The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  Recounting her ancestry reinforced Jenny’s sense of indisputable entitlement to be where she was, and her determination not to be browbeaten. ‘To my knowledge we’ve never taken in lodgers. If you’ve been living at Dragonburgh as long as it seems as though you have, you are greatly in arrears in what you owe me as chatelaine.

  ‘Not that we’ve established a rate, and unless you can prove yourself to be a hardship case, I’m not sure I’d want to formalize an arrangement. We’ve never done so before. If a member of the castle staff or an estate person is ill or needs help with a family member, we take care of them for nothing for as long as necessary, even permanently. It’s not like we’re short of rooms and cottages, and everyone rallies round. But I know personally everyone who works for us, and from the sound of your voice, I don’t believe we’ve met.

  ‘So, ma’am, it is only right that it is I who should be asking the questions. Your belligerent attitude is offensive, and I would also point out that it’s common courtesy for both parties to be visible when holding a conversation. I’m familiar with all the ghosts, too, and you’re not one of them.’

  Calmer now that she’d asserted herself, Jenny was struck by a possibility. ‘I don’t suppose you’re my husband Otto Huntenfisch’s aunt or grandmother, are you? Someone he doesn’t want me to know about? That would explain your rudeness. This being the wing of the castle he lives in, or did, I suppose it’s possible he could have set you up here without my knowing. Though if you’ve seen his own quarters, or ex-quarters I should say—I haven’t, but his servants talk—you must be disappointed that he didn’t provide better for you than this.’

  Jenny waved a hand around the room.

  The woman’s voice rang out. ‘Lodger? Aunt? Grandmother? Brazen hussy! My digs have done me very well over the years, and be it ever so humble there’s no place like home. Which it has been for a very long time. I’ll have you know, young lady, that it is I who built Dragonburgh…with a little prestidigitatory assistance, of course, from others in the trade. One cannot do everything oneself.’

  Jenny snorted. ‘And my husband undertook to remodel it. Such arrogance is not inconsistent with what I was just suggesting, and the results speak for themselves. Otherwise, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.’

  ‘Ye gods, such impudence!’

  ‘If you needed so little space for yourself, madam, why should you go to all the trouble of building a castle?’

  ‘In those days,’ returned the voice acidulously, ‘I was a personage, and had appearances to keep up. But when money started getting tight, and William the so-called Conqueror gave Dragonburgh to Henri Beauvais et famille in return for Henri’s saving William’s arse in 1066, by sticking his own fat bottom and breeches in the way of an arrow with the Conqueror’s name on it—he has a lot to answer for, does La Fesse Brave—I left it to the Northmarches to manage the castle and retreated up here.’

  Jenny stiffened. ‘The first Earl of Northmarch was a loyal soldier doing his duty and protecting his leader. Surely you do not hold that against him.’

  ‘No, but consider the consequences. In the exchange of arrows, not only was it one in the eye for Harold Godwinsson, or Harold the Second, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, whom I was backing, naturally, against the Normans; but one has only to look at the succession of royal dynasties that followed down the ages, to realize the appalling consequences of Henri Beauvais’ action.

  ‘I was very fond of Harold, and he would have gone on to do great things, in my opinion, if he’d worn the prescription glasses with toughened lenses that I made for him the night before the Battle of Hastings. Harold was as blind as a bat, and I was worried that he’d send his men in the wrong direction. I had to do it manually, because the closest spell I could find was for a monocle, and, knowing Harold, he would have put it in the wrong eye. I only just got the glasses finished in time, owing to my first grinding the lenses for long rather than short sight, and forgetting to compensate for his double astigmatism.

  ‘But what was, was. After the country had settled down a bit and the Henri Beauvaises had been here for a while, I decided to let bygones be bygones and invited them up for a glass of sherry. Rather more than a glass, as I recall, and we ended up playing Snakes and Ladders, and doing imitations of William the First trying to speak English.

  ‘After that we rubbed along very well, and the Plantagenet generations who followed were just as friendly. You shall now understand, young lady, that there was never any question of my paying rent, on account of the castle having been taken from me. So, now that you know the history, in consideration of my position, seniority, and the longevity of my tenure, I will appreciate your according me the respect due to me, notwithstanding your heritage and entitlement.’

  ‘As I said, that’s difficult when one is addressing thin air and someone who hasn’t yet introduced herself.’

  ‘Very well. Know that I am Hecate, Triple Goddess, and Goddess of the Lower World. There’s nobody and nothing in earth or sky, light or darkness, has power to alter that and there never has been. Those who, when I stepped down as head of the Witches’ Guild, began calling me Hec, as in “What the…”, are as guilty of lese majesty and as out of line as you are.

  ‘You, Eugénie Beauvais Plantagenet, may call me Dame Hecate, or Hecate, or ma’am. Ecce mulier! Behold the woman!’

  Jenny gasped and skipped back a pace: about ten feet away, next to a rubber plant, was standing a diminutive and dishevelled crone wearing a pilled shawl cardigan with sagging pockets and sleeves, a drab skirt of faded tartan, a wrinkled blouse, and scuffed pump shoes.

  Hecate had currant eyes on either side of a hook nose, and whiskers on her chin. It appeared that she had come directly from the beach, for she also had a colourful towel draped over her shoulder, sand in her grey hair, and she was twirling a pair of sunglasses. There were no beaches within easy reach of Dragonburgh, thought Jenny, and it was not sunbathing weather.

  Noticing the towel, Hecate pulled it from her shoulder, tossed it over the rubber plant and threw the sunglasses on the table. Conscious of her visible state, she drew herself up, thereby adding all of an inch to her height.

  ‘I’m still not buying your story, it sounds coached and implausible. Saucy and overbold, that’s what you are young lady, saucy and overbold. If it wasn’t Mona Monsoon who let you in, it must have been one of the witches. I’ll wager that awful Pott-Tempest woman, Camilla, has something to do with this, or Thea Toadflax. They want one of their own to get a job as my apprentice, so they can learn my secrets before I become too gaga to practise.

  ‘“Old Mother Hec’s pretty much lost it these days,” they say to each other; “we need to act fast, if we want to learn know how to do all those things the QuikSpells are no good for, like programming a video cassette recorder for the next five years without knowing what one will want to watch, and allowing for when the clocks go forward and back.

  ‘Well, they’ve got a long wait ahead of them, for the simple reason that I don’t watch television, and couldn’t do it for myself if I tried.’

  Taking the ball that Jenny had come across earlier out of its cup, Hecate dropped it, and without looking down flipped it twice in the air from her foot as expertly as any soccer player, before catching it and replacing it in the cup.

  ‘Come on, spill the beans, how did you get in? And don’t ask why I don’t use the ball to find out. Crystal balls are for looking into the future, and this one hasn’t worked for yonks, though playing with it helps me think. It’s also good for exercise, now that I don’t get out as much as I used to.’

  Jenny opted for politeness. ‘Well, ma’am, I can’t be sure. Jock McJoist—he’s the Clerk of Works—and I nearly fell down the stairs, we were so shocked when the door swung open. There was the most terrible storm the night before last, which did an enormous amount of damage to the fabric of the castle. So it was the perfect opportunity to look for the three windows, while my husband Otto is incapacitated with grief
at the loss of all that is dear to him. Put another way, he’s drunk in the cellar.

  ‘We’d been looking for hours, when the staircase leading to your apartment appeared, where there’ve never been steps before; and then the door, but it was locked, and we sat down to consider what to do. In telling Jock about the origin of the Plantagenet name, I recited an old verse about the broom that begins, “Time was when thy golden chain of flowers...”, and wished out loud that my forebears would help me out...not Useless Eustace, of course...and they did.’

  Hecate, looking surprised, said nothing for a moment. ‘Hm. I suppose that is possible. The third earl, Norbert, and I got along especially well. We diced and drank together every Wednesday evening, and one night after a lot of Drambuie, when I was on a losing streak and the petty cash box was empty—I couldn’t use witchcraft to beat him, it would have been unsporting, and besides, Drambuie plays havoc with my timing—like an idiot I bet my only door key, which was made of gold, in an attempt to get my money back.

  ‘Ever since then, after Norbert won the key from me, I’ve had to use a locking and unlocking spell, with a password that I change every few days, when I leave and come back. Today was one of those occasions when I had a senior moment and couldn’t remember the password, which is why I came in by the windows just now, to reset the PIN. The windows respond to a garage door opener that I keep clipped to my shawl.

  ‘Old Norbert dropped the key as he staggered downstairs at three o’clock in the morning, and came back later to ask me to help him look for it. I did a finding spell, but all it led me to was the box of gold glitter I use on Christmas cards. Not all magic is as sophisticated as you might think. From what you say, the Plantagenets must have come across the key at some point, and hung on to it. Can’t say I blame them, Norbert won it fair and square.

  ‘As for the stairs and door appearing, they only do so when the keyholders are in the vicinity. Which means that one or more of the Plantagenets must have been intrigued by what you were up to, followed you around, and obliged when you appealed for help. I, er, don’t suppose whoever it was left the key...do you have it?’

  ‘It disappeared as soon as the door was open. And I didn’t see anyone, which was odd. I’m on speaking terms with most of the Plantagenets.’

  ‘Probably because it was Norbert, and he didn’t want to run into me. Though I should have liked to have seen him; there’s no ill feeling on my part. So that explains that, but what about this storm? Oh, good gracious…storm! Of course!’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘I remember now. I was in a grump the other day after Griselda’s familiar, a cat called Bratwurst, made a mess in the hall, not for the first time. It was the last straw after many things that have annoyed me recently, and I prescribed myself a quick break in Bermuda to get my head together...white sand and cocktails with little umbrellas in them, that sort of thing.

  ‘I hate flying at the best of times…not what one would expect of the Queen of the Witches, I know, but it’s always been that way. Also, time differences play havoc with my body clock, and Dramamine makes me sick.

  ‘Hurrying as I was to catch the end of a favourable tailwind, I bumped, literally, into Fanny Fiddle, who is Chief Financial Officer of the Witch’s Guild, as I was zipping over the moor on Harriet, my broomstick. Fanny was on her new company air conveyance, a Crosswind Cavalier, which looks rather like a Vespa scooter, and Harriet side-swiped the Cavalier pretty hard, doing some damage. Harriet may be made of wood and full of worm-holes, bless her heart, but she doesn’t like Fiddle any more than I do, and took full advantage.

  ‘Fanny Fiddle yelled at me, “Oi! Whither away in such a Mother Hec of a storming hurry? Look where you’re going, old woman!” Toujours la politesse, with Fanny.

  ‘I didn’t stop because I had been wanting to get back at her for delaying settlement of my spell invoices to the Guild. ‘So I yelled back, “Aroint thee, witch! Your payment is thirty days overdue, Fiddle, I’m charging you interest!”, and kept going.

  ‘And Fanny bellowed after me, “You bent my fender! Hit-and-Run Hec, that’s who you are! I’ll report you to Wanda”—that’s Wanda Empiria, the Chief Executive of the Witches’ Guild—“and she’ll have you put under lock and key! Gaolbirds don’t get paid. When you get out, if you get out, I’m deducting this repair from your next cheque!”

  ‘”Lock and key”...that’s when I remembered I’d left home without locking up. Not wishing to lose the tailwind, I threw the spell behind me to put on the password, with a great deal of vim because it was from twenty miles away, and against the wind. And Fanny’s shouting “Mother Hec of a storm” must have got tangled up with it.’

  Jenny felt dazed. ‘The place nearly came down about our ears. You could have returned to find the castle and all your precious things in a pile of rubble.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, it was built to last, with a System Restore feature.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ said Jenny. ‘The oddest thing, though, was that all the damage was confined to the renovations done by my husband—his so-called improvements—and the new stuff he had brought in.’

  Hecate looked scornful. ‘Improvements and additions! The castle shall remain as I intended it to be when I designed and constructed it. Nothing shall exist except that which was meant to exist. On a lesser scale, you saw how things tidied themselves up in here just now after I breezed in. It would be the same anywhere else around here, too. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as Alphonse Karr put it: “The more things change, the more they are the same.”’

  Jenny was amused by Hecate’s description of the room as tidy. ‘Of course! Although I slept through the great storm, the servants swore that the original parts of the castle suffered a great deal of damage during the night. Come daylight, that proved not to be the case.’

  Nodding with relief at the assurance of the castle’s built-in obsolescence, and recalling how her inspection of the room had been interrupted, Jenny’s eye lit on an envelope on top of a teetering pile of newspapers and magazines. It had “P.D.T.” scrawled on it in green ink.

  ‘Excuse me, Hecate, if you don’t mind my asking, but what is P.D.T.?’

  ‘How do you know about P.D.T.?,’ said the old woman sharply; ‘have you been reading my spell books? I’ve frazzled people to a cinder for less. Although you don’t have the skill, everything in those books is a trade secret and highly confidential. Perhaps you are a spy after all!’

  ‘Don’t worry; apart from a glance at the title of the book on the desk, which has to do with some fantasy about dragons, I haven’t read anything. No, I was looking at that envelope.’ Jenny pointed at it.

  ‘Aha! I’ve been searching everywhere for that.’ Pouncing on the envelope, Hecate knocked the pile over and the item vanished in the drift. ‘Double drat.’

  Jenny started picking up sheaves of material. The newspapers were crumbling with age, and the print so faded as to be unreadable, and some of the magazines had been nibbled and shredded by small teeth. Interspersed with everything else were old notebooks and jottings on torn-out leaves and paper scraps.

  ‘You needn’t bother to do that,’ said Hecate; and she raised her arms and the wings of her overstretched cardigan. Jenny shrank as a mini version of the earlier tornado arose. Although neither of them were touched, and not a hair was turned out of place that wasn’t already, the matter that had been disturbed was flung to the ceiling.

  Abruptly the commotion ceased, and items floated downwards and settled in their former positions. Hecate picked up the envelope and turned it over to check that it was still sealed; it was, with the stamp of a small dragon impressed in gold wax over the flap. She put the envelope in a drooping pocket and patted it.

  ‘That really is a useful trick,’ observed Jenny.

  ‘Like I said, it’s a fact of life not a trick. Useful, certainly. Usually I know where my stuff is, but when Volumnia got out of her cage she must have moved the P.D.T. to spite me for fo
rgetting to feed her. I punished her by sending her upstairs to join the rest of them,’—Hecate waved towards the iron steps—‘but I couldn’t find where I’d put down the P.D.T.’

  Jenny looked at the bent bars of the cage. ‘Who is Volumnia?’

  ‘Volumnia is a vulture, and since you ask, P.D.T. is powdered dragon tooth. Dragon tooth is the crucial ingredient in all the more complicated spells; no witch can be without it if she wants to brew anything more complicated than rum punch. P.D.T. costs a fortune, and because Fanny Fiddle, the Guild accountant, never processes my reimbursements in a timely fashion, I’m always on the verge of losing my credit with the wholesalers. For my personal expenses alone, I need every penny I can make to supplement my pathetically inadequate pension from the Witches’ Guild. Now that so much classic wand-work has been replaced by cheap QuikSpells, and gadgets from the superstores, it’s a wonder I can keep body and soul together.

  ‘Dragons’ teeth are very difficult to come by; firstly because we’re at the mercy of the dragon cartel, and secondly because, with new dental techniques and better diets, the dragons aren’t losing their teeth as frequently as they used to. They es-chew sugar, as it were, and some of them go so far as to floss and brush; which under other circumstances would be highly desirable because a dragon’s breath, or exhaust as it’s called, in addition to being searingly hot when it’s aflame, can poison you if you’re not wearing a respirator with a special filter in it.

  ‘As a result the consumer pays through the nose, so to speak, to induce these newly health-conscious creatures to have their teeth removed. Many of them will only part with their wisdoms, because they’re not necessary for eating; but powdered wisdom isn’t as potent as incisor or canine, so one needs more of it.

  ‘It doesn’t end there. Dragons who are prepared to give up their cutting teeth insist on getting a porcelain crown in return, the cost of which is horrendous...a full-grown male’s tooth is very large. To which has to be added the crippling fees and surcharges demanded by the dragon dentists. I can’t say they’re exorbitant, because the dangers are considerable, and they earn every penny. There aren’t many professionals prepared to don a helmet and fireproof bodysuit and give a dragon a root canal. Dragons are filthy-tempered beasts, the females even more so than the males, and make the worst patients. One twinge and they’ll bite your arm off. The amount of anaesthetic the dentists get through would put an army to sleep in the middle of a battle.