Wine, Witches and Song (The Everyday Witches of Wildham-on-Sea Book 1)

by Molly Milligan

  This was different. Clare could choose not to eat the flapjack. That made it okay, didn’t it?

  “Right, what have you got for me?” I said, sitting down.

  “Anne Boleyn,” Clare said. “Have you looked her up online?”

  “A little bit. She got beheaded. And she was Queen Elizabeth’s mother. I got lost with all the other women Henry married and stuff, though.”

  “She was married to King Henry for three years,” she said. “How does that strike you?”

  “It’s short.”

  “Three years,” she repeated. “How long was Will in London for?”

  “Oh – three years!” I laughed. “That’s a co-incidence. Will Howlett isn’t the re-incarnation of Anne Boleyn and he wasn’t beheaded. Ugh. I would have hated to have found the body if he had been.”

  “There is more. She was beheaded on the nineteenth of May.”

  “And Will was killed on the fourth. So, no link there either.”

  “Yes there is,” said Clare. “Today is the fifteenth. If anything is going to happen...”

  “If something is going to happen, it will happen next week. Okay. And does your research suggest what might happen?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, no. She was beheaded in the Tower of London and buried initially in an unmarked grave in the chapel in the Tower.”

  “Oh, poor woman. I suppose her ghost walks the earth.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Clare. “Can’t you ... you know, contact the dead?”

  “I’m afraid not. My magic is a little more homely.”

  “Can you let them contact you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m just thinking outside the box,” Clare said. “You can’t go after them but can you open yourself up to be contacted by the dead?”

  “I am absolutely not wandering around a graveyard begging ghosts and spirits to come at me. No. No! That sounds terrifying.”

  “You’re a witch.”

  “Which just means I know exactly what is out there and that’s why it’s so terrifying. Anyone who isn’t scared simply doesn’t understand.” I shook my head decisively. “Nope, no, no way.”

  “Huh. Just trying to help.”

  “I know. I really appreciate all this! I do. I haven’t had time to do it myself.”

  “And why should you do it all yourself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Clare flicked some crumbs at me. “Because you think you’re the only person who can get it right.”

  “That is not true. Much. Oh, here’s a thing – I don’t know if you’ve come across it in your research or not – has she any connection with Norfolk? Is this place important? I’ve seen Anne Boleyn stuff in gift shops but I’ve never actually looked into why that is.”

  “Oh my god, you’ve really not explored it? You absolute doofus. You’ve got a few articles here you could write,” Clare said. “Didn’t you know she was born in Norfolk?”

  “Did she live here for long?”

  “No, not really.” Clare flicked through her notebook. “Yeah, so she was sent away to courts in Europe to learn how to be a proper lady. But I think that she spent her early years, her very early years, at Blickling Hall.”

  I sat back and tapped my fingers on my smartphone. “Boleyn ... okay, so it says here that she actually grew up at the family seat of Hever Castle in Kent. You’re wrong.”

  “The Boleyns inherited Hever Castle in 1505,” she retorted, scanning her notes. “But Anne’s actual birth year is debated. I went a bit deeper than Wikipedia. What is known for definite is that she was born here.”

  I screwed up my face. “It’s tenuous.”

  “It’s all we have so far.”

  “What does nowe thus mean?” I asked.

  “It’s the Boleyn’s family motto, that’s all.”

  I put my head in my hands and tried to force my brain to make the connections. Stubbornly, it would not.

  I gave up – for the moment.

  Temporarily stymied, I drove Clare home. She had come by taxi but I told her that I hadn’t run my car for a while and I needed to keep the battery topped up. It was a lie we were both happy to accept.

  I sat in the darkness outside her house and watched as she made her way up the path and through the door. She waved and I waved back. Then I continued to sit, thinking for a while, before I headed for home.

  But I did not enter my own house.

  IT WAS NEARLY TEN O’CLOCK now but there was a light on in Gloria’s house opposite to mine. She lived in a narrow two-storey cottage attached to the side of her gallery, which was accessed by a separate door. The window next to her front door was her kitchen and I could see a shape moving around as the blind was only pulled halfway down.

  I was buzzing with energy, crackling with it. Anne Boleyn raced around my head and I could not shift her. It was the most bare of links – just her name in an old book of music – but the book was a murder weapon and the victim had had the three years of success that the doomed queen had had.

  I knocked at Gloria’s door and poured all of that out as soon as she appeared. She was still in her day clothes, not yet ready for bed. She took me into her kitchen and made me repeat everything.

  I did so. “There is a link. I cannot sleep,” I told her. “There is a link! Do you see it? Tell me I am not going mad.”

  She half-closed her eyes. I realised now that she was trying to block out all the overwhelming impressions of the world around her, and respond directly and only to me. She smiled when she opened her eyes again. “You want to go to Blickling Hall, don’t you?”

  “Yes. And I need you.”

  “Give me a second.”

  “I didn’t mean right now,” I said hastily. “I saw you were up and thought I’d call to arrange something for tomorrow.”

  Gloria pointed at the waning moon. The moon had been full just over a week ago and the light was still relatively strong. “Why not now? How far is this place?”

  “It’s a forty-five minute drive in the dark, on these narrow roads.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll bring snacks, then.”

  I FIRED UP MY SAT NAV. I hadn’t been to Blickling Hall for many years. It was in the care of the National Trust and I’d once covered a story there about the bluebell woods in spring, which had been enjoyable. But since then I’d had no real reason to return.

  Blickling lay inland down a maze of twisting country roads that connected tiny villages and farms. Blickling itself was a small place, just a handful of houses around the estate connected to the Hall. I parked near a thatched cottage and we stepped out into the suddenly-cold night.

  “Are we going to be shot as poachers?” Gloria whispered as we walked up the unlit road towards the Hall.

  “Probably. Let’s try not to.”

  We weren’t going to be able to get close. The Hall would be bristling with security, we knew, but we had already decided to stay on public roads and paths. There was a pub on our right now, with the windows still lit and the door still open. Music wafted out. To our left was the boundary wall of the estate parklands. There was the ubiquitous village sign on a pole to our right, on a patch of grass that made a triangle between two roads. I flashed the light from my torch onto the sign, expecting to see some picture of local history or industry, but it turned out to be an advert for the pub.

  A car zipped along the road we were about to join, briefly lighting everything up. We continued, keeping the park wall to our left. Eventually the wall became a black ironwork fence with a locked gate, but I shone my light along the driveway and we could just make out the Hall. It loomed like a black shape with points along the roof.

  “Can you feel anything?” I asked Gloria.

  “Mmm... I am not sure. So many people come and go here, every day. I think we need to carry on.”

  “Away from the Hall?”

  “Mmm.”

  I had to trust her. We walked on, barely needing my torch’s light once our eyes had adj
usted to using the light reflecting from the moon and the ragged clouds. Suddenly we came to a curved wall and this had a smaller gate which was open. We stepped through. Gloria went on ahead and then stopped and looked up.

  “A church. Yes. Here. Here is where they all came.”

  “Who?”

  “The Boleyns.”

  I doubled back to look at an information board nestling under the spreading branches of a yew tree. Saint Andrew’s Church originally dated from the fifteenth century although it had been updated and renovated since then. When I came back to Gloria’s side she was standing at the church door, with her hands on the ancient wood, and breathing very slowly and deliberately. I reached out to touch the wood too.

  Immediately something sparked and we were both jolted. There was a laugh behind us. I spun around, and grabbed hold of Gloria with my right arm.

  “Who are you?” I challenged.

  The dark haired man, I suddenly realised, was faintly transparent.

  Clare’s comments from earlier, about letting myself be open to contact from ghosts, were literally coming back to haunt me. I giggled from sheer nervousness.

  The ghost bowed very low. He was wearing dark baggy breeches that ended at the knee, and a loose white shirt. He had a sexy, smouldering sort of grin to his face. “Good evening, goodwifes both. Let me introduce myself. I am Master Mark Smeaton, at your service.”

  Neither of us were particularly good wives but I let that one drop. “I’m Jackie and this is Gloria. What are you doing here?”

  “I am waiting for the true love of my heart, my dearest sweet, the sun in my now-darkened sky, and we shall sing together, as one. Two voices create a more harmonious magic than one alone can ever do.”

  “They do,” I said. And on a whim, I added, “But Will Howlett went alone to London and did not take Charlotte with him.”

  Mark Smeaton grinned and came up close to me, putting up his hand as if he were going to stroke my cheek. I recoiled. He flicked his wrist and carried on, dancing around us both as if that were his intention all along. He lightly ran up and down the church steps, and spun a few times like a random ballet dancer. “He was not alone, not really,” he said. “There were the voices of two in the book, of course.”

  “Anne! And who is the other?” I said.

  Mark continued to pirouette around. There was no Ritalin in the sixteenth century, of course. He laughed at the sky and tripped up and down, maddeningly flippant. “Tra-la-la!”

  If it were possible to smack a ghost, I would have surely done so. My earlier nervousness had quickly been replaced by infuriation. “Hey!” I said, angrily. A new thought struck me. “Is the other author of the songbook linked to Charlotte and Vincent Paston?”

  “Paston? Paston! Ah, Paston!” Mark giggled. He ran away from us along the path, stopped, spun around three times and bowed again. “Old Boleyn, he always beats old Paston. Take that!” He began to mime a sword fight, thrusting his right hand forward and backwards. Suddenly he took an invisible blow to the chest, and began to act out a most dramatic and long-suffering death. As he collapsed to his knees, he faded.

  By the time he had hit the ground, he had completely vanished.

  Gloria looked at me. “Who on earth is old Paston?”

  “That’s our next task. We will find out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  We had another meeting at my house on Sunday. I’d been busy in the morning with errands, walking, housework and generally catching up with the business of life. I needed a wife or another house-trained husband would do, I reflected – I could just about keep up with my freelance work and running my house, but if I were going to be some kind of witch-successor to Evangeline Dot, I would have to let something else slide. The first thing to be ditched would be dusting, I decided. I wasn’t asthmatic, so why did I even need to dust? It only came back again.

  I still needed to clean the bathroom and do some grocery shopping and water my houseplants, though, and in the absence of any hardworking domestic partner, I had to do it myself. I’d had some text-tennis with Clare who was in bed, exhausted after the previous day’s exertions, but she said she would try to come around in the mid-afternoon. Gloria was happy to come then, too. She promised to bring photos of the cats, although I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t even mentioned them again.

  When we assembled, I was immediately concerned for Clare. She was wearing the scarf that I had bought for her, but she looked very pale and wan. She saw me staring in worry, and said, “It’s fine. I just spent too long on the internet this morning, looking up the stuff you mentioned in your text.”

  “You shouldn’t have. I can use the internet just as easily as you can.”

  “You can’t, actually. I’ve seen you google for the google homepage.”

  “I have not!”

  “Ladies, please,” Gloria said. “Let’s not waste time and energy.”

  “I have precious little of that,” Clare muttered.

  “Exactly, I’m thinking of you, sweetie.”

  Clare glowered at me because of Gloria’s comment. I rolled my eyes. “Okay, okay. So what did you find on the internet, Clare?”

  “Thomas Paston.”

  “Don’t you mean Thomas Boleyn?”

  “I know exactly what I mean,” she said. “Sir Thomas Boleyn was Anne’s father. And Sir Thomas Paston was a Norfolk member of parliament in 1545. He was born around the same time as Anne Boleyn.”

  “Were they connected?”

  “I can’t find a connection between Anne and Thomas Paston directly, but I did find a fascinating legend,” Clare told us. “On the anniversary of Anne’s death...”

  “The nineteenth of May,” Gloria and I chorused.

  “Yeah, in three days’ time, apparently Anne rides around Norfolk in a coach, headless, holding her head in her hands. Oh, the horses are headless too. Don’t ask me how that works.”

  We all grimaced at our individual mental images. How much neck does a headless horse have, I wondered.

  “And when she gets to Blickling Hall, she watches – ugh, somehow – while her father and Sir Thomas Paston duel with burning swords. Her father, incidentally, has also been riding around Norfolk with a bunch of headless horses.”

  “There’s a bit of a theme developing,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where does he go? Is the route significant?” I asked. “Does he come anywhere near here?”

  “It’s impossible to say. Some of the tales say he drives the coach over eleven bridges in Norfolk, and some saw it’s twelve, and I found one legend suggesting forty. They are not named. But the end result is always Blickling Hall on the nineteenth of May.”

  “And a battle with Paston. What else do you know about this Paston?” I said.

  “Frustratingly little. I mean, there’s no evidence they even met in real life, and I can’t find the source of this tale.”

  “But there is a link,” I said. “What if the other writer of the book was a Paston? Someone related to Thomas Paston, and of course, the direct ancestor of Vin and Charlotte? What then?”

  We sat in silence for nearly two minutes as we all tried to digest the implications of this.

  The more I mulled it over, the more a prickling feeling stroked up and down my spine. I spoke first.

  “I think we need to go and see Evangeline Dot.”

  Clare said, “I am not up to that. Will you drop me off at home first?”

  “Of course. Gloria?”

  “Let’s go.”

  EVANGELINE DOT DID not live in a stereotypical witch’s cottage. In fact she lived in a small semi-detached bungalow that was one of a set of ten arranged in a horseshoe around a small green patch of grass. They occupied a space on a headland with commanding views of the sea. All were set aside by the local council for rent to elderly or infirm people, and came complete with ramps, handrails and benches outside so everyone could sit in the sun and gossip with their neighbour.

  I didn’t imagine t
hat Evangeline did much social gossiping. We arrived at around four o’clock, and I hesitated before knocking on the door.

  “She’ll be fine,” Gloria whispered to me as the door swung open. I hadn’t knocked yet. I lowered my hand.

  “No, I won’t be fine,” Evangeline declared. “I’ll be as grumpy as always because you are taking your time in all this. Time we don’t have,” she added, leading us into her small, square living room.

  It was clean, neat and free from all clutter. In fact it was verging on the bare and unwelcoming. There was one small framed photo on the magnolia walls, but not a scrap of any other decoration. The curtains were cream and brown, the carpet was pale beige, and the sofa and matching chairs had one blue cushion each. We perched, and I felt uncomfortable. When I glanced at Gloria, she was smiling.

  “It’s so calm!” she said, catching my eye.

  I wasn’t sure where the line between calm and soporific was, but this room definitely hovered on the edge of it. It was ideal for Gloria, though. Her senses could have a temporary respite from the onslaught of the vivid world.

  Evangeline sat in an armchair and her fingers curled in her lap. “He is taking my power,” she said.

  I thought she’d ask how we were doing or what we had achieved, but no. She was straight into her own problems.

  Although to be fair, being drained of your power was a fairly major problem. “Who?” I asked. “Ian Martinet?”

  “Yes. The door that they opened with their brutality is serving them well,” she said. “While they carry on unchecked, they grow in confidence. They see that this is the time to strike me down. And then what? Who guards them then? You? You’ve done nothing.”

  “You haven’t told me what to do,” I complained. “Fancy sentences are one thing but what am I supposed to actually do? Is there a certain charm I must perform, a rite I have to do, a spell to conjure up? A specific set of herbs to put in a particular place, a candle to light, or a standing stone to watch? Tell me, and I promise that I will do it.” It was a big promise but what choice did I have? All I needed were clear instructions and I could add them into my already busy weekly planner.