‘The teams will be here by tomorrow’ said Dominic.

‘Oh,’ said Stan. ‘You’re still going to help. Right?’

‘Help with what?’ I asked.

Stan made a little helpless gesture at the gaping hatch.

‘They stole my stash,’ she said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘All the illegal stuff you had hidden away so that the law didn’t catch you?’

‘Rabbits isn’t illegal,’ mumbled Stan.

‘Who do you think took your stuff?’ asked Dominic.

‘Thought it might have been a pony,’ said Stan.

‘Why would a pony get into your stash?’ I asked.

‘They’re a bugger for food,’ she said.

I asked Dominic if there were any ponies nearby.

‘There are some a couple of fields over,’ he said. ‘More down the hill towards Aymestrey. But I’ve never heard of them drinking diesel before.’

‘What about the drugs?’ I said. ‘What would diazepam even do to a horse?’

We both looked at Stan, who shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never given it to a horse.’

‘Maybe we should notify local vets,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t a horse,’ said Stan. ‘I had the door wired shut.’

She showed us the black iron loops on the door and the frame – remnants of a deadbolt, I thought. Stan said that she always pushed a double loop of heavy gauge steel wire through the loops and then twisted it to keep it shut. I asked where the wire was and she showed me where the unwound strands had been dumped. I picked them up and had a look – they hadn’t been cut or melted through or, as far as I could tell, been exposed to magic. In fact there was bugger all in the way of vestigia around the stash at all. Vestigia being the trace that gets left behind when magic happens.

Flora, your actual growing things, retain vestigia really badly and this makes the countryside, leaving aside poetry, not a very magical place. This caused a great deal of consternation to the more Romantic practitioners of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Particularly Polidori, who spent a great deal of time trying to prove that natural things in their wild and untamed state were inherently magical. He went bonkers in the end, although that could have been a result of spending too much time with Byron and the Shelleys. His big claim to fame, beyond writing the first ever vampire novel, is his work attempting to classify where whatever it is that powers magic comes from. He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you’re making it up as you go along.

He was amongst the first to postulate that things other than animals must generate potentia. Forests, for example, would produce potentia silvestris and rivers potentia fluvialis. And it is from these sources that the gods and goddesses and spirits of a locality gain their strength.