The unkind remarks of the other witches came thick and fast. And it had to be admitted that Mother Bloodwort’s toe did look exactly like all the others: yellow and bent with little tufty hairs.
But Mother Bloodwort was not to be put down. ‘You’ll see one day, all of you. When I get the rest of the spell, you’ll see, I’ll be so young you’ll have to put me into nappies!’
But she allowed Belladonna to help her on with her stockings and lead her back to the bus. It had been rather an exciting day.
When Lester found himself spirited away to Darkington in the middle of his banana fritter he had a feeling that his master was up to no good, and he was right. Arriman had sent for him to tell him that the witches couldn’t stay at the Hall during the competition.
‘But sir—’ began Lester.
Arriman, who was in his library, waved a hand.
‘Don’t try to persuade me, Lester. Even if they stay in the East Wing as you suggested, even if they’re completely covered in their hoods and gowns, I just can’t face it.’
Lester tried not to show it, but he was annoyed. It seemed to him that Arriman was doing everything he could to make the contest as difficult as possible. After all, if you wanted a black witch what was the use of fussing about a few warts with whiskers on them or a sea slug over someone’s eye? For a moment, he wondered whether to mention Madame Olympia. Arriman hadn’t seen her yet and she might be more his type. About Belladonna he decided to say nothing. The disappointment if she didn’t win would be bad enough without raising any hopes.
‘Well, where are they to stay, then?’ he asked.
Arriman brightened. ‘I had a good idea. I want them to camp in the West Meadow, the one opposite the main gate. They’ll be out of the way there. Just buy everything you need – those pretty orange tents with little plastic porches and primus stoves and those cunning canvas huts they have to spend a penny in. Buy everything,’ he said grandly, ‘and send the bill to me.’
‘But it’s October, sir! They’ll be freezing!’
‘No, no – not at all. Braced is what they’ll be. Toned up. Those nylon sleeping-bags are very good, I hear. You’ll have to excuse me now, Lester – I have the judges arriving tonight.’
As he came away from the library, Lester met the Wizard Watcher.
‘How do you find him?’ asked the Left-Hand Head.
‘Off his chump,’ said the ogre. ‘Wants the witches to camp in the West Meadow. Won’t have them in the house.’
The monster sighed. ‘He’s taken it hard,’ said the Middle Head. ‘You can imagine how we feel, letting him down.’
‘Still, if the wizard didn’t cometh, what could we do?’ remarked the Left-Hand Head.
‘And cometh he definitely didn’t,’ the Right-Hand Head said.
The monster then told Lester that it had asked for a holiday during the actual contest. It was just going to take a rucksack and go walkabout.
‘We’ll be back for the wedding, of course,’ said the Middle Head. ‘But everyone’ll be better for a break.’
Lester nodded. He could see that, in spite of itself, the Wizard Watcher felt it had somehow failed in its task and wanted to be alone till it felt better.
‘What’s with Sir Simon?’ he said. ‘Seems to me the old man’s seeing a bit too much of him, eh?’
He had no sooner spoken than there was a moaning sound, followed by the clank of leg armour and the hollow, gloomy spectre of the wife-slayer passed through them in the corridor.
‘Gone to watch the old man noshing,’ said the Middle Head disapprovingly.
‘Thick as thieves, they are,’ said the Left-Hand Head.
‘Gets me down, all that beating his blinking forehead,’ complained the Right-Hand Head. ‘I mean, if you’ve murdered your wives, you’ve murdered them and that’s it.’
Lester’s great craggy brow was so furrowed that the eyepatch seemed to be riding a storm-tossed sea.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘There’s something fishy going on between those two, you mark my words.’
He sighed and pulled a sabre out of the umbrella stand. There was never anything decent to swallow at the hotel.
‘Ready, sir,’ he called upstairs to Arriman.
And with a whoosh, was gone.
Seven
The news that the witches were to camp hit Mr Leadbetter extremely hard. Once, before he came to work for Arriman, he had taken a camping holiday in the South of France. He could remember a huge ironmonger’s daughter from Berlin who had lost her way back to her tent at night and fallen like a felled ox across his guy ropes. He could remember an old Greek lady cutting her toenails into the sinks for washing up, and three sunburnt Italian men who had stumped up and down with blaring transistors clamped to their oiled stomachs. He remembered the dead toad caught in the slatted floor of the shower block and the hairy housewife from Luxembourg who had sat on the steps of her caravan shaving her legs. And when he remembered that these were ordinary people, the thought of what the witches would make of camping made him groan aloud.
‘Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it, Lester, honestly I don’t,’ he said to the ogre.
But of course he went out, good secretary that he was, and ordered everything he could think of: tents and sleeping-bags and folding chairs, and had the stuff sent up to Darkington. Then he borrowed the Manager’s top hat and wrote the numbers one to seven on bits of paper and put them inside the hat and left it on the piano stool in the ballroom ready for the witches to draw lots on the following day for their place in the contest.
‘Perhaps Madame Olympia would care to draw first?’ he suggested, when he had gathered them together after breakfast.
So the enchantress, dragging her aardvark by his rhinestone collar, came forward and put her hand into the hat.
‘Is this some sort of joke?’ she said disdainfully, putting the thing she had just pulled out on to the piano stool.
It was an egg.
There was only the shortest of pauses and then it began:
‘That is an egg laid by my chicken,’ said Nancy Shouter.
‘Oh, no it isn’t. That is an egg laid by my chicken. I could tell that egg anywhere.’
The other witches came closer. There is always excitement when a familiar lays an egg. There could so easily be a small dragon inside or a dark stain which could be trained to grow up into a fiend – anything – and for once they could see what the Shouter twins were quarrelling about.
Mr Leadbetter sighed. He did so want to get on with drawing lots.
Ethel Feedbag now stepped forward. Working at the Egg Packing Station she was reckoned to be an expert.
‘That egg,’ she pronounced, ‘be, simply – an egg.’
This, of course, set the Shouters off again.
‘How dare you suggest that my chicken could lay an ordinary egg.’
‘Not your chicken! My chicken!’
Ethel shrugged. Nancy Shouter picked up the egg. Nora Shouter tried to pull it away from her. The next second they were all peering down at the mess of yellow yolk, transparent white and bits of shell sploshed across the carpet.
Ethel was perfectly right. Whichever of the chickens had laid it, the thing was simply an egg.
When at last they got round to drawing lots it worked out like this: Mabel Wrack was Number One which meant that she would be the first to do her trick. Ethel Feedbag was Number Two And the Shouter twins had drawn three and four. Mother Bloodwort was Number Five and Madame Olympia was Number Six. And the witch who would do her trick last, on the actual night of Hallowe’en and who had drawn Number Seven – was Belladonna.
‘Fine Hallowe’en that’ll be,’ sneered Nancy Shouter. ‘Blinking nightingales all over the place and angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Once, those words would have hurt Bellodonna badly, but not now. Only half an hour earlier, with Rover and Terence, she had turned the ashtray in her bedroom into a hideous, grinning
skull.
There was only one more thing for the witches to do, and in a way it was the most important of all. They had to decide on which piece of magic they were going to do and make lists of all the things they needed for it so that they could be got ready and waiting for them at the Hall. All the other witches seemed to know – you could hear them plotting and whispering and hiding bits of paper from each other all over the hotel – but not Belladonna. Being black needs a lot of practise and a completely different way of thinking to being white, and when she tried to imagine a trick foul and vicious enough to please Arriman her mind just went completely blank.
‘Oh, Terence, I wish I knew what to do,’ she said to the little boy who was sitting beside her on the bed.
Even in the two days since he had left the Home, Terence seemed to have changed. His mud-coloured eyes had grown bright and eager, his hair was no longer plastered to his head but bounced with life, and he wore his spectacles at quite a jaunty angle on the end of his nose. Happiness is almost as good as magic for altering a person’s looks.
‘I suppose Mabel Wrack will do some watery, fishy kind of trick,’ Belladonna went on. ‘And Ethel Feedbag’s sure to do something country-ish, and Madame Olympia . . .’ But the thought of Madame Olympia’s trick was horrible in a special sort of way and Belladonna left her sentence unfinished.
She picked up the mirror. Arriman was playing patience – not cheating exactly but sometimes rearranging the cards a little. The look on his dark, brooding face, the white hair in his curse curl, made her heart turn over. She was just going to put the mirror down again when a grey, wavering shape passed over its surface and she saw Arriman look up eagerly .
‘Is that Sir Simon?’ asked Terence. It was his first sight of the wicked spectre.
Belladonna nodded. ‘He’s his special friend.’
‘Why is he banging at his forehead like that?’ Terence wanted to know.
‘It’s guilt. Because he killed all his wives. It makes a plashing noise, Lester says, but we can’t hear it because the mirror’s silent.’
‘Is that all he does?’ Terence asked. ‘Can’t he speak or anything?’
Belladonna shook her head. ‘You’ve got to remember he’s been dead for four hundred years. Whatever it is people speak with must have got very withered up by now.’ She sighed. ‘It must be so lonely for Arriman, having a friend who can’t say anything. I mean, a plashing sound is not the same.’
Suddenly Terence gave a little cry and Belladonna saw that behind his spectacles his bright, mud-coloured eyes were positively sparkling with excitement.
‘Belladonna, I’ve had a marvellous idea! For your trick. Why don’t you raise Sir Simon? Bring him back to life?’
Belladonna stared at him. ‘Terence, I couldn’t. Not possibly. That’s the blackest magic in the whole world. Witches didn’t just get burnt at the stake for that, they got hung and drawn and quartered and rolled up into little balls of dung.’
Terence didn’t seem to think this mattered. ‘But you want to be black, don’t you? What’s the point of being just a little bit black? If you’re going to win, surely you have to do the most awful thing there is?’
‘Yes, but I’d never do it. Arriman hasn’t been able to do it and Lester says he’s tried and tried and tried.’
‘Arriman hasn’t got Rover,’ said Terence.
Belladonna was silent. The little boy’s faith in his worm was somehow catching.
‘Oh, Terence, do you really think I could?’
‘Of course you could. And think how happy you’d be making Arriman. That’s what you want when you love someone, isn’t it? To make them happy?’
So he had guessed her secret.
‘Yes,’ said Belladonna quietly, ‘ that’s what you want.’
She got up and went over to the wooden box which Terence had fitted out for Rover to live in when he wasn’t in the matchbox in his pocket. Just to know that the worm was there, cradled deep in layers of damp, rich earth, made her feel at once more evil, more wicked and more dark.
‘What shall I put on my list, then? There are awful things you need for necromancy. Warm sheep’s blood, I think and . . . pits . . . and things.’
Terence considered. ‘I wouldn’t bother with all that,’ he said. ‘I think all that stuff’s just for people who haven’t got Rover. I reckon you’ve just got to think black.’
So Belladonna got a sheet of hotel note paper out of the bureau and wrote, Witch Number Seven: Nothing, and went downstairs to give it to the secretary and the ogre.
Mr Leadbetter had just finished reading the lists handed in by the other six witches, after which he had done something most unusual. He had sat down. Not even the pain as his stump grated against the seat could keep him on his feet. He had expected the witches to want a few things like crucibles and thuribles (whatever they were), a bit of wax for making images, perhaps a spot of moonwort or of mercury – that kind of thing. But no; the witches had really gone to town.
‘Seven princesses!’ cried Mr Leadbetter, holding up the list that the chambermaid had written out for Witch Number Five. ‘What does she think I am?’
Lester pulled skilfully at the handle of the sabre sticking from his mouth and drew it from his gullet.
‘These’ll have to go up to the Hall,’ he said, coming to stand behind the secretary. ‘We’ll get the easy stuff, but the old man’ll have to magic up the rest on the day. I’m not going into Turnbull and Buttle’s to ask for Seven Princesses of the Blood Royal, and nor are you.’
Mr Leadbetter nodded. Much as he hated failing Arriman, he could see that Lester was right.
It was just then that Belladonna knocked and slipped in quietly with her list.
‘The dear girl,’ said Mr Leadbetter when he’d read it. ‘She’s never any trouble.’
But secretly, the orge and the secretary were anxious and dismayed. Did it mean that Belladonna had gone white again? That she wasn’t even going to try? What kind of magic could one do with, Nothing?
Meanwhile, at Darkington Hall, the visiting judges had arrived.
When the competition had first been suggested, Arriman had thought of having a whole panel of judges as they do for the Miss World contest or the Olympic Games. But people who really knew about magic were getting hard to find, and anyway now that he had seen some of the witches, Arriman felt so gloomy that he just wanted to get everything over in the simplest way possible. He had written to a lady called The Hag of the Dribble to ask if she would come and be a judge but she hadn’t answered – probably there wasn’t any writing paper in Dribbles – and what he was left with was an extremely old rather frail ghoul called Henry Sniveller and a genie called Mr Chatterjee.
Mr Chatterjee, like most genies, lived in a bottle out of which he swooshed if someone said the right words and remembered to unscrew the top. He was an Indian genie and felt the cold so dreadfully that mostly he liked to stay inside the bottle and talk through the glass. As his Indian accent was rather strong, this made it difficult to understand him, but he was a very fine judge of magic, having lived so long in the East where they do a lot of interesting things like sending people up on Flying Carpets and then bringing them down suddenly so that their behinds become impaled on spikes.
Mr Sniveller was a very different sort of person: a dark-faced, silent ghoul who lived behind a slaughter house in a Satanic northern town and spent the night foraging in dustbins for unspeakable, blood-red things, some of which he ate and some of which he collected. Ghouls are not particularly good at magic, but there is nothing darker, gloomier or more evil than a ghoul, and Arriman knew that he had been very lucky to get him.
So now the three of them sat at dinner round the carved oak table in the Great Hall, where the firelight flickered, the ravens croaked in the rafters and, on a rug, the weary Wizard Watcher rested its head. Arriman was in low spirits – the witches were due to arrive in a couple of days – and kind Mr Chatterjee, who was dining inside his bottle because of the dr
aughts, was doing his best to cheer him up.
‘Oh my goodness, it will not be so bad, I think, to have a wife,’ he said in his soft, sing-song voice, sucking up a piece of spaghetti which Arriman had dropped in for him. Although tiny, he was most beautifully dressed in a white turban and a scarlet tunic frogged with gold.
The ghoul did not see it like that. ‘Yak!’ he said. And presently, w hen he had swallowed a fish finger, ‘Ugh.’
Arriman was just beginning to explain about the contest and how it should be judged when there was the usual plashing and moaning and Sir Simon appeared through the tapestry and thrust his pale and ghastly face at Arriman.
‘You see,’ said the wizard gloomingly. ‘He’s trying to warn me. Seven times he’s been married and each time his wife drove him to murder. Quite simply drove him.’
‘Oh, dearie me!’ said Mr Chatterjee, very much upset. ‘How has he been murdering so many, please?’
Arriman shrugged. ‘The usual methods, I suppose. Drowning, stabbing, strangulation – that kind of thing.’
‘Then it is good he is only a ghost,’ said the little genie, ‘or your new wife will perhaps be Number Eight.’
Arriman threw him a sharp look from beneath his devilish eyebrows. ‘It’s only his own wives he kills,’ he said. But for a while he stared abstractedly into the fire as though turning a new and important idea over in his mind.
‘Well now, gentlemen,’ he said at last. ‘To business. I thought each witch should be given ten points. Two for darkness, two for power, two for presentation . . .’
There was a swoosh and Mr Chatterjee came out of his bottle, growing almost to normal size as he did. Like most genies, he was very serious about his work.
And for the next hour, while the shadows lengthened and the Wizard Watcher slept, the judges of the Miss Witch of Todcaster contest bent over their task.
Eight
The witches’ camping wasn’t as bad as Mr Leadbetter had thought it would be. It was worse.
Not that there was anything wrong with the campsite. The campsite was very nice. Mr Leadbetter had ordered a caravan for Mother Bloodwort, who had seemed to him too old to do well under canvas, and tents and a toilet block with showers and absolutely the latest kind of chemical loo. But the witches hadn’t been in the West Meadow outside the main gate at Darkington for twenty-four hours before pandemonium set in.