Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1)

by W. V. Fitz-Simon

  Out of her depth, Gosha needed someone to help make sense of everything. The obvious candidate was her mother. The old witch had maintained a respectful distance since she moved to the other end of Cheyne Heath to be closer to her grandchildren, but bringing her this would be a huge mistake. She would take it as license to renew her blather about lineage and apprenticeship and the importance of Gosha undertaking the Witch’s Betrayal, a ritual she claimed every woman in her family had undergone for generations stretching back a thousand years. Nothing would force Gosha back to that.

  And what about George?

  A cold, hard knot sank into the pit of her stomach at the thought of opening up to her husband. He knew about Influence and Craft, but telling him had been a mistake, the discovery awakening a vindictive avarice within him she never would have believed possible in the man she first fell in love with. If it weren’t for the boys, she would have left him long ago.

  She stood by the loading dock and watched the crew walking around dazed as they packed up the expensive lighting and camera equipment. Beyond the pull-down gates the set stood dejected, empty, and unfinished without the band to bring it to life. Revulsion cut through the numbed fog that had settled over her and pushed her to find a production driver to take her home.

  She didn’t yet know who she could hold responsible, or what could be done, but she wouldn’t let Mick’s death go unchallenged.

  4

  The car rolled to a stop outside the house. She slipped out with little more than a “thanks.” She would never normally be so rude, but she had to get somewhere she could breathe.

  George and she had bought number 64 Canterbury Gardens for a steal five years ago. Their friends thought them mad to throw their money away on a giant, dilapidated wreck in one of the worst districts of London. The six square, seedy, and squalid miles of the London Borough of Cheyne Heath reflected darkly its salubrious next-door neighbor, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, home to palaces, embassies, and million-pound mansions. All Cheyne Heath had to offer was the street market, a few nightclubs where the rich and famous could rub shoulders with London’s most notorious gangsters, and a rumor of Spanish gold bullion buried somewhere under the Heath.

  Still in love, she and George hadn’t cared. Instead of intimidating them, the chaotic energy of the neighborhood filled them with excitement. It was a rare chance to own something special that might have taken them years to afford otherwise. With Edmund, Gosha’s first, on the way, they worked hard to turn the four-story house and garden flat into a home. Once the marriage soured, it became a weight around her neck, a gilded prison she’d have to surrender if she took the boys and left. Making the best of it, she built herself a sanctuary, a small photographic studio where she could impose order on a small part of her life.

  All she wanted was to get up there and lock the door behind her, but George’s Rover was parked next to her black Mini Cooper in the drive. He was home early from work. She couldn’t get past him without having to answer questions she would rather avoid.

  Her face creased into a pinched ball, her body curling in on itself in a spasm of grief she couldn’t control. She sagged to the bottom stair of the stone steps that led up to the front door and sobbed so hard her body shuddered. A small part of her chided herself for making a scene out in the open on a weekday afternoon, but she couldn’t have stopped even if she wanted.

  “Mrs. Armitage,” came a cheery, piping voice from the pavement.

  Mrs. Dearing, Gosha’s housekeeper, put down her shopping bags and rushed to her side. She wrapped her arms around her and enveloped her in an embrace of freshly laundered cotton and cedared wool.

  “What happened,” she said as Gosha rested her head against Mrs. Dearing’s ample bosom. “Are the boys all right?”

  Five foot four in her sensible flats and a cotton floral dress wrapped in a hand-knit cardigan, Mrs. Dearing was the heart of the house. She only came in four days a week, but made her presence felt in countless little touches, from prepared food left in the fridge, to ironed linens, and small bundles of dried herbs hidden in every nook and cranny.

  “A performer at work died,” said Gosha through a wall of phlegm.

  “Oh, my dear!” Mrs. Dearing pulled a pristine white linen handkerchief from the pocket of her cardigan and handed it to Gosha to blow her nose. “What happened?”

  Gosha recounted the events, taking care to edit out all references to the supernatural. Fifteen years ago, when she was first making friends in London, she’d found the process of self-censorship exhausting. By now it was second nature.

  “You poor, poor thing,” cooed the housekeeper. When standing, her head barely came up to Gosha’s chest, but here on the steps her plump frame enveloped Gosha in a blanket of comfort. “You’re so brave. Why don’t you come into the kitchen, dear, and I’ll make you a cup of tea?”

  She spotted George’s car and glanced up at the front door.

  “Or, we can stay out here for a bit.”

  The last thing Gosha wanted right now was to deal with George. He could be such a child. They argued constantly, doing a poor job of keeping it from the boys. Sullen silences in the kitchen and time spent huddled in the boys’ bedroom when their father was in a mood did little to foster a healthy environment for them.

  “Here.” Mrs. Dearing rummaged in her shopping bags to find her purse. She unzipped the small, hand-sewn Chinese silk pouch and removed a lozenge wrapped in a twist of wax paper. “I made these myself. I thought I’d be adventurous and try my hand at making sweets. It’s chamomile and lavender and a little something extra. A special secret ingredient.”

  Gosha popped the lozenge in her mouth, and its lemony tartness made her salivate. A weight lifted off her chest.

  “Oh, heavens, look at the time.” Mrs. Dearing glanced down at the nurse’s watch pin attached to the front of her dress. “The boys will be home soon. Perhaps we should go inside.”

  Gosha blew her nose again and wiped the tears from her face. She knew her makeup hadn’t smudged, but she was certain her eyes would be a red mess. The boys would only worry if they came home to find their mother crying on the front steps.

  “Yes.” She picked up her handbag and one of Mrs. Dearing’s grocery bags and sighed, the lozenge melting away another tiny fraction of her grief. “We’d better go in. I could murder a cup of tea right now.”

  5

  “I’m not asking you for money!”

  George’s voice rang out from the living room as Gosha and Mrs. Dearing walked through to the kitchen. Mrs. Dearing took the outburst in her stride and made the tea as if he weren’t ranting at the top of his lungs in the other room. Gosha’s jaw clenched with every outburst as she put away Mrs. Dearing’s shopping.

  “Why do you think I’m always asking you for money?”

  He was on with his father.

  “I’ve never once come to you for a handout. I have my own money. They’re your grandchildren. They’re your own flesh and blood, whether you like it or not.”

  This wasn’t a new conversation. Robert Armitage was a cold and stubborn man who cut George out of his life when he turned eighteen, deeming him unworthy of any further care or attention. His father always met George’s repeated attempts at reconciliation with the same wall of indifference.

  Gosha put away the last can of beans from the shopping bags.

  “I'm going up to my studio, Mrs. Dearing.”

  “But your tea!” The housekeeper hovered, distraught, over the kettle on the stove. “It's almost ready.”

  She slipped her hand into the pocket of her cardigan to wrap her fingers around the hairbrush Gosha knew was in there, one of Mrs. Dearing's many endearing quirks. That hairbrush was never far away and was always the first thing she reached for whenever there was a problem.

  The kettle boiled, and the housekeeper tittered with her usual delight.

  “Perfect!”

  She poured the hot water into one of Timothy's mugs containing one
of her homemade tea bags and handed it to Gosha.

  “Have a sip, dear, but don’t burn your tongue.”

  A bright yellow amorphous cartoon character smiled up at Gosha from the mug as she blew on the tea and took a sip. An earthy flavor, with pungent notes that seeped into her and warmed away some of her shakiness.

  “It’s very good. Thank you.”

  Mrs. Dearing served them all sorts of teas, so many different concoctions Gosha couldn’t keep track, all of them delicious.

  “You are such a piece of work! You will die a lonely, miserable old man. All that money will not do you a damn bit of good when the angel of death comes for you. How old are you now? Eighty? You’d think mortality snapping at your heels would make you less of a prick.”

  She took the increasing volume of George's ranting as her cue to leave, but he slammed the phone down and stormed into the kitchen before she could escape.

  “This is your fault.” As he bore down on Gosha, Mrs. Dearing attacked the kitchen sink with a soapy sponge as if nothing in the world were more important. “I had one—”

  Mrs. Dearing clanked the teapot against the tray, drawing attention to herself, and he lowered his voice.

  “I had one chance to win his respect, and you ruined it for me.”

  Six months after Timothy, their second child, was born, they packed up the car and drove to Liverpool to see Robert. After the success of integrating Gosha’s mother into the children's lives, they hoped presenting George’s father with the darling faces of his descendants might soften the old man, but the audience was short and acrimonious. Father and son stood fast in their feelings about the other’s shortcomings. For twenty minutes, Edmund hid behind Gosha’s chair, pale as a ghost, as Timothy bawled in her arms. The squabble ended with Robert summoning his butler to escort them from the house.

  When Gosha turned back to give Robert a piece of her mind, a vision struck her as clearly as if she had opened a door and peered into another room. She saw him dressed in an embroidered scholar’s cap and gown before a vast wall of blackboards covered in diagrams and equations scrawled in symbols she didn’t recognize. The writing throbbed with supernatural power. Whether the vision was a literal tableau or a metaphorical impression, Gosha couldn’t be sure, but all the hairs on her body stood rigid as needles. Robert Armitage reeked of Influence.

  They drove in silence for an hour, George clinging to the steering wheel, the muscles in his arms rigid and his foot heavy on the accelerator. When the speedometer edged up past ninety miles per hour, she had to calm him down. He refused to talk and brushed her hand away when she tried to touch him, so she did all the talking. As much as she loved and trusted him back then, she had never told him about Craft and Influence. Fear he might think her mad always stopped her, but a little madness right then might help him understand his father’s behavior.

  She told him what she had seen and everything about her mother and Influence, all her stories. The only thing she held back was the one story she didn’t dare think of herself, the reason her family had fled to Britain from the Old Country. At first, he thought she was telling a story to little Timothy, swaddled in the back seat. When he realized she wasn’t, he got angry, accused her of mocking him, but she was patient and adamant. By the time they passed Birmingham, he believed her.

  As he warmed to the idea, his questions grew more eager. He wanted to talk to her mother, to see Influence at work for himself. When she refused, he asked if there were other witches like her mother they could consult. She was sure there were, but she had met none in England. Her aunts from Poland vanished along with the rest of her family when they fled the country. She tried to make him understand how dangerous that life was. She had moved to London to get away from the old ways of her mother. But how could he when she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the one story that would show him how much danger they would be inviting into their lives?

  Her refusals turned him angry again. He accused her of being cruel, of enjoying seeing him humiliated.

  By Luton, he was a petulant, whining, and sulking child. If he were Timothy or Edmund, she would have cuffed him behind one ear and sent him to his room. By Watford, he was quiet and sullen. By the time they walked up the steps to the house, her mother’s world of awfulness had shattered another of her relationships.

  “This bloody Influence—” George hissed. Leaning on the table, he thrust his face at hers.

  “George!” She grabbed his arm and led him back to the living room, closing the door so they could talk without Mrs. Dearing overhearing. She wanted nothing more than to go upstairs and clear her head, but she knew from experience he wouldn’t let this go.

  “This Influence business is all he's ever cared about.” He abandoned all pretense of whispering. “I never understood him until you told me, and then my whole childhood made sense. All that secrecy. All that time he spent locked in his damn study. Why won’t you stand by me? You’re my wife. You’re supposed to support me.”

  “Because Influence has only ever brought me misery.” A memory of earthen cellar walls crawling with unspeakable insects leaped into her mind, and a shudder rippled across her skin. She did her best to push the memory away. “It’s dangerous. I don’t want it near the boys, and you shouldn’t either.”

  “You hate me, don’t you?” He paced the length of the living room. “You’re just like my father. You have the power to do marvelous things and you keep it all to yourself. You’re utterly selfish. If you took a second to look past your own insecurity, you’d see how much you’re hurting me.”

  “Oh, grow up, George!” She couldn’t hold back her irritation. “Can you just give it a rest? Not everything is always about you. Mick Trash died today. He overdosed on the shoot.”

  To her satisfaction, George’s expression went slack with shock.

  “He died?”

  “I was the one who found him. I tried CPR, but I was too late.”

  His jaw moved, but no words came. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he walked away from her, paused, turned on his heel, and stalked back.

  “What did he take?”

  “I don’t know. It must have been some kind of designer drug.”

  She knew it wasn’t, but even in her exhaustion, she couldn't help but censor herself.

  “What time did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. During the lunch break.”

  “Did anyone see him do it?”

  They had invited the band over for dinner once. Mick and George had disappeared into a corner and talked for hours about she knew not what. She couldn’t believe the way George was acting. He almost seemed excited to hear Mick was dead.

  “I told you, I was the one who found him. For pity’s sake, George. Show some compassion.”

  The unmistakable squeal of young boys at play came from the foyer. The children were home. With a grunt of disgust, she pushed past him and went out to greet them.

  “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!”

  Edmund and Timothy exploded toward her with rosy cheeks and overcoats steeped in the cool freshness of an afternoon playing on the heath.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Cressida, their nanny, a tall and slender girl with blonde hair and perfect diction.

  Cressida did her best to take their coats from them before they went into the kitchen where lurked the inevitable crumbs and stains of teatime. At such precious ages, Edmund six and Timothy four, Gosha wanted to scoop them up in her arms and tumble around on the floor, but today she felt spoiled, tainted by darkness. She was afraid it might rub off on them.

  “Boys, boys, boys.” Mrs. Dearing bustled back to the table with a giant tray of provisions. “Be gentle with your mother. She’s had a trying day.”

  “Are you okay, Mummy?” A look of worry creased Edmund’s perfect face.

  “I am right as rain.” She smiled and kissed him on the forehead. “Even better now you’re home.”

  “Come along.” Mrs. Dearing shooed them into the kitchen with her tea tow
el. “I’ve made your favorite: fish fingers and chips. And there’s Jammy Dodgers when you’ve finished.”

  “Boys,” said George, emerging from the living room.

  “Hi, Daddy,” they chimed back, with much less enthusiasm than when they greeted her. He had never been affectionate with them.

  In the foyer, Cressida hung the boys’ coats on the rack by the door. As he passed, George stopped and leaned in to whisper something in her ear. Cressida suppressed a smirk.

  A hot coal of fury ignited in Gosha’s gut. She made another entry into her mental file of evidence that George and Cressida were having an affair. Young, blonde, lithe, and from a family far more posh than she or George, Cressida was just his type, Gosha knew from experience. He’d almost destroyed their marriage with an affair once before and swore he’d never do it again.

  “Why don’t you take your tea up with you and run yourself a nice hot bath,” said Mrs. Dearing with a comforting hand on Gosha’s arm. “A hard-working mother like yourself must have all her faculties about her if she’s to be any good to her little ones.”

  A queer thing to say, thought Gosha, never quite sure how much Mrs. Dearing really knew about her relationship with George.

  Mrs. Dearing beamed with a smile that crinkled her eyes and pulled from the pocket of her apron a cheesecloth sachet of herbs. “And drop this in with you. It’ll do you no end of good.”

  Gosha put it to her nose and drew in a breath. A thick bouquet of lavender, rosemary, and other floral fragrances filled her nostrils.

  “That smells amazing.”

  “Careful, dear.” Mrs. Dearing snatched the sachet back with a nervous titter. “That’s powerful stuff! Save it for when you’re soaking in the water. It’ll be much better then.”

  She tucked it in the pocket of Gosha’s trousers.

  “Will you be okay, darling?” asked George, coming back into the kitchen. “I told Cressida to keep the children occupied and give you a little peace.”