A Spell in the Country

by Heide Goody

  “We’re not open yet,” said the shopkeeper.

  “She needs shoes,” said Kay.

  There was no sign of Bacon-Face yet. Jenny pushed Kay towards the till. The podgy woman with a dodgy perm behind the till seemed horrified by their appearance.

  Jizzimus, bounding with nervous energy, ran under the clothes racks, clambered up the book shelves and ripped a poster from the wall.

  “Gotta keep movin’, guv,” he said.

  “Can I help you?” asked the shopkeeper automatically.

  “Is there a back exit to this shop?” said Jenny.

  The woman stared at Jenny. “Are you in trouble, poppet?” she asked.

  A brochure on the counter caught Jenny’s eye. She recognised the huge boxy house on the cover. Eastville Hall. Her hand went to her pocket.

  “Balls!” yelled Jizzimus in sudden alarm.

  The door flew open. It was Bacon-Face, perfectly alive and not squashed by a bus after all.

  “Shit!” said Jenny.

  The shopkeeper goggled, open-mouthed.

  Jenny clenched her fist, prepared to conjure witchfire, but Kay grabbed a squeezy tube from the counter and squirted it directly into his face. And then something truly strange happened; Bacon-Face’s upper face exploded, ballooning into a candy-floss mess of enflamed tissue and distended skin. Blindly, he screamed and lurched forward, arms flailing. Kay and Jenny recoiled from his reach and he went stumbling past until a box of toys – and a helpful shove from an imp – sent him crashing to the ground.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no!” cried the shopkeeper. She ran forward to help the man.

  “Please,” begged Jenny. “We need your help.”

  “What you did—!” said the shopkeeper.

  “He kidnapped this girl,” said Jenny.

  The shopkeeper froze. “Kidnapped?”

  On the floor, Bacon-Face, who now bore more than a passing resemblance to the Elephant Man, yelled and thrashed. He tried to get up and fell into another rack of clothes.

  “This young woman’s life is in danger,” said Jenny. “Mine too, now.”

  Kay nodded in vigorous agreement.

  “The police,” suggested the shopkeeper brightly.

  “He is the police,” said Kay.

  Jenny picked up the brochure on the counter. “Were you offered a place on this course?” she asked.

  The shopkeeper frowned. “Um. What?”

  Jenny pulled her own crumpled brochure from her pocket and held it up to show. “It starts this evening.”

  “I’ve just packed,” said the shopkeeper.

  “Please,” said Jenny. “Please tell me you’re planning to drive there.”

  It was a long and dull drive east, not made any better by Madison Fray’s car which, as far as Caroline could tell, was made in a country which no longer existed and was held together by good karma and beaded seat covers. The car had an eight-track player and a single eight-track cartridge of the soundtrack to Hair. Long after Caroline was sure they should have hit the North Sea – and the fourth sing-along of Good Morning Starshine had made her wish they had hit the North Sea – they were still zigzagging through a flat landscape of tilled fields and drainage dykes wide enough and deep enough to swallow a car whole. Eventually, they passed a sign that declared it was only three miles to Eastville Hall and Luxury Spa.

  “Luxury Spa?” said Caroline. “You should have definitely put that on the brochure.”

  “Sorry,” said Madison Fray. “You’re not actually in the spa area. Mrs du Plessis has given us the west wing of the house but it’s just rooms. None of the Jacuzzis or whatever else it is they have in spas.”

  “Mrs du Plessis. Interesting name.”

  “Oh, they’ve been in the area for years,” said Madison with sudden enthusiasm. “They were Huguenots, you know the ones, driven out of France centuries back because of their beliefs. Lots of them settled round here. It was them who drained the fens. If not for them, we’d be underwater right now.”

  “What clever people,” said Caroline.

  “Apparently, the locals weren’t pleased. The draining of the fen killed off the fishing and duck-hunting. They drove most of the Frenchies out of the area – you know, torch and pitchfork style – but the du Plessis family held on.”

  He pointed ahead. A mile or more distant, a wide patch of woodland and a large building appeared out of the early evening mist.

  “Eastville Hall.”

  It wasn’t an attractive building, thought Caroline as they pulled into the long driveway. It was big, true. It had a stone façade, complete with Doric columns, gable windows and an ornately carved parapet roof. It even had a small dome towards the centre of the roof. But all these grand features had been put together with a magpie’s eye. It was a stately home as envisioned by someone who had read of them but never seen one. It was neither beautiful nor grimly gothic and forbidding.

  “I think it looks tacky,” said Madison. “But I’m just a pleb, so what do I know?”

  Madison’s car puttered and sputtered past the lines of parked German saloons, Bentleys and Jags and to a long low offshoot from the main building which Caroline suspected had once been stables. Caroline stretched as she got out. There was a salty tang to the air. She looked across the flat fields to the east and wondered how far from the sea they actually were.

  “Boston, ten miles that way,” said Madison, pointing. “Skegness fifteen that way. The bar is just over here.”

  “Read my mind,” said Caroline. She passed Madison her bags and went inside.

  The restaurant-cum-bar in this minor wing was correspondingly small and cosy. Three women sat together at a small table. A buffet table set out against the wall looked untouched. The dark-haired young man at the corner bar was pouring a glass of fizz.

  “Prosecco, ma’am?” he said.

  “Prosecco, yes. Ma’am, no,” Caroline said, taking the weight off her feet at a bar stool. She took a good, long drink.

  “You are welcome to join the other guests.” The barman nodded towards the table of women.

  “Yeah, let me get a couple of these down me first.”

  She put the empty glass down. The barman automatically refilled it. His hands, strong-fingered and work-worn, weren’t the hands of a barman.

  Madison tottered in with her bags and wearily dropped them by the bar. “Evening, George,” he said.

  The barman’s smile for Madison was a fleeting thing.

  A tall skinny woman with glasses, spiky grey hair and a computer tablet entered the bar. “At last,” she said to Madison, voice frosty.

  “Aunt Effie,” He went to kiss her on the cheek and was wafted away.

  Effie, looked at the women sat in the centre of the dining area. “Three delegates checked in,” she said, displeased.

  Madison looked at them. “Ah, Shazam’s here.”

  “Sharon, Madison,” corrected Effie. “Sharon Jaye. Shazam indeed!”

  “I don’t recognise the other two,” he said.

  “No?” Effie sighed. “Norma Looney there has joined us because she’s been instructed to. It was either this or disciplinary action. And that graceful stick insect next to her is Sabrina Holder-Eckford of the Cheshire Holder-Eckfords. Her mother understands the value of what we’re trying to do here. And she owes me a favour.”

  “Right,” said Madison.

  “Three,” said Effie, still plainly unhappy. “Hardly the basis for a grassroots revolution.”

  “Four,” said Madison and gestured to Caroline. “This is Caroline Black.”

  In a heartbeat, Effie’s scowl sprang into a smile of genuine warmth. “Caroline,” she said, hand outstretched to shake. “Effie Fray, course co-ordinator. So glad you could make it.”

  “Happy to swell your numbers from an abysmal three to a positively overcrowded four.”

  “Quite,” said Effie. “But it’s not about the numbers, is it?”

  Caroline smiled. “It frequently is.”

  �
�Not at all, my dear. Although if you could magic up a few more delegates, it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Caroline and downed her drink.

  The double doors swung open and three women walked in.

  “Ta da!” said Caroline.

  The dumpy looking one in a wonky cardigan and wild curls, smiled brightly. “Are we late?” she said.

  “Not at all,” said Madison and closed his eyes as he tried to remember. “Dee, isn’t it?”

  “Dee Finch,” said Effie, tapping her tablet.

  “I’m Jenny Knott,” said the tallest of the newcomers.

  She looked mildly familiar to Caroline, although she couldn’t place her and was distracted by the fact the woman was barefoot.

  “And this is Kay,” said Jenny, gesturing to the timid girl in the biker jacket.

  “Kay?” said Effie, frowning at her screen.

  “That’s right,” said Jenny.

  “Prosecco, ladies?” said George the barman, pouring three glasses.

  “Kay and I would really like to get to our rooms,” said Jenny. “It’s been a tough day.”

  Effie was still scrolling around on her tablet.

  “Sure,” said Madison. “I’ll show you the way.”

  As Caroline watched Madison and the two of them leave, she didn’t miss the look of concern with which Dee Finch followed them.

  When they’d gone, Dee looked at the glasses of sparkling wine as though she’d just realised they were there. “I’d rather have a cup of tea,” she said to George. “I’m a bit parched, poppet.”

  “Of course,” said George.

  Caroline picked up one of the untaken glasses of fizz. “Waste not, want not,” she said.

  Jenny shut the bedroom door, twisted the lock and threw the hinged door guard across. She felt they were as close to safe as they could possibly be. Their troubles were over a hundred miles away and – Jenny had spent most of the journey thinking about it – there was no evidence, no documents to link either of them to this place or this event. Running from the law was never going to be a long-term strategy, but Jenny was willing to take this situation three weeks at a time. All this was assuming that the course organisers or whoever would let Kay stay.

  “I have to go out again,” Jenny told Kay.

  Kay sat, knees under chin, arms folded around her legs, on one of the twin beds. Madison had said they were welcome to a room each but Kay clung to Jenny, and Jenny also thought it for the best.

  “Why?” said Kay.

  “I need to make sure we can stay here.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” said Kay.

  Kay found the remote for the tiny television mounted on the wall above the tea and coffee things. She tossed it onto the bed at Kay’s feet. “Find something to watch. I won’t be long.”

  Jenny went into the small en suite, scrubbed her face with soap and hot water and regarded her reflection.

  “You look like shit, guv,” said Jizzimus, dangling by his knees from the shower rail.

  “Shut up.”

  “What?” called Kay.

  “Nothing. Talking to myself,” said Jenny.

  She put a finger to her neck and peered closer at her reflection. A wart coming through. Add it to the list, she thought.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she told Kay as she walked through the bedroom. “I’ll bring some buffet snacks.”

  “Can I help myself to the mini bar?” said Kay.

  “Do not help yourself to the mini bar! And take your dirty shoes off while you’re on the bed. And lock the door when I’ve gone.”

  In the corridor, Jizzimus kicked tiny dents in the skirting board. “You do know you’re meant’a eat ’em, not be their bloody muvver?” he said.

  “Yeah?” said Jenny. “Well, while we’re here, you’re going to be her bodyguard.”

  “What?”

  “Stand right there. Do not leave your post. If she leaves this room or there’s the slightest sign of danger, you come find me.”

  Jizzimus grumbled and pouted. “Jizzimus Bentwood Flapkin didn’ sign up for this.”

  “You didn’t sign up for anything,” she said. “You told me you were hatched out of a cockerel’s egg laid on a murderer’s grave and exist to serve me.”

  “But this… Should report you to my union.”

  “You don’t have a union,” she said, walking away.

  “Then I’ll start one!” he shouted. She didn’t look back.

  Jenny expected to find the course co-ordinator woman or her scruffy survey-taking lackey in the bar, perhaps looking for her and ready to ask who the strange girl was she’d brought with her, but they were nowhere to be seen and there was only the barman and the five women sat round a table together.

  She asked the barman for a long stiff drink and he duly obliged.

  “Free bar tonight,” he said, waving away her cash.

  “Then I’ll be having a few more of these later.” She raised her glass to him and joined the others.

  “And another of our Brummie friends is here,” said a middle-aged woman in practical tweed wearing a sticker on her lapel that said, Miss Norma Looney.

  “Sorry?” said Jenny.

  “I told them you’d driven over with me today,” said Dee, an anxious look in her eyes as though she feared she had done wrong in telling them.

  Dee knew no more now than she did when Jenny had barged into her shop that morning: two women on the run from a dangerous man; a cop. Perhaps she thought they were fleeing domestic violence. Perhaps she thought they were illegal immigrants. Dee hadn’t pried and Jenny hadn’t explained.

  “That’s right,” said Jenny. “We were in Birmingham this morning.”

  “We were just finding out where everyone was from,” said Norma.

  “Didn’t know if anyone was from round here,” said the beautiful and slightly squiffy woman with a Caroline name tag.

  “Ur, I should imagine,” said a languorously thin creature called Sabrina, “that if anyone was ‘from round here’ they wouldn’t be in a hurry to return.”

  “What about you, Cobwebs?” Caroline said to the big woman with huge cow-like eyes and a red drink with an umbrella.

  The woman’s name tag said Shazam and she’d drawn a little black cat next to it. Shazam wore a purple dress of a style that might have been in fashion a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, with a crocheted shawl shaped like a spider’s web over her shoulders and a black fur stole around her neck. Jenny guessed that Shazam was either a time-traveller, a historical re-enactor or was going through some sort of clothing-based identity crisis.

  “I’m from Melton Mowbray,” she said.

  “Like the pork pies,” said Norma.

  “And it’s where Stilton is made too,” added Shazam proudly.

  “Ur, how nice for you,” said Sabrina coolly. Sabrina prefaced every utterance with a long breathy vowel as though each sentence had to be hauled up from a deep cavern of well-spoken ennui.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” said Dee. She dipped below the table to bring up a battered pre-war suitcase. “You needed some shoes, Jenny.”

  Jenny wasn’t sure what aspect of pork pies or cheese reminded Dee of Jenny’s feet but she didn’t make a comment. Dee opened the case and lifted out two pairs of shoes.

  “Pumps or mules?”

  “I’m not sure you and I have the same size feet,” said Caroline.

  “I take a one size fits all approach at the charity shop and you’d be surprised how often it works,” she said cheerfully.

  “Ur, I’m not sure I could wear charity shop shoes,” said Sabrina. “Or clothes. Or indeed any items that might touch the skin.”

  “So, ‘things’ then,” said Caroline.

  “Right. Ur, I don’t believe I could buy ‘things’ from charity shops. It’s the thought of communicable diseases, you understand.”

  “Can you get diseases from shoes?” asked Shazam.

  “No,” said Jen
ny firmly as she tried the pumps on.

  “I always treat shoes in the shop with a spray of liquorice and wild lime,” said Dee.

  “Ah,” said Jenny, who had been wondering why her feet smelled like Bertie Bassett.

  Sabrina chortled in her now-empty glass. “Ur, liquorice and wild lime are useful against STIs and not much else.”

  “I beg to differ, sweetness,” said Dee. “I’ve read that they were used in ages past for treatment of foot diseases.”

  “Yes. And you are aware that, in antiquity, ‘diseases of the feet’ was a handy euphemism for venereal disease?” said Sabrina. “Those Biblical kings weren’t dying of athlete’s foot, dear.”

  Sabrina clicked her fingers to catch the barman’s attention and gestured for fresh drinks all round. Jenny wiggled her toes. The shoes were a perfect fit.

  “They’re great,” she said.

  “And,” said Dee cheerily, “apparently your feet are entirely safe from syphilis and herpes, poppet.”

  “My mum got foot herpes,” said Shazam.

  “Really?” said Caroline.

  “From a masseur called Carlos who she met on a package holiday in Faliraki.”

  “You know,” said Norma stiffly, “we didn’t have such things in my day.”

  “Package holidays?” said Shazam.

  “Herpes?” said Caroline.

  “Charity shops,” said Norma. “Things lasted back then. Make do and mend.”

  “I make nearly all my own clothes,” said Shazam.

  Without asking, Norma leant over, took Shazam’s purple dress sleeve in her hand and rubbed it critically between thumb and forefinger. She grunted and plucked at Shazam’s spider web shawl. “Is it meant to have all these holes in it?”

  “It’s a ‘look,’” said Shazam with a certain timid bravado. “And I knit all my own underwear.”

  “Knit?” said Jenny. “Doesn’t that—?”

  “—Chafe?” said Sabrina.

  Norma made a disagreeable noise. “Too flimsy for my liking. That’s the problem with modern clothes.” She placed her hands either side of her ample, tweed-clad bosom. “Good fabric. Solid under wiring. Whalebone had its uses you know.” She grasped her bra through her jacket and gave a good jiggle. “They don’t make them like they used to.”