Page 50 of The Book of Magic

“What is this?” Gillian said, gazing up at the cunning woman before her.

“Recite the incantation each night.”

Gillian turned the card over, tears rimming her eyes.

Goddess of the Night, Hecate, honored above all, you are the beginning, you are the end. From you are all things, and in you, eternal one, all things end.

“This is the recipe that worked for me when I wanted a child,” Margaret Wright told her. “I’ve been grateful ever since.”

Sally couldn’t bring herself to have lunch with the others under her family’s watchful eye. She was falling apart and didn’t want their pity. What was worth living and dying for? How did one go on in the trembling darkness of what might happen next? Women who lost daughters or husbands, women who were skin and bones, who were filled with sorrow, women who couldn’t find their way home, who denied who they were or what they might be willing to do. Instead of joining the others at the table, Sally walked to the marsh. She’d left her boots behind and held up her skirts. The sun beat down on her narrow shoulders. She stopped to watch a cloud of crows soar overhead. With one hand across her eyes she still searched for them vainly even after they’d scattered to perch on the banks, where they couldn’t be seen in the tall grass. She wanted a sign. A voice, a song, an omen. Clouds that turned pink, a vision of another place and time. This was a remote area, one where you rarely saw a person, perhaps the occasional fisherman on a long boat. Sally’s heart lifted when she saw a figure in the reeds. Perhaps it was her daughter, it surely must be, but as she waded forward she observed a dark-haired girl she didn’t recognize treading through the land that was half earth and half water, a leather bag held above her head for safety’s sake. Everything was blue, her dress, the water, the sky.

“Wait,” Sally called. “It’s too deep,” she scolded.

The girl turned and their eyes met across the marsh and then Sally knew it was a shade out there; Maria had steadfastly been repeating her steps for three hundred years, unable to rest while the curse was at work. Sally stood there spellbound as the girl vanished between the bands of shadow and light. Once she had, the crow gave a shrill cry and lifted back into the sky.

“Are you all right?” Ian had come up behind Sally, breathing hard. He wasn’t entirely sure what had happened until Sally turned and he saw the wonder looming in her eyes. “You witnessed the appearance of a shade.”

“It was a girl.” Sally’s palms had grown clammy and panic overtook her. She started off into the water. “I won’t let her drown.”

Ian didn’t wait to hear any more of her explanation. He was vain about his knowledge of the marshes and fens. People drowned by accident all the time and Sally wasn’t going to be among them. “Stop right where you are, Sally. That was not your daughter. It was a ghost if it was anything at all. Something that was mortal and is no longer. I’ve seen her, too.” He’d been high on LSD at the time, but there was no need to mention that. He had seen a shade with black hair, a young girl who vanished as he approached.

Sally continued on until she was waist deep in the water.

“Damn it, stop!”

The urgent sound of his voice made her do so. Despite his knowledge of the hazards of the terrain Ian stepped blindly forward into the water to follow. When he caught up to her he was overcome with inexpressible longing and couldn’t speak. Instead he bent to kiss her.

Sally leaned in, then leaned away. “There’s someone drowning.” She could barely breathe.

Ian laughed and said, “Yes, I know. It’s me.”

There was no girl now, there was only this man who’d come after her without bothering to take off his boots. He was cruel to remind her that she had a heart. And perhaps he felt a fool, for he backed away.

“We call that the Witch’s House,” he said of the abandoned house by an inlet of the shore.

By now, Sally knew the history of Thornfield, how witches were tried here, drowned with no evidence other than rumor and gossip and fears spoken aloud. Even when Ian was a boy, people would stare when his mother rode through town on her bicycle late at night whenever someone fell ill, though most people agreed that she was more reliable than the doctor, who lived forty minutes away and had a temperamental vintage MGB that often didn’t start in rainy weather, of which there was a great deal in this county.

“You’d never live in a place like this,” Ian said, his gaze falling on Sally’s beautiful worried face. She worried a good deal, and he wished he could put an end to that.

“I come from a place like this,” Sally told him. “Have you never been to Massachusetts?”

“New Haven was as far as I got, to do a bit of research at Yale. And New York, of course. I was lost in the public library for days.”

“But you prefer Cat’s Library.”

She’d seen the truth. He was a country boy who happened to live in London. “I do.” Some places got ahold of you, and this one was a landscape he couldn’t go without.

Sally laughed at how seriously he’d said I do. “Do you think I proposed to you?”

Ian was immediately ill at ease. He had kissed her and wanted to do so again. He was burning up, really, though he was standing in the cold, green water. This could not be it. In his mind, his story ended with him alone in his flat in London. Likely, his body wouldn’t be discovered for days. He’d pictured his funeral. His mother, the Poole family, maybe an old girlfriend or two, maybe not. “Do you want a proposal?” he asked, then felt like an idiot. Before Sally could answer he pointed to the shell of an abandoned cottage across the fens. “That’s where I used to hide out. Me and the herons. I did some bad things out there.” Drugs and drink and girls he vowed to love while he knew he’d never phone them up again. All the same it had been so beautiful in the fens, to sit there on the porch that was falling to pieces as he watched the moon rise had saved him in some way.

They went a bit farther, moving slowly. Sally realized how deep the mud was; it could pull you down if you didn’t keep moving. “Are we now trapped here for life?”

Ian wanted to say, I wish, but since they were not stuck and since that would likely offend Sally he turned toward higher ground and a path that he knew would be more earth than mud. When he gestured for Sally she stood there unmoving. “Are you coming or would you prefer to drown?” Ian asked pointedly. He was known to sulk when he didn’t get what he wanted and what he wanted was Sally, and to drop the pretense that there was nothing between them.

“My people can’t drown.” Was she so helpless that she couldn’t find her daughter? She knew this had happened to Maria. Her daughter had disappeared for years, and the loss had nearly ruined her. “We have to find her,” she said.

“We will, Sally. But come with me now out of the water.”