Gloria gasped in an exaggerated way. “The headless horses! The coach! Anne returns to Blickling! Oh!”
Evangeline said, “You’re clever, aren’t you?” She was addressing Clare. It sounded almost like half a compliment, but only half, the way that she said it. “Yes. This has to be done before Wednesday. Think like Ian Martinet. Think like an evil snake of a man. What will he do next?”
I could feel it. I could feel the power rising. I believed Evangeline and I met her gaze. She nodded, imperceptibly. I nodded back. “We need to act before he does,” I said.
I got up and took the tea things through to the kitchen. Clare’s husband accosted me and I reassured him that we were all leaving.
He didn’t look happy with me. I understood why. I dragged Gloria out of there. Evangeline was already halfway out of the door but Gloria insisted on fussing, checking that Clare had her phone to hand, and enough cushions, and a hundred other silly things that she didn’t need to do, but she seemed compelled to do anyway.
“Enough,” I said, forcibly taking her arm and propelling her through the front door. “Clare is fine. Save your energy for what we’re going to do next.”
“Which is?”
“Weren’t you listening? We’re off to Ian Martinet’s farmhouse to get that book back. Do you own any clothes in black?”
GLORIA MANAGED TO FIND a dark grey sweatshirt and some jeans which were so purple they might as well have been black, and she didn’t stand out too much in the dark. She’d also ditched the jangly bracelets.
She laughed openly at me, though.
I stood in her doorstep, and spread my gloved hands wide. “What? We’re on a mission.”
“Mission Impossible! And you’re Tom Cruise.”
“How rude. I’m dressed appropriately.”
She looked me up and down. “Won’t you get arrested if you’re wearing a balaclava?”
“I’ll say I’m sensitive to the cold.”
“And shades?”
I took them off. “They might be a little impractical,” I conceded. “I was worried about the whites of my eyes showing, though. Maybe I’ll just squint.”
“And people say that I’m dippy and daft,” she commented. But she couldn’t keep her face serious for long. Her true nature burst out and she clapped her hands in delight. “Anyway! Wow! So, what’s the plan? I bet you’ve assigned us codenames, haven’t you?”
“Oh – no, I didn’t think of that. I don’t think it’s necessary.”
It was easier to bicker and play silly than to face the reality of what we were doing. I drove us to the car park on the edge of the industrial estate, and we sparred verbally all the way. If we didn’t, we’d have to consider the monumental idiocy of what we were about to do.
Our plan was simple. We were going to sneak around the farmhouse, and look for a way in, and essentially steal the book.
I mean, was it really such a stupid idea? People rob houses all the time. Around two in every hundred houses in the UK were burgled last year (yes, I’d written an article about it, except the editor had Americanised it and changed it all to “burglarized” which made me laugh.) We were just following in a fine tradition. A fine criminal tradition, it was true. But we weren’t actually planning the impossible.
Just the ill-advised.
We sat in the parked car, but I let the engine idle. Gloria had fallen silent. She was spinning the rings on her fingers almost frantically. She’d wear a groove in her skin at that rate. I was feeling no less nervous. Finally, I said, “I think we’ve got a little bit carried away, haven’t we?”
“We were full of great ideas,” she agreed. “But it’s not a great idea at all, is it?”
“Nope.” I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “I feel pretty silly, if I’m honest. Are we really proposing we try to steal something?”
“We are. I suppose it comes down to what we truly believe,” Gloria said. “We’re witches, right?”
I gazed out into the sodium-lit night. A young woman was in a police cell, her life force being drained from her by her brother and a man who thought that he knew best. They were using a book. We didn’t need to harm anyone to stop this – we only needed to take the book.
But breaking into someone’s house was a big step.
“I’m scared,” I said in a very small voice.
“Me too. Whether we succeed or not, there’s no going back after this.”
“What if we’re caught?” I said.
“Neither of us will be sacked,” Gloria pointed out. “That’s one advantage of being the high-flying businesswomen that we are.”
“Businesswomen! Ha. A features writer and a gallery owner!” I spluttered. “We hardly make the corridors of power shake.”
“No, but we are powerful in our own ways, aren’t we?”
“We are.” I looked at her and she nodded. “Okay. We’re here. Let’s do this.”
I could hardly believe I’d talked myself back into this, but we stepped out into the night. Things got tricky as soon as we left the welcoming circles of lamplight from the carpark because tonight the thin moon was hidden by low, thick clouds. We crept along and every now and then one of us let out a giggle. Things rustled in the hedgerows to either side of the road. We could barely see, and we were navigating by following the lighter grey tarmac flanked by darker lumps of bushes and trees. My senses were heightened. I was aware of my feet hitting a hard surface. If they went onto earth I knew I was straying off the road. Our breathing was loud and the air was cold.
We reached a gate and the encircling thick hedge, and beyond that there was a long, low farmhouse with homely lit windows. There was a glowing lamp by the front door, and two windows downstairs were yellow and beckoned to us. We stopped.
“We have to assume that he has security measures,” I whispered. “And we can’t do anything until they are all in bed.”
So we waited, and as it was late, we didn’t have to wait long. The lights downstairs went off, and one came on upstairs. We watched it until that, too, went out. The light at the porch remained lit.
We crept around the perimeter of the garden so that we were at the back of the house. Here we could see one more room lit up but it went dark almost immediately.
That was both Ian and Vin in bed, then.
We waited a little longer, hoping that they fell asleep quickly and didn’t suffer from insomnia. My feet were getting cold and my hips were stiff from tension. We eyed the back door of the house. It was obvious but it was definitely worth a shot – we were simply going to creep across and try the door handle.
This was a rural county, after all, and plenty of people still didn’t lock their doors. I didn’t want to be that idiot who spent ages breaking in when they could have just opened an unlocked door.
But the house stood square in the centre of the grassy garden and there was no way to sneak up on it by sheltering behind walls or hedges. There was nothing to do but step out onto the lawn and the moment I did so, the whole place was illuminated by bright white lights triggered by motion sensors. I flung myself back into the safety of the hedge again.
“Damn.”
There was a scraping noise and a click. I couldn’t see what was going on, as I was blinded by the lights, but I assumed that someone had opened a window to look out. Then there was another click and the security lights went out again.
I had to hope that they thought it was just a random fox or errant hedgehog.
My heart was thudding and all in a rush, all my courage fled. “We can’t possibly get close,” I said to Gloria.
“I could run for it,” she said.
Before I could stop her, she rushed across the lawn. Once more the lights blazed on but she was surprisingly fast, and had slammed against the wall next to the door before I heard the window open again. This time there was another clicking sound, and I heard voices.
“Can you see anything?” said one man, distantly. I think it was Ian.
“No. Pr
obably a cat or something.” That was Vin.
“I don’t know. I’ll check downstairs. You stay up here.”
I hoped that Gloria heard all that and decided to stay where she was. There was no way of me attracting her attention. I saw lights go on in the house, and the main security lights flicked off again. A figure padded from room to room, going up to each window in turn. He really was locking and checking everything.
There was no way we were getting into that house.
I was blinded for a third time as Gloria came to the same realisation. She sprinted towards me and this time the back door slammed open. She grabbed me as she went past me and we threw ourselves deeper into a rhododendron thicket, and then went very still. We crouched down, silently, gripping one another’s arms and rocking on our heels.
We hardly dared to breathe.
We stayed like that for a very long time.
Eventually, cramped and sore and with our nerves strung out on edge, we eased our way back onto the road and finally reached my parked car.
We slumped in the seats. I rubbed my eyes while Gloria raided the glove box for sweets. She helped herself to three mint imperials, chewing down on all of them at the same time.
“Really,” she said at last, “what did we expect?”
My phone buzzed with an incoming text message. It was an unknown sender and a very strange time of night to receive any kind of message. I read it, with a mother’s fear in my heart.
But it was not from Scarlett.
I read it out loud.
“You will not stop what is coming.”
“Who was that from?” Gloria whispered.
I shoved it into my pocket. “Three guesses.”
“I use all my three goes in guessing Ian Martinet.”
“I reckon you’re right. We have to get that book. And we have to get it before Wednesday night.”
Chapter Sixteen
I didn’t think I slept but I did have bad dreams, so I must have done. Hares leaped over blue flames and I knew that Anne Boleyn was in my thoughts. I woke with a song or a charm in my head and I could not shift it. I hummed it as I went about my morning walk, and it remained there in my mind like a stubborn ear worm.
I was just picking up my phone to call Clare when I got home, and it buzzed into life – it was Clare phoning me. “Hey, spooky,” I said. “I was just about to call you. Have you suddenly become a witch? Last night was a disaster, by the way.”
Her voice was very faint. “Can you come over? Please. I hate to ask. But Steve has gone to work and I can’t ask him to come home again. His boss is great, but...”
“Of course. I’ll be there before you can brew the tea.”
I dropped everything. She hated to ask for help. When I got there, in ten minutes flat, I let myself in and found that Clare was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking confused, and holding a cup. I took it from her hands and put it to one side, and led her into the living room.
“I need to wash,” she said, sounding slurred.
“No problem.” I supported her as I led her up the stairs to her bathroom, and my nursing skills would have done my daughter proud, I think.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been called upon to help Clare out. She hated being so reliant on Steve, always expecting things from him. She didn’t seem to qualify for council assistance or social care. She had far more good days than bad, so times like this were infrequent and couldn’t be planned for.
When they did hit, she needed someone to help her.
And that someone was me.
I didn’t mind, and I waved away all her apologies and self-loathings and excuses and pleadings. I knew she hated being like this and it put an uncomfortable spin on the power in our relationship, shifting us subtly away from being simply friends, simply equals. I dealt with that by being a different person – brisk, efficient, capable, and by never mentioning it at any other time.
We certainly never mentioned it to Steve.
I left her in the bathroom and went to find some fresh clean comfortable clothes for her. Sometimes her skin was very sensitive and she could not cope with anything itchy or tight. I brought her fuzzy soft fleecy pyjamas, and got her installed in the darkened living room.
“What’s that you’re humming?” she asked as I busied around, getting everything within reach for her.
“Sorry. Was it bothering you?”
“No – it sounded familiar. Do it again.”
I half-sang it this time. “O Death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest. Let pass my weary guiltless ghost, out of my careful breast ... for I must die, there is no remedy... for now I die.”
I stopped and looked at Clare. “I’m sorry. It’s a horrible song. It’s been going around my head all night and all morning. I don’t know where I must have picked it up from.”
“You got it from Anne Boleyn,” Clare said. “She wrote it. Look it up.” She had her eyes squeezed tightly shut. I brought her some fresh lemon-flavoured water, surrounded her with love, asked the elementals to guard her, and left her alone to sleep.
I LOOKED UP THE SONG as soon as I got home and found a few versions, but all were attributed very loosely to Anne. The legend said that she had written it while awaiting execution, but there was no real evidence it was hers. Nothing that convinced academics, anyway, but internet “experts” were full of it, and that was enough for me. I wanted to probe deeper, but I had an email from an editor wanting to bring forward the deadline of the animals-in-care-homes article. She’d been let down by another writer, and hoped that I could fill the gap. Naturally I said yes first, and panicked second, then brewed up a strong coffee and knuckled down to work.
The hand in my back was pushing, pushing, and I knew in my heart that Ian was plotting something. I raced through my article and then took a break, because I could not send it in a rush. I was still a professional. Even so, I fired it off before five that evening and felt a pang of anxiety. My mind had not totally been on the job. I hoped they had a good and forgiving sub-editor.
I grabbed a sandwich and a bag of crisps and ran over the road to see Gloria. “Clare’s ill,” I said, and told her about the song that had been plaguing me. “What do we do?”
The gallery was open until six, but there was no one in, so Gloria flipped the sign to closed and started to cash up. “We get that book before tomorrow night,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this.”
“Go on. Because I am out of ideas.”
“The house is well protected with technology,” she said. “We can’t wait until they’re out for the day, and we can’t get in at night, right?”
“What are you suggesting? Perhaps we should tunnel in?”
“Magic.”
I rolled my eyes. “Really? How? What spell, exactly? I don’t know about your brand of magic, but mine is definitely more on the tweak-the-universe side of things, not David Bleeding Copperfield with fireworks and fish tanks.”
“You’re pretty close,” she said.
“Fish?”
“Fireworks. We start a fire.”
“That won’t get the book back. It will just destroy it.” I shook my head. “I suppose it would stop Charlotte’s power being actively drained, though.”
“No, listen. He’s got a shed in his garden, right?”
“Has he?” I said, startled. I hadn’t noticed.
But then, Gloria would notice such things, even in the dark. She ran twice as fast as everyone else, overwhelmed by her senses. There were advantages to her hyperactivity. “He has,” she said. “It’s a wooden one. So let’s start a fire in it, and that will draw him out, and we’ll get into the house.”
“Ooh. Okay, so how do we start the fire?”
“Magic! I don’t know about you, but I reckon paper magic will work. We can charm a piece of paper to burst into flames, can’t we?”
She was right. Yes, we could. Although I could not start a fire out of nothing, and I doubted that anyone could, it was possible, wi
th the right preparation, to make a certain piece of paper more inclined to set itself alight.
Yes. We could do this.
She bagged up the last of the day’s takings and we set about finding the right piece of paper for the task.
IT WENT TERRIBLY WRONG.
Because of course it did.
I mean, we started pretty well. We experimented with various papers and charms until we hit on the right combination – a light, thin handmade sheet of plant-based paper, and a charm dedicated to Vesta. I tended to stick to local deities but Gloria would happily draw on any god or goddess as appropriate, and anyway Vesta wasn’t completely unknown to me. I knew that we had something of a link as my domestic magic brought her to my dreams from time to time.
She was the goddess of hearths and naturally the hearth fire, and with a sigil to the sun inscribed on the paper, and a chant in her name, we were able to get the paper to spark into life from quite some distance away.
The next challenge was to get this charmed paper into the shed on Ian Martinet’s land. We didn’t wait for full night. We drove out and parked amongst the cars of the late shift workers who were still toiling away in the industrial units, and walked in twilight up the road to the farmhouse.
Once we were in sight of the house, we switched to a stealthier mode and crept through the bushes. Now I could see the shed that Gloria had referred to, and it backed onto the boundary hedge, so we could approach it without being seen from the house.
I was ignoring the possibility of security cameras, of course. We couldn’t see any, so if he had some, they were well hidden.
The shed was locked. But that didn’t matter. I kept a look-out while Gloria shot around it, and posted the folded-up paper under the loose-fitting door and before joining me behind the hedge again.
Then we retreated carefully to a point near the rhododendrons and began our chant, as quietly as possible.
I had the irrational thought that the paper needed to “hear” us but we gave it our best shot, and anyway, that was no more irrational than everything else we were currently doing.
Wine, Witches and Song (The Everyday Witches of Wildham-on-Sea Book 1) Page 15