by Ashly Graham
The wide floorboards like the banister rail outside were shiny, not from polishing but the traffic of feet; and there were several balding rugs, rucked up and dotted with holes caused by the trodden cigarette butts of careless smokers.
Every surface was covered with bric-à-brac, and teetering piles of journals and magazines, and newspapers that were yellowed with age as if one had never quite got around to reading them.
In the middle of the room was an open spiral, rather than helical—in that it was wider at the base and tapered upwards—wrought iron staircase, which Jenny guessed must lead up into one of the turrets. Also of particular note was what appeared to be a sawn-off lamppost set in a weighted base, from one ladder arm at the top of which depended an empty birdcage big enough to house an eagle. The other arm, judging from the copious black and white deposits on the floor beneath, which was inadequately covered with newspaper, served as the creature’s day perch.
Inside the cage were hanging a shoulder of ham with a few shreds of dessicated meat left on it, a stick of red liquorice, and an enormous cuttlefish bone. Secured by pieces of twisted wire to the top were a hand-mirror, and a bell-ball the size of an orange. The only evidence of the absent occupant was a very large feather, with which, if it were bound with a few more of the same on a handle, one could have swept the floor. Although the cage door was open, the bars were in one place bent apart as if an escape had been attempted.
Restraining herself from darting about as each novelty caught her attention was proving very difficult, so Jenny went back to the door and started in an anti-clockwise direction around the perimeter of the room, with the intention of circling inwards until she reached the centre...then a thought struck her and she halted.
‘Widdershins!’, she said aloud, recalling that in nearby Scotland going round anything “widdershins”, or in the opposite direction to the sun, especially a church, was asking for trouble.
‘Well, it’s not a church, is it?’, she said, peevishly; ‘it’s my house and I’ll go around it any way I please.’ As she spoke she was conscious of the bravado behind the words.
Continuing as she had begun, because she wanted to deal with them first, she came to several armoires. The upper sections were shelves filled with the sort of very large glass jars found in old confectioners’ shops; except that, instead of sweets, they contained odd-looking biological specimens and organs in formaldehyde, none of them immediately identifiable.
From waist-level down were rows of brass-handled drawers, graded in size from very small at the top to full width at the bottom. A number of them were open, revealing a “gallimaufray or hodgepodge”, to use the description from the dedicatory epistle to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, of clear envelopes of variously tinted powders; boxes of loose bones and teeth; scalpels, forceps, pliers, tweezers, needles, tubes, droppers, probes, and pins; and piles of what Jenny supposed to be a taxidermist’s collection of animal skins and bird capes. Some were stiff from curing with boracic powder; but spilling from the lowest drawers were a number of soft pelts with long, short, coarse, and fine hairs.
In addition to brown and black furs, there were solid, spotted, and striped ones of orange, red, green, turquoise, and pink. They did not look as though they had been dyed.
A gallery of pictures hung haphazardly and askew up and down the walls. A series of hunting scenes were signed by the artist, R.T. Pallitt R.A.: they included a couple of very large hares grilling a scarlet-coated and -faced huntsman over a fire; a gaggle of geese stringing up Charlie the fox on a gallows; a muscular-looking pheasant dropping a brick on a man with a shotgun; a V-formation of ducks attacking a gun blind; a monster pike biting a hole in a fisherman’s skiff; and a salmon dragging another angler off a riverbank in the direction of a pool that fed a hundred-foot waterfall onto rocks.
Other framed items revealed a little about the profession of the resident. There were honorary medical and philosophical degrees from universities and academies around the world, and certificates and diplomas in subjects so arcane that Jenny had never heard of them; with the exception of one affirming that the holder—the ink the names were handwritten in was faded to illegibility—had satisfied the examiners in Intermediate Sanskrit. That the person might be a doctor, was indicated by a badly typed letter from one Hedley Akehurst, thanking the recipient for relief from a lifetime of migraines.
Photographs showed people at parties, who, judging from their be-medalled uniforms, and fancy if untasteful clothes, were officials and celebrities.
All were in the company of the same little old lady. In one picture she was leaning on a cane and wearing a frozen smile and a rusty black dress; and in another she was in a Bath chair, holding up a pendant on a gold chain that she had been presented with. The four bosomy dames who were standing behind her didn’t look sober, and one of them was holding two fingers over the honoree’s head like rabbit ears.
Jenny’s presumption that the woman was infirm or incapacitated, rather than suffering from injury or fatigue, or too much to drink, was proved incorrect when she saw, tucked into the frame, a snapshot of her taken after the latter occasion by, according to the scrap of paper pinned to it, “Your partner in crime, Dodie”. In the picture there was sign of neither cane nor chair: the beldam was running through a courtyard picking up her skirts with one hand, swinging the chain around her head with the other, and clicking her heels together two feet off the ground.
The rest of the back of the room was taken up with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, against which leaned a wooden ladder on wheels that ran along a track slide at the top, for the purpose of enabling one to reach the highest shelves. There were many leather-bound octavo sets, and, at the base, multiple thick volumes of an edition that made the full Oxford English Dictionary look like the Concise version. Jenny could not hazard a guess at the language, because each tome bore a single letter like a rune, which indicated that it might indeed be a dictionary or an encyclopaedia.
Another section was devoted to books on music, which, judging from the authors’ names, were of an instrumental nature. The first, by Cordelia Piano with a foreword by Joanna Baddeley, was followed by others either written or edited by Violet Olin, Adolphus Stringfellow, Linette Cleary, O. Bough, Paula Piccolo, Arthur Bass, Fritz Trump, Trond Bone, Hornblower S. French, Glwladys Harper, Perry Cushing, Drummond Kettles with Tim Panini, and Morgan Pipe. There was a biography, Sixta Conti-Nenta: The All Round Soprano; a beginner’s guide to composition co-authored by Melody Lyne and I. Mortell Tune; a monograph on modern jazz by Verity Noyce; and sheet music for a duet from an operetta called Strike It Up! starring Donna Vibrato and Bravo Tenna.
Moving on, Jenny’s eye lit next on a glass ball in a cup, on a short stand such as one might find at a funfair coconut shy. When she carefully picked it out of its receptacle it was warm and heavy, and the surface swirled with a smoky opalescence as if it were alive. Replacing the crystal ball, if that was what it was, and feeling guilty at having touched it, she proceeded past a dovecot, the “pigeon holes” of which were filled with papers; these she deemed personal and refrained from sneaking a look at them.
Mounted on a plaque on the next section of wall was a horseshoe, on its side with the points going left, under which the Macbethian inscription read: “‘When shall we three meet again?’ In memory of our stormy, wet, but fun holiday in the Urals, summer 1467 CE. Ditzy Moonblocker & Veronica Broome.”
Horseshoes, Jenny recalled, repelled witches when the points pointed down, and betokened good fortune when they were up so that the luck did not run out. Which presumably it had, weather-wise, on this occasion, the implication being that thunder, lightning, and rain were for doing business in only; which might explain the ambivalence of the shoe’s position.
Next to the plaque was a framed parchment diploma, inscribed in a slightly wobbly round- or copperplate hand, stating that
The International Guild of Witches
is proud to present the
Fifth Millenn
ial Order of the Golden Broomstick
to
Dame “Hec” Hecate, MA (Oxon); D.Sorc.;
Dip. Wiz.; Cert. Necr.; MBA (Houston); Hon. Litt.D.
(Queensland); Triple Goddess, and Goddess of the Lower
World (Emerita); former Grand Mistress of the Ancient
Order of Necromancers; and first Chairwoman and President
of the International Guild of Witches (retd).
Signed: Wanda Empiria, Chairman and Chief Executive
p.p. Mona Monsoon (Mrs), Hon. Sec.
”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“
Suddenly there was a sound of rushing wind. All three windows blew open, and Jenny was surrounded by a whirl of papers and flying objects, some of them sizeable. She dropped to her knees, shut her eyes, and covered her head with her arms.
As she crouched Jenny was certain that the storm, after recharging itself at sea, must have returned to complete its job of annihilation; and she wondered, for all its history of impregnability, how many more such onslaughts the ancient fortress was capable of withstanding.
It also occurred to her that this was retribution for the radical changes made by her husband; in which case this was all her fault for agreeing to marry him. The discovery of the hidden rooms was small recompense for the destruction of her heritage. Even in eleventh century Scotland, at the time of Malcolm, Duncan, and Macbeth, nothing of such magnitude had taken place; and Glamis castle, Macbeth’s home, was still standing. But as Jenny knew, the historical Macbeth was innocent of attracting misfortune: he had been a religious man who went on a pilgrimage to Rome, and brought peace and prosperity to his country.
It was Shakespeare, Macbeth’s calumniator, who was responsible for the troubles that historically afflicted productions of the Bard’s dramatizations of his source, Holinshed, and the accidents that befell the actors. There were too many instances to be brushed off as coincidences: from the falling of stage lights, and collapse of flown scenery as ropes snapped from pulleys, to the illnesses and sudden deaths of cast members. When the occasional Lady Macbeth sleepwalked off the edge of the stage, one might attribute this to the dimness of the lighting, or the actress being so absorbed in her performance, or drunk, as to fail to pay attention to her position; but the lore was too well documented to be dismissed as bad luck.
The most important superstition related to the calamities that ensued when actors mentioned Macbeth the Tragedy by name—“the Scottish play” was the approved euphemism. There were a number of remedies for those who were remiss, most important of which was that of leaving the theatre and spinning around three times before spitting, cursing, and knocking to request readmission to the building. Also reckoned efficacious was the quoting of lines from other Shakespeare plays, such as, “Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you!” from The Merchant of Venice; or Hamlet’s, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
When the brouhaha in the room subsided, a thankful Jenny uncovered her ears. Fearing another whirlwind, she rose slowly to her feet, clutching the side of a table…and watching in fascination as the windows closed as if they were electrically controlled.
Tiptoeing forward, she was astonished to note that everything that had been tossed around had come to rest in exactly the same position it had been in before the irruption. The pictures were slanted at the same angles; the book on dragons, the pages of which had been violently riffled, was open at the same chapter with its scarlet ribbon marker on the desk; and the crystal ball that had been rolling around the floor, like a marble in a child’s game, was back in its place in the cup. Even the dust on the furniture was back.
Alarming, however, was that, not only was there the sound of footsteps crossing the wooden floor, but as Jenny frantically looked around to see who had entered the room, nobody was visible.
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ snapped a voice; ‘tell me who you are, who sent you, and how you got in. I’ve no idea where my diary is, but I don’t usually make appointments so late, especially on Mondays.’ The speaker sounded female and annoyed.
‘What?’ Jenny quavered; ‘I mean, I beg your pardon? Who is it?...please. If someone is here, I’m sorry but I can’t see you.’
The voice responded in a more aggrieved tone. ‘That’s two and a half questions in as many seconds, girl, and you still owe me an answer. Not such a girl either, if my eyes don’t deceive me without my glasses, wherever they may be.’ The voice turned suspicious. ‘You haven’t touched or broken anything, have you? If so, and it’s compromised or important, I’ll dock your wages for a year.’
The hidden person did not wait for a response. ‘Drat it, we haven’t even begun the interview, and already things don’t bode well for our relationship. It really is too bad that I can’t afford a decent assistant; one of the Witch Academy undergrads, for example, who needs a job during the summer vacation. I blame the employment agency for sending girls like you, who have lousy references and are invariably clumsy.
‘The few who have a glimmer of talent leave for higher wages as soon as I’ve got them trained. The last one, Felicia, was only here a lunar month, just as she’d got moderately proficient in...but that’s confidential. I could tell you, but I’d have to turn you into a tadpole. Really, I should give up and do everything myself from scratch, including all the grinding and chopping, as humiliating as that would be.
‘Anyway, I’ll ask again: who are you, who sent you, and how did you get in? And turn out your pockets and that bag, girl. Things have a habit of disappearing around here, and I don’t mean in the course of spelling. You temps are a light-fingered lot. If you’ve any item of mine on you I’ll kick you downstairs and see that you never get work.’
As flustered as she was, Jenny was not inclined either to confess her identity, or to produce the contents of her satchel, let alone explain about Plantagenet household gods.
‘No one sent me...ma’am. By the way, it’s Tuesday, not Monday. I came on my own and let myself in, and I’m not here for an interview or seeking employment.’
‘Nonsense, you don’t know the password that unlocks the front door. Already, a lie. There’s a lot of unique and valuable stuff in here that certain women would love to get their hands on, and it’s more than likely that one of them sent you to steal something while I was out.
‘I’ve got it! That meddling Monsoon woman is behind this, isn’t she? Mona! Just because she’s secretary to the high and mighty Wanda Empiria, she acts as if she were a qualified witch, though she can’t tell a rune from a rite. All Mona has is a lowly Mortar and Pestle diploma from Bideford Polytechnic, with a pass grade, not even close to a merit and miles from a distinction. That’s it, Monsoon must have looked up how to do an unlocking spell in one of her boss’s books, and sneaked you in to get some quality stuff to boost Empiria’s meagre skills. She was waiting for me to leave.’
Jenny said weakly, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but I don’t know who you are talking about.’
‘I’m not believing.’ There was an impatient clicking of fingers. ‘Facts, I want facts. Monsoon didn’t prep you very well, did she? She didn’t even give you a story that would hold as much water as a sieve, may in a sieve she go to sea, like the Jumblies. Edward Lear. But then the woman’s got the imagination of the turtle she resembles, so I can’t say I’m surprised.’
Jenny was left with no alternative—other than to point out that turtles could swim, unlike tortoises—but to come clean. ‘The truth is, ma’am, that after the storm I wanted to come up and check for damage at the top of the castle, what with there being so much damage to the roof, or so I thought; and see if anything had opened up that might explain the three windows and the missing rooms.’
‘Storm, what storm? The weather’s been bloody marvellous for the time of year, and nobody’s worn a mackintosh or put up an umbrella for a month, which is good because I’ve lost mine. I’ve only been away a few days, and nothing’s changed since I left. And which windows and ro
oms are you referring to, and why and how should and could they need explaining and have come to be missing?’
Jenny, assuming that the woman was observing her, looked to them. ‘Those windows, ma’am; they’re even bigger than they look from below. Nobody has been able to account for them and the rooms they look out from.’
‘Storms, questionable windows, missing rooms…don’t riddle with me, girl, you’re bound to lose. I can out-riddle the Sphinx; and did on several occasions, much to its discomfiture.’
Irked by the unequal terms she was on with this undeclared person, and the questioning, and the accusation of intrusion, Jenny sharpened her tone. ‘Fact: whoever lives here has found a way of keeping this room or apartment secret in order to avoid paying rent. And it worked, until today.’
There was a squeal of annoyance. ‘The temerity! It’s lucky for you that I’m in my sere and yellow, and not as quick to take offence as I used to be. So again, and answer me plain: who...are...you?’
Jenny took a deep breath, and said loftily, ‘I am the Lady Eugénie Beauvais Plantagenet, and my father is Henry St John Pheasantbane Arthur Plantagenet, twenty-third Earl of Northmarch, and a descendant of the Angevin kings. In the event that you care to reveal yourself, I may invite you to call me Jenny when we are better acquainted. My mother the Countess was born Isabelle Sauce-Piquante, and she traces her lineage to the Dauphins. Dragonburgh castle has been in my family since the day it was built, and you can look it up: the charter is in the British Museum. I was born in the blue room off my mother’s bedroom, on the east side of the castle, and have lived here all my life.’
