“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.