Beswitched (18 page)

Flora wanted to say “Wait and see,” but Pogo was giving her warning looks, so she shut up.

“I thought you were going to give away the whole shooting match!” Pogo said that night, when they were all undressing for bed. “In a way I wish we could tell Nev about you coming from the future—he’s always talking about all the things that are going to happen when the workers rise up, whatever that actually means.”

“They haven’t risen up yet,” Flora said. “A lot of the future
isn’t all that different to now—except that people are allowed to do more. You can stay up late and get divorced and dye your hair, and nobody cares.”

“I think it sounds exciting,” Pogo said. “I can’t wait to live in a world where girls can be judges and prime ministers when they grow up. We’re hardly allowed to be anything at the moment.”

“Well, I think the future sounds rather frightening,” Dulcie said. “And I wish we could tell Neville about it—I bet he’d know all the right questions to ask.”

“Yes, but I might not know how to answer them,” Flora pointed out.

Pete turned a somersault on her bed, and rolled off it with a loud thump. “OW! Neville wouldn’t want to talk about the future, anyway. All he wants to do is stare at Virginia.”

“Shut up, you beast!” Pogo threw her pillow at Pete.

“I think it’s very romantic,” Dulcie said. “They’ll probably get married. I hope communists are allowed to have bridesmaids. I’ve always wanted to be one.”

They were all giggling. It was true, Neville and Virginia always seemed to be apart from the group, sometimes holding hands when they thought nobody was looking.

“Gosh,” Pogo said. “I can’t quite imagine old Nev being in love!”

Pete suddenly let out a squawk of laughter. “I say—we can go ahead with that spell for Ethel now!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember? We promised Ethel we’d cast a
spell to find her a rich husband. The one in the book says we need a hair each from the heads of true lovers! Well, we’ve got the lovers now, haven’t we?”

“I thought we’d stopped doing magic,” Dulcie said doubtfully.

Pogo finished buttoning her pajamas, and pulled her small overnight bag from under the bed. She had brought the spellbook with her. They hadn’t liked to leave it under the floorboards, where the fumigator men might find it. “Here it is. I suppose there’s no harm in looking it up.”

“I’d like to do something for Ethel,” Flora said, remembering how kind she’d been on her dreadful first day. “As long as it’s not dangerous.”

Pogo opened the book at the chapter about Love. “ ‘An incantation to make a wealthy match for a Dowerless Maid,’ ” she read. “Yes, that’s the one. ‘Dowerless’ means poor, and Ethel’s poor. Her father’s a farm laborer, and they all live in a tiny cottage over at the edge of Compton Wood.” She studied the spell. “You’re right, Pete—it does call for the hairs of true lovers. We also need a sprig of common samphire, a leaf of moneywort, some snail spittle—”

“Yuck!” said Flora. “How do you get a snail to spit, anyway?”

“It means the trail they leave, it’s not like dribble. Hmm.”

They were all quiet, looking at Pogo. She was wearing her thinking frown.

“Well?” Pete asked impatiently.

Pogo put the old book back in her bag. “It looks perfectly
possible. And I’ve just realized that tomorrow would be an ideal time to do it. Virginia’s going to the market with Dorsey and Lady B., and Nev’s going to meet them there. We’ll be free as air until tea.”

They began the search for ingredients next morning, as soon as the car had taken Virginia, Lady Badger and Dorsey off to the nearest market town. Pete had come up with all kinds of outrageous plots to get the lovers’ hairs, but Pogo said, “I’ll snitch one of Nev’s hairs at teatime, and we’ll take one of Virginia’s out of her comb. It’s the snail spittle I’m worried about—and does anyone know what moneywort looks like?”

The samphire was a kind of spiky seaweed that grew among the flat rocks under the cliffs, and was easy to find. The snail-spit problem was solved when they stopped in a wood to eat their lunch, and Dulcie found a damp place crisscrossed with snails’ silvery tracks. You couldn’t pick these up, but Pogo wiped her handkerchief across them several times, and they all agreed that this would do.

In the afternoon the sun was almost as warm as summer, and they cycled to a place called Thurlestone Sands. Pogo bought them each a bottle of ginger beer, which Flora thought horrible—like a fizzy drink flavored with black pepper. The wide, sandy beach was almost deserted, and they had such a great time paddling and racing the waves that they had to hurry to be back at Merrythorpe in time for tea.

Pete, who had set her heart on casting Ethel’s spell, found
the moneywort by simply asking Lady Badger’s gardener. “Excuse me, Archer—what does moneywort look like?”

He showed them to a patch of ground in the shade of the garden wall, where flat, round leaves were spreading across the cracked stone ground.

Pogo snatched one of her brother’s short brown hairs while they were pretending to fight before tea. She showed it to the others afterwards, stored in an old envelope. “Now all we need is a box of matches and an earthenware bowl—a pudding basin will do, Dulcie. You can sneak into the pantry while Dorsey’s clearing the table.”

For once, they were impatient to go up to bed. Flora had never performed a real spell before, and was almost giddy with nerves. The excitement made them all giggly. Pogo placed the earthenware pudding basin in the middle of the bedroom floor. Into it, she put the two hairs, the samphire and the moneywort. The snail spit was more of a problem—it seemed to have disappeared. They shook Dulcie’s handkerchief over the bowl and hoped it would work.

“Is that it?” Flora was disappointed. The ingredients at the bottom of the bowl looked like nothing but a couple of dirty leaves. “What happens now?”

Pogo consulted the old spellbook. “It says all persons present must chant the incantation, so you lot squash round where you can read it. We have to put in Ethel’s name after ‘Dowerless Maid’—her full name, just to be sure. And then we drop a live cinder into the bowl—we’ll use a lighted match.”

The other three girls pressed close to Pogo, and slowly
chanted out the spell (quietly, because they didn’t want anyone else, particularly Dorsey, hearing them).

Flora felt breathless and solemn. They watched in silence as Pete struck the match and dropped it into the bowl.

“It’s gone out,” Dulcie whispered.

“No—look!” Flora could see a wisp of smoke, as thin as a thread. It rose out of the bowl in a straight column, then suddenly vanished. “Was that it? How do we know if it’s worked?”

They all stood staring doubtfully at the heap of cinders at the bottom of the bowl, and then Dulcie suddenly farted—and the four of them erupted into screams of laughter. They laughed so hard that Lady Badger appeared in the doorway.

“My dear girls! Get into bed at once—before Dorsey hears you!”

Luckily, she did not see the bowl on the floor. Trying to swallow their giggles, the four girls climbed into their beds.

Pete moved her camp bed so that she was right beside
Flora. “I’m so glad you came to the past,” she whispered. “I hope it’s ages till you have to do your task, so you can stay with us as long as possible. Isn’t it ripping that we’re such pals?”

“Yes,” Flora whispered back, feeling very happy, “utterly corking!”

She didn’t know that their friendship was about to be tested to the limit.

16
The Wrong Side of Pete

“I
sn’t it beastly to be back in prison again?” Pete sighed. At the end of their first full day back at St. Winifred’s, it was warm enough to sit out in the garden after tea. Pete had bagged one of the best places, on the lawn under the acacia tree.

“I don’t mind,” Pogo said. “There are so many nice things about the summer term—I can’t wait for the cricket to start.”

The smell of warm grass gave Flora a swift, sharp memory of drinking Diet Coke in Ella’s garden. “I think I’m quite glad to be back,” she said. “It feels nearer to my real home, somehow. This is where the magic has to happen.”

“I don’t think magic works at Merrythorpe,” Dulcie said. “Otherwise Ethel wouldn’t be such a disappointment.”

“Oh, Dulcie,” Pogo said kindly, “do stop going on about it! Did you really, truly expect to find Ethel married to King Cophetua?”

“Why not? It worked with Flora, didn’t it? I didn’t expect to come back and find that she’s still just an ordinary parlormaid.”

“Perhaps she’s already fallen in love, but it’s a secret,” Flora suggested.

“Oh no.” Dulcie was firm. “A secret love would make her pale and thin.”

“You make it sound like an illness! When I fall in love, I want to be struck by a grand lightning bolt of passion—like Flora’s granny was,” said Pete.

She was lying on her back with her long, spindly legs sprawled up the trunk of the tree. Her brown stockings were baggy and full of bad darns, and the others giggled—it was hard to picture her being struck by a bolt of passion.

Pete was haughty. “That’s what she said, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Granny’s always going on about love and passion and stuff,” Flora said. “When she met the artist guy, she ran away from her husband without even taking her toothbrush. She didn’t take any money, either. The artist offered to buy her a diamond ring, and she said she’d rather have a few pairs of knickers.”

“Gosh, she sounds divine!” The long legs swung down, and Pete sat up. She never got tired of hearing about Flora’s granny’s love life. “My grandmother looks like Queen
Victoria—nobody on earth would want to paint her in the nude. You’re so lucky!”

She’d said things like this before, and it was starting to make Flora feel uncomfortable. If her granny had belonged to someone else, wouldn’t she want to know more about her? When she told other people about her adventures—the famous artist, the famous nude paintings of her in national art galleries—they were often really impressed. The boring holiday in Italy, and then the huge changes happening at home, had taken up too much of Flora’s attention.

Let’s face it
, she thought,
I was too busy sulking to get to know Granny properly. Ella was the one who liked listening to her stories
. If she ever got home, she might give the old bat another try.

There were a lot of very nice things about the summer term. The evenings were longer and lighter, and the weather was warmer. The gardens were full of flowers and birds.

The teachers concentrated on the girls taking School Certificate (the old-fashioned version of GCSEs) and were far less strict with the lower forms. On warm afternoons, Mademoiselle Dornay taught her French class under the big acacia tree on the lawn, and Flora found it hard to think about verbs and tenses when there was a nest of thrushes on the branch above her, and caterpillars kept dropping on her book.

Miss Palmer, the English teacher, did less grammar in her lessons, and more poetry, which Flora liked. She had discovered that she was rather good at reciting poems. One morning, they did Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” which Flora knew well because Dad had read it to
her when she was little. All the girls read different bits of the poem. The carpenter made Flora think of the gloomy old man who had built their kitchen in Wimbledon, and when she read: “ ‘ “I doubt it,” said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear,’ ” in his deep, dragging voice, the class fell about laughing.

This was the beginning of all the trouble. Flora’s performance gave Miss Palmer a brilliant idea.

“As you may know, I’ve been put in charge of the first form’s contribution to our annual Speech Day display,” she told them at their next English class. “This display will be seen by all the school governors and visiting parents on Speech Day—and I’ve decided to do ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ Flora, I hope you’ll give a repeat of that splendid performance. The other girls taking part will be Dorothy and Consuela. We’ll be having our first rehearsal next week—I expect you three to know every word by heart.”