“Thanks for your help,” Clarissa smiled and stepped backwards.
“Thank you,” said Toby.
It came out to the man’s untrained ear as roo-roo, and the old chap laughed. “You’re welcome,” he said.
The Gamekeeper’s Cottage turned out to be both a gamekeeper’s cottage and to be called The Gamekeeper’s Cottage. A late Georgian building with a wide bay at the front, it had recently been repainted and the brickwork repointed. The path had been swept clean. Lady Amphitrite had certainly tended her herb garden with care.
Everything appeared spick and span.
Clarissa looked down at the path and swallowed. Impossible to imagine that Lady Amphitrite had left here this afternoon, never dreaming she would not be returning home later this evening.
“She wasn’t a particularly nice person.” Toby’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
“No. I suppose not. But still.”
Toby understood. He nuzzled into her legs and she reached down to pet his ears.
Across the path the cemetery—or graveyard or family burial plot, whatever it had been—stood desolate on an unkempt patch of land. One large crumbling stone mausoleum dominated the space, with perhaps another twenty or so gravestones lying higgledy-piggledy around it. The grass had grown tall and dried out over the long summer. It waved backwards and forwards, buffeted by the steadily stiffening breeze.
A crack of thunder startled Clarissa, so lost in her thoughts had she been about the cycle of life and death. In the midst of life, we are in death… isn’t that what good Christians claimed? To Clarissa, who had never really reflected on her own mortality, the words had never seemed more pertinent.
“The storm’s getting closer,” Toby said. Even he seemed uneasy.
“Yes, you’re right. We’d better crack on.” Clarissa pushed open the gate. Freshly painted and oiled, it didn’t so much as squeak. Clarissa admired Lady Amphitrite’s housekeeping and maintenance skills, comparing herself to the high priestess somewhat unfavourably, although in her defence, paint and plaster and plants cost money and Clarissa didn’t have any of that to spare, thanks to The Pointy Woman.
But then again, at least Clarissa was alive, so she had that advantage over Lady Amphitrite.
Clarissa ventured slowly to the front door and stared at it. “Do you think we should knock?” she whispered.
Toby, by her side, studied the house. “It all looks quiet. Do you think she lived with someone else?”
Clarissa had no idea. She side-stepped the door and peered through the huge bay window. A neat living room—surprisingly mundane in its decorative taste, all cool beige and white wood—offered no clues.
Still non-committal about announcing their arrival, Clarissa chewed her bottom lip, trying to conjure up some kind of plan. “Let’s go around the back,” she decided.
They followed Lady Amphitrite’s weed-free crazy paving around the side of the house to the small back garden. The rear of the space had been given over for growing vegetables. Runner beans and peas drooped from trellises, ripe for picking. A wooden shed, painted a pale sage green, stood on a concrete base, and a number of wooden chairs were arranged on the patio in front of a small conservatory.
Clarissa stretched up on tiptoes to peer into the kitchen. Another tidy room. No-one in sight.
She turned to the conservatory and on the off chance tried the door. It had been left unlocked. The sliding doors separating the house from the conservatory were already standing open, perhaps to regulate the heat.
“Whoa!” Clarissa pushed it open and flicked a glance at Toby.
“Who leaves their door unlocked?” he asked her.
Clarissa shrugged. “I suppose living this rurally she imagined she wouldn’t be a target for the bad people.”
“Or it might just be that she is the bad people,” Toby said, and before Clarissa could stop him, he’d jumped up the step and over the threshold into the conservatory.
“Toby!” Clarissa whispered and gestured at him frantically. “Get out of there. We don’t know—”
“We’ll never know unless we investigate.” He turned tail and skipped through the open sliding doors, disappearing from view.
He’d left her little choice. Clarissa followed him in. “Hello?” she called, not really wanting anyone to answer her.
Nobody did.
Clarissa poked her head into the downstairs rooms. A relatively large lounge-diner ran the length of the house, with the kitchen opening off it. There was a hall with an under-stairs cloakroom and that was it. No basement. No secret rooms.
Halfway up the stairs, Toby stuck his head out between the banisters. “Are we going up?”
“I suppose so,” Clarissa whispered. “Can you hear anything? Sense anyone?”
“Not a thing,” Toby replied and started to climb. Clarissa followed him, slowly, reaching inside her bag to locate her wand. Toby waited on the landing for her, eyeing the battered stick in her hand with something akin to puzzled amusement. “What are you intending to do with that?”
“Shhh!” Clarissa widened her eyes, as if to say, don’t prewarn the enemy. But even she smirked. She’d taken the obligatory defence and attack magick courses at Ravenswood, but her scores had been middling to poor, and it had never been something she had much interest in.
There were four doors up here and a hatch to the attic. Clarissa tried the first door and found an airing cupboard with an old-fashioned lagged boiler. Lady Amphitrite’s towels and bed linen were arranged on shelves above it. The second door opened into a guest bedroom looking out over the rear garden. It had a small double bed with immaculate white linen, a white wooden chest of drawers and a rug. Pristine, Clarissa could well imagine that nobody had ever slept here.
The third door opened into a bathroom. Clarissa was pleased to see things were a little less orderly in here. The shelves were jammed with packets of black hair-dye, tubes of mascara and lipstick, jars of concealer, pots of dark-coloured make-up and numerous other beauty products. Clarissa twiddled with a few of them, reading the labels.
Dermismajik.
Purchased from Temperance House.
Not damning evidence by any means. Lady Amphitrite had been the High Priestess after all, and where else would she have purchased her magickal cosmetics?
But still…
The final room was the main bedroom, and once again Clarissa found herself surprised at its simple nature, its general lack of witchiness. She’d expected a much more gothic feel from Lady Amphitrite. For sure the furnishings in here were black—a black iron bedstead with a twisted frame, an enormous black wardrobe and chest of drawers containing Lady Amphitrite’s extravagant clothing—but the prints on the white walls depicted wild flowers, and the patchwork bedspread looked like something her granny might have stitched together for her.
“Hmmm.” Clarissa pulled open the doors of the wardrobe and riffled through them. Nothing of interest.
They retreated to the hall and Clarissa peered inside the bathroom once more. “This is where the magick happened.” She pointed at the candles. “She donned this make-up and became the draconian Lady Amphitrite. Other than that, she was just an ordinary witch, like me.”
“You’re not ordinary,” Toby reassured her, and waited at the top of the stairs while she closed the doors.
“Catesby isn’t here,” Clarissa stated the obvious.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here except Lady Amphitrite,” Toby agreed.
Clarissa joined him at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t found anything that would help them in their search for poor Grace.
Toby sniffed at a pole leaning against the crook of the wall. “What’s this?”
“It’s the thing you use to unlatch the loft door,” Clarissa told him, looking up at the ceiling. “Should we take a look?” She reached for the pole and deftly wielded it, slipping the hook into the latch first time. The door dropped open, exposing the loft ladder, and once more she brandished her po
le, grabbed the ladder and drew it carefully down towards her.
Clarissa pursed her lips. “I don’t have a torch.”
“Oooh!” Toby jiggled around. “I know a spell. I read it in Dom’s book. Can I use it? Can I?”
“Have you practised it before?” Clarissa asked, dubious about his ability to replicate what he’d read.
“No, but—”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Toby grumbled in discontent.
“Sorry darling, it’s just with magick you need to be careful, anything can go wrong—”
He didn’t wait to hear any more. Jumping up he placed his front two paws on the ladder, stretching through the length of his body to see a little more of the roof space above them, before barking, once, twice. “Levis est vita mea!” he ordered, and the loft room lit up with gentle golden light as though entertaining a convention of fireflies.
Clarissa gawped at him. “Well,” she said finally, “that told me.” Quickly she scaled the ladder and climbed into the roof space. “Completely empty,” she called down, and she sounded puzzled. “There’s nothing up here at all. Not even empty moving boxes or suitcases.”
She clambered down to the landing and busied herself stowing away the ladder and closing the hatch.
“Sorry,” said Toby. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“That’s the thing, Toby.” Clarissa turned to him. “It was a good idea. A very good idea. You see, one thing stands out to me. There is nowhere in this house for Lady Amphitrite to perform her magickal workings. There’s no altar. Nothing at all.”
Toby nodded. Even Clarissa, who quite possibly was the laxest witch of all time, kept a small altar in the spare bedroom of Silverwinds where she slept.
“Maybe she does it all at Temperance House?” Toby suggested.
“Maybe.” Toby could tell by the scrunched up look on Clarissa’s face that she didn’t buy that idea.
“So you’re thinking—”
“There must be somewhere else she has access to. Somewhere really close by.”
They descended the stairs together and returned to the immaculate front room. Nothing in the house spoke of Lady Amphitrite’s personality. Nothing at all. Perhaps she slept here and ate here, but she didn’t ‘witch’ here.
Clarissa turned about and stared out of the bay window, across the small front garden, beyond the low wall and across the path outside. The mausoleum in Hawkerne Hall’s family burial plot was starkly silhouetted against the bruised purple sky, the storm only a few miles away now and travelling quickly.
“There!” Clarissa’s eyes lit up. “We need to go and visit that mausoleum.”
The first drops of rain peppered Toby’s head as he pushed his way through the tall grass. Huge droplets of water that promised they’d be soaked to the skin in no time.
“There’s a path, here!” Clarissa called excitedly, and he pushed through a particularly dense patch of thistle—ouch—to join her. It wasn’t a path so much as a trail of grass that had been flattened over time.
It led straight to the mausoleum.
The mausoleum was one of those typical mid-Victorian gothic architectural pieces you’d find in any old graveyard and cemetery up and down the length of Britain. Part brick, part stone, part marble, it had four ornate pillars, now crumbling and covered in lichen, and a pair of cherubs adorning the entrance. Probably the size of a single garage, Toby didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything of interest.
Clarissa—who had more than an inkling of what to expect from a mausoleum such as this—had other ideas.
“Come on,” she urged him, covering her head with her handbag as the rain began to lash down on them. She ran the last few metres and took the steps two at a time, crouching under the shelter of the sturdy stone roof. Toby dashed in after her and took his time to sniff his way around.
It smelled of damp, of mustiness, of a time long gone, of crumbling bones and memories long forgotten. If nobody had visited here for decades, perhaps he wouldn’t have caught the traces of any humans, only badgers and rats, squirrels and foxes and the odd cat. But people had been here… and he recognised the scents.
Lady Amphitrite for sure. Recently. As recently as this morning, he guessed. Her fragrance—something musky like patchouli mixed with lily-of-the-valley—and her own particular human smell was the strongest scent, lying heavily over everything else.
He followed her trail between the shelves, where dusty old coffins in poor repair lay on triple-tiered shelves, one above the other. The smallest, children perhaps, inhabited the top shelf to the left. A grander, much larger coffin occupied the bottom shelf. It had handles that sparkled, albeit dully in the dim light, and seemed to have held together well.
“Who were these people?” Toby asked.
Clarissa scraped the dust from the plaque of the coffin nearest her. “Lord John Tomlinson, 1793-1854, of Hawkerne Hall. I guess he was the local bigwig.”
“He wore a big wig?” Toby asked.
Clarissa blinked. “He probably did, actually. The biggest wig in these parts.”
Toby accepted this and continued with his investigative sniffing. Clarissa followed him, instinctively knowing what he would find.
The mausoleum ended at an iron gate. It was dark beyond. What little light there might have been had been banished by the onset of the storm. Behind them, rainwater cascaded over the edges of the roof, pummelling the ground. Clarissa regretted her choice of open-toed footwear right now, but she’d have to cross that bridge when she came to it.
“Do your switching on the lights spell again, Toby,” she said, and Toby happily obliged.
“Levis est vita mea!” The area beyond the gate lit up, softly illuminating a hole in the floor and a flight of roughly carved stone steps.
“Bingo!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I’ve heard of these family mausoleums before. From the outside they look quite small, but they were often built with a lower level so that more ancestors could be lodged together.”
“A kind of library of the dead,” Toby suggested.
“Mmm. Something like that.” Clarissa tried the gate. Locked, of course. She lifted her wand and directed a short shot of energy at it. The lock fizzed and clinked and the next time she tried the handle, the gate swung free.
“I’ll go first,” Toby said. “I’m more likely to hear someone if they’re lying in wait for us.”
“Be careful,” Clarissa said, and fell in behind him.
They edged down the stone stairs, Clarissa steadying herself with her free hand, running her fingers against the rough wall, her wand held out in front of her. She’d imagined such a staircase would be cramped and winding, but actually it was wide enough for a coffin to be carried down, and while the stairs themselves were deep, they didn’t wind around. It was a straight descent to the next floor.
At the bottom was a pair of heavy wooden doors. The first thing Clarissa noticed was their condition. Unlike everything else they’d seen in the mausoleum thus far, these were new, the hinges and lock plate sparkling and made of less sturdy steel, the wood untreated and unmarked. A recent replacement for something far older and weaker that might be easily broken through.
Clarissa lifted her wand and tried her spell on the lock, but although she sent out the same energy as previously, this time there was no fizzing, no welcome clink as the lock dissolved. She made a second attempt, increasing the intent of her thoughts. The lock glowed red but stubbornly resisted her magick.
“It’s been charmed.” She sighed in exasperation. “I don’t know what sort of charm, or how to break it.”
Toby, sniffing at the floor, suddenly sat back. “We have to get in there.”
“I’m trying.” Clarissa glanced down at him. “Why? What do you smell?”
“Someone… not someone I’ve met, but it must be Catesby. When we were in her study in Ravenswood I could smell her scent. It’s here. She’s crossed over the threshold. It’s faint. But she’s b
een here.”
Clarissa tried her spell again, but to no avail.
Toby jumped onto his back legs and scratched at the door before collapsing to the floor once more. The bottom hinges, at the perfect eye-height for him, sparkled merrily.
“You know, I think maybe we’re doing this all wrong,” Toby said, and patted the hinge closest to him. “Ignore the lock and blast these things to smithereens.”
Clarissa studied the hinges more closely. “I think that could work. I’ll have to do one side at a time though.”
“No need,” Toby said. “I’ll do the left-hand ones; you do the right.”
He focused on the bottom hinge, imagined it melting to little more than warm silvery paint. “After three,” he said. “One, two, three! Diffluo!”
The hinge crackled and hissed and dissipated into liquid, dribbling down the door.
He stepped back and regarded Clarissa’s work. Her hinge had exploded. “Nice,” he said.
“Let’s do the top ones,” Clarissa urged him. “Do I need to lift you up?”
Toby took another few steps backwards. “No, I’ll do it from here.”
He nodded at Clarissa. “Ready? After three again. One, two, three! Diffluo!”
This time when the hinge melted, and Clarissa’s exploded with a loud pop, the door wobbled in place. “Stand back,” Clarissa ordered him, and leaning forward she pushed the door with the tip of her wand. It remained stubbornly in place for a few seconds then tipped forwards, gathering momentum as it fell. It crashed to the floor with an almighty boom. A cloud of dust and air flew back at them, obscuring their view.
Toby sneezed and Clarissa coughed and blinked. When the dust had finally settled, they stared into the large vaulted space beyond. It had to be six times the size of the tomb above their heads.
“I guess we’ve lost the benefit of surprise,” Toby said, and Clarissa snickered softly.
“Wise guy. Let’s go,” she said. “Keep your eyes… and nose… and ears peeled.”
“Why would I want to peel my eyes or nose or anything?” Toby asked as he trotted over the surface of the door. It wobbled beneath his feet like a seesaw, and Clarissa, too busy keeping her own balance, declined to answer.
Bark Side of the Moon: A Paranormal Animal Cozy Mystery (Spellbound Hound Magic and Mystery Book 3) Page 14