Not Just a Witch

When she first realized that it was Mr Knacksap who had half-killed Daniel and tried to murder three hundred people in cold blood, Heckie had felt nothing except anger and rage. But as the days passed she couldn’t help remembering the chocolates with hard centres, and the red roses, and the careful way the furrier had brushed the crumbs off his trousers as they picnicked above the gas works – and she felt so sad that really there seemed no point in staying alive.

And while Heckie faded away, the power of her magic grew weaker too and very strange things happened in the zoo. The warthog had to be taken out of her cage and sent to the veterinary hospital because an odd fleshy bulge, just like a human leg, had appeared on her back end, and the unusual fish began to gasp and come up for air. The others tried to keep news of these things from Heckie, but they were all very worried indeed.

‘I really think I ought to call the doctor,’ said Dora now, taking away the tray with Heckie’s untasted soup.’

‘There’s nothing he can do,’ said Heckie dramatically. ‘I’m better off dead.’

So poor Dora shuffled off and Heckie lay back on the pillow and thought about her ruined life and what she wanted put on her tombstone. She had decided on: HERE LIES HECATE TENBURY-SMITH WHO MEANT WELL BUT GOT EVERYTHING WRONG, when she heard a voice somewhere in the room.

‘Quite honestly,’ it said, ‘I think this has gone on long enough.’

Heckie opened her eyes. All her visitors had gone. Dora was in the kitchen. Then she looked down, and there was the dragworm sitting in his basket and looking peeved.

‘But you can’t speak!’ she said, amazed.

‘I never said I couldn’t,’ said the dragworm. ‘I didn’t because there’s too much conversation in the world already. Babble, babble all day long. But to see you going on like this just turns me right off. And all for a man who, to say the least, is thoroughly vulgar. Furthermore, I have no wish to turn back into a duck. Being a duck was the most boring thing that ever happened to me.’

‘But surely—’

The dragworm rose from the basket and slithered over to the bed. ‘There,’ he said, lifting his tail. ‘On the fifth bulge from the end. Feathers.’

‘Oh, dear!’

‘And more to come, I shouldn’t wonder. Everything’s going to pieces. I wouldn’t be surprised if that mouse you made in the bank hasn’t got himself a machine-gun by now. So I suggest you pull yourself together and forget that creep. The smell of his toilet water . . .’

Heckie had propped herself on one elbow. ‘You didn’t like it?’

‘Like it? You must be joking!’

‘Perhaps it was a little strong,’ Heckie agreed. ‘But I don’t really know what to do with my life any more. I feel such a failure.’

‘Well, for a start you can eat something. As for me, I could do with a change. What’s with this Paradise Cottage there was all that fuss about?’

Chapter Twenty-Four

There is nothing like country air for mending broken hearts, and it was not long before Heckie and Dora realized that marriage would not have suited them. However hard gentlemen try, they always seem to snore in bed, their underclothes need washing and they throw their socks on to the floor.

And Paradise Cottage was exactly the kind of home the witches had dreamt of. Mr Knacksap had cut the picture out of a house agent’s catalogue and when Heckie and Dora went up to the Lake District to enquire, they found that it was still for sale. So they bought it with the money from both their businesses and settled down to be proper country ladies.

Heckie did not often turn people into animals now; she liked to Do Good more quietly, healing the wounded sheep she sometimes met on her walks, or comforting a cow that was having trouble with its calf. Dora, too, preferred just to help with the stonework of the church, adding noses to chipped statues or building up the missing toes on tombstones. Country people are used to seeing strange creatures and they could take the dragworm out without having to zip him in to his basket, and he and the spirit in the wardrobe had become firm friends.

But though they were so happy in the country, the witches had been looking forward for weeks to Daniel’s first visit, and they had planned a special surprise. He arrived on a beautiful frosty afternoon at the little station beside the lake, but they were not there to meet him. Instead, they sent a friendly taxi driver who took Daniel up the steep winding lane and left him at the garden gate. The front door of the cottage was open, but when Daniel knocked there was at first no answer. He could see two bats hanging upside down on the umbrella stand – the bats that had fallen on Sid in the ballroom, which they had changed back and adopted – but no sign of the witches.

‘Is anybody there?’ he called.

There was the sound of rustling and whispering, and then Heckie’s voice.

‘This way, Daniel. We’re in here!’