A sudden strong whiff of fish wafted past my nose, cutting through the incense of the Midnight Mass. All around me the congregation of the Roman Catholic church of Beaucoup-sur-Mer knelt in devotion as Father Pedro conducted the Mass on Christmas Eve. I raised my head and glanced around me to trace the source of what was becoming more pungent by the second. Far over on the other side of the aisle a group of fishermen from the port at Darennes offered the only explanation, but surely they were too far away?
My family and I had moved to the Atlantic seaside town of Beaucoup-sur-Mer five months earlier after the news of my father’s death. I’m Mpenzi Munro; my friends call me Penzi. My father, Sir Archibald Munro, had been a world famous anthropologist. He’d disappeared while researching the cannibal Wazini tribe in the Middle Congo. Rumor had it that he’d got too close to the subject of his research and they’d eaten him. His will had stipulated that we should sell up our house in Notting Hill Gate, London, and move to France, to his holiday home which sat on the tip of the left-hand side of a perfect crescent bay, much loved by both French and British tourists.
Our mother had gone walkabout with a band of druids seven years earlier, leaving me to bring up my then eleven-year-old brother, Sam, and my two-year-old brother, Jimbo. So, when my father’s will left no alternative I packed up the family and moved us with our two German shepherds, Zig and Zag, to Les Dragons in Beaucoup-sur-Mer. I had to give up my newly established practice as a barrister, but with years of schooling still to go for Jimbo, we needed a roof over our heads and the revenue from the trust fund my father had set up.
When we eventually arrived in the town aboard a tow truck, we found our long lost mother, Gwinny, staying in our hotel. She told us our father had left instructions and funds for her to renovate Les Dragons and turn it into a suitable dwelling for his three children. Jimbo was thrilled to bits to rediscover his mother while Sam and I treated her sudden reappearance in our lives with polite skepticism. Gwinny was repentant and lonely. What else could I do but invite her to share our home with us, at least until our lives settled down?
For the past few months we’d made friends with the local townspeople and done our best to follow the adage of When in Rome. That’s why Sam, Jimbo, Felix and I were attending mass at the local church although our family is not Roman Catholic. Gwinny had opted to stay home and prepare for Christmas Day. Oh, I haven’t explained who Felix is. Felix was one of the two big surprises my father threw at me when he died. Felix arrived out of the blue as a beautiful Savannah cat. My father had sent him by special animal delivery from the Middle Congo. A few days after his arrival I walked into the kitchen at Les Dragons to find a handsome but unknown young man with tawny shoulder length hair and peridot colored eyes sitting at the kitchen table. It was Felix in human form. When he’d had a chance to reassure me, he explained that he was a shape shifter. I’d never met one before and wasn’t even sure I believed in them. He tried my belief even further when he shifted into leopard form. Sir Archibald had sent me a shape shifting man-cat-leopard to be my bodyguard against all things evil in the natural world.
On to the second surprise left me by my father — the natural as opposed to the supernatural world. Apparently, I was a witch, a white witch, the genes coming down to me from my mother in her mitochondrial DNA. Over time we learned that Gwinny had been a feckless witch, but even so she gave me important advice from time to time. She had put me in touch with the High Council of the Guild of White Witches who were now supervising my training in witchiness. The Council had kindly made an exception for me. I’m dyslexic and so learning my craft from my mother’s old Book of Spells was impossible. They had granted Felix permission to act as my helper. We made a good team, Felix and I. He taught me the spells as and when we needed them to fight evil and restore good, and I cast them. To date that had involved solving several murders and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
Along the way we’d established a sometimes rocky relationship with the mayor, Monsieur Bonhomie. Tonight, he’d invited us to share his family’s Christmas dinner after the Mass. Sam and the mayor’s daughter, Emmanuelle, were good friends, so Sam was looking forward to spending the Christmas celebration with the Bonhomie family.
I wrinkled my nose as the fishy pong grew in pungency. What could it be?
