The Witching Hour (The Witches Pendragon Mystery Series Book 1) (10 page)

One can only play so many rounds of lawn tennis before one grows quite bored. We aren’t on holiday, we’re supposed to be catching a ghost, but things never go our way. It’s been five days, and Camille and I have yet to see or hear the appearance of anything paranormal.

During the days, we while away the time with Claire-Elaine. Camille was smart enough to bring her embroidery and she has gloriously reproduced Chateau Trisse on tapestry with a thousand tiny French knots. She also embroidered portraits of all its inhabitants, including the ten hunting hounds. Camille is every bit as bored as me. We witches were not meant for the idle life.

“Shall we play another round, Elfie?” Claire-Elaine asks. I wave her off. I didn’t bring many clothes, and trying to play tennis in my long black robe is exhausting.

“I’ll give it a go,” Camille flutters, staring up from her embroidery. “Why not? The sun has returned and it’s warmed up considerably. This is probably the last decent day for tennis until next spring.”

I really don’t think Camille should play. The woman is so tall that with a racket in hand, she could accidentally swat birds out of the sky.

“Tally-ho,” she calls, for no reason whatsoever. Claire-Elaine looks confused by her words, but performs a mean serve, sending the tennis ball whizzing over the net. Camille, awkward in her black robe, swings but misses the ball entirely.

“Just a warm up, just a warm up,” she cries. I can see the uncertainty on Claire-Elaine’s face as she stands on the other side of the court in a starched white short skirt and polo shirt. Nonetheless, the petite woman serves again. This time Camille makes contact with the ball, smashing it so hard that it sails over Claire-Elaine out of the court and into the woods.

“Goodness!” our hostess exclaims, startled by Camille’s strength.

“I’ll get it.” I bound out of my seat, leaving behind a smattering of magazines that I have been reading while sitting at a small bistro table sipping my morning tea. Feeling happy to have something to do, I scour the ground with my eyes as I enter the woods and search for the ball.

“No, no leave it, Elfie. I have others,” Claire-Elaine protests, but I just turn around and give her a carefree shrug before heading deeper into a stand of alder trees.

With my bad sense of direction and the heavily overgrown forest, I never find the ball. Worse yet, it only takes me twenty minutes before I realize I’m quite lost. With all the poplars, pines, sycamores, oaks, and alders, everything in the forest behind Chateau Trisse begins to look the same. I become genuinely concerned when I realize I have passed the same outcropping of rocks three times.

“I’m going in circles.” I splutter, feeling freaked that this is not the first time such a thing has happened. Once, when I was only nineteen, I got lost in the Feral Forest. I was on milking duty when a lively black and white calf escaped the pen. Of course I chased after it into the forest. Where the trees haven’t been thinned by us witches, the Feral Forest harbors horrible creatures. As already mentioned, it is full of fassals, peffer-footers, and other things that’d sooner swallow you as look you in the eye. I was lost in the blackness of those trees for three days, sure that I would either die from exposure or be eaten by some hideous, man-eating azalea.

One night, after going in circles for hours, I fell asleep, dehydrated and exhausted. My mind floated out of my body and up into the universe. Figuratively, that is. Anyway I’m not quite sure how long I lay there at one with the stars. Then, from betwixt two trees, a flash of something brought me out of my reverie; I saw a faint light and I was sure I was dead. The light grew closer and closer.

“Take me, I’m ready,” I said, and it was true. At the ripe old age of 19, I had made peace with my maker.

“Death? No, not today,” a voice boomed, and the light extinguished itself.  A face pressed down close to mine. It was chiseled and wizened with age, and the wrinkles on its face represented the wisdom of a life well-led.

“Not today, Elithra, my dear. You shall die someday, but not today. You are far too young,” Merllyd said. He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, carrying me back to camp. Hatha attended to me immediately and when I came to, I realized the light I had seen had emanated from the crystal globe that sat at the end of the wizard’s walking stick.

Darn if I couldn’t use that light now. Darn if I wouldn’t be ecstatic to be rescued once again by Master Merllyd.

“And you call yourself a witch of the forest,” I chide myself and sit down on a large stump. When I glance down, I let out a chuckle. Right there at my feet is the tennis ball. It has collapsed in on itself, probably from the impact of Camille’s mean swing. I bend down to pick it up when suddenly I hear a voice.

It sounds like the Count, but that couldn’t be, he went up to Paris today for work.

“I told you to lay low,” the Count hisses.

I hear a woman whisper something back. I can’t quite make it out. Her tone sounds pleading.

“You could have ruined everything. You’re ridiculous and I want you to stop. As it is I can’t get those idiot nuns out of my house. Claire-Elaine seems to have claimed them as pets. She’s so desperate to have others in the house now that I’ll never get them to leave. If that old one comes back, spewing Latin, I swear I’ll hit her over the head with a shovel…”

I gasp.

“What was that?” the Count hisses.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” a woman’s voice replies sharply. I’m so disoriented that I can’t tell from which direction her voice is coming.

I jump up from my stump and head towards the great outcrop of rocks, searching for some place to hide. Finding a crack between two rocks, I wedge myself into it, hoping against hope that the Count and whomever he’s talking to won’t see me.

That’s when a giant spider falls from the rock onto my head. I gasp again, and brush it off. At that moment the unthinkable happens, the Count emerges from a large hole in the ground, a hole that is between the rocks where I am standing. My goodness, is that where the figures were hiding? What are the chances of that?

Obviously, he spots me and my heart stops. Then the chase is on. I spring from my ill-chosen hiding spot and run like the prey that I am.

Trying to interrogate a ghost is a futile affair. Hugo is so clueless about his murder that I wonder if he didn’t die of blunt force trauma rather than being slashed in the throat.

Alright, that’s crude, but after trying to talk to him about the circumstances surrounding his death and getting nowhere for an entire hour, I give up and close up shop. I still don’t know how he knew that Etienne wasn’t the murderer given his vagueness about everything, but I guess a ghost instinctively knows when the right person has been caught.

Exiting onto the street, I pull my warm woolen coat around me and open my lovely red-and-white polka dot umbrella. A heavy rain sets in and I watch the last leaf from the nearby oak tree swirl to the ground as I turn down the Quai de Marais.

Tonight I stride up the street with purpose. If I don’t move fast enough, I won’t make it on time.

The hospital on the outskirts of Amboise is in a dark and ugly structure that was thrown up in the 1960’s with little regard to classic architecture. Perfect squares of yellow light emit from its windows, somehow adding to its menacing look. Its door resembles a tiny mouth and the whole awful edifice strikes me as a garish face with over a hundred eyes.

I enter the main lobby, with its deteriorating concrete floor, and hurry past the nurse on duty who shouts at me that visiting hours are over in half an hour. Climbing the steps two at a time, I then hasten down the hall. I am about to swing open the door to Manon’s room when I hear a voice –a man’s voice– coming from her room.

Who on Eostre’s Great Green Earth is in there with her?

I stop in my tracks and do something Hatha wouldn’t approve of –I stick my ear to the door. Wait a minute…the voice is not deep enough to be a man’s, rather it sounds like a teenager. Is this the young man with whom Manon has reportedly gone walking in the woods?

From the other side of the door, it sounds as if the teenager is crying. “There, there, now, it will be alright…” Manon soothes.

I can’t believe it. Is it true that our tiny, mouse-like Manon is…is having some sort of relations with this boy? Of all of the people to be swayed by masculine ways, I would have never thought it would be quiet, sensible Manon. And a relation with a teenager, no less. I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that.

It’s all so very strange that it makes me shake my head. Dating is something we witches don’t do.

Well, come to think of it, back in the Forest Fosse, Eleanor of Jarrow ran off with a snake oil salesman. Hatha was most disappointed about that. But Hendra gleefully reported that Eleanor got her comeuppance by having four children in five years, to which Hatha replied that children were a blessing and not a payback for bad behavior.

And exactly why am I thinking about Eleanor of Jarrow at a time like this? I don’t know. I press my head tightly to the door, hoping to hear more.

“Why don’t you just go in? That way you can hear the whole conversation,” someone says to me.

Startled, I turn around to see the most handsome man I’ve ever met in my life. He has black hair that falls in curls, and his eyes are a deep emerald. He has the strongest, sharpest cheek bones that look as if they could be used to chisel a masterpiece out of marble. My stomach does a summersault.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I stammer. “I was just listening to see if they were done talking, I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Uh-huh,” the man muses. Only then do I notice he’s a doctor. I never really made it passed his angelic face to take him all in. He’s wearing a white lab coat, tan pants and has a flip chart in his hands. 

“Well, I need to visit my patient. Perhaps we should go in together,” he says and puts a hand on the doorknob.

“N-no, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I sputter, but it’s too late, the doctor turns the knob and strides right in.

I stand in the hall, thinking about making a break for it.

“Come on in, Madam,” the doctor motions to me, “I’m sure Manon is up for one more visitor.”

I slink in sheepishly. This is one of the most awkward scenes I have ever witnessed. Manon doesn’t meet my eye. The young man she’s been talking to backs into a corner, as if he hopes nobody notices him. And the doctor? Well, the doctor seems to find everyone’s behavior quite amusing. A smirk appears on his face as if he has just caught the three of us behaving badly. He’s not wrong. He has caught the three of us behaving badly. He caught me eavesdropping and who knows what he caught Manon and this…this…pimple-faced teenager doing when he opened the door.

The doctor rocks back on his heels and unhooks his pen from his clipboard. Feeling self-conscious with so many visitors, Manon pulls her bedsheet tight around her body.

“Good news, Manon, you’ve been here for five days and I think if all goes well, tomorrow you may go home,” he says and scribbles something on her charts.

“That is good news,” Manon whispers quietly, staring down at her hands before looking up to meet me straight in the eyes.

“What were you doing standing out in the hall, Noelle?” she asks.

“I was just about to come in,” I begin.

“She was eavesdropping,” states the doctor.

My jaw drops, I can’t believe this man ratted me out.

“I was not, I was just coming down the hall and was about to knock…”

“She had her ear pressed to the door.”

Hex him, vex him, turn him to pie,
I chant in my head, suddenly so infuriated I feel a hotness in my cheeks.

It’s not a very nice nursery rhyme. Hatha doesn’t approve of it, she says it helps feed unhealthy stereotypes about witches. Still every little girl growing up in the woods knows it. And, incidentally, I have learned some modern day nursery rhymes that are not so nice either. Like the one where the man puts his wife in a pumpkin shell and there he keeps her very well. What is that all about?

“Is that true?” asks Manon, beads of sweat forming on her brow, her paper gown rustling as she fidgets. My goodness, why is she so nervous? What is going on between her and this young man?

“Oh well, just briefly. I heard you talking to someone and didn’t want to interrupt,” I murmur and stare up at the ceiling as if this is a very boring line of conversation.

“You had your head pressed to the door for the entire time I walked down the hall,” the doctor continues with a smirk.

That’s it! I spew Latin.

“Noelle, don’t!” Manon cries.

Oops, I didn’t even really realize I was doing it, I was just so enraged that this man wouldn’t shut up.

“Curious,” the doctor mutters, “My right arm just fell completely asleep,” indeed his arm goes limp and the pen he’s been holding drops and rolls along the floor. So my incantation
does
work, I have successfully caused the doctor’s right arm to feel very heavy.

“If you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go to the emergency room myself, I am losing…” this time he drops the clipboard that is in his left arm, “All sensation in my fingers.”

Green eyes wide with alarm, the doctor hurries out. Manon shoots me an I-can’t-believe-you-hexed-someone look.

I shoot her back an I-can’t believe-you-are-having-relations-with-a-teenager, you-are-in-so-much-trouble-if-Hatha-finds-out look.

For a while, we just stare at each other, eyebrows twitching.

“Good-night, Lucien,” she says to the teenager, who has withdrawn into a dark corner of the room.

At the sound of his name he calls out, “Goodnight, Manon” and bolts for the door, practically running me down.

“I won’t tell Hatha you cursed the doctor, if you won’t tell anyone about, Lucien,” Manon says the moment he’s gone.

I stare her down.

“No can do. I’ll risk Hatha’s wrath and do my penance. The incantation will wear off the doctor shortly, I assure you. But, now, dear Manon, it’s time to fess up. I want to know exactly what is going on with that boy; all of it, every last sordid detail.”