The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ika had just finished watering the plants in the greenhouse when Jamie came to find her. She set the empty metal watering can on theM shelf, checked on the rosemary and shallots she’d planted just last week, and turned back to where she’d left her coat.

And bumped straight into someone’s chest.

She let out a startled yelp and rocked back on her heels, off balance.

Jamie’s hands closed around her upper arms at once, steadying her, and the sudden scent of pine needles made her dizzy. Warmth bloomed out from the places where his hands touched her bare skin. She blinked up at him. He let her go very quickly.

“Sorry.” He backed up a couple of steps, into the narrow doorway of the greenhouse. The sun was behind him, making it difficult to see the expression on his face. “I just came to tell you we’re good to go.”

“Wait,” she said, closing the gap between them again and seizing the lapels of his shirt. She inhaled. “Definitely pine needles. And the ocean?

What is that?”

He cleared his throat. “My aftershave, I guess?”

“But you don’t shave. Do you? I mean, there’s always that short, bristly shadow on your—” Mika stopped and took two hasty steps back. Her love of all sensory joys had gotten her in awkward situations before, notably that time on a train when she’d reached out to stroke an old lady’s beautiful pashmina without remembering to ask permission first, but this took the cake! Her cheeks grew hot, and she smiled sheepishly. Really, it was impossible not to see the humour in her own mortification. “Um. Sorry.

Even after a lifetime of reminding myself, I still forget what is and isn’t socially acceptable behaviour.”

“You’ve met me, haven’t you? I’m not exactly a bastion of socially acceptable behaviour.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m now done sniffing you.” She ran an eye over the greenhouse again, just to give the hummingbird flutter of her heart a minute to calm the hell down.

He watched her. “You have an insect in your hair.”

“Yes, that’s intentional,” said Mika affably. “I find they make wonderful ornaments.”

His eyes lit with unexpected laughter. “I was going to get rid of it, but if

it’s there on purpose—”

“No! Take it out, please?”

He plucked a ladybug out of her hair. His hand brushed the shell of her ear and she backed away quickly, tucking her hair behind it and pretending to be very interested in the ladybug he’d rescued.

Jamie’s voice was brusque as he said, “They’re waiting for us,” and walked out of the greenhouse.

Mika blew out a slow breath and followed him around to the front of the house, where the Broomstick was waiting. Ian had insisted they take it today because, he said, he and Rosetta were not about to pass up the opportunity to travel in a witch’s enchanted car. They were both in the back seat already, bouncing up and down like a pair of toddlers on their first roller coaster.

Mika got in the driver’s seat, retrieved her keys from Ian, and waited for Jamie to fold himself into the little hatchback beside her. As he buckled his seatbelt, she marvelled at the fact that she’d had a golden retriever, a greenhouse, and an entire koi pond in this car, yet it had never felt as small as it did right now, with Jamie Kelly’s elbow just an inch away from hers.

Oh. Oh, no. He’d pushed the sleeves of his white button-down shirt up past his elbows. She could see his forearms.

Forearms were invariably her ruin.

She sighed, started the car, and peeled away from the house before she did something that would well and truly put the cherry on top of her mortification sundae.

“Wheeeeeee!” Ian squealed behind her, as if he didn’t drive his own car faster than this. (He did. Ken had told her.) “When does the speed spell kick in?”

“When I need it to,” said Mika. “Emphasis on the word need there. I’m

not using it today.”

“Spoilsport.”

“I don’t mind,” Rosetta said happily. She’d twisted as much as her seatbelt would allow and had her arms propped on the bottom frame of her open window, her eyes glued to the woods and rolling fields zipping past. “I don’t want to miss anything!”

Mika looked at Rosetta in the rear-view mirror. When they’d told her about this trip, she’d allowed herself only a heartbeat of unabashed delight before she’d cast worried looks at Terracotta and Altamira because she hadn’t wanted them to be left out. They had both immediately informed her that they didn’t want to go to a bookshop, thanks, and were more excited about getting to spend the afternoon swimming in the sea under Ken’s watchful eye. (Privately, Mika thought this sounded like a ghastly way to spend an afternoon. There was no force in the universe that would have persuaded her to dip more than a toe in the North Sea in November, but Terracotta and Altamira seemed to positively delight in the cold.) Reassured, Rosetta’s excitement had been boundless. She’d dug out the clothes she only ever wore on birthdays, had insisted on washing her hair this morning, and had sat patiently for an hour while Ken had dried, untangled, combed, and styled it until it was a perfect halo of thick, beautiful curls around her face. It was heartbreaking to Mika that Rosetta thought a trip to a bookshop justified all this effort, but it was also wonderful to see how happy she was.

As if he’d been thinking the same thing, Jamie turned his head now to look Rosetta in the eye and smiled the warm, twinkly smile that he only ever gave the children. “You okay, kid?”

“I’m whatever okay is when you multiply it by a million,” Rosetta said, still gazing raptly out the window.

“And Mika obviously has everything well in hand,” Ian said, “so we’re off to a splendid start.” There was a pause, and then, his tone shifting, he went on: “If something should go wrong, Mika, how do you propose to handle it?”

“By leaving straight away and trusting that whatever’s happened is dismissed as a trick.”

“Perhaps you and Rosetta could preserve your anonymity by disguising

yourselves,” Ian suggested.

“What, like with hats and moustaches?”

“Or with magic,” Ian said meaningfully. “On account of you being a witch and all.”

Mika noticed Jamie’s whole body had tensed. She had no idea why he’d agreed to this outing after how adamant he’d been that it was madness, but the last thing she needed was for Ian’s apocalyptic hypotheticals to put him off before they even got there.

“Ian, nothing’s going to go wrong,” she insisted.

“Hmm,” Ian said noncommittally. “But could you disguise yourself if

you needed to?”

“Ian.” Jamie’s voice was clipped.

“I’ve heard of glamour spells,” Mika said, considering the question with academic interest. “They project an illusion, so you could make yourself look however you wanted, but they’re very difficult and I don’t know the right runes. If I had to cover my tracks and I knew as much in advance, I’d probably stick with something less complicated, like a tea to confuddle the

senses of anyone who drinks it.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“I’ve never tried to brew one, but I don’t think it would be difficult to figure out. But again,” she emphasised, “extreme measures are not going to be necessary today.”

Ian dropped it after that, and looked out of the window with a slightly troubled expression on his face. Mika wondered if she’d misjudged him and he was, in fact, a lot more worried about this trip than he’d let on.

But then, as they drove past a pretty country church, Ian piped up again.

“So, my dear. Do you have anyone special in your life?”

While the endearment could have been addressed to anyone, the question made it obvious that it was Mika he was asking. She rolled her eyes. So he wasn’t that worried, then.

“I live with you,” she said. “When exactly do you think I see this hypothetical special someone?”

“So it’s been a while then,” said Ian, rubbing his skinny chin like a

cartoon villain.

“A while since what?”

“He means since you had sex,” said Rosetta, without taking her eyes off the window.

Jamie choked. Ian shrugged as if to say, “Yes, that is what I meant.”

“Inappropriate,” Mika said to Ian. Her stern tone was somewhat undercut by the fact that she was trying very hard not to laugh. “It is categorically not your business, Ian Kubo-Hawthorn, but if you must know,

it’s been a few months.”

“Was it serious?”

“It’s never serious,” said Mika. “I haven’t done serious since I was at university, and that was a huge, colossal, fuck-off ginormous mistake.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jamie look curiously at her.

“Is it the secrets that stop you?” Ian asked.

“It’s always the secrets,” Mika said. She flicked the indicator, turned left, and followed a sign for the A47. She thought suddenly of Hilda Kim, sweet, extroverted Hilda who had told the Very Secret Society that she was struggling with hiding a big part of herself from her fiancée. “I couldn’t fall in love with someone who didn’t know I was a witch. I think it would hurt too much. It’s why I never stay long in any one place, and never stay in touch with anyone I happen to meet while I’m there. If I get close to people, I’ll want to tell them the truth. And if I tell them the truth, I’ll probably lose them.”

“You don’t know that,” Rosetta objected. “You’re awesome. I refuse to believe anyone who knew you would turn on you.”

Mika’s heart became a puddle of goo. “You’re too pure for this world, Rosetta.”

“To be clear,” said Jamie, ruining the moment with his usual flair, “you’re saying you won’t live in one place for more than a few months because you don’t want to get close to people you might later lose, but you’re happy to bond with a dog and four fish?”

“First of all, I don’t want to get close to people I can’t ever be myself with,” Mika reminded him. “The secrecy is kind of the key point. Even if I choose not to tell the truth, if I stay too long in one place, anyone who gets to know me might figure out I’m different. And second of all,” she went on, “Circe is only four years old. I’m not going to lose her for a good long while. As for the fish, they’re koi. They can live for over thirty years if they’re properly cared for. I’m not exactly risking my heart by letting them have a piece of it.”

“Look!” Rosetta interrupted them to goggle at the cars and lorries rumbling beside them on the wide, busy A47. “I’ve never seen so many cars in real life!”

Mika seized on this interruption. In the rear-view mirror, she could see that Ian had a look on his face that suggested he was not yet done with the subject of her romantic escapades, and she was determined to divert him.

“Does Lillian have any family at all?” she asked, wondering if anyone else out there knew about the girls. “Have you ever met them?”

“Oh.” Ian shrugged, his eyes pointed out the window. “She told us once that she and her sister were raised by relatives who despised them. She left them as soon as she was able and never looked back, so no, we’ve never met any of them. Mind you,” he went on, “that’s her version of it, but as you might have noticed by now, Lillian is not exactly forthcoming.”

“I don’t think she’s ever outright lied to us,” Jamie objected.

“Withholding information is just as bad as a lie,” Ian replied petulantly.

“And you needn’t give me that look, James. I know you feel like you have to defend her when I get going, but I’m not saying anything that isn’t true.”

Mika cast a doubtful sideways look at Jamie. “Why do you feel like you have to defend her?”

Jamie turned his head around so that he could scowl at Ian in the back, clearly irritated that he was now going to have to explain something he didn’t want to, and said, shortly, “I left home at sixteen. Lillian took me in.”

“So you lived at Nowhere House before you started working at the library? And you were still just a child when you left home?”

“He took the ferry from Belfast to Liverpool, then got on the first train from Liverpool going anywhere,” Ian said. “All by himself, this wee lad.

He didn’t care where he was going so long as it was away from home. The first train turned out to be a train to Norwich. He got off at this end, bumped into Lillian outside the station, and she took one look at him and brought him back to the house with her.”

“Where Lucie, Ken, and Ian proceeded to take great pleasure in fussing over me,” said Jamie with a faint smile.

“He needed fussing over,” Ian insisted.

“How old are you now?” Mika asked.

“Thirty-six.”

Twenty years. Nowhere House had been his home for more than half his life. It was no wonder he was so territorial.

“We made him finish school a little way up the coast,” Ian went on, as proud as an indulgent grandparent, “and then we packed him off to Cambridge for a few years. He stayed on after he got his degree to lecture at the university, then went to Amsterdam for a year to teach there, then moved back to Nowhere House for good when Lillian turned up with Rosetta.”

“Are you quite finished narrating the entirely uninteresting documentary

of my life?” Jamie asked irritably.

“For now,” Ian chirped.

Mika was desperately curious to know what had made Jamie leave his childhood home so dramatically, but she was quite certain asking him wouldn’t go down well. Instead, she said, “What about the rest of you?”

“Lucie was the housekeeper, just like we told you,” Ian said. “She didn’t always live at the house. You’ll have to ask her to tell you the whole story,

but the long and short of it is, she had a violent husband. When she left him, she came to Lillian, who insisted she stay.”

Nowhere House was shifting in Mika’s mind. The new Nowhere House was messier than the first, a place made up of fractured pieces that, somehow, had come together to make something whole and wonderful.

As for Lillian herself, well, Mika had a lot of bones to pick with her, but Ian’s stories had given her a bit of a boost in Mika’s estimation.

“And you and Ken?” she asked Ian.

“Ours is an unexciting tale, I’m afraid,” said Ian. “We came to Nowhere House because Ken turns gardens into works of art.”

Mika watched him narrowly in the mirror. “And that’s all it was?” she prodded. “It didn’t have anything to do with you and the way you seem to be able to spot a witch just by looking at her?”

Their eyes met. Ian’s twinkled. He gave her a too-innocent shrug.

Mika let it go for the moment. Instead, she said, diplomatically, “It sounds like Lillian’s rescued a lot of people in trouble.”

“Lillian likes her strays,” said Rosetta.

Ouch. Mika felt Jamie go very still beside her. Even Ian had been silenced.

Rosetta looked around at them. Her cheeks flushed guiltily, but she held her ground. “We talk about it, Terracotta, Altamira, and I,” she said. “I know Lillian’s given us a lot and she’s always been nice to us, but it kind of feels like she thinks of us as stray puppies she picked up from the shelter rather than as actual people. If she cared about any of us as much as she cares about whatever point she was trying to make when she took us in, she’d have stuck around more. Mika’s taught us more in a week than Lillian has in all the time we’ve known her.”

“It’s okay to feel that way,” Jamie said, his voice low. “She does care, in her own way, but her way is . . .”

“Not right for us,” Ian finished for him, which was a more polite assessment than Mika had expected from him. “Let’s just get it out there: she has done a lot of good, and she has enjoyed the warm fuzzies of doing a

lot of good, and she has also stuck around for absolutely none of the real work.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Mika saw that Jamie’s jaw was tight and he was clearly conflicted, but he didn’t contradict Ian.

“I don’t pretend to know much about people,” she offered, fixing her eyes on the road ahead, “but one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that some people are nice and some people are kind. Lillian sounds like she’s more nice than she is kind. Does that make sense? Niceness is good manners, and stopping to give someone directions, and smiling at the overworked cashier at the supermarket. These are all good things, but they have nothing to do with what’s underneath. Niceness is all about what we do when other people are looking. Kindness, on the other hand, runs deep.

Kindness is what happens when no one’s looking.”

“You know, my dear,” said Ian, sounding much struck, “I do believe you’re right.”

Mika cut Jamie a look. “You, for example, are not nice.”

He made a sound that could have been a laugh. “Thanks?”

“Meanwhile, Ken is both nice and kind.”

Rosetta and Ian nodded vigorously at this. “It’s true,” said Ian. “The man has no flaws! Not one! That is, apart from his refusal to partake in my many madcap schemes.”

“That’s not a flaw,” said Jamie wryly. “That’s having a spine, and a whole lot more common sense than you do.”

Mika laughed. “See? Not nice at all.”

“Did you see that?” Rosetta interrupted, bolting ramrod straight. “That sign back there? We’re close!”

As they reached the edge of the city, Mika grew quiet, her eyes flicking to the map on the screen of her satnav. Norwich had evolved in ten years, she could see that already, but she still wanted to stay well clear of the University of East Anglia, with its familiar misty green fields and glass walls and all the memories it came with.

Luckily, they approached the city from the opposite side, avoiding the university entirely as they wove through a network of crisscrossing streets

lined with trees, pubs, and old-fashioned terraced houses. Rosetta had gone silent, too, her eyes wide with awe as she tracked an enormous cathedral.

Mika found a space in a multistorey carpark that seemed to have been built underneath Norwich Castle—or near enough to feel like they could have been in a castle’s dungeon anyway—and they made their way out into the bright, cold sunshine on foot.

Instantly, the city seized them in what felt like a friendly and slightly daunting hug. Someone was already playing Christmas music in a nearby shop, loud enough to spill out into the narrow, cobbled street. People trotted past, this way and that, checking their phones and gesturing animatedly to their companions. Pigeons dodged passers-by, darting between their legs to snatch up dropped bits of sandwiches and scones.

There was a quaint timelessness to this part of the city, from the castle looming above to the twisty cobblestone streets to the old-fashioned shopfronts. It was far more relaxed than many other cities Mika had been to, but she still looked anxiously at Rosetta to make sure she wasn’t overwhelmed.

Rosetta had moved close to Jamie and followed in his shadow like a baby bird seeking shelter from the cold. She looked shy, and certainly a little unsure, but her eyes were bright with excitement and drank everything in. Instead of making a big deal out of it, Jamie let her follow at her own pace and continued to talk to Ian, who, as always, was never short of opinions he felt it was imperative he share.

“My mother was a witch,” Ian said unexpectedly.

Mika blinked, because it had come out of nowhere, but she found it wasn’t much of a surprise. “That does make a lot of sense,” she replied.

“Considering how little you say Lillian told you, you do know a lot about

us. And you can see magic.”

“Can’t everyone?”

“Everyone can see spells,” said Mika. “Or, rather, the result of a spell.

But I’m talking about magic, the gold dust that witches can see and use.

You can’t use it, but you can see it. That’s how you knew I was a witch just

by watching my videos. That’s why it sometimes looks like the girls and I are shining.”

“Mother shone,” Ian said, smiling softly. “She took so much pride and joy in her power. She considered it such a gift, and it felt like even more of a gift that she shared it with me.”

Mika kissed his cheek, overwhelmed by affection. “You have a big, wonderful heart, Ian Kubo-Hawthorn.”

“Now you’re just making an old man blush, Mika Moon.”

“I’m glad you told Mika,” Rosetta said. “I’m pretty sure Altamira would have blurted it out any day now.”

“I thought it was time to tell her,” Ian said smugly. “After all, she’s now

one of us.”

“I am?”

“I’m making the executive decision to end your two-week trial period a few days early.” Ian raised his eyebrows at Jamie, as if he expected the latter to object. Jamie rolled his eyes but said nothing, much to Mika’s surprise. Ian smiled, and added: “We’ll discuss it some more this evening, when Ken and Lucie are with us. There’s plenty to talk about. Until then, you should know that I don’t tell just anyone about my mother.”

“It’s Ian’s way of inducting someone into his circle of sacred trust,”

Jamie said drily. “He did it to me, too. Except it came as much more of a shock to me because I didn’t even know witches existed at that point.”

Mika had a lump in her throat. She had never felt so welcomed and included, so much a part of something, and she couldn’t rid herself of a lifelong fear that it was too good to be true. That any minute now, like every person who had flashed in and out of her adolescence, they would decide she was too something or not enough of something else and snatch away their welcome.

But she held back the fear and doubt, and let only her delight show. She put an arm around Rosetta’s shoulders and beamed at the two men. “Do I get a cake to celebrate?”

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