Have you ever had an affair?  Personally, my nerves couldn’t take it, all the clandestine meetings and coded texts.  Plus, I feel like a ‘proper’ adulteress would own tights and wear matching underwear rather than cartoon socks and sports bras.  Also, I’m a creature of habit, I like the same skin to covet, a lover’s knowledge gleaned from lazy weekends in bed and (many) nights when I just can’t sleep, tracing a constellation of moles and scars like a well-thumbed map.

However, that said, this week…I’ve cheated. 

There I said it, turns out my old priest was right; confession truly is good for the soul.  I just had a weird flashback of my 10 year old self stuck in that stuffy vertical coffin trying to come up with something to purge from my conscience and silent prayers on unforgiving pews.

Now before you brand me with the scarlet letter I would like to clarify that I have not done the dirty on my husband, you see my lurid act of passion was with a book.

We’ve all been there surely, we read something so beautiful, so captivating that resonates with our psyche in ways our loved ones could only hope to reach, that we suffer the eternal dilemma; what to read next?  What could possibly follow after something so heartstoppingly poignant?

So, I decided to be reckless, I couldn’t possibly read something of the same genre because it would be like comparing children (although admit it we say we don’t but we all have a secret favourite).  Instead, I went rogue and plumped for something completely different and whilst it was fun at first tearing off the jacket in the first throes of passion, stroking the pages and sniffing the long-dried ink, I must say, the encounter left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied and if I’m totally honest, I was thinking of Fyneshade the whole time.

There we have it, the Governess of my dark little heart – Marta, ever since reading Fyneshade I can’t get the story of Marta out of my mind, but that is no bad thing, when you love something you always want more.  Such is the joy of books, they transport us, and they stay with us long after the spine has contracted.

Ever since being little I’ve been interested in folklore and wicca.  Like most girls I fell in love with Salem of Sabrina the Teenage Witch fame but unlike most my thirst for magic and ritual could not be sated and failed to wane. 

Whilst I started with Roald Dahl’s The Witches and went on to name my mice William and Mary in homage, I later discovered Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic and realised my obsession was rooted far deeper than parchment.  I was besotted by the antiquity of ritual, the familial cultivation of grimoires and the comforting cloak of moonlight.

I devoured works like Witchlight, The Daylight Gate, Cunning Folk and the Discovery of Witches trilogy like a fun size Mars bar and tried levitating my friend after downing too much cheap vodka and watching The Craft on repeat.

I love stories that steer away from the kitsch imagery that Halloween casts and instead focus on the extraordinariness of the everyday blessings nature leaves at our doorstep.  Subtle works by Sarah Addison Allison that enchant by the page.

But just as time casts day and night, magic teaches us light and shade.

Marta is the perfect antiheroine, all polished poise on the surface and calculated rage beneath; slowly drowning in the hysteria and sexism of the time.

Fyneshade perfectly captures the bias of knowledge and how it has always been wielded in man’s favour and how little that grip has yielded in the eras since spent. 

After all a spell is no more than a well tuned recipe, a cure for an ailment, and yet women were ridiculed for their wisdom, accused of heresy, cast out, tortured and drowned by hands they had previously shook.

There is something cloying between the pages of Fyneshade, something cold and bitter that seeps through the skin and leaves its mark just as Marta left hers in chalk on centuries old passageways that refused to give up their ghosts.

This book is a tale of woe.  A reminder to open the shutter that surrounds our hearts and let the shadows unfurl, and what may manifest in the encroaching dark when we fail to do so.