Grammy Beadle let out a shriek. “Stop, witch! I come to take Little Firkin from ye!”
The young lady, about to say something to her companion, a slender woman as arresting in her dark handsomeness as the girl was in her vibrant prettiness, turned around and faced Grammy.
“I come to take Little Firkin from ye!” the old woman repeated, hobbling down the center of the street.
“Why bother?” the very young lady asked, the lightest trace of a Highlands accent in her voice. “I’ll just give it to you.”
The old woman’s lips compressed. “Oh, no, missy. I’ll not have it said the Witch of Beadletown come by her dark empire through the pity of a young ‘un.”
“That’s absurd.”
“That’s the way it be,” grumped Grammy Beadle.
The girl cast an imploring glance at her sable-haired companion. “Just a few minutes?”
“Oh, ballocks,” that lady muttered quite clearly. “But do try to hurry things up a bit, won’t you?” And, taking the girl’s parasol, she retreated to a bench outside the grocers.
“Ye canna hurry dark magik,” Grammy snapped, reaching into the tattered velvet bag hanging around her scrawny neck. With an evil cackle, she flung a fistful of something into the air—something that apparently had hard bits in it, because she yelped when the wind blew it back in her face. “Ouch!”
“What was that?” the young lady asked curiously.
“Magik! Magiks made with the feet of a white mouse born during the full moon.”
At this, the young lady’s hand flew up to cover her lips. “You chopped off a baby mouse’s feet?” she whispered from behind her fingertips.
Grammy squirmed. “Well, maybe the mouse was stillborn. And maybe it weren’t white, but it were very light gray. But no doubt, ’twere a full moon.”
“That’s disgusting,” the fashion plate said, setting her hands on her hips. “I am afraid I cannot allow someone who would chop off baby mice feet, even dead baby mice, to move into the neighborhood. You will have to go away.”
“No, ’tis you who will have to go!”
“I am afraid not.”
“I am afraid so—”
“Get on with it, will you?” someone shouted.
With a flourish Grammy whipped open her patched cloak and twirled around. “By the hair of Beelzebub’s chin, by the cloven foot of Bacchus, I expel thee, oh, witch!”
The young lady remained unexpelled, but stood by politely. Finally, Grammy threw her hands up in frustration. “What are ye doin’, you cluck? Spell me!”
“You’re done?” the girl asked. “I assumed there was more to it than that.”
Grammy’s little sunken face collapsed in on itself even more. “Of course there’s more. I was just giving you a chance to run away is all.”
Once more, she hefted her stick over her head. “By Moobkamizer’s black heart and Nimbleplast’s hor—”
“Who?” the young lady interrupted. “I’ve never heard of those two.”
Grammy’s arms sank and she grinned, revealing a dimple of such unexpected charm that it went far in explaining the hitherto unsolved mystery of why there existed so many Beadles. “That’s because they’re brand-new demons.”
“Really?” the young lady asked. “How frightfully interesting. Where did you find them?”
“Come to me in my dreams,” Grammy said proudly, and then with a sly glance at the townsfolk added, “As an incubus. And I gots more, too. By Shillyman’s wart and…and…Cobbiepouff’s whisker, I take what was yers and make it mine. Begone.” She spun around. “Begone!” She spun around again. “Begone!”
At the end of this last and most violent spin, Grammy pitched sideways, her hand outstretched and her eyes rolling. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said with a gasp.
The young lady grabbed the hag’s arm, steadying her. “Sit down.”
Gratefully, the old lady plopped down in the middle of the street, holding her side. “Yer turn,” she wheezed.
“Come, now. This can wait until you are feeling more the thing—”
“Yer turn!” Grammy insisted.
“Very well,” the young lady replied. She took a deep breath, lifted her hands, palms up to the sky, and pronounced in a loud, ringing voice, “Ipse dixit.”
Grammy froze like someone who’d taken a spitball shot to the bum. “What? Who’s that? What’s that?”
“Ipse dixit,” the girl repeated. She waved her hands in a circle. “Ipso facto. Ad hoc!”
Anxiously, Grammy patted herself down from head to foot. Upon discovering that everything was in the same place it had been that morning, she relaxed. “Yer magik seems to have left you, missy,” she said.
The young lady very discreetly glanced overhead. Grammy Beadle followed her gaze. Directly above them two dark shadows were making slow, lazy circles in the tranquil blue sky.
“So what?” Grammy said. “A pair of birds.”
Nonetheless, she scrambled up and surged forward on one foot, like a fencer executing a lunge, stabbing at the young lady with her bole. “By the Name of He Who Goes Unnamed and is Nameless, I take your power and your towwwwnnnnnn!”
The girl raised a slender finger to her mouth and nipped the edge of the nail off between her pearly teeth. Again, her glance rose to the sky. Grammy’s unwilling gaze followed.
The pair of ravens had been joined by a half dozen others describing slow pirouettes. A distinctly uneasy expression crossed Grammy’s face. As a witch, Grammy Beadle was extremely conversant with all things of the natural world, and the sudden appearance of a host of silent ravens…well, it wasn’t natural.
“Dark powers, unite! Heed me, Bacchus, Beelzebub, Moobkamizer, and Nimbleplast, Shillyman, and…and…” She trailed off as the young lady, examining the torn nail on her left hand, made a slight indication skyward with her right.
With a scowl, Grammy looked up.
Twenty ravens?
Furtively, she glanced around, gauging the Little Firkians’ reactions to the flock of malevolent death-harbingers. If they had seen the ravens, they apparently didn’t think much of them—except, that was, for the girl’s companion, who was leaning forward, frowning up at the sky. The rest of Little Firkin was watching Grammy, and their expressions were frankly disappointed. Even a little pitying. And pity, Grammy Beadle knew, was not a good foundation upon which to build a witchly empire. She’d better get rid of these heebie-jeebies and—
Caw!
The salutary sound sent her gaze overhead. A single raven was winging its way to join the other—Grammy’s mouth gaped—forty ravens. All silent. Silent as the tomb. Grammy’s skin crawled.
Maybe she didn’t need to take over the town. Leastways, not today.
Still, pride kept her rooted. She’d never live it down if word got out that a bunch of birds had driven her off. Which meant she needed to provide a good reason for turning tail and running. And what better reason than—
“Is that all?” Grammy shouted. “Is that the best you can do? Come on, lass. Give it yer best!”
The young lady’s face reflected a second of surprise before tightening. “No. That’s not all. Amo!” she said, taking a step forward.
Gratefully, Grammy commenced quaking.
“Amas!”
Another step. This time Grammy’s hand flew to her chest.
“Amat!”
Grammy staggered back as if impelled by some monstrous, unseen force. She whimpered for added effect.
The young lady, after a brief look of bewilderment, rubbed her palms briskly together as if preparing for some physical exertion and declared, “Per diem. Non sequitur.” Her hand rose toward Grammy Beadle, who was now fully engaged in cringing backward.
“E PLURIBUS UNUM!”
With a shriek, Grammy Beadle lifted up her skirts, displaying a pair of crooked shanks encircled by improbable red garters, turned tail and shot off down the street, disappearing into a side alley.
The young lady, af
ter a glance overhead at a sky now completely free of any shadows, ravenlike or otherwise, walked calmly over to her companion. The Little Firkians gave one another nods of approval and, without a single word to their champion and defender, went back to gossiping, eating, and drinking.
At the same time, a handsome and elegant young man let a curtain drop back down across the pub window through which he’d been watching.
“What an extraordinary creature. Whatever is she doing here?” the young gentleman asked, turning his bemused gaze to a man sitting tipped well back in the chair opposite him, a dark, broad-shouldered gentleman with sooty, overlong hair and piercing blue-green eyes currently riveted on the scene outside.
Before he could reply, the inn’s rotund barkeep arrived at their table bearing two tankards of ale. “That be Amelie Chase,” he said. “Our witch.”
Chapter 5
“What do you mean by calling that delightful young lady a witch, barkeep?” Lord Hayden Augustus Collier asked, his gaze following the pert swish of plaid skirts down the street.
“I’m just stating what’s fact,” retorted the rotund barkeeper, Donnie MacKee. He plunked down their ale and a dish of beef and turnips and moved off.
Thoughtfully, Hayden lifted his tankard to his lips. This trip to the Scottish wilderness looked like it might have more to it than the trout fishing he had anticipated. Here was a mystery, by God. A cure for the ennui plaguing him these last few months, an ennui born of London’s utter predictability: the same conversations, the same drawing rooms, the same music halls, the same women with the same goal to ensnare him in matrimony.
It wasn’t vanity that led Hayden to this supposition. He’d only to look into the mirror to see a handsome face. Add to good looks an expensive education and pretty manners, and couple these with a future barony and the fortune that accompanied it, and only a dolt would fail to appreciate his desirability as a husband.
He had accordingly quickly agreed when his uncle had suggested a trip to the wilds of Scotland, where the renovations on his brother-in-law’s hunting lodge had just been completed. Since his uncle’s brother-in-law was also Hayden’s father, and thus the lodge would one day be Hayden’s, his curiosity was stirred. The old lodge had been uninhabitable since a fire some fifteen years earlier, and Hayden’s memories of the place were vague. But the thing that made the trip irresistible was that it would be undertaken in the company of his uncle, Greyson Sheffield, a man one could never call boring. Exacting, intimidating, and unnerving, but never boring.
Indeed, Hayden considered it more flattering to be asked to join his maternal uncle on a fishing trip than to be chased around the London ballrooms by a flock of debutantes. At thirty-eight years of age, Grey Sheffield had developed a reputation for being notoriously picky about the company he kept.
Hayden glanced at Grey, balancing on the back two legs of his chair, his laced fingers cradling his head. The expression on his uncle’s bold, angular face belied the insouciant pose. Something outside held his attention. His eyes had narrowed in intense focus.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
“Grey?”
Grey shook his head slightly, his gaze never wavering from the view outside, staving off any questioning. Hayden knew better than to disturb him. He waited until the girl and her companion disappeared into the green grocer’s across the street.
“What the devil is a beauty like that doing here dressed like a Parisian mademoiselle?” Hayden murmured, assuming he was echoing his uncle’s thoughts. “And what the blazes did that fellow mean, calling her a witch?”
The intensity faded from Grey’s expression. He let the front of his chair fall to the floor with a thump, swung his feet down, and applied himself to his food. “Don’t be too harsh on the poor fellow, Hayden.”
Hayden scoffed at such advice, coming from a man who took pride in being called draconian.
“I’m completely earnest,” Grey said, stabbing a piece of beef. “The fellow is only speaking the truth. At least, such as he knows it. Who can do less?”
“You of all people don’t mean to tell me you think that charming girl is a witch?”
“Please.” Grey’s lip curled at the suggestion. “I hope you know me better than that.”
Hayden did, indeed. For fifteen years it had been Grey’s vocation as a special adjunct working for the Crown prosecutor to expose dealers in supernatural phenomenon. Spiritualists, mediums, fairies, demons, haunts and hauntings, table rappers and mind readers, levitators and, yes, witches—he exposed them all as frauds and brought forth the necessary evidence to see them prosecuted as swindlers.
There had never been an instance where he could not reveal the science or trickery behind the supposed magic. He hated his quarry as much as he pitied their victims, and he claimed to despise them both.
“But simply because I do not believe the chit is a witch,” Grey was saying, “doesn’t mean our host doesn’t. The poor bloke is a victim of his own desire to believe in something extraordinary, a curse caused by an excess of hope.
“No, Hayden, my lad. You can pity him,” Grey said, waving his fork instructively. “You mustn’t mock him.”
“I’ve never noticed you refraining from mockery,” Hayden said.
“That’s different,” Grey replied equitably, taking a swig of ale. “I am a lost cause. There is still hope that you shall grow a nicer view of your fellow man. At least, that is why I believe your father was willing to let you tag along. I am to provide a cautionary example of the wretched end to which a misanthropic worldview can lead.”
“I don’t need my father’s approval to accompany you. I am, after all, twenty-one years old,” Hayden said stiffly.
“Exactly,” Grey said with a broad grin. “A babe. So, in keeping with my charge of educating you, eat up whilst I explain the amazing and monumental idiocy that has brought us here.”
“I thought we were here to fish.”
Grey rolled his eyes. “You didn’t actually think I’d come all the way up here to dangle a string in front of some gaping piscatory lips, did you?”
“Fish don’t have lips.”
Grey sighed. “You have no romance in you, Hayden.”
“And you do?”
Something flickered in Grey’s gaze. It might have been amusement. Or regret.
“At one time.” He shrugged. “But to answer your question, we are here precisely because of that young lady, Amelie Chase, who is, in fact, the town’s witch.”
At Hayden’s look of astonishment, Grey laughed. “Though in all fairness, she belongs at least as much to your father, who is her legal guardian. At any rate, a few weeks ago your father received a letter from someone in this town stating, and I quote, ‘Come quick. Someone is trying to kill our witch.’”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Hayden asked, bewildered.
“About six or seven years ago, Colonel Hubert Chase, the owner of the hunting land adjoining your father’s here, moved to Little Firkin from London with his orphaned daughter, Amelie. He did so after unusual occurrences began happening in the girl’s presence, occurrences for which society, being the credulous, dull-witted dolts they are, had, unsurprisingly, no explanation and therefore, as is the way of credulous, dull-witted dolts, seized on the most improbable explanation they could come up with: that the girl was possessed.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Hayden declared. “What sort of occurrences?”
Grey took a deep draft of ale before answering. “The usual claptrap. Things moving about, flying off walls and tables. Plus, there were the feelings of unease and otherworldliness that are ubiquitous amongst believers. I wonder how many bowel rumbles have been attributed to the supernatural rather than indigestion.”
“Was the girl responsible?”
“Someone was. But whether she purposely contrived these things as a childish prank or to attract attention—she was, after all, only about eleven—she hardly deserved to be labeled a witch.”
&
nbsp; “I find it hard to believe anyone could take such a thing seriously. This isn’t the Dark Ages.”
“All ages are dark, Hayden,” Grey said gently, before continuing. “Unpleasant as society made it for the girl, it wasn’t until a group of religious zealots began making threatening noises that Colonel Chase, reportedly himself a superstitious crackpot and having recently been diagnosed with a terminal disease, decided action was called for.”
“Zealots?” Hayden breathed, his sympathies completely engaged. The poor girl.
“A pedantic little lot of posers who affected monks’ garb. More like a masquerade party than a religion, actually, and mostly harmless. Mostly.” Grey’s expression briefly hardened.
“What did this Colonel Chase do?”
“He built a house just outside of town here, his old hunting lodge being antiquated and drafty, and hired a woman to act as governess and companion.” Here, Grey’s gaze moved back to the street outside. “He then installed the woman and his daughter here to keep Amelie out of harm’s—” He abruptly stopped and leaned toward the window, staring outside.
Hayden looked to see what had arrested him. The girl and her friend had exited the grocer’s and were moving slowly along the plank sidewalk.
“Is there more?” Hayden asked, eyes on the girl.
“Oh, yes. Much more even than I suspected,” Grey replied softly before turning to regard him. “Don’t stare.”
Hayden bit back his protest that that had been precisely what Grey had been doing, knowing he’d never get the full story if he engaged in an argument with his uncle. The man loved to argue.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Please continue.”
“Colonel Chase then drew up a will, naming your father, the only friend from his pre-India days with whom he’d remained in contact, the girl’s legal guardian should he die before she reached her majority. Shortly thereafter, he died.”
“But?” Hayden prompted, reading his uncle’s expression.
“But unofficially, Little Firkin is Miss Chase’s guardian. At least physically.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
So Enchanting Page 4
