on the road, so that if a car passed by many of them would be squashed.

“Go on,” he said to the toads as he made his way.

They continued to ignore him, and in the end he was the one who had to watch where he walked, stepping carefully over them, for it was bad luck to kill a toad. Ian decided it was easier to walk through the woods where the worst he would tread on were ivy and weeds. If there was anyone in this town who knew magic, it was his mother. He could study all his life, he could write the definitive History of Magic, but Margaret Wright knew the Nameless Art inside out, and that was why he needed to see her.

Gillian heard the calling of the toads, an urgent chirping sound. Here, in the first Essex County, she felt as though she were an entirely different person, or maybe it was simply that after all this time, she finally knew who she was.

“Do you ever see anything strange when you’re walking in the marsh?” Gillian asked their driver, Matt, as he loaded their luggage into the taxi.

“We call it the fens. You’ll find water, miss, there among the weeds. It’s a place where you need to be careful, otherwise you may drown and join the others who have. You’ll find toads out there as well, especially at this time of the year. That’s what you’re hearing now. They used to be hunted by those wishing to protect themselves from evil. They say there’s a witchbone in every toad. Folks called the Toadmen delved into magic, and my great-grandfather was one of them.” Matt took out a tin cough-drop box and shook it. Gillian could hear something inside rattling around. The taxi driver lowered his voice.

“I’ve got my own witchbone. You cut it out of a toad and dry it in the sun and you make sure to keep it close to your heart for protection and courage. I wouldn’t walk through the woods without it. It protects against evil and gives you power, especially over horses and women.”

Gillian glared at him. When she spoke her tone was dark. “You think women and horses are in the same category?”

“Not at all. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying that men are fools who need all the help they can get no matter what or who they’re dealing with. Every traveler used to carry a toad bone if they were lucky enough to be given one. Even ladies such as yourself.”

Matt continued to talk, but Gillian was no longer listening to him. Perhaps the girl in the fens had been holding up a white sliver of a toad bone, one used to keep a person safe from all the evils of the world. Perhaps it was a message for Gillian. Be who you can be, not who others think you are.

Gillian was the last to get in the taxi. She took her time and breathed in the cool, fresh air. Ever since she’d spied the girl in the fens she could see spirits drifting through the canopy of the trees. The scent all around was the green perfume of the watery fens where a woman could get lost, where she might drown if she wasn’t careful, if her bloodline didn’t protect her so that she was too buoyant to go underwater. Gillian had no need of any charms such as boiled milk thistle that would allow her to see shades. She glimpsed one right now. A woman walking down the street who’d been let out of jail to find her home ransacked by those who thought her to be a witch. The woman stopped and turned to stare at Gillian, a slaughtered tabby cat in her arms. The rustic cottage she had left abandoned when she fled into the woods was currently the town library, called Cat’s Library, for reasons no one in Thornfield could recall, and this shade had walked down this lane every night for three hundred years in a loop of time Gillian had stumbled across. Gillian wanted to go closer, but how could she justify running into the street? Instead, she held one hand over her heart as a greeting, and in return the woman nodded before she disappeared.

Gillian scrambled into the back seat beside Sally. She’d always thought that Sally was the sister with power, but perhaps she’d been wrong. It appeared Gillian had skills she hadn’t imagined, and being here had woken what was inside of her. Everything that had been done could not be undone, but what was to come was unknown. Fate could make the best of you or you could make the best of fate, that was what Jet always said. “We’ll find Kylie,” Gillian told her sister.

“We will,” Sally said, her voice shaky.

The sisters held hands as the van headed toward the Three Hedges Inn. It was a ramshackle place thought to be charming by Londoners who came for the weekend to look for antiques or hike in the forest where masses of wildflowers could be seen each spring. There were tales of how forbidding these woods once were, there had been robbers and horse thieves and men who thought of murder as sport, but people tended to laugh at such stories now, even the ones about women who were drowned and burned and who had cursed those who had done them wrong. All the same, it was a tradition for hikers to take a black stone and leave a white one in its place, to appease any magical forces, just in case danger still existed, perhaps in the form of a root one might trip over, or a child separated from a class on a school trip, or a woman stung by a bee.

The road was a bumpy, single lane that was dark and overgrown, but by the light of the fat pink moon, they soon saw the inn before them, a squat whitewashed building with a thatched roof. There was a pub and a function room where the town council had monthly meetings and wedding and engagement parties were held. The inn itself had six rooms to let, and three of those were said to be haunted and weren’t usually rented out. Tonight, however, they would be, for Americans would likely not notice the tapping in the walls or the chill in the corners of the rooms. Visitors from the States tended to keep their headphones on and ignore what was going on around them, and frankly they made the best guests as French and German tourists were inclined to complain about the shabbiness of the decor. Furniture was frayed and rugs were threadbare, but wasn’t that all part of the lure of the place? Sally and Gillian and Franny were given the haunted rooms. They happened to be the biggest and most well furnished, even if most people refused to stay the night.

“If you see any figures, throw salt in their direction,” said Jesse Wilkie, the manager of the pub who had taken a break from her duties as a waitress in order to help them with their luggage. She was in her mid-twenties and the youngest of the staff, except for a boy called George who came to help on weekends, putting out the trash and carrying in the boxes of groceries. “If the salt doesn’t work, then say Begone three times. My granny told me so when I was a girl. That should do the trick.”

Franny rolled her eyes. The advice was total nonsense, although it might work if a bat managed to get inside, after you threw a blanket over it, pulled on a pair of leather gloves, and brought it out to the garden.

“Do you have ghosts out in the fens?” Gillian wanted to know.

“Oh, we have them everywhere,” Jesse said cheerfully. “My granny said there was once a lady she knew in town who had relations with one. Or maybe she just said that so no one would ask who the father of her child was.”

“I’m happy to take one of the haunted rooms,” Vincent said. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“We’re fine,” Franny told Jesse. “Don’t worry about us.”

Vincent wished he did believe. He’d waited for William to return to him in some form for weeks after his death. He had avoided sleep. Come back to me, he’d whispered. Love of my life. Love eternal. One night, he’d heard a scratching and had run outside, only to find that the vines had twisted around the window ledge. Vincent had collapsed in the sandy earth, exhausted, remembering what their aunt Isabelle had told them, what comes back from the dead comes back as dark and unnatural if forced to return, brought back by necromancy and spells. All the same, Vincent was made to use magic and when he’d arrived in Paris to stay at Agnes’s, he’d brought along a pure white candle to William’s grave when he went to the cemetery at night. He would light it and wait till it burned down to a pool of wax, the dog Dodger at his side. And still, the night remained empty and dark. He could not call up the dead; he didn’t even think it was possible.