Authors: Kaye C. Hill
“Sounds bracing.”
That bought a pale smile to the girl’s lips. “You’d better believe it.”
“So, apart from the wind, what’s it like, this cottage?”
Rowana pulled a face. “Completely isolated. Halfway up a hill, surrounded by trees.”
Sounded good to Lexy.
“We just looked in a couple of windows when we went up there. We couldn’t go inside, because the solicitors haven’t drawn up the paperwork yet to sign the place over to us.
Well, to me. We’ve been staying in a B&B in Clopwolde for the past few days. You know, it was pretty difficult being up at the cottage – I couldn’t help thinking about what
had happened. I mean, the balcony Elizabeth fell over is right at the front. And Dad was having problems being there, too. If I could, I would have just got the solicitors to sell the place without
us even looking at it.”
Rowana flipped the notes again. The rustle made Kinky sit up straight. He knew about how money converted to dinner.
“But my sister Gabrielle made us all go there. She’s very... assertive.”
So she had a pushy sister. “Why do you reckon your dad felt so reluctant about going up to the cottage?”
Rowana shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know, really. But, when we got the news from the solicitor about the will, he seemed – well, almost as freaked out about it as
I was.
It was only Gabrielle who was acting like we’d won the lottery. That is, once she’d got over her jealousy that I was the one who inherited it all.”
“So, did you find out from the solicitor who Elizabeth Cassall was, exactly? And why she left you all of this?”
“Kind of. It turned out that Elizabeth originally left her cottage and estate to my mother.”
Aha. Now we’re finally getting somewhere. Why did teenagers have to be so obtuse? “You haven’t mentioned your mum yet. Is she... not around?”
“She’s dead,” said Rowana. “Years ago.”
“I’m sorry. But clearly Elizabeth knew her if she made her a beneficiary in her will?”
“Yes – apparently they were friends. This was before I was born. And my mum died not long after I was born, so...”
Lexy gave the girl a sympathetic look.
“Elizabeth wrote in her will that in the event of my mother dying, the cottage and estate would come to her daughter.”
So Elizabeth knew there was a daughter.
“And your dad never knew any of this?”
“He says not...” Rowana’s eyes became guarded.
“But if your mum and Elizabeth were friends, surely he would have known her?”
“He says not.”
Lexy wasn’t liking the sound of this. Nevertheless she changed the subject. She’d do some subtle probing about Paterson senior later.
“What about your sister?” she said. “Wasn’t she mentioned in the will?”
“Oh – I forgot to say. Gabrielle’s my half-sister. From my dad’s first marriage. She died too. Gabrielle’s mother, I mean.”
“Bl... blimey.” Both Paterson senior’s wives dead, now Elizabeth Cassall.
“It was pretty awful for my dad,” Rowana went on. “But I think he always felt worse about my mother. His one true love. You know, like Henry the Eighth and Jane Seymour. Except
that Dad was only married twice. And no one was beheaded.”
Lexy nearly choked. This kid was priceless. “Er... how old is Gabrielle, by the way?”
“Nineteen.”
“How did she take all this?”
“Well, like I said, she was fairly gutted that I was the one who inherited it all. But when I said I was going to sell the cottage and put the whole lot back into starting a new business,
she was OK about it. I mean, I have to do that, don’t I? I can’t keep the money to myself.”
She looked down at the notes in her hand. “Except this, because I really do need to find out what happened to Elizabeth.”
Poor kid. Not only did she think she’d dispatched this unfortunate woman by some clandestine magic ritual, she was also having to cope with an uppity half-sister, and a father who, by the
sound of it, might have a guilty secret or two of his own.
“So, will you help me?” Rowana held out the money again.
Lexy took it. She knew she should have dropped this one like a hot cauldron but something about the girl tugged at her heartstrings. And intrigued her. And she had that rent to pay.
"Before I do anything, I’ll need to know every detail about this. Right from the start." She flipped open a notebook on her desk, uncapped a biro, then arranged her features more
sensitively. "You say you lost the family business?”
The girl nodded. "We’re confectioners. Paterson’s Fine Cakes, we’re called. Were called. My great granddad started the business in 1899.”
Lexy raised her eyebrows in respectful interest.
“Our shop was in Bloomsbury, in London – near the British Museum. You know it?”
“I know the British Museum." It was one of the places Lexy used to go to get away from her husband, Gerard. For an antiques dealer he was surprisingly averse to culture.
“We lived in a flat over the shop," Rowana continued. "I was brought up there. It was a bit..." She searched for the word. “Unorthodox.”
Lexy looked at her with new sympathy. She knew all about unorthodox upbringings.
“Thing is, Paterson’s never changed with the times. My granddad took it over in the nineteen fifties, and he kept things just like they always had been. He died when he was
eighty-four, still running what was left of the business. Then my dad took over."
“So... did he try to turn it around?" asked Lexy.
“You’re joking. He’s as obsessed with the past as granddad was. More. In fact, up to this year we were still using the same copper saucepans, dipping forks and caramel cutters
that great granddad used. The same ones!"
“Sounds good to me," said Lexy. "People are really into retro stuff these days, aren’t they?"
“Maybe. But when customers came into the shop and saw the old 1920s till and everything, they thought we were doing it as a gimmick. They didn’t actually realise it was for real.
That we were living it. I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered to us if it was only the shop, but you should have seen the flat above." She gave a helpless grin. “In a funny way, I really
liked it. I mean, it was inconvenient and cold, no central heating, and having to take our washing to the launderette and stuff like that. Gabrielle couldn’t stand it – she wanted all
the home comforts. But somehow it felt to me like we were really alive. You know, not wrapped in cotton wool.”
Lexy found herself nodding. Her own upbringing in a series of caravans bore that out.
“But everyone Gabby and I knew – well, from school and that – thought we were barking. Our dad actually is barking. I mean, he was restoring a Squirrel in the living
room.”
“A squirrel?”
“Scott Squirrel. It’s a motorbike from the 1930s.”
“Ah." That kind of barking.
“So, you get the picture," Rowana went on. "Until the day I found the letters I thought that Paterson’s Fine Cakes would just go on and on forever.”
“The letters?”
“It was the day I discovered how bad things really were – two months ago. I found a bundle of letters tucked behind the range. It turned out to be a load of correspondence from a
firm of solicitors to Dad, threatening to take legal action against him over non-payment of rent.”
“So you didn’t own the place?”
“No. It’s always been owned by a property company who’ve had it ever since great granddad set up in business. I think he must have done them some sort of favour, because we
only paid what’s called a peppercorn rent – practically nothing, really
-
and there was a very long lease agreement. Which is why I’d always just assumed that things would
go on as they had been.”
“But," prompted Lexy, “something had obviously gone wrong.”
Rowana nodded. “I found out that last year the company had been bought out by this big corporation of developers. They used an old covenant in the lease agreement to raise the rent to what
they described as a ‘realistic reflection of the commercial potential of the property’. Totally out of our league.”
“Did your dad try to fight it?”
She nodded. “Apparently he refused to pay it, and he went to a fair rent tribunal last year. I mean, Gabrielle and I had no idea about any of this. All we knew was that he’d turned
from being someone fairly happy with life into a miserable... well, git. We thought he was having the male menopause.”
“What happened at the tribunal?”
“It ruled in the property developers’ favour, of course. They gave us four months to vacate the premises, unless we came up with the money.”
Lexy gave her a look of commiseration.
“But by the time I found the letters, we only had eight weeks left. God knows when Dad was going to mention it to us. Although I think he probably meant for one of us to find the
letters.” She said this with a kind of fond resignation.
What a strange mix she was, thought Lexy. An intelligent, charmingly naïve kid who had lost her mother but not her sense of humour. Stuck with an eccentric father, and an angry half-sister,
and weighed down by a floury family legacy. Can’t have been an easy life.
“Anyway, Gabrielle and I spent every waking hour from then on trying to decide what to do. Blimey, Gabby even offered to marry her rich boyfriend, because he could have bailed us out, but
Dad totally put his foot down there. Can’t blame him. I mean, not only is Russell nearly thirty, he’s also going bald and his main topic of conversation is carburettors. I think
Gabrielle was only going out with him because he had a Ferrari, although...” She tailed off, then shook herself. “Anyway, it caused a massive row, and didn’t get us any further.
It wasn’t like Dad had any useful ideas – in fact, he seemed to have given up completely. So I realised in the end it was down to me.” She fumbled in her bag. “I found this
in a jumble sale.”
Rowana handed a book to Lexy.
It was a slim hardback in matt black, the title picked out in ornate silver text.
Thirteen Moons – The Magical Cult of Helandra.
Lexy nodded to herself. She’d seen this kind of thing before. She turned to the first page and read aloud.
“
Welcome, Fellow Seeker, to the ancient art of Ceremonial Magic. Transform your existence through Helandra, Supreme Goddess of the Moon, Arch-Mistress of Change.
”
She skimmed the pages. Helandra was associated with an ancient and powerful form of natural magic. The book explained how to summon the goddess in order to bring about change.
The transformation
, it said,
may be constructive, for example, the gift of love, or the increase of material wealth, or destructive, perhaps the elimination of something
unwanted
.
This last made Lexy look at Rowana sharply. She was following the words too.
“It was the idea of the increase of material wealth. Got me hooked.”
Lexy could see that. She read on. Apparently Helandra could be summoned by anyone game enough to try.
However
, the book admonished,
magic is a dangerous tool when exploited by the
unprepared. The purpose of this Handbook, therefore, is to guide the initiate safely through the basic Arts. This may be accomplished in the time that it takes for the moon to circle the Earth
thirteen times
.
“I’m guessing that you taught yourself the magical arts in a rather shorter timescale than a year?” Lexy said.
“Yup. Basically, I had about a fortnight to get the Supreme Goddess to intervene before we had to leave.”
Lexy shook her head wearily.
“But look at the inscription on the fly-leaf,” Rowana implored.
It was written in tiny, spidery script:
To R. Hesitate Not.
“So what exactly did you do?”
“Took it home, learned as much as I could, and went out and bought all the stuff I’d need – you know, incense, candles, herbs. Then, one night, six weeks ago, when Dad was away
and Gabrielle was out for the night with Russell, I went to the greenhouse... ”
“The greenhouse?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to set up a pagan altar on the back lawn,” Rowana reasoned. “For a start, the ritual I was doing needed me to be, um, naked.”
Lexy held back a grin. “Right.”
“So I set up my circle, with the altar in the middle, facing east, of course, and I got out my wand...”
“You have a wand?”
“Yeah. It was a nightmare getting it, too. I was meant to cut it from a branch of hazel at midnight under a waxing moon, but the only tree I could find that was anywhere close was an
elder, in the park opposite the shop.”
Despite her private amusement, Lexy felt a sudden chill. Elder. The witch’s tree. Bad luck if you cut it. She could hear her dad saying that.
“And the moon was waning.”
Waning? Not a good time to mess with the spirit world.
“And I got chased by a tramp.”
Lexy shook herself. She wasn’t sure how folklore interpreted that one. But it was unlikely to be lucky.
“Anyway,” continued Rowana. “I lit this little charcoal burner and sprinkled on some incense, and some dried parsley and snail shell...”
Lexy interrupted her before she got to eye of newt. “Sounds like you did a thorough job.”
“I thought so, too,” said Rowana. “I lit four candles, rang my silver bell – well, actually it was the shop counter bell – then I stepped into the circle, er...
dropped my robe, took up my knife and invoked the goddess.”
“Your knife?”
“Bread knife.” Rowana’s expression changed. “Invoking Helandra made me feel...” She searched for the right word. “Empowered. It was like I suddenly knew that
the magic was going to work.”
Lexy felt herself nodding.
Rowana took a deep breath. “I started dancing and chanting. I had this picture in my mind, this vision of the shop doing well and us paying the new rent, and everything continuing as it
always had.”
She looked directly at Lexy, her pupils wide. “Then suddenly this weird little thought popped into my mind.”
“What?” Lexy could feel the hairs on the back of her neck springing up.
“Well – I was summoning a goddess. You know, actually summoning a real goddess! I wanted to make it worth my while.”