by B G Denvil
“It’s not just astrology,” announced Ermengarde Spank, a tidy sixty-four. “One of our most interesting and powerful neighbours has been murdered in shocking circumstances. We should have discovered the perpetrator before now.”
“I quite like astrology,” muttered Gorgeous Leek, who was only a nineteen and so never wanted to be noticed.
“I,” said Montague, “have no interest in the matter. Whistle Hobb was a fool who played with spoons and candle sticks, and wrote books that William Caxton refused to print.”
Lemony Limehouse often behaved with surprising levity, but everyone knew beneath the giggles, she was a respectable sixty-six. “I do believe,’ she said, “we were all in our beds at that time. No one heard anything, and no one saw anything. Except the killer, of course. So how do we find out?”
“What about asking the bats?”
“Done.”
“What about the crows?”
“Done.”
“What about the owls?
Rosie looked up. “I haven’t spoken to Rocky. I did with Cabbage, but I forgot Rocky. Of all those who could have seen what went on at night, Rocky might be the most appropriate.”
“Then stop bothering the rest of us,” said Montague.
Rosie went off him in an instant. “But we ought to continue talking here and now,” she said. “There’s a lot to learn. For instance, did anyone hear footsteps?”
Montague sighed. “As a fifty you may have to walk,” he said. “But most of us more talented wiccans choose to fly.”
Rosie snapped her mouth shut and left the rest to Peg.
Boris, short stocky and a somewhat tough little twenty-four, sat back behind most of the others and muttered, “Humbug. Pissywallop. Pendigo-parcels. Squirrel breath and toppsy-turvey- pickled rodents and hedgehogs swimming swamps.”
“There are certain facts which I see as obvious,” Peg said, ignoring Boris. “As such a powerful wizard, Whistle can only have been killed by someone over a seventy. For that sort of physical strength as well as magical power, it has to have been a male. He may have entered by the window, but he left by the door, so he walked some of the way.” Here she scowled at Montague. “He wore brown boots on large feet. And he didn’t like Whistle.”
“That means almost everyone,” Alice interrupted, standing with an impatient sniff. “And since it excludes me, I’m going to the kitchen to start dinner, and Rosie can come and help.”
But Peg shook her head. “Rosie has been investigating this situation from the start. She needs to stay here.”
Alice flounced off alone, and Rosie looked around as more than half The Rookery occupants were pushing over their stools, ready to leave. “But,” she called, “someone could have seen something, even if they didn’t do it themselves.”
It was Percy Rotten who marched to Peg, raising his voice. “OK. I’m a sixty-nine, not strong, but enough when something matters. I could have killed the wretched man, since I never liked him. I’m strong in both ways, and I own a great pair of brown boots which I never bother to polish. My feet are definitely large. So it could have been me. But it wasn’t. Why would I bother? There’s lots of people here I don’t like, including you, Madam Tipple. But I’m not going to trot around killing anyone who annoys me. And how could you prove it anyway, even if I did?”
“Besides,” said Mandrake, “if any of us disliked someone enough to bounce them off in such a manner, why wait until now? If I’d wanted to, I’d have done something years back.”
“Squeezy – wheezy. Spooky – slosh. What a dipsy waste of time,” muttered Boris. “Teezle-weezle and pintified bricks.”
“I’m inclined to agree with Boris,” said Mandrake, leaning back with a yawn.
Rosie was disappointed, but smiled at Peg and wandered out to join her mother. “It’s obvious we’re getting nowhere. I suppose I’d better go and help my miserable mother.”
It was on her way to the kitchen that she bumped into Uta Hampton, the impressive eighty-one who rarely spoke to anyone. “I was wondering,” she said softly, “whether Whistle was working on anything new lately.” Smiling, she pulled Rosie into a shadowed corner. “It’s probably finding the motive that is so interesting, you know,” she said. “The why, and the why now? All sorts of us might have had the occasional conversation, you know, giving some faint disclosure of what he was doing. Only motive will unmask our villain.”
Rosie supposed this was true. “And you were friendly with him,” she smiled back. “Have you any idea?”
“Unfortunately not,” she murmured. “He disliked discussing his work, as most of us do. But it’s possible he was discovering some facts that disproved someone else’s work, made another of us look foolish, or simply proved their work false. Mandrake or Montague, for instance, since they both fancy themselves magical geniuses. I’d believe both of them capable of killing someone who threatened to make them look like the idiots they are.”
“So both capable of bashing an old man’s head in.” Rosie gulped. “Just to keep him quiet.”
“True.” Uta nodded. “But I confess, I’m less interested in finding the guilty one. After all, we must die eventually, every one of us. Sometimes such long lives prove most tedious. Whistle had led a remarkably interesting two hundred years. Perhaps that’s enough.”
Rosie, however, knew nothing of any wizard’s present work, since her only job usually involved sweeping, dusting and scrubbing. She thanked Uta and plodded to the kitchen. She had insisted on leaving the one secret paper she had found in Whistle’s room with Peg and hoped that might bring up new ideas. Peg, for all her muddles, was an expert at the wiccan runes. But since the room had originally held at least a thousand papers of all kinds, the discovery of one was unlikely to prove significant. The other nine hundred and ninety-nine had evidently been destroyed.
Watching her mother boiling a watery gravy in the cauldron over the fire, and since it was still hot outside, Rosie spoke from the doorway. “You don’t really need me, do you, Mamma?”
Alice snorted. “Why should I ever actually need you, girl?” She returned to the stirring. “Once this is hot enough, I shall turn it into mutton and peas. “I might add a little chutney on the side. And parsnip jelly for pudding.”
“Must it be parsnip jelly? What about blackberry jelly?”
Alice didn’t bother turning around. “I shall make whatever I wish, rude brat. You can go and play.”
“I was just wondering,” wondered Rosie, “how you can turn hot water into proper dinner. You’re a fifty like me. I can’t do things like that, and I can’t even fly. Couldn’t you have taught me a thing or two?”
Her mother snorted back over her shoulder. “I’ve taught you a thing and ten,” she said without turning. “Obedience, cleaning up, keeping out of my way. That’s enough for me.”
Biting her lip and refusing to get annoyed, Rosie asked, “Whistle’s papers? There were so many, and they might have held clues. But Kate says you had them all torn up and set on fire.”
“Naturally,” Alice bothered to answer. “I could hardly leave a mess like that for our new lodger. And I might add she’s arriving tomorrow. She’ll pay a high rent, since she wants both rooms, and I shall greet her myself when she flies in.”
“Do you know her number?” Not that it mattered.
“Oh yes indeed,” replied Alice. “She’s a nice warm ninety-three.”
Rosie gasped. “Ninety-three? That’s nearly the whole hundred. Have you met her yet? Is she nice? Do you know her name?”
“Twenty-five questions as always,” sighed her mother. “Yes, yes, yes, and yes. There’s just one no, since I haven’t met her yet. But she’s flying down from the north. I believe she’s been living in a cave in the Scottish mountains. An odd choice, but I suppose as a ninety-three she can keep herself warm wherever she is.”
“And she’s arriving tomorrow?” Rosie was quite excited at such a powerful new-comer. Even Whistle had only been a ninety-one.
Chapter Twelve
Sitting at her own little table which she used as a desk, Peg stretched out Whistle’s last surviving piece of parchment, which Rosie had left with her, and attempted to decipher the codes and scattered runes. This was no beautiful illuminated manuscript, and no gorgeous pictures nor decorated letters adorned it. There simply seemed to be a mess of scribble. Yet Peg was magical enough herself to know that this was surely a disguise, and a disguise was only ever used to hide something important.
“Emphatic,” she read out, using her fingers constantly just in case something turned out to be a spell. “Sing at the sun. Spoon up the negatives and pour the positives into the cup.” Mentions of spoons and cups interested her since both those items had been spoken of as relevant. Rosie kept the spoon safe in her room, but no one had yet discovered the cup. “But that greedy old baggage won’t have chucked it,” Peg muttered, “since it was silver.” She read on. “One, two – three – four – humph,” she said. “Sounds like Rosie.”
Yet half the signs were unreadable even to her, and she leaned back, gazed from the window and sank into dreams.
Rosie rushed in, wishing Peg a good morning. and skipped to her side. “Edna Edith Ethel Enid Elsie Oppolox is our new resident,” she said, “she’s coming today, and she’s a ninety-three.”
Peg refused to appear impressed. “Then I hope she doesn’t show it off,” she said. “In the meantime, I’m trying to understand this wretched parchment of Whistle’s.”
“Perhaps Edna will be able to,” Rosie suggested.
“You mean perhaps we should give it to Edna whatever her name is when she arrives?”
“I just meant, if you were tired of it—”
“Certainly not,” grunted Peg. “As soon as the poor woman arrives, you think we should tell her she’s taken over the rooms of someone recently murdered, and would you please read this parchment before hanging your cloak up?”
“Alright,” Rosie nodded, accustomed to being told off. “Besides, it’s quite easy, isn’t it? I expect you read it ages ago. I mean, the spoon and the cup. And that’s the same number of spots as the toadstool,” she said, pointing to where the dots were. “Here’s the wind whistling down the chimney, so he means himself. This could be a Rosie rose, but I’m quite sure he isn’t writing about me. And that’s multiplication, with a hand, and an umbrella. In the end, there’s a sliver of papers like glass shards, glass being transparent, so papers easy to read. And I think it means go and stand in the rain with the cup, the spoon and the toadstool, and demand the return of anything you’ve lost or been destroyed.”
Peg stared at her young friend in absolute amazement. “How on earth did you manage that?”
“I may be a fifty, but I’m not an idiot,” sniffed Rosie.
Having worked on that parchment for two days without being able to read it, Peg was somewhat shocked. “True,” she said in a mumbled undertone. “Well done, dear. Then this could be exactly what we need to do. Wait for the rain, and we can demand the return of all those papers your mother destroyed. And it will take us weeks, but we can study every one of them and find the clue to the murderer.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting this new witch,” Rosie said. “She’s been living in a cave. But a ninety-three? Gosh. That’s special.”
“Not much more than an eighty-six.”
Rosie got the point. “Almost the same,” she agreed. “But a new look from an outsider – you know – can be useful.”
It wasn’t raining. They looked at each other. “I shall see if I can summon up a little drizzle,” Peg decided.
“Alright.” Rosie sighed. “I suppose I should go and search for the silver cup. But if Mother has it, and I go hunting amongst her precious belongings, she’ll carve me into crumbs.”
“Get someone down there to call her out for a long, concentrated task,” Peg suggested, “to keep her out of the way. Then sneak in. You always make her bed anyway, don’t you?”
“I did that already.”
“Well, do it again.”
Since she wasn’t offering to call Alice away herself, Rosie accepted she was being dismissed, and trotted all the way down the endless staircase to the ground floor, and went to find a friendly soul who would call her mother out of the way. She was wandering the corridors when the front door whooshed open, and a tall thin woman, struggling with a huge feathered hat, a long velvet cloak that seemed determined to entangle itself, three large baskets of belongings, the rattan baskets painted with flowers, and a big fat white bird on her shoulder which seemed nervous and was demanding comfort by pecking the woman’s ear, entered in a flap and flurry, almost sinking to the floor once she arrived indoors.
She saw Rosie, who had run to help with the luggage. “Oh, my dear girl, thank you,” said the woman. “I should have flown, but I was worried that someone might see me. Of course I didn’t know how your beautiful old house was situated. Had it been in the middle of a town, I couldn’t have dived down the chimney.”
Rosie was excited. “You’re the new ninety-three,” she said, hauling up the baskets but keeping a distance from the parrot. “Welcome to The Rookery. My mother owns the place, and I’m Rosie.”
“My dear Rosie,” Edna said at once, “I’m delighted to be here, and I’m delighted to meet you. Perhaps you’ll point me in the right direction?”
Pointing dutifully, Rosie said, “Top floor. Rooms One and Two. It says so on the doors. You can fly straight up, but I’ll tell my mother, and she’ll follow up to greet you and talk about breakfast and dinner and other stuff.” She had thought of the perfect solution. “I’m sure you’ll want to talk to her at some length. I shall be thrilled to meet you later at supper.”
Clutching the handles of all three baskets flicking her cloak out of the way and threatening the bird with decapitation unless it stopped eating her ear, the woman disappeared up into the long dark stairwell, feet clicking toes together as she disappeared.
With another happy skip, Rosie ran to the kitchen. “Mamma, she’s arrived. I mean, Edna Oppolox. She’s delightful but she has a funny bird. White. No, not a pigeon, I mean a real white white, and I’ve never seen such a white bird before. I doubt it will get on well with the ravens, but that’s their problem. I’ve directed her to her rooms, but she says she wants a lovely long conversation with you, to help her settle in and get to know everything.”
“I suppose so.” Alice sighed. “And plenty of time before supper. But the high numbers can be very arrogant, like Whistle.”
“She didn’t seem arrogant.”
Heaving herself from the chair, Alice staggered from the kitchen, grabbed her skirts and flew upstairs. Rosie quickly slipped from the kitchen door, along the outside passage and into her mother’s spacious apartment.
Rummaging without leaving a trace proved hard work, and Rosie worried a little that her mother might simply use magic to discover who had been in her rooms. But since her mother’s magic was no better than hers, she felt a bit safer and kept looking. She was somewhat surprised to discover four large wooden chests under the large covered bed, which she had tidied herself that morning. But she had never looked beneath before. Now she pulled out the first chest. It was locked with both padlock and spell, and Rosie thought she had no chance of breaking in, but tried anyway. She’d heard spells like this before and knew just two simple answers.
She said, “I summon this lock to break with a plop, and whatever is spoken, let it be open. So – OPEN.” She’d been taught that as a child and did not expect good results. And yet, with the requested plop, the padlock fell open, and the chest’s heavy wooden lid swept upwards all on its own.
Rosie stared. It was stuffed full with a thousand papers or more, and she recognised some as having been Whistle’s. So her mother had not torn or burned the magic papers at all, she had smuggled them away and burned something entirely different to look as if she had. Rosie pushed the lid back down and pulled out the next chest.
This had two pad
locks, and Rosie spoke the same spell but without success.
“Bother,” she mumbled. “What was the other one I used to know? Oh yes, a bit too simple, but let’s try. Hubble, bubble, toil and trumble, kick the lock and make it crumble.”
She aimed and kicked. The chest flipped open its lid with a jerk, and Rosie stared inside with even more astonishment than she had with the previous one. This chest was gleamingly full to the brim with money, coins of every type from sovereigns and pennies to pounds and guineas. There was a ton of foreign coins with flashes of large silver tokens and big lumps of pure gold.
Gasping, finding it actually difficult to breathe, Rosie stared at this enormous and unexplained wealth. She supposed that the rent from twenty-one paying guests, with only two simple minded staff to pay out, would give her a reasonable savings chest. But this was more than seemed reasonable, even over two hundred years. Unless, of course, she had created some by magic, which meant they would fade away after a couple of days once removed from their companions.
With a gulp of utter fear, Rosie removed three coins, one pound each, and a solitary silver token. She couldn’t drop them into her apron pocket in case they jangled, so she wrapped them in her kerchief and stuffed the parcel in her garter at the top of her stocking. Very carefully she closed the chest and pushed it back into place. If the coins faded after a few days, then she had no problem. And surely, stealing from one’s mother wasn’t the same as stealing from someone else.
Pulling out the next chest, Rosie discovered the problem, since she did not know a third spell of openings. “Just please open,” she said, pleadingly and with both hands raised. To her absolute amazement, the chest slid open. It contained her mother’s clothes. Rosie grinned. Presumably there had been no spell binding it in the first place.
So to the last chest, but this one refused to open. Rosie tried to pick the lock with her pen knife. She begged, kicked, thumped and pushed. Nothing opened. She said her two spells again, several times in fact, pleaded and demanded, and managed nothing at all. Eventually, having few options left, she returned to the first chest, opened it once more, retrieved a handful of papers to stuff into her apron pocket, closed and locked everything, and hurried from the room. She had searched nothing else, which made her feel a little pathetic, but she had already been too long and feared her mother’s return. Besides, if she was going to hide anything, surely it would have been in one of those four chests. Whether a silver cup sat in the last chest, she could not know, but guessed it was.