Not Just a Witch

by Eva Ibbotson

  Not Just a Witch

  Eva Ibbotson writes for both adults and children. Born in Vienna, she now lives in the north of England. She has a daughter and three sons, now grown up, who showed her that children like to read about ghosts, wizards and witches ‘because they are just like people but madder and more interesting’. She has written seven other ghostly adventures for children. Which Witch? was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal and The Secret of Platform, 13 was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. Her novel Journey to the River Sea was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award.

  ‘A fast, funny tale with a stinging bite!’

  Books for Keeps

  ‘Horribly funny’

  Susan Hill, Sunday Times

  Also by Eva Ibbotson

  Which Witch?

  The Haunting of Hiram

  The Great Ghost Rescue

  The Secret of Platform 13

  Dial a Ghost

  Monster Mission

  Journey to the River Sea

  The Star of Kazan

  The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

  For older readers

  The Secret Countess

  A Song for Summer

  Not Just a

  Witch

  Eva Ibbotson

  MACMILLAN CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  for

  Bertie, Freddie, Theo

  and Octavia

  First published 1989 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This edition published 2001 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47773-4 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47772-7 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-330-47774-1 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Eva Ibbotson 1989

  The right of Eva Ibbotson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter One

  When people quarrel it is bad, but when witches quarrel it is terrible.

  Heckie was an animal witch. This didn’t mean of course that she was a witch who was an animal; it meant that she did animal magic. Her full name was Hecate Tenbury-Smith and she had started when she was still a child, turning the boring noses of her mother’s friends into interesting whiskery snouts or covering the cold ears of traffic wardens with thick black fur. She was a kind girl and only wanted to be helpful, but when she gave the swimming bath attendant red spots and a fishy tail so that he could pretend to be a trout if he wanted to, her parents sent her away to a well-known school for witches.

  It was a school for making good witches. The motto the girls wore on their blazers said WITCHES AGAINST WICKEDNESS and the headmistress was choosy about whom she took.

  Heckie was very happy there. She made a lot of friends, but her best friend was a stone witch called Dora Mayberry. Dora wasn’t made of stone, but she could turn anything into stone. When Dora was still in her high chair, she had looked at a raspberry jelly out of her round little eyes and it turned into something you couldn’t cut up even with a carving knife. And when she started turning the toothpaste solid in its tube and filling the fridge with statues of pork chops, she too was sent away to school.

  It takes thirty years to train a witch and during all that time, Heckie and Dora were friends. Heckie was tall and thin with frizzy hair, pop eyes and teeth which stuck out, giving her an eager look. Dora was squat and solid and had muscles like a footballer because it is heavy work dealing in stone. They shared their secrets and got each other out of scrapes, and at night in the dormitory they talked about how they were going to use their magic to make the world a better place.

  By this time Heckie could change any person into whatever animal she pleased by touching him with her Knuckle of Power (though for the best results she liked to use her Toe of Transformation also) and Dora could turn anybody into stone by squinting at him out of her small round eyes. And then, when they had been friends for thirty years, Heckie and Dora quarrelled.

  It happened at the Graduation Party where all the witches were to get their diplomas and get ready to go out into the world. The party, of course, was very special, and both Heckie and Dora went separately to the hat shop kept by a milliner witch and ordered hats.

  Obviously a witch on the most important day of her life is not going to turn up in a straw hat trimmed with daisies or a bonnet threaded with sky-blue lace. Heckie thought for a long time and then she ordered a hat made of living snakes.

  The snakes were mixed. The crown of the hat was made of Ribbon Snakes most delicately woven; edging the brim were King Snakes striped in red and black and a single Black Mamba, coiled in the shape of a bow, hung low over Heckie’s forehead.

  Heckie tried it on and it looked lovely. The snakes hissed and spat and shimmered; the flickering tongues made the hat marvellously alive. Snake hats are not only beautiful, they are useful: when you take them off you just put them in a tank and feed them a few dead mice and a boiled egg or two and they last for years.

  The day of the party came. Heckie put on her batskin robe, fixed a bunch of black whiskers on to her chin – and lowered the hat carefully on to her curls. Then she set off across the lawn to the tent where the refreshments were.

  But what should happen then? Coming towards her was her friend Dora – and she was wearing exactly the same hat!

  It wasn’t roughly the same. It was exactly the same. The same Ribbon Snakes heaving and hissing on the crown; the same King Snakes writhing round the brim; the same poisonous Mamba tied into a bow!

  The two witches stopped dead and glared at each other and the other witches stood round to see what would happen.

  ‘How dare you copy my hat?’ cried Heckie. She was really dreadfully upset. How could Dora, who was her best friend, hurt her like this?

  But Dora was just as upset. ‘How dare you copy my hat?’ she roared, sticking out her jaw.

  ‘I chose this hat first. I am an an
imal witch. It is my right to wear a hat of living snakes.’

  ‘Oh, really? I suppose you’ve heard of my great-great-great-grandmother who was a Gorgon and had serpents growing from her scalp? It is my right to wear living snakes.’

  But showing off about your relatives never works. Heckie only became angrier. ‘The only thing you’ve got a right to wear on your head is a bucket,’ she shrieked.

  This was how the quarrel started, but soon the witches were throwing all sorts of insults at each other. They brought up old grudges: the time Dora had turned Heckie’s hot-water bottle to cement so that Heckie woke up with her stomach completely squashed. The time Heckie borrowed three warts from Dora’s make-up box and got cocoa on them . . .

  From shouting at each other, the witches went on to tug at each other’s hats. Dora tugged a Ribbon Snake out of Heckie’s brim and hung it on a laurel bush. Heckie pulled at the end of Dora’s Black Mamba and undid the bow. And all the time they screamed at each other as though they were spoilt little brats, not respectable middle-aged witches.

  Ten minutes later both their hats were in ruins and a friendship which had lasted all their schooldays was over.

  The witches had planned to go and live close together in the same town. They were each going to buy a business where they could earn their living like ordinary ladies, but all their spare time would be spent in Doing Good.

  Now Heckie went by herself to the town of Wellbridge, but Dora went off to a different town.

  It was without her best friend, therefore, that Heckie began to try and make the world a better place.

  Chapter Two

  It was a boy called Daniel who found out that a witch had come to live in Wellbridge.

  He found out the night he went to babysit for Mr and Mrs Boothroyd at The Towers. Mr Boothroyd owned a factory on the edge of the town which made bath plugs and he was very rich. Unfortunately he was also very mean and so was his wife. As for his baby, which was called Basil, it was quite the most unpleasant baby you could imagine. Most babies have something about them which is all right. The ones that look like shrivelled chimpanzees often have nice fingernails; the ones that look like half-baked buns often smile very sweetly. But Basil was an out and out disaster. When Basil wasn’t screaming he was kicking; when he wasn’t kicking he was throwing up his food and when he wasn’t doing that he was holding his breath and turning blue.

  Daniel was really too young to babysit and so was Sumi who was his friend. But Sumi, whose parents had come over from India to run the grocery shop in the street behind Daniel’s house, was so sensible and so used to minding her three little brothers that the Boothroyds knew she would be fit to look after Basil while they went to the Town Hall to have dinner with the Lord Mayor. What’s more, they knew they would have to pay her much less than they would have to pay a grown-up for looking after their son.

  And Sumi had suggested that Daniel came along. ‘I’ll ask you your spellings,’ she said, because she knew how cross Daniel’s parents got when he didn’t do brilliantly at school.

  Daniel’s parents were professors. Both of them. His father was called Professor Trent and if only Daniel had been dead and buried in some interesting tomb somewhere, the Professor would have been delighted with him. He was an archaeologist who studied ancient tribes and in particular their burial customs and he was incredibly clever. But Daniel wasn’t mummified or covered in clay so the Professor didn’t have much time for him. Daniel’s mother (who was also called Professor Trent) was a philosopher who had written no less than seven books on The Meaning of Meaning and she too was terribly clever and found it hard to understand that her son was just an ordinary boy who sometimes got his sums wrong and liked to play football.

  The house they lived in was tall and grey and rather dismal, and looked out across the river to the university where both the professors worked, and to the zoo. As often as not when Daniel came home from school there was nobody there, just notes propped against the teapot telling him what to unfreeze for supper and not to forget to do his piano practice.

  When you know you are a disappointment to your parents, your schoolfriends become very important. Fortunately Daniel had plenty of these. There was Joe whose father was a keeper in the Wellbridge Zoo, and Henry whose mother worked as a chambermaid in the Queen’s Hotel. And there was Sumi who was so gentle and so clever and never showed off even though she knew the answers to everything. And because it was Sumi who asked him, he went along to babysit at The Towers.

  The Boothroyds’ house was across the river in a wide, tree-lined street between the university and the zoo. They had been quite old when Basil was born and they dressed him like babies were dressed years ago. Basil slept in a barred cot with a muslin canopy and blue bows; his pillow was edged with lace and he had a silken quilt. And there he sat, in a long white nightdress, steaming away like a red and angry boil.

  The Boothroyds left. Sumi and Daniel settled down on the sitting-room sofa. Sumi took out the list of spellings.

  ‘Separate,’ she said, and Daniel sighed. He was not very fond of separate.

  But it didn’t matter because at that moment Basil began to scream.

  He screamed as though he was being stuck all over with red-hot skewers and by the time they got upstairs he had turned an unpleasant shade of puce and was banging his head against the side of the cot.

  Sumi managed to gather him up. Daniel ran to warm his bottle under the tap. Sumi gave it to him and he bit off the teat. Daniel ran to fetch another. Basil took a few windy gulps, then swivelled round and knocked the bottle out of Sumi’s hand.

  It took a quarter of an hour to clean up the mess and by the time they got downstairs again, Sumi had a long scratch across her cheek.

  ‘Separate,’ she said wearily, picking up the list.

  ‘S . . . E . . . P . . .’ began Daniel – and was wondering whether to try an A or an E when Basil began again.

  This time he had been sick all over the pillow. Sumi fetched a clean pillow-case and Basil took a deep breath and filled his nappy. She managed to change him, kicking and struggling, and put on a fresh one. Basil waited till it was properly fastened, squinted – and filled it again.

  It went on like this for the next hour. Sumi never lost her patience, but she was looking desperately tired and Daniel, who knew how early she got up each day to mind her little brothers and help tidy the shop before school, could gladly have murdered Basil Boothroyd.

  At eight o’clock they gave up and left him. Basil went on screaming for a while and then – miracle of miracles – he fell silent. But when Daniel looked across at Sumi for another dose of spelling he saw that she was lying back against the sofa cushions. Her long dark hair streamed across her face and she was fast asleep.

  Daniel should now have felt much better. Sumi was asleep, there was no need to spell separate and Basil was quiet. And for about ten minutes he did.

  Then he began to worry. Why was Basil so quiet? Had he choked? Had he bitten his tongue out and bled to death?

  Daniel waited a little longer. Then he crept upstairs and stood listening by the door.

  Basil wasn’t dead. He was snoring. Daniel was about to go downstairs again when something about the noise that Basil was making caught his attention. Basil was snoring, but he was snoring . . . nicely. Daniel couldn’t think of any other way of putting it. It was a cosy, snuffling snore and it surprised Daniel because he didn’t think that Basil could make any noise that wasn’t horrid.

  Daniel put his head round the door . . . took a few steps into the room.

  And stopped dead.

  At first he simply didn’t believe it. What had happened was so amazing, so absolutely wonderful, that it couldn’t be real. Only it was real. Daniel blinked and rubbed his eyes and shook himself, but it was still there, curled up on the silken quilt: not a screaming, disagreeable baby, but the most enchanting bulldog puppy with a flat, wet nose, a furrowed forehead and a blob of a tail.

  Daniel stood looking
down at it, feeling quite light-headed with happiness, and the puppy opened its eyes. They were the colour of liquorice and brimming with soul. There are people who say that dogs don’t smile, but people who say that are silly. The bulldog grinned. It sat up and wagged its tail. It licked Daniel’s hands.

  ‘Oh, I do so like you,’ said Daniel to the little, wrinkled dog.

  And the dog liked Daniel. He lay on his back so that Daniel could scratch his stomach; he jumped up to try and lick Daniel’s face, but his legs were too short and he collapsed again. Daniel had longed and longed for a dog to keep him company in that tall, grey house to which his parents came back so late. Now it seemed like a miracle, finding this funny, loving, squashed-looking little dog in place of that horrible baby.

  Because Basil had gone. There was no doubt about it. He wasn’t in the cot and he wasn’t under it. He wasn’t anywhere. Daniel searched the bathroom, the other bedrooms . . . Nothing. Someone must have come in and taken Basil and put the little dog there instead. A kidnapper? Someone wanting to hold Basil to ransom? But why leave the little dog? The Boothroyds might not be very bright, but they could tell the difference between their baby and a dog.

  I must go and tell Sumi, he thought, and it was only then that he became frightened, seeing what was to come. The screaming parents, the police, the accusations. Perhaps they’d be sent to prison for not looking after Basil properly. And where was Basil? He might be an awful baby, but nobody wanted him harmed.

  Daniel tore himself away from the bulldog and studied the room.

  How could the kidnappers have got in? The front door was locked, so was the back and the window was bolted. He walked over to the fireplace. It was the old-fashioned kind with a wide chimney. But that was ridiculous – even if the kidnappers had managed to come down it, how could they have got the baby off the roof?

  Then he caught sight of something spilled in the empty grate: a yellowish coarse powder, like breadcrumbs.

  He scooped some up, felt it between his fingers, put it to his nose. Not breadcrumbs. Goldfish food. He knew because the only pet his parents had allowed him to keep was a goldfish he’d won in a fair, and it had died almost at once because of fungus on its fins. And he knew too where the goldfish food came from: the corner pet shop, two streets away from his house. The old man who kept it made it himself; it had red flecks in it and always smelled very odd.