[Brenda & Effie 06] - Brenda and Effie Forever!

by Paul Magrs

  Effie and I stick to the coffee. We’ve both got thumping headaches this morning.

  Mrs Harris has a very fancy coffee machine, hubbling and bubbling in the corner, looking like something from space. She is poised above it, surveying us critically as she puts a perfect froth on top of my cappucino.

  ‘I hear the two of you were out enjoying yourselves last night,’ she says.

  ‘There’s no law against it,’ Effie mutters darkly.

  ‘Drinking and singing in the Branwen Bronte, I hear!’ the landlady laughs. Yet, looking at her, it’s easy to see she isn’t really amused by our reported carrying on.

  ‘We’re on holiday,’ Effie says. ‘So what if we let our hair down?’

  Mrs Harris looks at her and then quickly forces a smile. ‘So what indeed? Good for you!’

  I’m keen to ask how she knows what we were up to. Has she got spies out there in Haworth? Why would she want to know what we’re doing?

  ‘I hear you met old Jack, too,’ she says, too casually. ‘That old drunk.’

  ‘He seems like a very nice man,’ I put in.

  ‘Still, you shouldn’t listen to a word he says. His brains are addled, poor thing. He really does talk the most awful old rot.’

  Effie asks sharply, ‘It’s up to us who we talk to, and believe in, isn’t it?’

  The two of them are staring daggers at each other. Then Mrs Harris smiles as if conceding defeat. ‘Of course, my dear! You just do what you like. Now, I’m off to my badminton practice. Do lock up properly when you go out. We don’t want burgling.’

  When Mrs Harris is gone I ask Effie why she was so snappy with her. Effie glowers. ‘Because she’s a bloody old busybody, that’s why. All her questions over breakfast. All that jollity. Ugh.’

  Suddenly I’m wondering what I must sound like to my own B&B guests. Are they irritated with me when I try to engage them in breakfast time chitchat? I really hope I’m not like Mrs Harris.

  Effie stumps upstairs to shower and dress properly for the day. I’m fiddling with the fancy coffee maker, attempting to extract a second cup. Just when I think I’ve damaged the machine with my clumsy fingers there’s a shout from Effie on the top landing.

  I lumber up the stairs. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here!’

  She’s on the top floor of the house. I hurry up there, knees clicking and aching as I go.

  ‘Effie, what are you up to? You can’t go poking around in here…’

  But it’s too late. She’s in our landlady’s private quarters. She has breached the bonds of trust and I am reminded of the treachery of the Hoffmanns and how they ransacked my things while my back was turned.

  ‘Look!’

  Effie is standing in the middle of Mrs Harris’s bedroom and she looks utterly unashamed at snooping where she oughtn’t to be.

  She’s pointing at a reproduction of a painting of the Bronte sisters. There’s other memorabilia here – even Bronte dolls preserved inside plastic tubes.

  ‘See? She’s a Bronte fanatic as well,’ Effie hisses. ‘I wonder if she has a shrine, too?’

  Before I can urge caution, Effie is opening cupboards and drawers. After a few moments she drags out some kind of scarlet ceremonial robe and hood. ‘See? She’s in a cult. And I bet it’s just the same as Jack’s.’

  ‘They’re worshipping the spirits of the Brontes?’

  Effie nods glumly. ‘Those Bronte girls were very powerful, Brenda. Believe me, I know. They had all kinds of magic at their disposal. They could do anything. And, remember, I delivered the Book of Mayhem into their very hands, back during the War years. Only very adept witches could be trusted with such a text.’

  To my immense relief, we both exit our landlady’s bedroom. I’m earnestly checking nothing looks rumpled or out of place.

  ‘The Brontes trained many of the witches in my family,’ Effie tells me as we go downstairs. ‘Aunt Maude herself had spent some time in the secret base under Haworth. That’s why my aunts in Whitby weren’t surprised that I went rather quiet for a year and a day. They knew I was underground with those ghostly girls, learning to harness my incipient magical talents. And I was learning spells and jujitsu and swordplay and how to fly, too.’

  My head was spinning. ‘You can fly? You’ve never mentioned this before.’

  ‘Only on a broomstick, and I think I’m way too rusty to trust myself to try it now. Because of my lapse of memory, I’m not even sure what was the extent of my education at the hands of Charlotte and her sisters. Perhaps there are all kinds of things I’ve forgotten I know how to do.’

  I’m concerned about Effie’s memory loss. As she nips off to take that shower at last, I’m wondering whether someone has caused her to lose her memory for a reason, and what that might be. I’m quite used to the random and arbitrary lapses in my own faculties, but Effie’s blockage has a whiff of something sinister about it. As if someone had meant her to forget about her supernatural education. It’s very curious. But in the meantime, Effie seems delighted to have a missing portion of her childhood returned to her. She emerges from our shared room, having performed her ablutions and dressed herself in a very smart tweedy two-piece and she’s singing something from ‘South Pacific.’ She looks radiant now that she’s in possession of her recovered past.

  Before I go off to clad myself for the day’s coming rigours, I ask her, ‘What’s our plan, then?’

  ‘We’re going to find that tunnel,’ she tells me. ‘Even if no one has heard a word from the sisters since 1973, there must still be a way down into their base.’

  ‘You want to dig your way in?’

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Brenda. But we’ll see. There’s bound to be a way.’

  ‘So it’s back to the graveyard, then?’

  ‘Hmm. Might look suspicious in the daytime. So I think we should go in via the Bronte museum in the old parsonage. That way we can look like two old biddies on a day-trip. No one will give us a second glance.’

  Then she opens her bag and I see she’s got a trowel in there, and a miniature pick-axe.

  §

  And so the morning passes in a blur of sight-seeing. With a whole coachload of pensioners from out of town we investigate the Bronte Parsonage museum. It’s at the top of the graveyard and, as we pass through the rooms that those brilliant girls, their brother and their father once lived in, we peer out of the windows at the gravestones beyond the garden. Even in daylight the cemetery doesn’t look quite benign.

  We marvel at the tiny cupboards and beds, the dresses on midget dummies, plus the fact that they have spectacles and pens and letters on show.

  ‘So they weren’t just writers, then?’ I ask Effie, sotto voce.

  She nods. ‘They were women warriors, witches and the teachers of witches, too. They had immense powers, you see, and they had to hide them from the world. But the sisters knew that the forces of darkness were encroaching and that the girls of the world needed training up in order to face the evil from elsewhere.’

  I look at Effie, striding about as if she owns the place, and am astonished by all this stuff in her past. She is an adept, a woman warrior. I can’t help thinking, though, what was the point of all that training, if she simply forgot everything on leaving the Brontes’ academy?

  Surely the point was to equip her with knowledge and skills? Or was there something else going on? Something that required her to forget, but not necessarily unlearn, everything she had been taught? I don’t bring any of these quibbles up just yet, as Effie is quite excited and pleased with herself right now, as we explore the whitewashed rooms of the old parsonage.

  Out back there is a gift shop, where our fellow visitors are fingering commemorative tea towels, plates and posters. We take our opportunity to slip out of a side door closed to Joe Public. Effie sniffs the air like a bloodhound as we search all over
the garden and grounds, looking for anything that might be the mouth of a tunnel.

  Soon enough we’re rumbled by the old dear selling cream teas in the front garden. I suppose we do look quite suspicious, me looking on while Effie brandishes a trowel.

  ‘Can I help you ladies?’ The old dear has flyaway hair and is wearing a very unflattering smock, which billows just like the cream tea marquee in the morning breeze.

  ‘Just having a poke about,’ Effie snaps.

  ‘Two teas, please,’ I tell the woman, and drag Effie into the tent.

  ‘What if we can’t find a way down?’ Effie asks me, when we’re sat together. ‘What if the whole secret academy has been whistled away somewhere? And their ghosts have gone for good?’

  She’s becoming rather agitated, and I can see the tea lady glancing over with interest from behind her urn. Soon she’s over with our tea and some homemade Melting Moments biscuits, which she says are on the house.

  ‘Thank you, I’m sure,’ mutters Effie.

  ‘A word to the wise,’ says the tea lady abruptly. ‘Folk know that you two are up to something here in Haworth. You have been seen poking about. Old Jack has been bragging about the two ladies who accompanied him home last night…’

  ‘But nothing untoward went on!’ says Effie hotly.

  The tea lady beams, her face a mass of gentle wrinkles and burst veins. ‘He just showed you his shrine, didn’t he?’

  ‘As it happens, yes,’ I tell her. ‘So what? It seems to us that everyone in this town is doo-lally over the Bronte sisters. It’s like a sort of cult.’

  ‘And so it is,’ says the tea lady. ‘We have ceremonies and revels and all sorts. We have our traditions in this town, for paying homage to the little ladies who put this place on the map and gave us all our livelihoods.’

  ‘They did rather more than that,’ Effie murmurs.

  ‘Well, we don’t like outsiders messing about and spoiling things,’ growls the tea lady. ‘Sometimes we’ve had to dissuade them from disturbing our way of things. A biographer or two have had to be discreetly vanished.’

  ‘What?’ gasps Effie, swallowing a mouthful of scalding tea.

  ‘Like I say, we locals don’t want folk poking and prying into our Brontes and learning too much about the truth. And so, sometimes, we have to take desperate measures.’

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘And so you think that we’re getting too close to the truth?’

  ‘I do,’ she snarls. ‘Some folk, like that daft old Jack, say that you mean no harm. That you’re good girls. And that you,’ – here she jabs a thick finger in Effie’s direction – ‘were possibly one of Charlotte’s Chosen Ones. Her Angels. Well, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s worth the risk. You’re too noisy and unpredictable. You could leave and tell the world about what goes on here.’

  I finished my funny-tasting tea in one big slurp and protest: ‘But what is there to tell? We haven’t seen anything to tell the world about! All that’s happened is that Effie’s memory has come back…’

  Effie shushes me, and kicks my leg under the table.

  ‘Exactly!’ says the tea lady. ‘And now she knows all about being one of the Chosen Ones! She could leave and tell the whole world about the miracles of Haworth!’

  Effie gets to her feet. ‘Come on, Brenda. This one is crackers. We’re not staying here.’

  As she stands, though, there’s a slight wooziness to Effie. She sways on her feet.

  ‘You aren’t going anywhere,’ the tea lady snaps. ‘Both of you are staying here, as my prisoners.’

  Effie puts shaking hands to her temples. ‘What have you done? Drugged us?’

  I must say, I’m feeling pretty odd, too. That woman must have dropped something in our tea. It must have been bloody strong to affect me like this…! I’m reeling and going fuzzy round the edges, just as Effie is.

  ‘I’ve put you under for the good of everyone here in Haworth! We can’t take the risk of letting you escape. We’ve too much to lose!’

  There’s a tunnel of blackness opening up before my eyes and I’m swimming straight into it, headfirst. I cry out as I watch Effie crumple to the grassy floor of the marquee. We were such idiots to drink our tea!

  ‘You will both wake tonight, fresh as daisies!’ laughs the tea lady. ‘And at the appointed hour, we will offer you as sacrifices to the eternal spirits of the Bronte sisters!’

  §

  Hours must have passed. The muggy daylight has gone, to be replaced by a musty, dank dimness. We awake in a cellar. We have no idea where, or who has dragged us into this awful, wormy, slimy place. It’s not too bright in here. Light seeps through the gap around the door. It’s locked when I try it. We are prisoners.

  Effie looks furious. She checks the time and finds that her watch has been nabbed. Then we both realise that we are not wearing the outfits we set out in this morning. We are garbed in the same rough white robes as we found in Mrs Harris’s bedroom. Ceremonial robes.

  ‘Who the devil undressed us, that’s what I’d like to know,’ says Effie. ‘I’ve only got underwear on under this nasty thing. That two-piece of mine was expensive!’

  I’ve never been as fussy about clothes as Effie. But I’m disturbed at the thought of strangers undressing me and seeing my scars and maybe being horrified at what they found under my everyday apparel. I don’t want these people knowing anything more about me than they need to. However, right now the thing I’m most concerned about is the reason we’ve been incarcerated.

  ‘Do you really think they want to sacrifice us, Effie?’

  She nods grimly. ‘There’s no telling what they might do. If these people don’t want the secret of the Brontes getting out into the wider world, they might very well bump us off.’

  ‘But can’t you make them understand that you wouldn’t tell anyone? It’s not like you’re going to go to the newspapers, is it?’

  ‘They don’t know that,’ says Effie. ‘They’re frightened, I suppose. Think about it from their point of view. They worship the sisters and they keep all kinds of secrets about them. Then here come us two, trotting about and sticking our beaks in. And then I have my memory restored to me and start shooting my mouth off in front of old Jack…’

  ‘He betrayed us!’

  ‘Not quite. He told the others, but I don’t think he meant us any harm.’

  I shiver, and it’s not just because of the mildewy cold. ‘Is everyone in town involved in this cult, do you think?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ Effie frowns. ‘I think they’ve all had their eyes on us, from the moment we arrived.’

  And there we were, thinking we were being so subtle with our sleuthing, as per usual.

  Then there comes all this scuffling from outside the door of our basement cell. There’s the clink of a large bunch of keys. And then the door swings open with a hideous screech. The figures that step through are backlit and silhouetted, but it only takes a second or two for us to recognize the burly landlord of the Branwen Bronte, and the svelte figure of our landlady, Mrs Harris. Both are sporting off-white ceremonial robes with cowls and hoods.

  ‘Oh dear, ladies,’ says Mrs Harris. ‘This is an embarrassment and no mistake. I’ve never had to be party to the ceremonial killing of any of my house guests before.’

  ‘We won’t be recommending you to anyone,’ I tell her.

  ‘I should think not,’ spits Effie. ‘What a dump your place is! All those tacky ornaments! Doilies under everything! What a rip-off!’

  Mrs Harris looks furious. ‘Jeer all you want, you two. You’ll not live to blacken the name of my B&B!’

  Then she waves the big man from the pub to manhandle us. He picks Effie up in one fist and then he turns on me. But I am stronger than Effie. I thump him a good one up the hooter and he staggers backwards, letting go of the incensed spinster who happens
to be my best friend. The big man’s nose has exploded in a shower of red and he is on the floor moaning pathetically.

  Mrs Harris screeches as we surge past her. Effie lashes out with an elbow and winds the skinny mare. For a fleeting moment I wonder if that move of Effie’s was a vestigial memory of the fighting skills the Brontes gave her. But we don’t have time for chitchat.

  ‘Hurray for us!’ Effie shouts as we pelt down a dark hallway or two. Where the hell are we? And then the rank smell of old hops and weak beer suddenly hits us. We turn a corner and find ourselves in the basement of the Branwen Bronte. There are pipes and kegs and everything you’d expect to find beneath a pub.

  And there is the exit. Into the backyard and the cemetery beyond. Perhaps we’ve made it! Perhaps we’ve even escaped!

  Effie grins ruefully. ‘Why is it we always end up running about in our underwear and having fights with our enemies in the middle of the night? It’s not very dignified for ladies of our ages.’

  Outside we dash and it’s the middle of the night. Whatever was in our tea put us out for hours on end.

  There’s no escape for us.

  Under the full moon and the clear dark skies the whole town seems to be waiting for us in the churchyard.

  Like us they are wearing their robes. They stand as still as the gravestones themselves. They aren’t alarmed by the sight of us breaking out and escaping. They know there can be no escape for us. There are too many of them. The whole town is ranged against us.

  As we stand frozen before their implacable stares, I find myself locking eyes with old Jack. His terrier, Delilah, is still in his arms, even here at these ceremonials.

  There is a fire blazing and some chanting going on. The words are unfamiliar, but the tune rings a bell.

  ‘‘On Ilkley Moor Bar T’at,’’ Effie informs me, as we are seized hold of, and led towards one of the larger, flatter gravestones. Mrs Harris and the landlord of the pub emerge from the cellar behind us and they join the throng that ushers us towards the place where we will meet our doom.