What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  What The Cat Dragged In

  Celtic Witch Mysteries Book One

  Molly Milligan

  Text copyright 2017 Molly Milligan

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction

  Table of contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-Four

  One

  (Welsh is an ancient language with some unique sounds. It’s phonetic and not too hard. My simplified advice would be: w = oo, y = u (except when it’s the last syllable when it’s more like i), ll – thl (but really not, it’s impossible to describe), dd = th, au = ai/eye, si = sh, h = always pronounced, g = always hard, a = always short, c= like k, always hard, f = like v in very, ff = f, r = always rolled. Good luck!)

  The day after Gwyl Fair y Canhwyllau – Imbolc – 2 Feb

  The dry grains of rice spilled across the kitchen table spelled out one word.

  DEATH.

  I rolled my eyes. It could, indeed, be a dire portent of doom and despair, or it could just mean that my Great Aunt Dilys was limbering up for a fortune-telling session later on.

  Still, I paused for a moment before I swept the rice into my hand and deposited it into the plastic bag tied to a cupboard door that served as a general refuse bin. My aunt had been acting strangely, lately. I’d almost say she’d been secretive. She was old, and eccentric, and prone to drama. I had a feeling that she was planning something, but when I’d spoken to her, she’d clammed up.

  I shook my head. I had work to do right now.

  I was already a little late in making the annual batch of marmalade. The right oranges, the big bitter orbs from Seville, were dwindling now as January rolled into February. I’d bought a large bag from the market a few days previously, and Mai, the stallholder, had warned me then that they were “on the turn.”

  And now I couldn’t find any of the glass jars I’d been collecting.

  “Aunt Dilys!” I called out, trying to keep the irritation from my voice. My erratic great aunt could be anywhere in the long, low stone cottage that we shared. It had been in our family for generations, and seemed to develop new, dark hidey-holes on a weekly basis.

  And if there was one thing my aunt excelled at, it was lurking in shadowy corners, plotting mischief.

  That probably wasn’t fair, I muttered to myself. This week – apart from the cryptic messages in household groceries – she was mostly plotting music.

  I left the kitchen and its comforting warm fug, and hurried out into the freezing, unheated hallway that dominated the centre of the house. “Aunt Dilys?” I listened to the answering silence.

  And in that silence, I heard a distant ting-ting-ting.

  She was upstairs. I found her at last in her large bedroom. Her door stood ajar, and I could hear a musical bell-like tinkling coming from within.

  “Aunt. You’re still exploring your musical side, are you?”

  Aunt Dilys’s ancient face wrinkled into a smile and she beckoned me into the mad scientist’s lair of a room she occupied. “I’ve moved on from that crumhorn,” she told me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Her five-foot frame had struggled to cope with the vagaries of the mediaeval woodwind instrument. When she played it, she’d looked like she was wrestling a snake.

  And when she played it, it sounded like the snake was winning.

  But the crumhorn had been cast aside, like most of her short-lived obsessions. Now she was sitting at a table set in the centre of the room, and she clutched two wooden knitting needles in her withered hands. There were around a dozen glass jars on the table, filled with various amounts of water.

  “I can nearly play Sosban Fach,” she said, and began to hit the needles against the jars. “Sing along, Bronwen!”

  “Mae bys Meri-Ann wedi brifo…” I began dutifully, churning out the popular children’s song about a little saucepan. You only had to have been raised in Wales to know the words, even if you didn’t speak Welsh beyond “good morning” and “thank you.” Then I stopped myself. “Aunt Dilys, I am making marmalade today. I told you last night, after the Imbolc ritual. I need those jars. Please.”

  Ting, ting, ting. She worked her way to the chorus, her eyes half-closed. With her hooked nose, she was every inch the archetypal witch. Her likeness seemed to adorn every other postcard you could buy in the tourist shops in the local town. It was the same nose that I had inherited, though I preferred to consider mine “aquiline” and “Roman.” Sadly it was more like “roamin’ all over my face.”

  She didn’t reply. Then I said, “And what was that business with the rice. Whose death?”

  She scrunched her eyes more tightly closed. I watched her and I felt uneasy. Something was coming.

  I was about to interrupt her once more, when her deep-set eyes snapped open. “That cat has something for you.”

  The hairs were already standing up on the back of my neck as Harkin pre-warned me that he had brought an animal for me to heal. I unfocused my eyes and Harkin filled my mind. “Something small,” I said. I felt relief flood through me. I dealt with injured animals all the time. I hoped the message in the rice didn’t bode ill. “At least it’s not another badger. Those things fight like blazes when they get wedged under a low chair.”

  “So would you,” Dilys pointed out.

  “You’re not wrong.”

  I picked up two jars, and Dilys followed me down the stairs with two more in her hands. For a hunched-over, stick-thin, parody of an old woman, she was remarkable spry on her feet. In private, that was. In public, of course, she was mindful of the impression she had to give. People seemed to pay her more for her skills and services if she lived up to their expectations. At home, though, she dispensed with her stick and the ceaseless litany of “oh my back, my poor eyes, woe is me.” It was more like “put the kettle on, where’s the corkscrew for the wine, why are my slippers in the cat basket?”

  The answer to the last question was usually “Because of Harkin.” My dark brownish, reddish, scruffy-looking cat was currently sitting proudly in the middle of the rag rug in the kitchen, in front of the old black range that took up one wall of the room. This was the source of all our heat and cooking and hot water. It was all very romantic-looking, and wholly impractical, and though I didn’t often feel ready to join the twenty-first century, I did sometimes dream of at least being able to stumble into the twentieth and have proper central heating.

  There were certain barriers to that. For me, such things could never happen.

  At Harkin’s feet was an injured mouse.

  Now I ought to explain something about my cat, because you’re probably wondering why I’m even wasting time telling you that my cat has done something that all cats do. I promise you that I am not one of those crazy cat ladies who thinks that everything her darling Mr Tibbles does is somehow wonderful and uni
que and worthy of a tale. If I had a regular job, you wouldn’t avoid me in the office for fear of me telling you at great length about my “furbaby’s sweet little thing that he does with his nose” or whatever. (Actually you might avoid me for other reasons. I will get to those.)

  No, Harkin really is a unique cat. Oh, aside from the sort-of telepathy, obviously, though that is more common than you’d think in hedge-witch folk like myself. Harkin rescues injured animals and brings them to me for healing.

  Seriously. Everyone assumes that Harkin is attacking these animals, first, like all cats do, and then bringing them to me as a gift. But no, he actually does find injured or ill creatures, and carefully herds them back to me for me to do my thing.

  I mean, when was the last time you heard of a regular cat bringing in an injured badger?

  I knelt down and peered closely at the mouse. It was frozen still with shock. I wondered where Harkin had found it; the winter had been a harsh one and the mouse should have been tucked up in a state known as torpor, deep in a nest, staying safe and warm. Harkin bent his head and nudged the mouse so that it rolled over, and then I saw the small tear in its side.

  Oh, that was fixable, and not magically. What would take my magic, however, would be the task of bringing the mouse out of shock.

  I set about it. I could hear Dilys coming in and out of the kitchen behind me, and the occasional chink of glass as she set out the jars on the sideboard, ready for my marmalade-making extravaganza. But she knew not to disturb me as I gently cleaned the wound and pulled the edges together with tiny bits of surgical tape.

  Then I closed my hands around the mouse, and pulled it close to my chest, and closed my eyes, and bent my whole being around it, drawing a golden circle in the air using just my mind.

  The whole house was a sacred space but I still would cast a mental circle when performing any healing.

  The mouse was such a tiny little thing, and didn’t take very much out of me. I felt only slightly light-headed when I finished, and Dilys had brought a chair to my side, ready as I got to my feet, the mouse now kicking and struggling in my cupped hands. I sat for a moment but didn’t need long.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve made up a little nest for him for overnight,” Dilys told me.

  “So it wasn’t about the mouse’s death,” I mused to myself. “Aunt, do you feel something coming?”

  She tapped my arm and grinned. “Any moment now.”

  She looked too cheerful for me to be properly worried, but something nagged at me. She was plotting, I just knew it.

  I was just putting the now-active mouse in the cage in the utility room – a small offshoot of the kitchen which had originally just housed a washing machine but was now more of a sick animal hospital - when I heard the landline telephone ring in the main house.

  We don’t have any mobile phones here. We can’t. I say “we” but it’s me, actually.

  It’s my fault.

  I closed the door to the cage, checked our other residents – currently the angry badger, two robins and a hibernating grass snake – and was just making my way back into the kitchen when I heard Dilys mention my name on the telephone.

  “Bronwen will be there soon. Well, not soon. As soon as she can. You’ll recognise her, I’m sure. She’s fat and blonde. Very pretty. Of course. See you soon!”

  I am not fat. I’m comfortably built, and I’d only call myself fat if I was trying to annoy someone who thought they had any right to comment on my apparently “poor life choices.” I am blonde, that’s true. Pretty? That’s not something Dilys would say to my face.

  “Who was that?” I demanded, suspecting some dreadful and excruciatingly embarrassing blind date to be on the horizon.

  “Ah! You said something was coming. And you were right. She’s here! You need to go and collect your cousin Madison.”

  “Maddie lives in America.” I’d never even seen her.

  “She’s come over for a visit. She’s flown over, and she’s at the airport.”

  “The nearest airport is … in England. We’re in Wales. And I don’t drive.” And how on earth, I thought crossly, did you arrange all this?

  Dilys dug around in her old purse. “Here’s the money for the bus. And the train. And the taxi.”

  “It will be a three-hour trip just to get there,” I said. “That’s if I get the right bus. If not, it could take days…”

  “Don’t be silly,” Dilys said. “You’ll be there in no time. Travel is so exciting, isn’t it? Oh, will you make me a brew before you go, cariad?”

  “And what about my marmalade?”

  Dilys was already gathering up the jars to take back to her room. “Madison can help you when she gets here.”

  Why was Maddie coming here? I didn’t like change and I didn’t like surprises.

  Who was she?

  “Aunt,” I said, planting myself squarely in front of her. “Did you write ‘death’ in the rice?”

  She met my gaze. “Is that what you were talking about earlier?” And she looked very serious. “No, I didn’t.”

  That worried me. My aunt was a fortune teller but she went out to seek the future. It rarely came to find her.

  And in this case, the message had come for me.

  Two

  I put the rice and the unsettling word out of my mind. After all, if you’re a witch and your aunt is a witch and you come from a line of witches, you get used to uncanny events in everyday life. I wasn’t about to freak out over one word. I mean, I once saw PAIN written out in daubs of red on the front door, but it turned out to be my aunt with some tester pots looking to choose a new colour for the woodwork. She’d meant to write PAINT but had run out of space.

  So, instead, I tried to use the long, tedious journey time to prepare for my meeting with my cousin Maddie, but how do you do that, when it’s someone you’ve never met before?

  My mum died when I was fifteen. It was a long illness, and she welcomed her final passing as a release. She was stoical and we were all distraught, of course. I kept thinking she was putting on a brave face for us, but in hindsight, she really wasn’t. I know that we tend to idealise the ones we have lost, but honestly, you know, she was the best of women.

  Her sister – Maddie’s mum - was much, much younger than my mum. I’d been what they call a “late gift” to my mum who never thought she could have kids, and she was already old when she’d had me. She had never left the town she’d grown up in. It gives me a rootedness that is at once both stifling and reassuring. I’ve never left this place, either, except for short holidays in Ireland or Cornwall.

  But my mum’s younger sister was different. I’ve seen the photos. The first thing she did when she was old enough was have her nose “fixed” – they shaved off the top bit of bone and made her into a pert, pretty, pixie-faced woman. The second thing she did was to leave, and I don’t mean she went to Wrexham. No, she upped sticks and heading way out west, over the sea, and settled herself in America.

  The third thing she did was to marry a man whose African-American great-grandparents had moved from the Deep South to California to do war work in the 1940s. She’d kept in touch, sporadically, with my mum, sending photos of her new family against huge coastal backdrops or with unimaginably teeming skylines of skyscrapers. My cousin, the same age as me, whose name was Madison, was always called “Maddie” in these letters, but I realised with a jolt that I had no idea what Maddie, or Madison, actually wanted to be called.

  So I could not prepare for this strange new unknown person in my otherwise ordered life, and I spent the journey thinking about a million other things instead.

  I ate a hurried lunch of a watery sandwich between my bus journey and the train trip to the airport. Once there, I floundered around, trying to guess which terminal she’d come in from. I avoided catching the eye of the security staff. I was prowling like an idiot and probably looked as suspicious as they come, uncertainty rolling off me in waves.

  Why couldn�
�t Aunt Dilys have mentioned this to me earlier?

  Then I could have spent a week or two panicking, rather than trying to cram it all into a few short hours.

  Tannoys buzzed and information screens shuttered black and yellow, and crowds surged past in waves.

  And then she was there, and I recognised her instantly. She didn’t have the family nose – maybe her mum’s plastic surgery was inheritable, I thought illogically. But she had our deep set eyes, and our wide grin, though her hair was black and scraped back in a bun, and her eyes were as green as my own.

  “Hey!” she called, seeing herself in me, a pale ghost of a reflection. “Oh my gosh, you must be Bronwen!” She hurled herself forward, dragging a wheeled case, and then I was enfolded in a bear-hug.

  “Bron,” I muttered into her shoulder. “Maddie? Madison?”

  “Maddie,” she said, and stepped back, and stared at me, and grinned again.

  I grinned back, feeling strangely warm and relaxed by her unfettered joy. “Are you ready to go? I’m sorry but it’s going to be a bit of a trek…”

  “Hey, a few more hours won’t hurt, right?”

  “The suspension on the buses here isn’t great,” I warned her. “These few hours might hurt more than you think…”

  ***

  We did not talk for long. Maddie fell asleep on the train, and I had to shake her awake to make the connection to the bus. She stumbled across the concourse as the darkness began to gather. She’d come sensibly prepared for our winter, and as soon as we were on the bus, she snuggled into her thick puffed jacket and fell asleep again. The bus ride only took us into town, and I didn’t think she would walk the mile or so out to our house, so I used the last of Aunt Dilys’s money to take a taxi. It was a rare treat, but also meant that the local gossips would hear of our new arrival just the very minute that Dai dropped us off at the door and got onto his phone to alert everyone that he knew.

  By this time it was very late. Maddie claimed to have been awake for “days” though she managed to rouse herself enough to greet Aunt Dilys with the same warmth that she had hugged me.