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

by Molly Milligan

  It worked! I had to stifle my whoop. I felt the magic take before we saw anything, but I knew from the jolt down my spine that the paper had caught fire.

  Then we had to wait and it seemed like an age before we saw smoke begin to curl from the cracks between the wooden slats of the shed. Then something flammable must have caught, because there was a sudden cracking sound, and I could see the roofing felt on one edge begin to curl and blacken.

  There was no sign of movement from inside the house. Soon the shed would be fully ablaze, however, so we crept around to the other side of the garden, as close to the house as we dared to be, while still under cover of a shrubbery. There was no danger of the shed setting fire to anything else – I couldn’t bear the thought of committing full-blown arson on Ian’s house. Robbing it was one thing, but burning it to the ground quite another.

  “Oh god, I can’t stand the suspense,” Gloria muttered just as the back door was flung open and a male figure sauntered out. He was bearded and I recognised Ian Martinet. Behind him, a pale-skinned younger man took a few paces into the garden, and then stopped.

  That was Vin. He looked around, and Ian spoke to him briefly, before pointing back to the door. Vin went back inside.

  “No, no, no!” I groaned. “This will take two of you to put out!”

  “And the fire brigade,” Gloria said, adding, “Mmm. Hunky firemen.”

  “Not now, please. Come on, Ian. What are you going to do?” I muttered.

  “Watch it burn, by the looks of things,” Gloria whispered.

  And he really was just standing there, hands in his pockets, watching his garden shed burn right down. The flames got so intense that he had to step back, but the wooden structure was quickly consumed, and it soon fell into a pile of blackened timbers and smouldering wood.

  I could feel a faint hint of heat even from this distance.

  Then he turned around. He didn’t quite face us, but he was pointing in roughly the right direction, and he spoke very loudly. We could hear him perfectly well.

  “I know who you are. I know you are listening and I know why you are doing this.”

  We did not reply.

  He waited, and then said, “And I know who has filled your head with nonsense. I am not going to tell you what to do or what to think – unlike her. I just want you to go away and consider a few questions of right and wrong, good and evil. Morality. I want you to take a step back from your actions and consider them objectively, with a little distance.”

  He sounded so amiable and plausible. He paused again, letting his words sink in. “I want you to look at the facts and look at who has done what. You might have been misled. You might have been tricked. Think about it. I want you to make a list of things that I have done, and things that you have done. And when you are ready, come to find me, and we’ll have a little chat about ethics. Okay?” He raised his hand as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “But don’t come tomorrow. That’s a very busy day for me.” He grinned.

  With that, he turned around, and headed back into his house. The back door closed firmly.

  Gloria looked at me. I could see her in the dusk, her eyes bright and her white skin faintly glowing. “What the hell did that all mean?”

  “That means,” I said, “that he is one clever bugger with a sneaky way with words, that’s all. But for all that, does he really think he can out-talk a journalist? All his rhetoric and passion means nothing to me. Come on. We might as well head home.”

  We drove home in silence, and in spite of my confident speech to Gloria, I had to admit that Ian had got me rattled.

  After all, we were the ones committing trespass and arson and attempted burglary.

  All he was actually doing was living in a nice house, offering shelter to a young man whose sister was in crisis, and studying a rare book. None of those things were crimes and they weren’t even technically wrong or bad.

  Whereas us...

  THE COMMENT ABOUT WEDNESDAY was bugging me, too. I had a feeling that he was still playing us, but I wasn’t sure what his aim was. Did he mean that his house would be empty on Wednesday – would he be somewhere else? Was it an invitation to rob him? Or did he mean to imply something else entirely?

  I could feel a trick in the air.

  I made myself a calming drink. I soaked in the bath for half an hour, and listened to peaceful music, and meditated to a candle flame without willing any images or insights to come to me. I wrapped myself in my fluffiest bath robe and dimmed all the lights.

  I did everything possible to ensure a good night’s sleep.

  And I was still woken in a sweat in the deep dark on the wrong side of midnight by the ghost of a man standing over my bed, shouting and hollering and swearing and waving his arms. I grabbed my sheets and dragged them up to my neck and froze, dazed and confused as my brain fought to wake up fully and make sense of what I was seeing.

  The ghostly figure faded before I could fully understand what was going on. I had an impression of a stocky figure in a doublet, with curled hair and a beard, but the image was fleeting. I had no idea what he was shouting about.

  It took me a few minutes after he had disappeared to uncurl my fingers from the top edge of my bedclothes, and even longer for my heart rate to come back to normal.

  I’d like to be able to say that I wasn’t scared, but in reality I was terrified, and that fear only subsided as I woke up properly and could rationalise what I’d seen. It was a ghost, I told myself – just a ghost, with no capacity to harm me at all.

  I knew that the man had not been Mark Smeaton. As I sat up in bed and put my light on, the name Thomas came into my mind. Thomas? Which one, I thought. Sir Thomas Boleyn or Sir Thomas Paston?

  And what on earth was he so angry about?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The first thing I did after my morning walk on Wednesday the nineteenth was phone Clare to see how she was doing. She didn’t answer so I left a message, and she got back to me by text, assuring me that she was all right, but she needed to rest. Steve was taking the morning off work to do some stuff around the house and to be on call for her, but she reassured me that she would be fine when he went back to work in the afternoon. Her texts came in a series of bursts. The final one said, “It’s the night, tonight. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I sent back. But I had no idea what we were going to do, so that luck was going to have to be very lucky indeed.

  I was about to leave the house when my phone alerted me to an email – I had notifications set to ping during office hours – and I was reluctantly called to my desk to deal with some last-minute edits and clarifications on the latest article. I felt like a sullen teenager being forced to do some homework. But I should have expected it. I’d written it in a hurry and now it was causing me more work than if I’d done it properly in the first place.

  I got it all done by midday and went to make some dinner. I wandered around the kitchen while my toast burned, staring out of the window and trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together.

  I thought about Ron and Mary at the folk club, and Sandra’s exposure of their fraud. Will had known about the fraud, but it hadn’t been uppermost in his mind, in spite of Ron’s fears. It was no motive, just a red herring. I thought about Liam and his misappropriation of funds, and his lies. I thought of Will’s short musical career, and on an impulse I brought up some of his songs on a music-streaming website. He had an upbeat, pop sound although the instruments he used were traditional. I could hear the appeal but I could also see why he didn’t ever hit it big. He fell between two stools, neither one nor the other. There was talent there, sure, but it needed to fit into a box for the public to understand it.

  What a tragic waste.

  He hadn’t been perfect, but none of us are. He had returned with the book he’d taken from Charlotte. He didn’t need to die. He could have given it back and made amends and got on with his life.

  But Vin had killed him. I was sure of it. Vin had kille
d him – but why? Revenge? Was it that simple?

  I knew nothing about Vincent Paston but I was starting to understand he was a shallow, empty, easily-led sort of person, and his flaws made him ideally placed to fall under the sway of silver-tongued Ian.

  And a shallow, hollow person like that would also be easily susceptible to ideas of honour and revenge. I could look for deep and complicated reasons but they would be deeper and more complicated than Vin himself – in reality, he was simple and the murder was simple and the reason was simple: revenge, that was all. His sister had been left behind and had faded to a shadow of herself. The apparent injustice burned him. So he’d acted when Will came back.

  Murder. Boom. Gone, dead. As if that was going to make everything all right again.

  Now he was embroiled in something much bigger than murder, as if murder was anything small and inconsequential. I shivered. If I lost sight of the human side of things, I was in danger of becoming Evangeline Dot, focussing only on the battle between good and evil. I still thought that people mattered more than that.

  I hoped that I was not wrong.

  GLORIA HAD BEEN AS caught up in everyday life that day as I had been. Cora didn’t work every day for her, having been taken on just to help at weekends, and Gloria was tied to the gallery. She had visits from artists and appointments with suppliers and a business advisor from the bank had arranged to go around in the early afternoon. We had a little bit of back and forth texting, expressing our frustrations to one another. I didn’t burden Clare with it.

  At some point over the past few weeks, Gloria had become a friend. And I was grateful for that.

  As the day wore on, I was plagued by the sounds of singing. At first it was like a faint buzzing sound and I assumed I had a little tinnitus or a budding ear infection. I took immediate preventative measures – my orange, lemon and bay concoctions had staved off many a cold over the past few years – but this time nothing improved. By the time that Gloria came around, just after four in the afternoon, I was hearing a female voice singing as clearly as if she had been in the next room.

  In fact I’d prowled around my house about eight times, hunting for the vocalist, just in case it was some trick.

  “Can you hear it?” I demanded as I let Gloria into the house.

  “Hear what?”

  “A woman, singing.”

  She nodded and blinked rapidly. “Yes, I can hear her.”

  “You don’t look surprised,” I said.

  “I have heard her before, since this case started. And I hear a lot of other things, too, all the time – from this plane of existence and from others. My senses are open, you know. It all flows in.”

  I stared at her, feeling appalled. I knew she was sensitive to things, but that sounded insane. “How do you not go mad?”

  She smiled at me merrily. “Who’s to say I haven’t?” She spun around the kitchen and picked up a cookbook that was lying on the counter, and flicked through it, randomly reading out the titles of the recipes.

  And I saw that action for what it was, and I let her get on with it. She focussed onto everyday things, clinging to the real world as the slew of the entire existence of the universe battered her, and she fought to keep her head above the tide.

  “I’ll make us some earthy, grounding tea, for before we go,” I said, and she nodded gratefully.

  While I ground up some oak bark – this was not the nicest tasting tea in the world, but we weren’t drinking it for pleasure – Gloria paced around, poking and prodding things, and I told her about my dream. “I don’t know which Thomas it was,” I said, “but he was pretty angry.”

  “I was dreaming of a young woman singing and dying,” Gloria said, her voice flat. “I didn’t like it.”

  “Charlotte?” I said with a tremor.

  “Anne, I think, but it was so sad. Oh! Galingale.” She shook the jar of spices in the air like she was playing the maracas, then opened it up to sniff it. “Where do you get this from?”

  “The internet,” I said. “But there’s a Caribbean shop in Norwich that sells it too.”

  She started to tell me about her travels around the world in her youth, and I was only half-listening, but I think that she knew that, and we both knew we were trying to avoid thinking about the real business of the day.

  Or, rather, of the coming night.

  WE DRANK THE TEA AND grew more pensive. “It happens tonight,” Gloria said, “but we don’t know what that thing is. How can we prepare for something we don’t know?”

  “We know a lot,” I said. “We know that tonight, Sir Thomas Boleyn rides over a random number of bridges in Norfolk – eleven, twelve or forty – and then he battles with Sir Thomas Paston.”

  “Who wins?”

  “The legends don’t say. We also know that Anne will ride in a coach to Blickling Hall and then walk around.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Again, the legends don’t say. What do ghosts do? She’s just indulging in a little light annual haunting, I suppose.”

  “Whooo!” said Gloria, but her heart wasn’t in the silly noise and she tailed off rather quickly.

  I continued. “I think we can assume that this night is a night of power. We also know that Ian might claim to be against witchcraft but he still uses the powers of the earth for his own ends. He can call it what he likes, but he’s doing it. He has a book linked to Anne Boleyn and tonight she walks the earth. So he’s going to get them both in the same place, right?”

  Gloria nodded. “He’s going to be at Blickling Hall.”

  “Exactly. Once he’s there, with the book, he’s going to be able to draw on a lot of power.”

  “What’s his aim, though? I mean, power’s power but what does he want to do with it? If we know that, we can work out a more effective way of stopping him, right?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got some information from Evangeline but I don’t entirely trust her. I did look him up on the internet and he’s a professor of ethics and morals. He doesn’t seem to do much teaching. He writes things and goes around giving papers at conferences and stuff. I think he supervises a few PhD students.”

  “Nice life if you can get it,” sniffed Gloria. “Ethics and morals, eh?”

  There was probably more to his academic life than what I saw, but I was in no mood to be sympathetic to the man. “He genuinely believes he wants to make a better world for everyone,” I said.

  “By getting rid of witches?”

  “By containing and restricting the use of power to those he believes are capable of handling it correctly,” I said. “Whatever correctly means to him. We’re too wild and unpredictable and can’t be controlled.”

  “Yeah!” said Gloria, punching the air. “I want to put that as text on a photo of a woman on a mountain and post it on Facebook!”

  “I am pretty sure I’ve seen it up there already.” I sighed and jumped to my feet. “Right. We know what he is intending to do tonight. Once he gets to Blickling, I think we’ve already lost. He knows more about the events of the night than we do. So the obvious thing to do is to stop him getting to Blickling.”

  Gloria leaped up too. “How? Oh! Yes, I know. Let’s sabotage his car!”

  “Exactly,” I said, and reached for my coat.

  She grabbed my arm. “Wait, what? No! This is the point where you tell me that I’m being stupid and that you have a much more sensible scheme.”

  I faced her and shrugged. “Unfortunately, I don’t.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ian Martinet’s words were haunting me as much as the singing, which followed us all the way to the farmhouse. He had asked me to consider which actions were right, and which were wrong.

  I knew that “sabotaging a car” almost certainly fell in the “wrong” camp. I could possibly justify it as “for a greater good” but I wasn’t comfortable with the situation. As my doubts increased, so did the singing. I’d put the radio on to try to drown it out, but the voice I could hear simply seemed t
o merge with the tunes on the radio, and it became some strange kind of harmony or duet.

  We parked in the usual spot. We’d be charged for a permit at this rate, I reflected. The car park was still full of cars at this time and we slotted into a gap at the far end. I was carrying quite a large handbag and it was full of things that I thought would be useful. However, I wouldn’t consider myself a hardened criminal – not yet, at least – so these items were guesswork.

  I had a kitchen knife, a hammer from my shed, a few metal tent pegs with spiked ends, my phone, some cord, four pairs of latex gloves, hand sanitiser, a few empty carrier bags, and some tissues.

  “I hope we don’t get stopped by the police,” I said in a low voice as we went along the lane. Everything in my bag could be used as a weapon.

  “You’ll just mention your sister’s name and it will be all right, won’t it?”

  She sounded worried so I lied and said, “Oh, yeah, probably.”

  In reality, Bernie would probably use the weapons on me herself.

  We went more stealthily as we got within sight of the farmhouse. We sheltered behind a tree and observed the house carefully.

  “Where’s his car?” Gloria whispered.

  “I don’t know. Does he park it around the back?”

  “I’ve only ever seen it at the front.”

  “Damn.” We made use of the trees and bushes around the house and worked our way in a large circle right around the outside of his garden, peeping over the hedge wherever we could.

  There were no vehicles on the property and no garage in which he could have parked on.

  “Are we going to assume he’s not home?” Gloria said.

  “I’m going to make sure.”

  What else could I do? It was not as if Ian was ignorant about events. He knew I was after him. There was no point in subterfuge now. I strode right up to the front door and rang the bell. The singing in the back of my head mimicked the two-tone chime and turned it into a repeating motif.