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

by Sarff, Julie

  I am just finishing unpacking my own bag when Claire-Elaine calls us down to the red room to show us the marks on her daughter’s back. All four of us gasp when she lifts her tiny daughter’s white cotton blouse. The marks are light but clearly visible. Someone or something has scratched the poor girl.

  “How evil!” Hatha exhales.

  “Indubitably,” Camille agrees.

  “Time for that ghost to go,” Hendra insists, feisty as ever.

  “Ladies, first things first. What kind of a host would I be if I didn’t serve you some dinner before you get started?” Claire-Elaine asks.

  I smile ruefully at this. The idea of ghost hunting has stolen my appetite. Hendra however, looks delighted, so we follow Claire-Elaine down the hall where she slides a pocket door open to reveal a room with dozens of windows and a long mahogany dining table running down its center. This room is so much saner than the red room. Here the walls are painted a calming green color. I take a seat next to Camille as Claire-Elaine serves a simple dinner consisting of a creamy leek soup, a cheese course, and pears from Anjou.

  After dinner, the Count goes upstairs to ready his children for bed. Since the incident with the fingernails, we are informed that the girls no longer sleep alone. At the insistence of their mother, cots have been installed in their parents’ suite.

  “That sounds very sensible. Until we rid you of the ghost, it’s best if your family stays together at night,” Hatha concurs.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to make her leave us alone?” Claire-Elaine asks with a twinkle of hope in her eyes.

  Hatha nods, “I do,” while I marvel at her optimism. Ever since we moved into Chateau Morcelle, we’ve been telling Francine and Lizelle to move into the light. Hatha has tried reasoning with them several times, but they say that now that we’ve come to live with them, they’re having too much fun to move into the beyond. It seems to me that if we can’t convince reasonable ghosts like Francine and Lizelle to move on, what chances do we have with this totally irate spirit who is raking its fingernails down the backs of innocent children?

  Of course, with Lizelle and Francine we didn’t try the Gathering like we’ll do tonight at the Witching Hour.

  “I’ve done some research on your ghost,” Hatha reports, as we retire to the horrible red room after dinner. “I believe your ghost is Lady Charlotte du Mont. She was married to a count in the 11th century. I found this information by contacting a Catholic priest in Paris who is a genealogy expert. He was more than happy to help one of his own.” She says this with a straight face. I shoot Hendra a penetrating look. What does she mean by “happy to help one of his own?” We are witches, not Catholics. Although these days, Hatha seems to be some mixture of the two.

  “It took the priest, Father Antoine Beaufort, about a day to get back to me. He said that a fellow priest living in the 14th century wrote about the haunting. They have some kind of fancy machine where Beaufort works, a cat scan I believe, and they’ve entered many priest’s and monk’s diary entries into their computer. I don’t really understand it all, but he was able to access some entries in a database pertaining to your ghost.”

  Here Hatha breaks off and looks at me to see if she’s got her facts correct. Hatha doesn’t do computers, and she has a tenuous grasp on the concept of a database.

  “No, not a cat scan,” I tell her.

  “An MRI!” shouts Hendra.

  “No, not an MRI. The priest’s diary entries were scanned into the computer and stored in a database. You both are getting your terminology messed up with medical equipment.”

  “It’s because you forced us to watch that idiot show about Dr. Mc Dreamy,” Hendra flails her arms in disgust.

  “Anyway,” Hatha continues, smiling at Claire-Elaine, “It turns out that we know who your ghost is, or at least we think we do. Her name is Charlotte and there were reports of her haunting this house as early as the 14th century, some one-hundred years after her death. Apparently, Lady Charlotte had a very hard life.”

  Claire-Elaine sinks into a chair, turning a ghastly white, looking like a woman who is being haunted to death.

  “Lady Charlotte,” Hatha continues, “was forced into an unhappy marriage with a much younger man –Charles du Mont, the Count of Trisse at that time. He openly cheated on her with a younger woman and then, after only three years of marriage, he poisoned her so that he could marry the younger woman.”

  Sitting in her scarlet-upholstered wing chair, Claire-Elaine makes a slight, moaning noise. “So her initials were perhaps C. L. D.?”

  “I don’t know her middle name, but they could have been, why?”

  “On the windowsill outside the only bedroom at the top of the 11th century turret, there are initials C. L. D. etched into the stone.”

  We witches exchange looks.

  “But,” Claire-Elaine says, coming half way out of her chair, “the initials are etched facing the wrong way, as if someone on the outside was writing them, which would be impossible given the height of that tower. Those initials have been here as long as my husband can remember, but we never knew how or why. In the 14th century that turret was all that there was to Chateau Trisse, so that bedroom would have been the main bedroom at the time.”

  “Sounds like the poor ole’ thing wanted back in after she got chucked out,” Camille gives a small laugh accompanied by a smile so warm, it would cheer up anyone except a mother who’s fretting about a ghost harming her daughters.

  Claire-Elaine sinks back into her chair and stares down at her hands, which are shaking.

  “There now,” Camille mutters, rising from the couch. We witches understand the healing power of touch, so Camille walks around to the back of Claire-Elaine’s chair and puts a hand on her bony shoulder.

  “She needs a cup of tea, Elfie,” Camille addresses me a moment later.

  “Oh…right…I’ll just pop into the kitchen and make some.”

  “No, you mustn’t bother,” Clare-Elaine insists, “The cook’s gone for the evening and I really can’t ask my guests to make tea.”

  “Nonsense,” Hatha says. “All Elfie needs is a kettle. I brought my own special tea, it will help steady your nerves.”

  Claire-Elaine protests feebly, but in the end, she informs me of the kettle’s whereabouts.

  “In the cabinet to the left of the stove,” she mumbles.

  “Good enough, I’m sure I’ll find it.”

  Before I rise from the sofa and head for the kitchen, Hatha leans in and whispers to me. “Brew the tea with the mixture in my black tin. It’s a mixture for courage and strength. And add two drops of the liquid in my silver flask to Clair-Elaine’s cup along with a healthy dose of sugar.”

  I know better than to ask Hatha what’s in the silver flask. If Hatha believes a person needs a certain potion or remedy, then Hatha is always right. I make my way down a stone hallway hung with cheerful, modern portraits of the Count and his family. Reentering the kitchen, I examine its layout with the eye of a renovator. The room is gorgeous. Here everything is modern and well-appointed, with white granite countertops gleaming over sleek cabinets. I make my way to the range, grab the kettle from the cabinet, fill it with water, place it on the stove to boil and proceed to rummage about through all of Hatha’s stuff, searching for the black tin. Outside, the sun has set and a fine, misty rain begins to fall.

  I am just pouring the tea into a yellow-chintz tea cup and adding two drops of liquid from Hatha’s silver flask when the kitchen light flickers. Everyone knows what a flickering light means. Well, at our chateau, it means faulty wiring on behalf of yours truly, but everywhere else, it means ghosts.

  Hastily, I begin to arrange several more cups on a silver serving tray. Sugar? Where is the sugar? I begin searching thoroughly through the cupboards with great celerity.

  In the span of ten seconds, the kitchen turns from warm to slightly cold, to downright frigid. Dropping temperatures are, of course, another sign of a ghost. I am now flying through the dra
wers of a large wooden hutch, searching for the sugar bin when I hear the clanking of pots above the stove.

  I turn around and a tingle runs down my spine.

  Hatha says that she read in Deterring the Demonic that the presence of a witch can antagonize certain ghosts. For some reason, knowing that we can sense them makes them, in her words, mad as spitfire.

  “Quærite lux,” I shout in the language of the Roman invaders.

  In response to my words, the rustling of the pans grows louder.

  “Sod the sugar! Sod the tea!” I shout, preparing to race across the kitchen to the door on the other side with tea tray in hand. That’s when I see it. A shadow appears in a tiny corner of the kitchen, faint at first, it grows and stretches spreading greedily across the ceiling.

  I drop the tray, stand up and run for it, making it to the door on the other side in nothing flat. Yet five minutes later, I find myself returning down the hallway towards the kitchen with Hatha fearlessly in the lead. Hendra’s right behind her and a twittering Camille is holding my hand, telling me it’ll be all right.

  “Chin up, that’s the ticket,” she cheers me on. “We’ll put Charlotte on the right path. Send the ole girl into the light. It’ll be alright.”

  Hatha swings open the kitchen door bold as you please. She’s ready for whatever the ghost may have in store. But the kitchen looks perfectly normal, no clanking pots, no creepy shadow and no freezing cold temperatures.

  “But, I don’t understand. It…the presence, the ghost, whatever you want to call it…it was here. The shadow was spreading over the ceiling.” I try to illustrate this with sweeping gestures of my hands.

  Hatha says nothing, instead she gathers up the tea tray while Camille and Hendra search for the sugar. Together we make our way back to the red room where an exhausted Claire-Elaine asks us if everything is okay.

  “My dear,” Hatha replies, “there are two things I know quite extensively: how to bring a child into this world and how to deal with the occasional spook. Don’t you worry about it. Make sure to drink your tea, there you go.”

  I figure this last part about “how to deal with the occasional spook” is a bit of an embellishment on Hatha’s part. It’s true she’s helped dozens of woman give birth, but as for ghosts, we really only know Francine and Lizelle. There were bad things in the Forest Fosse but they were generally magical creatures, or agents of the Dark Queen. I only recall the occasional passing ghost back in our old world of 546 A.D., and I personally never confronted one before Lizelle and Francine. Noelle, however, has met more than her fair share of spirits. Once, she ran into an entire dead contingent of Anglian soldiers. Sounds hideous, but Noelle said they were all extremely polite and bowed and doffed their hats as they marched silently past her in the forest.

  Given Hatha’s encouraging words, Claire-Elaine takes a small sip of her tea. A moment later the finely dressed woman slumps motionless in her seat. Prepared for this reaction, Hatha pulls the cup out of her hands and rests it on the silver tray.

  “She needs her rest,” Hatha says succinctly and now I know exactly what was in the silver flask –the strongest sleeping potion the world has ever seen.

  So much for not giving potions to the locals. Hatha appears to have broken her own rule.

  Chapter 10 (Noelle)

  Late Saturday evening, I, Noelle, hurry down to the chocolate shop to check on Beatrice, who generously took over in the afternoon as I ran errands at the large market in Tours. I had to go by train, since the other ladies have the Volkswagen, and I had a difficult time managing all my sacks of cocoa beans until I shoved them into a taxi at the Amboise station. When I finally got them home, I tucked them in the chateau’s dark cellar to keep them fresh.

  “No sign of him?” I ask as I come through the door of Le Denouement at half past eight to find Beatrice sweeping the floor.

  “Your ghost?” Beatrice replies calmly. “He was here, Noelle. Scared the daylights out of me. He’s a pale, skinny thing. Looks like he might have been a heroin addict in life.”

  I wonder how she can determine all that from viewing a translucent being for the five seconds she said he materialized.

  “They all look pale,” I reply.

  “Him even more so,” Beatrice insists. “Maybe he materialized a little better for me than he did for you. He had a pentagram tattoo on his ankle, did you know?”

  “A pentagram?”

  “Yes, you know, like they have for the Knights of the Round Table, only his was inverted.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I do say. By the way, I made up a batch of Elfie’s Chocolate Surprises…sold gobs… people kept coming back, saying they had the munchies.”

  Oh by the thumbs of Uther, no! When I ask her how much cannabis she added to her Chocolate Surprises, I find out that she has almost doubled the miniscule amount Elfie uses.

  “They like it with a bit more weed than Elfie put it. For all her wild ways, she’s overly judicious. Nobody will get any medicinal benefits with such a small amount added into their chocolates.”

  “Beatrice,” I say quite seriously, “You do understand it is a banned substance here in France. You understand that the French don’t believe it has any medicinal benefits? Please tell me you only sold them to those over 18.”

  “Of course,” Beatrice looks very serious. She always looks serious behind the thick-lensed glasses Merllyd made for her. “I only sold them to a handful of adults, who then came back an hour later and bought us out.”

  I am about to reiterate Hatha’s stance on putting marijuana in chocolates in the modern world, and how adamant she is against it, when Sheila pops through the door. “Good evening,” she greets.

  “Thought you were home supervising the electrician,” I say, startled to see her so soon after leaving her at the chateau.

  “I was and he’s finished for the day. He didn’t get much done, but he told me the first floor is as good as it will ever be. Second floor is still not working; we’ll have to keep using our candles. Anyway, tomorrow I intend to start tiling, like Elfie taught me. Going to use that fancy saw she has, if I can figure out how to turn it on.” She smiles wide and a wisp of hair escapes her wimple.

  “But what are you doing here?” I ask as Sheila tucks the auburn lock back in.

  “Well, since there’s nobody up at the house tonight –except Francine and Liselle who are still refusing to talk to any of us witches– I thought I’d come down and help you both close down the store. Thought maybe we could all go out to dinner, it’s a Saturday night.” Her eyes travel to the back room, “I see everything’s done, all washed up and ready when you reopen on Monday.”

  “Yes, it’s all ready,” Beatrice answers cheerfully. “Spic and span, neat as you can,” she adds, which is a saying we witches like to repeat. She reaches for the strings of her owl-print apron and unties them.

  “Isn’t Manon here?” Sheila asks.

  “Why would she be?” I question. “She’s probably closing up her store.”

  “That’s strange, I saw her not that long ago, she was walking towards the house. But a young man came running up the drive calling her name. Don’t know how she knew him, but they went walking into the woods together.”

  “Manon, sweet innocent little Manon went walking in the woods with a man?” I ask.

  “No.” Sheila’s tone is serious. “He wasn’t a man. The boy looked way too young for her. It wasn’t that kind of a relationship. The boy came out of the woods a little bit later but Manon did not, so I thought she might have ended up here.”

  “That does sound intriguing,” Beatrice murmurs while I wonder: should I be worried about our missing sister witch? Should we go search the woods for her?

  I suggest that we do just that thing, when I see Elise from the hardware store slinking down the street. She’s wearing a hoodie pulled tight around her and looking a little shifty. I watch her glance up and down the Quai des Marais. Apparently satisfied that nobody’s watching
her, she crosses to the other side of the street and heads in the direction of the river. A moment later she crosses the bridge heading for the woods.

  “I think the two of you should go and search for Manon,” I assert.

  “Really? There’s nothing wrong with walking through the woods by oneself. We all used to do it back in the Feral Forest. Maybe she’s just missing the whispering of the trees. I know I miss it sometimes,” Sheila says, but even she doesn’t seem to convince herself with this argument. Her voice trails off and she furrows her brow.

  “You have to go and look for her, just to be sure,” I insist. “And right now, I have to do something. I’m heading to the river, to the woods on the other side. If I’m not back by the time you find Manon, come looking for me.” Quickly, I toss the keys to the store to Beatrice who has her mouth open, ready to ask me a million questions. I’m sure she wonders why I suddenly feel compelled to head to the river at such a late hour. I don’t give her the chance to ask anything; instead I slip away, hurrying after Elise.

  I walk with quick steps. The heels of my shoes make a clippity-clop sort of sound as I head down the sidewalk. Why am I doing this, following a girl I barely know? Inside, I know why; my witch’s intuition tells me that Elise is somehow involved in the murder of poor Hugo, and if I want my shop to return to normal, I need to find out exactly what she’s up to.

  Chapter 11 (Elfie)

  “If we are going to face this force of nature head on,” Hatha huffs, after the four of us carry the catatonic Claire-Elaine back to her room, “We must do it at the hour when we are the strongest. So, I suggest we all turn in for a couple hours of sleep. We’ll regroup at midnight down in the kitchen. Since Elfie has already experienced paranormal activity in that room earlier this evening, we might just be better off in the kitchen than in the basement anyway.”