The Witching Hour (The Witches Pendragon Mystery Series Book 1)

by Sarff, Julie

  The Witching Hour

  Julie Sarff

  Version C

  Copyright 2015

  This book is dedicated to my husband; thanks for putting up with all my witchy ways.

  License Agreement

  DEAR EBOOK READER, we sincerely hope you enjoy this book. This book is licensed for your enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not buy it, please return it to the online distributor from whom it was originally purchased. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Please note all characters are works of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1 (Noelle)

  It doesn’t matter how many times I hear a ghost wailing “murder,” it always grabs my attention. Tonight, it happens as I am closing up the chocolate shop. As usual, I am bagging up the last of the unsold chocolates to take back to Chateau Morchelle. I’ve already scrubbed the front display case and Hatha was dear enough to finish up with the big iron cauldron in the back before heading home. Being in the food business, it’s essential to leave the shop spic-and-span and ready for a new day.

  “Muur-deer,” the voice wails again. I glance around, but the ghost is nowhere to be seen.

  “Hmmph, if you need help, you’d better darn well materialize or I’m leaving,” I state plainly. When nothing happens, I reach up to turn out the lights. The ghost must know I mean business because, as I am pulling my keys out of my purse to lock up, it appears. Its pale outline glimmer in the moonlight that streams through the store front windows.

  “Beautiful, a harvest moon,” I murmur turning to stare at the big orange globe that hangs over Chateau d’Amboise.

  “Muur-deer,” the ghost wails again, demanding my attention.

  Drawing from all my years of training as a witch, I decide to address it thusly, “You are trespassing on private property. You are also dead, and should seek out the light and move on.”

  The ghost moves towards me, hovering somewhere in the vicinity of the store shelves with only the outline of its torso and head visible.

  “The dead cannot trespass…” it wails, and for a second, its face materializes so that I can see it clearly. It’s a young man, perhaps a teenager, with sandy-colored hair, a Gallic nose and haunted blue eyes.

  “They can and you are. You need to leave.” With that, I grab my bag of chocolates and head home.

  *****

  Chateau Morcelle is a chateau in name only. It sits on an overgrown lawn surrounded by a wicked-looking forest. Historical records indicate it has been decomposing on this spot for the last four hundred years. But we witches are happy to have it. Dark and decrepit as it is, this chateau has become our refuge in modern times.

  “I don’t know why they come to us,” Hatha laments as we gather to eat dinner in the chateau’s enormous salon, “As if we don’t have our own problems.”

  “That’s not very nice,” Francine replies. “They deserve sympathy.”

  “What is on the slate for dinner tonight?” Hendra enthuses, clapping her hands together.

  “For starters, mulligan stew,” answers Beatrice, emerging from the kitchen carrying a blue-chintz tureen, “of the thickest, lumpiest kind, and in a truly terrifying shade of green.”

  Indeed, the stew is the most virulent green I’ve ever seen. The very sight of it puts everyone in a good mood, except for Hatha who continues to contemplate my ghost.

  “I expect he wants something,” she says, turning her beautiful face to mine. Hatha is much older than me, but there’s a certain light that always shines from her face. I think this is due to her fabulous night cream, which she has been making ever since we lived in the Fine Feral Forest of Fosse. Her night cream is also the reason she doesn’t have a single wrinkle.

  “I think you’re right. He looked an awful lot like that chap they say went missing a week or two ago. That vagabond whose picture is all over Amboise,” I respond. This evokes silence at the table; it’s terrible to think that the teenager who went missing might be dead and is now haunting my chocolate shop.

  “Why do they always come to us?” Camille asks from across the table. Everything about her is extra-large. It’s just the way she’s built. With an enormous hand, she reaches across the table and grabs the pepper shaker.

  “They come to us because we can see them,” Beatrice replies, ladling soup into her own bowl before taking a chair at the table.

  “Again, I think you’re all being quite rude,” Francine interjects, nodding her head of golden locks. Beside her, Lizelle, her twin, states her staunch agreement.

  “It’s an amazing thing that people of the modern era cannot see ghosts, and we, who have been transplanted here, through no fault of our own from 546 A.D., can see everything that is going on,” Camille laughs. Camille always sees the bright side of things; she is the witch you want around if you’re feeling down. I’ve never really known her to be in bad spirits, unless you talk to her about her mother. Her mother is the very high and mighty Countess of Jarrow; a woman who has a sharp tongue and exacting standards. She was not keen on having Camille sneak off to join our coven of witches. In fact, I think it’s safe to say she was most angered by the idea. In a fit of rage, the Countess actually tracked her daughter down, with 15 knights in tow and came careening into our camp at night, pulling Camille out of bed by the ear. I remember that night well, because back in the Fine Feral Forest of Fosse, Camille and I shared a hut. Luckily, Hatha saved the day. She stared down the Countess and in the end, the enraged woman and her knights retreated.

  I wonder what Camille’s mother thinks now, all tucked up in her cold, stone castle 1600 years away. Surely she’s heard about the disappearance of all the witches from the Fine Feral Forest. Surely all of Anglia knows that the magnificent wizard Merllyd accidentally sent sixty of us through a portal into the future. Thank heavens nine of us were lucky enough to end up together.

  This thought, that at least we have each other, makes me smile at all the souls who sit around the dinner table with me tonight.

  “Please pass the stew,” Manon whispers, and I reach for the tureen as we sit elbow to elbow at our rickety table. We witches love tradition –safe to say, we thrive on it– and so we sit in the same seat every night. Since Hatha is the most important witch in the coven, she sits at the head of the table. Next in order of importance is Monique, who sits at the other end of the table, falling asleep in her chair half the time. Monique is the oldest witch here, having retired from witchdom in 533 A.D.

  Like Camille, Monique is great fun. Life’s one big adventure for her, and so it isn’t any wonder that she was downright delighted when we were thrust through a portal into the future. When the spinning and twisting that accompanied being sucked through time stopped, and we were dumped unceremoniously onto the forest floor outside of Amboise, Monique sat up and clapped her hands.

  “Best ride ever,” she declared and then recited all ten books of Plato’s Republic as we traipsed from place to place, looking for a spot to lay our heads. To her credit, Monique’s never spent a moment worrying about how we’re going to return to Anglia. She’s quite content to be where she is, thank you very much.

  After Hatha and Monique, Hendra is third in the hierarchical structure of our coven. She is the practical, down-to-earth counterpart to Monique’s starry-eyed dreamer. An extremely plump witch, Hendra is slightly older than Hatha, but not quite the ripe old age o
f the witch who sits at the end of the table.

  The rest of us witches at this table are younger –Elfie, Camille, Beatrice, Sheila, Manon and I are in our mid-twenties. Rounding out our dinner table and adding to our numbers are Francine and Lizelle, who gossip madly as we eat. They are neither witches nor Anglian, but this crumbling chateau belongs to them, so we consider ourselves fortunate to have met them on that first night in Amboise.

  “And here is a beet root salad,” sings Beatrice merrily, having retrieved a large tray from the kitchen.

  “We shouldn’t get messed up in this ghost business. We need to keep our eye on the prize,” Hatha reminds everyone, returning the subject of the ghost in my shop. Using gold-plated tongs, she places a small amount of yellow beets on her plate. Afterwards she nods her gratitude to Beatrice who brings the salad around in my direction.

  Hatha is right, I think, as I add some of the beets to my own plate. We must keep our eye on the prize. And the prize, as Hatha calls it, is home. The nine of us long to return to our world of 546 A.D., but we never know when that might happen. We’ve been trapped in Amboise for 16 months now. At least when the beleaguered Merllyd accidentally sent us 1600 years into the future, Hatha had been fortunate enough to have 27 golden coins with the Emperor Justinian’s head stamped on them in the pocket of her long robes. They turned out to be worth a mint, and we’ve been selling them one by one to raise the money to restore the chateau.

  Granted, we haven’t done much to date; when we arrived none of us knew the first thing about restoration. Surprisingly, it is the glamorous Elfie who has undertaken this massive job. In addition to helping me at my chocolates shop, Le Denouement, Elfie has become quite the renovation expert. She has the rest of us tiling bathrooms, scraping paint, repairing windows, wiring electricity, and plumbing bathrooms. It’s an uphill battle, and many things in the chateau still don’t work. Case in point: right now the huge chandelier over the dining room table sputters on and off as if following some sort of disco beat.

  “Yes,” Hatha repeats as Beatrice retakes her seat. “We must keep our eyes on the prize.”

  Poor Hatha, she’s in such denial. What if Merllyd never opens the portal and return us home? The others from my coven, at least to some small extent, have accepted this fact. Take, for instance, Manon. She was the first of us to adopt a modern French name and she recently opened up a children’s clothing shop.

  I turn and smile at her as she chews on a breadstick. In my mind, even though Manon looks very mild and meek with her ash blond hair cut in a short, unflattering bob, she has streaks of unbridled bravery. She was brave enough to climb into one of those great flying tubes and be hurtled along to another continent, the existence of which we had never even heard of back in our day. Once in America, she learned all about how to run a children’s store, which is what three other members of our coven do. Manon found them on a thing called Facebook. She typed in their first names and used the name of our forest –Fosse– as the surname, and just like that, up popped their profiles on the computer at the Amboise library.

  Elfie, who currently sits across from me downing a second helping of beets, is also brave. She accompanied Manon to America and she learned about something which has caused a bit of division in Chateau Morcelle. Elfie learned about modern strains of cannabis, which are quite legal in Aspen, Colorado. When she packed up a few plants in her suitcase and brought them back to Amboise, it sparked grand outrage. Suffice it to say, Hatha and Hendra were not pleased.

  “More wine?” Beatrice asks, coming out of the kitchen with a crystal decanter of Burgundy.

  Seven arms raise their glasses in reply.

  “Come now,” replies Monique, suddenly roaring back to life as Beatrice pours a healthy dose of the red liquid into her goblet. “If the dead man needs our help, who are we to say no?”

  “Here, here,” says Francine in utmost agreement.

  “Who made us the modern paranormal police?” Hendra complains, jabbing at the lumpy bits of stew with her fork. She is on her third bowl tonight, and I know she will have at least two more. Sometimes I feel as if I can see her expanding day by day. It’s not her fault, she came from extreme poverty, and so she learned to eat whatever is placed before her.

  “As if isn’t enough that we now have some vagabond haunting the chocolate shop, the Count of Trisse stopped by today to ask if we could investigate paranormal activity at his chateau. I wasn’t going to bring it up until I had a chance to talk to you privately, Hatha, but well, there it is,” Hendra says and makes a loud crunching noise as she chews.

  “Once again, I must say, I really don’t know why they come to us,” Camille says with a smile.

  “They come to us because half of us go around masquerading as modern day nuns,” Manon complains. “We shouldn’t be doing that. It’s not right. And since the townsfolk think we are nuns, they believe we can help them with their otherworldly problems.”

  “I will not change the way I dress,” Hendra insists, slamming a large fist onto the table and rattling the dishes. “I’ve been wearing a long black robe for as long as I remember. You younger witches have already made me give up my pointed hat. It’s not my fault that when I walk down the street people see me in my robe and my wimple and assume I’m a nun. It seemed easier and more sensible to play the part, rather than inform everyone that I’m a witch. Modern folk are afraid of witches. They think we have something to do with the devil.”

  “I don’t care what anyone calls me…witch…nun…whatever… I’ll never give up my hat,” insists Monique, who has the tallest, pointiest chapeau on her head. It’s so tall that it reaches all way up to the iron chandelier. Whenever Monique gets excited and moves around, her hat sends the chandelier sailing back and forth, which is what it’s doing right now. It’s sailing back and forth and blinking on and off so rapidly that one second I can see everyone’s smiling faces and the next I can’t see my hand in front of my face.

  This whole conversation about “I’ll never give up my robe” and “I’ll never give up my hat” makes me uneasy. While some of my sisters in witchcraft chose to keep the long black garments we wore in the Forest Fosse, I have adopted modern dress and modern lifestyle. For a long time after we arrived, I wore my black robe, but I found I got quite hot working with the chocolate every morning. The conching, the tempering, the cooking up chocolate in a large cauldron –it’s very sweaty work. So one day, I went into a store and came out with a lovely dress with butterflies printed all over. It was three-quarter length and quite modest, or so I thought. Yet when I returned to Chateau Morcelle, Hendra stared at me like I was a streetwalker, and Hatha said, “My, isn’t that an interesting thing to wear.” Only Monique seemed enthusiastic that I had embraced nature “by sheathing myself in a robe covered with insects.”

  “It’s not a robe, it’s a dress. And they’re not insects, they’re butterflies.”

  “How strange that nature does not knock and yet never does intrude,” Monique said, quoting some famous poet.

  “Hush with your nonsense! Can’t you see? Nothing is covering her ankles?” Hendra stared at my calves as if they were pornographic.

  “That’s Emily Dickinson, my dear, she doesn’t write ‘nonsense.’ You really should avail yourself of the books at the town library…”

  In the end I left them bickering and went on to show the younger witches my new dress. That day changed everything. Seeing me in a modern outfit, Elfie, Manon, and Camille gave up their long robes and went shopping as well. And it wasn’t just the clothes we changed –like Manon, we also changed our names.

  So now we are a coven divided. There are those of us who still wear the long robes –Hatha, Hendra, Monique, Beatrice, and Sheila all walk around town pretending to be nuns. And then there are those of us who have chopped off our long locks and pass around copies of Vogue after the more traditional witches go to bed.

  “…and since the townsfolk of Amboise just assumed that a bunch of women wearing long black r
obes must be nuns, I just ran with it. Never mind that we are pagans to the core,” Hendra continues as Beatrice carries in tonight’s entree.

  “Was it really necessary that you put up that sign saying ‘The Sisters of Perpetual Patience’ on the front gate?” Elfie asks.

  Hendra snorts. “Well, we had to have a name for our order, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, but it’s a stupid name, and the sign is written in blood red. It looks like something out of a horror movie.”

  “Hmm, what say you, Hatha? Do you like my sign or what?” Hendra asks with a raised brow.

  All eyes swivel to look at our head witch, who has never weighed in on Hendra’s sign. Truth is, I think Hatha might be in the middle of converting to the new religion. She has recently taken to wearing a small silver cross on a chain around her neck.

  “I see no harm in these pretenses. And I guess since the local priest is refusing to do exorcisms, people with paranormal problems have come to us nuns…um…er…witches. You all are correct about Noelle’s ghost. Perhaps I am being short-sighted. Perhaps we should help people with paranormal problems while we’re here in modern day France.” She looks at each of us in turn and lets out a small smile.

  “Come now, it’s true,” she continues, “we do know a few tricks. We’ve met plenty of ghosts in our day, and I suppose if we can help them to the beyond where they can find rest, it is our duty. But we must remember that we’re here temporarily. It could be any moment now that Merllyd opens the portal and we head home.”

  “Then I should help the vagabond?” I ask.

  “Yes, I suppose. See what he wants,” Hatha replies.

  “I’m pretty sure I know what he wants.”

  “Ah yes, it is always the same,” Monique says, coming to life as Beatrice brings out a large chocolate cake for dessert.

  “Dollars to donuts,” I say using an expression Elfie taught me after her trip to America, “The ghost wants us to find his murderer.”