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.”