When I was told that my Grandmother had passed away, I didn’t know what to feel. I had never met her, and my mum never talked about her if she could help it. By all accounts they hadn’t seen each other since before I was born, although mum never really went into the details. It must have been bad, though. Mum wasn’t the kind of woman to carry a grudge for long, and since the feud had started over twenty years ago, I could respect the fact that it obviously caused her pain.

It was a fluke that I even found out about her passing, actually. Neither mum nor dad said anything, and at the time I had no idea if that was deliberate or not. Now I think that if it wasn’t for the phone call, I wouldn’t have heard anything about it at all.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, hello?’ came a friendly, female voice down the line. She sounded like an older woman, and her tone was uncertain. ‘I’m terribly sorry to trouble you, but could I please speak with Mrs Reynolds?’

‘Mum’s not here at the moment,’ I told her. ‘Can I take a message?’

I sat down on the rickety, wicker chair beside the phone, glad to take the weight off my aching feet and fishing for the pen I knew I had shoved in my hair-bun earlier. I only ever tied the cloud of tight, cork-screw curls up when I was at work, but the rest of the time I liked to have it down. I wasn’t a small girl. I was 5’11” and well built, and the simple mass of it balanced me out somehow. My job was at a garden centre, and it made life much easier to have it fixed out of the way when I was carrying pots and bags of compost about. Plus it doubled as storage for pens.

‘I see,’ said the woman on the phone hesitantly. ‘Is this Renatta?’

I blinked in surprise, having assumed this was a client of my mum’s. She worked as a carer, but rarely gave out the landline number. Most people rang her mobile, as they were much more likely to get a hold of her that way. In her line of work, she didn’t have any close working relationships except with the people she looked after, and the only person who ever called from her office was Sally, a perky young woman of thirty-something, who was usually ringing to find out if mum could do extra.

‘It is,’ I answered slowly. I knew mum didn’t like to get her work involved with her home life if she could help it. ‘Who is this?’

‘Oh, this is Trudy. Trudy Gibson?’ came the response, and I could tell that she didn’t really expect me to know who she was. She was right, too. ‘I’m a friend of your Gran’s. Her neighbour, actually. I’m so terribly sorry for your loss.’

‘My loss?’

She became very flustered then, tried to fob me off quickly as she realised I had no idea what she was talking about, but eventually gave way to my persistence. I suppose I felt sad, but probably not in the traditional way people experience when their grandmother dies. I was sad that I had never known her, that she and mum had been estranged and would never have the chance now for closure. I was sad that she had died alone.

‘I’m very sorry, dear,’ Trudy said when I fell into long silence after she told me the news. ‘I had thought you would know, but I suppose it’s difficult for your poor mother. She missed the funeral, and I’ve been trying to contact her about what to do with the house. I know she wants it sold, but all of Germaine’s things are still here, and some of it… well. Some of it is dangerous.’

‘Dangerous?’ I echoed. ‘Dangerous how?’

‘Oh goodness,’ Trudy sighed, sounding remorseful once again. ‘It’s so hard. I don’t know what you’re aware of and I’ve already done enough damage… your mother is obviously grieving, of course, but someone needs to take care of things. It wouldn’t do for some unschooled pedestrian to try and dispose of it, and I daren’t do it myself. We were never compatible, you see. Different branches of practice.’

My brown eyes were wide in my face as I listened to the woman babble on, and I had to agree with her initial statement. It was hard. Neither of us could speak freely unless we were certain, absolutely certain of what the other knew or didn’t know. There were rules, after all, and they were there for good reason.

I was only twenty-one, and my mother was very private about things. I had grown up in the safety of that, respecting her decision and perfectly content to take it up for myself. Now, though, my curiosity ate at me, and I had no guidance.

The trouble with witches is that while they only have two rules, one of them makes things very difficult: We aren’t allowed to talk about being witches. Now in theory this is a good, even a necessary rule to have. In practice, however, when you have a huge group of people all keeping the same secret, it can get terribly lonely, and very complicated.

There is no council of witches. There’s no governing body or leader we all look to. There isn’t even any kind of law enforcement agency or fixed punishment for rule breaking. You might ask how we’re all kept in line, I suppose, but witchcraft is mostly about common sense when it comes down to it. We don’t talk about being witches to strangers, because it’s dangerous.

I didn’t know this woman, and despite my suspicions, I couldn’t be sure she meant what I believed she did. Really I ought to have taken a message and ended the conversation, but something about Trudy made me trust her.

‘Her spells, you mean?’ I asked before I realised I’d done it. ‘My grandmother was a witch, too?’