CHAPTER ONE - The Witch who Couldn't Spell.
If ever I rued the fact that I couldn’t spell, it was the summer’s day the mystery parcel arrived at our house in Notting Hill Gate.
I was upstairs trying to get Jimbo, my nine-year-old brother, out of bed when the doorbell rang setting off our two German shepherds, Zig and Zag.
“Sam, get the door for me,” I called out over the din.
He pounded up the stairs. “It’s from Dad’s lawyers. Strictly Private and Confidential.”
“Who’s it addressed to?”
“All three of us: Ms Mpenzi Munro and Masters Samuel and James Munro.”
“Well, open it then and tell me what it’s all about,” I called over my shoulder.
Sam rushed in, flung the parcel down on the chest of drawers and dashed out of the room. “Sorry. It’s the last day of term. I’m already late. I have to go.”
“Wait, just five minutes. I won’t be able to read it.”
“Can’t,” he shouted up as he slammed his way out of the front door.
He ran down the street and crossed over to join his fellow sixth formers as their bus drew up at the stop. He was gone. He wouldn’t be back until five after his end of term class party.
Moving away from the window, I picked up the parcel and turned it over, trying to divine its contents from its appearance, but it wasn’t giving anything away, and I had to see to Jimbo. He’d taken advantage of the distraction to screw himself up even tighter in his duvet, snatching himself away from my attempts to strip his bed and force him to get up.
I tweaked his copper curls, a brighter red than my auburn. That usually worked. He hated me fiddling with his hair.
“Leave off, Penzi. Leave me alone. I’m not going to school today,” he croaked in a voice close to tears.
I sat down quickly on his bed and hugged him, quilt and all.
“Whatever’s the matter, Jimbo? It’s not like you not to want to go to school?”
A sob. Another one.
Zig whined and crawled up onto the bed to rest her head on Jimbo’s foot. Zag took up a guard position at the bedroom door.
Gently but firmly easing down the quilt, I uncovered my little brother’s face. His freckles stood out dark khaki against the pallor of his skin and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.
I stroked his cheek with the back of my hand. “If you don’t go to school today, you’ll miss out on your merit badge, the one for unbroken attendance. And tomorrow it’s the holidays. Would you like to do something to celebrate?”
“Whatever.” He shrugged away from me and buried his face in the pillow.
“Please, Jimbo. At least tell me what’s wrong. It’s not like you to want to stay at home. It’s so boring, you say. And you’re upsetting the dogs.”
Zig whined again on cue and wriggled a few inches closer.
“Listen to that. They’re worried about you.”
He flung out an arm and walloped the mattress.
“They understand me. You don’t. You’re just a bossy big sister. Why don’t I have a mum like the other kids do? She wouldn’t make me go to school.”
Oh, not that again. How do you explain to a nine-year-old that his mother found her maternal duties too onerous? That she skipped off to Brittany in France when he was only two? Disappeared never to be seen again. Gone off to join a grove of druids. Druids of all things. I was eighteen at the time and flabbergasted at her nonsense about wanting to learn more about magic. As if she should have allowed the lure of magic to outweigh the responsibility of being a mother.
I had come home the day I finished my A levels to find a taxi waiting at the curb for her. She was pacing up and down in the hall with her bags packed. She thrust a letter into my hand and signaled the driver to load her luggage. She was well aware of my reading problem. Her lack of understanding over my dyslexia had been the cause of many arguments between us over the years.
I ran down the steps after her. “Mum, can’t you tell me what this says?” I shouted waving the letter at her.
All she said was “You’ll have to wait for Sam to come home and read it to you, won’t you?”
With a toss of her long blond hair she climbed into the taxi, sank back against the seat with a sigh and closed her beautiful blue eyes as if to blot us all out of her life.
So, I did understand Jimbo’s anguish, but all three of us had to deal with her absence and carry on with our lives.
“Jimbo,” I said softly. “Jimbo, love… Sam and I miss our mum, too. It’s harder on you because you’re so much younger than Sam and me, but please, don’t spoil your life because our mother chose to follow a dream that didn’t include us. I love you to bits and only want what’s good for you.”
Jimbo only groaned and turned over again.
“Tell me what’s wrong and I’ll see if I can fix it?”
He remained silent for a while, and I checked the time. We were cutting it fine if he was to get to school in time for the end of term assembly and his award.
“Jimbo? You really do have to get up now or you’ll throw away all your good points.”
He sat up with a jerk.
“If I tell you, you promise you won’t tell Sam? He’ll think I’m such a wuss.”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“Well, there’re these boys at school who are nasty to me 'cause I have red hair. They call me a ginga and push and shove me in the boys’ cloakroom where no one can see them. Look, I’ve got bruises.”
He pushed up his pajama sleeve and showed me. Someone had grabbed his arm with enough force to mark it with a row of blue impressions, now turning a sickly yellow.
I gathered him up and hugged him for all he was worth. Nobody was going to get away with doing that to my little brother.
When I let him go, I dried his tears.
“I tell you what. I’ll come into school with you and speak to your headmistress. It’ll have to be after your assembly, but I’ll wait outside her door until she can see me. How does that sound?”
He opened his eyes wide, eyes as blue as our mother’s. Hope rushed in and his sparkle returned.
“You’d really do that?”
“Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Penzi, I’m sorry I said those horrid things. You do your best to look after Sam and me.”
I phoned the office to say I needed a day’s emergency leave and to arrange for our secretary to reschedule my client appointments. All the time I sat outside the headmistress’s office I wondered about the parcel waiting at home. Was it good news or bad? I didn’t know although I had opened it downstairs while Jimbo was dressing. It held a letter, a sealed package and a thick legal document. I’m a barrister. That summer I’d just completed my twelve months’ pupilage, but I couldn’t cope with reading all the close text in the document. Panic and apprehension doubled my dyslexia, and so I’d left the bundle on the hall table knowing I would have to wait for Sam after all.
The headmistress was appalled to hear how the boys in Jimbo’s class had been bullying him. “We’ll have a talk in assembly next term about famous redheads such as Churchill, Washington, Elizabeth I and Ewan McGregor.”
“Don’t forget Prince Harry and Nelson,” I added with relief that she was taking the matter seriously. “Oh, and Jefferson.”
“Now don’t worry about it any more. It’ll probably all be forgotten by next term,” she said when she showed me out.
On my way home at nearly two o’clock, the bus overshot my stop. I had to run back up the road in the pelting summer rain, not an easy task for someone who stepped only on the cracks. I arrived on the doorstep drenched and dying for a cup of tea and a cheese and pickle sandwich. That’s when I realized I’d forgotten my keys. The day couldn’t get any worse.
But all was not disaster. One thing I’d been able to do all my life was move objects about. Not with my hands. Anyone can do that. But with my thoughts. I didn’t fully understand why. Perhaps it had something to do with all that rubbish my mother was always on about, telling me I was a witch. A witch, for heaven’s sake. In the middle of London in the twenty-first century? Or maybe it’s because I had unusual kinetic abilities. Whatever it was, I never told my mother about my strange talent and took care not to use the power in front of her. She didn’t need any encouragement in her absurd belief in all that magic nonsense.
It was a skill that required deep concentration though and I was tired, worried about the letter and wet through. I had to try. Either that or wait until Mrs Brown collected Jimbo from school, brought him home at four and let us in with her key. I closed my eyes to shut out the street noises and the dripping of the heavy raindrops on my head. I concentrated as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t work. Maybe the door was too thick. I ducked down and peered through the letter-box so my thoughts would have a direct path to the hall table, and I concentrated my socks off. Slowly the keys rose from the table and hovered above it only to fall back down with a jangle. My attention had veered to the ominous documents lying beside the keys. I had to put the parcel out of my mind if I was to get inside before the rain washed me away down the gutter.
Lack of practice that was all. Positivity, that’s what I needed. I banished all the negative and panicky thoughts of the day and beamed my mind on the keys again. This time they rose high enough to clear the table top and flew straight for me and out of the letter box. I ducked aside in time to avoid a black eye and they dropped down onto the step at my feet. I snatched them up, opened the door and made for the kitchen to put the kettle on.
With dry clothes on, my hair in a towel and a cup of tea and a sandwich beside me, I sat at my laptop working on one of my cases until I heard Jimbo return from school. I thanked Mrs Brown and told her to leave as I had taken the day off. I gave Jimbo the news about his headmistress’s idea. He said it was great or cool, probably both, grabbed the uneaten half of my sandwich and disappeared upstairs to watch TV.
I tried to work but my thoughts kept returning to the letter waiting in the hallway. There was still an hour to go until Sam was due home and would read it to me. I worked on until my headphones ran out of charge and closed down the text to speech program which gets me through my working day.
Curiosity over the contents of the strange parcel lured me into the hall. I tried again to read the letter, but it was too much for me. The characters chased each other around on the page like drunken tadpoles. When I replaced it my hands were drawn towards the package that had come with the letter. It was the size of a photo album but twice as heavy. A thick red wax seal sat on the knot of golden cord binding the parchment wrapping. I carried the package to the kitchen table and was hunting for the scissors when Jimbo came in.
He raised his eyebrows at me, “You were supposed to wait for Sam.”
“I am but it won’t hurt to find out what it is, will it?”
“I guess not,” he answered leaning on the table with his elbows to get a better view of the seal.
“That’s a funny symbol on the wax. It looks like a five-pointed star.”
I found the scissors and turned back to look at the seal and my heart sank. It was too familiar for comfort but in for a penny. I snipped through the cord and was about to prize away the seal when Jimbo reached for the scissors.
“Please let me,” he asked.
I handed him the scissors. He wedged the blades under edge of the seal and levered, but the seal didn’t crack or budge. Jimbo shook his head, relaxed for a moment and tried again but still the seal resisted. He looked up at me in puzzlement.
“Perhaps you should try,” he said, handing the scissors back to me.
No sooner had I slipped the tip of the blades under the rim of the seal than it popped off and flew across the room hitting poor Zag on the nose. He sniffed it, decided it was inedible and pushed it away.
“The package must be special,” said Jimbo. “Only you can open it, Penzi. I put all my strength into it and nothing happened. You just touched it and whoosh.”
The parchment crackled and grinced as I unfolded the ends and smoothed them out. When I peeled the sides open, we were looking at the back cover of an antique book. It was bound in faded and patchy red leather with black tooled corners. The pages were hand-cut, uneven and crinkly.
Flutters pirouetted in my stomach. I sensed what was coming.
“Turn it over,” said Jimbo “Go on.”
I braced myself mentally and picked it up to turn it over. A prickling like a mild electric shock buzzed in my fingertips and ran up my arm.
As I laid the book back down right side up, Jimbo gasped at the studded jewels sparkling in their bed of leather. He spoke, but no sound came out of his mouth. He pointed at the title and tried to speak again but could only mouth the words, his eyes growing wider as he realized I was unable to hear him.
But I didn’t need to. I knew only too well what the title said. My mother had thrust that book under my eyes all my life.
It was her Book of Spells.
Why had Dad’s lawyers sent us Mum’s magic book?
