Page 31 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“Good point,” said Jules. “Aren’t witches supposed to be pagans?She might have been dancing around fires naked at midnight, that kind of thing.”
“Not in this climate, surely.” Flo shivered. “Anyway, I thought we decided being called a witch might just mean she was the local wisewoman. She could have been quite conventional, I’m thinking?”
“There’s a lot of work still to do,” admitted Charlie. “I haven’t even started on analyzing and dating materials—the vellum and so on—but we’ve got dates from the text, which is a good start. The earliest dated entry is 1635, and the latest is 1685, although that’s not the end of the book, so...” He stopped, considering for a moment. “Anyhow,” he finished briskly, “I’ll let you read for yourselves, but let’s just say there’s a sting in the tail.”
Flo insisted that Jules have first go, and she took the sheaf of printed-out A4 pages from Charlie with some reverence, promising to read it that night and pass it on the next day.
“And keep your phone with you,” Jules exhorted Flo as she saw her off in the taxi to her lunch with Graham. “Callme, and if anything’s the slightest bit weird, just get out, okay? You’ve got Terry’s number in your phone, and he’ll be standing by—”
“Darling, I’m going for lunch with a friend, not backpacking around the world,” Flo reassured her with just a touch of impatience, as she slicked on her lipstick without a mirror, before snapping the lid back on and dropping it into her bag. “And isn’t the whole stranger-danger talk a bit over the top? We’ve been chatting in the shop for over a year.”
Jules sighed. “You’re right, Aunt Flo,” she said. “I just want you to have a lovely time.” She gave her great-aunt a peck on the cheek. “Terry’s waiting, you’d better go.”
The shop was quiet that afternoon, with few customers. Flo was with her hot date, and Charlie was doing a paid shift in the healthfood shop up the hill; Jules was glad the poor man had work he actually got paid for. Bored and lonely, she did some dusting and restocking, then, settling down alone at the till with a mug of tea, Jules started on Charlie’s transcript of Bridget Capelthorne’s grimoire.
After the faded, scrolly-brown-inked original, the transcript was a miracle of clarity. Charlie had swapped F’s for S’s where appropriate, which made the whole thing so much more readable, but mostly he had kept the original spelling. The majority of entries bore little relation to the cliché-ridden witchy spells of Shakespeare’s hags, with not a single eye of newt or toe of frog. Instead, with the aid of Google, Jules could see that many of the herbal treatments were more than just spells and superstitions; they were either perfectly legitimate or, at least, probably harmless. Lavender and rosemary seemed to be used for lots of different things, probably partly because both were readily available. There was a remedy for “the headache” that instructed the sufferer to chew on the “barke of the willowe,” or, as an alternative, Biddy had written herself some notes on steeping the bark in alcohol and giving the sufferer a spoonful of the resulting tincture. It must have tasted absolutely disgusting, but Google informed Jules that Biddy had been onto something: willow bark had high concentrations of salicylic acid—the chief component of aspirin.
Another remedy that might have cured, rather than killed, the patient was the instruction to give a person with “the fevere” some cheese that was blue with mold and ripe with maggots. Again, not very palatable, and the maggots might have been de trop, but Jules was pretty sure penicillin was a mold, so basically Biddy was giving a patient with a bacterial infection a primitive antibiotic. Impressive.
In among the logical, there was some flaky stuff that made Jules smile, including a delightful but unscientific suggestion thata woman wanting a man to fall in love with her should smuggle a lock of her own hair under his pillow so he would have sweet dreams of her. There wasn’t anyone Jules wanted to bewitch on that score, although if there was a way to make Roman develop horrendous warts or go bald overnight, she was more than happy to give it a whirl. She snorted at the thought and her eyes, as always, were drawn to the shop across the road. Just as she glanced up, several giggling teenage girls were trooping into his shop.
Damn him. Those customers would have been spending their money at Capelthorne’s by default just a couple of months ago.
Just then, Terry’s taxi pulled up outside, and Flo got out of the passenger’s seat, looking happy and relaxed.
“Well?” Jules demanded, as soon as Flo walked in.
“Well, what?” she retorted, an impish smile playing around her lips. And then she relented. “It was very pleasant,” she said. “There were four of us—so, absolutely not a ‘hot date.’ Mungo and Diana were there, and we all got on famously. Diana’s such a party animal. She could make a church coffee morning feel like a rave.”
“What did you eat? Has hereallymade himself into a good cook?”
“He certainly has!” exclaimed Flo, sounding proud of him. “We had roasted asparagus spears wrapped in Parma ham and homemade hollandaise to dip them in—totally delicious—and then the most delightful Moroccan lamb, with couscous and things. It was out of that Ottolenghi book I made him buy a couple of months ago. I tell you, that man has gone from someone who could barely boil an egg to a chef who could give Freya a run for her money.”
“Really?” asked Jules, the mention of Freya reminding her that she really must go and iron the hated yellow dress for the wedding tomorrow.
“Well, perhaps not quite Freya’s standard yet,” Flo admitted. “Sheisabsolutely outstanding.”
“What did you have for pudding?” Jules asked.
“Oh, Diana very sweetly brought a huge, boozy trifle,” Flo told her. “Grown men do love their nursery puddings, don’t they? The two boys absolutely lapped it up, and it was fine, but trifle isn’t really my thing.” Flo pulled a face. “I had a good catch-up with Diana, though,” she went on. “The poor woman is mortified about her book club consorting with the enemy.”
“So she should be,” said Jules. “Tell her to inform her possewe’lldo bubbles and cake next time. Anything that man can do, we can do better... You look tired,” she added, noticing Flo was a little flushed and bright-eyed.
“Think I’m a tiny bit tipsy,” Flo confessed. “I’m no good at this lunchtime drinking lark.”
“Go and have a nap,” Jules suggested. “I’m totally fine here on my own.” She was keen to get back to Biddy Capelthorne and her enchantments, still wondering about the sting in the tail Charlie warned them about. In the end, with the shop suddenly getting pleasingly busy, it wasn’t until she went to bed that night that she had time to finish her read-through.
Chapter 14
Jules sat up in bed with a mug of cocoa and the pages spread on her lap. There were more remedies with vaguely sensible science behind them and then the more superstitious stuff, the spells—or “speeles,” as Biddy called them—which were rather sweet and harmless. It was clear she was also a midwife, caring for the women and babies, as there was quite a bit on food and herbs for the mother in pregnancy, along with herbal remedies for everything from encouraging delivery of the afterbirth to bringing in a good supply of breast milk.
Biddy really must have been a key person in the community, Jules mused. She was probably the only source of health care for ordinary people at a time when life was typically “nasty, brutish, and short.” There was no mention of a husband or children, so there would also have been pressure for her to earn a living. Unless there was family money—after all, less than two hundred years later, the Capelthornes were considered members of the local aristocracy, a highborn family in favor with the monarch. Clearly the children in Biddy’s family managed to marry up at some point.
Being a woman of importance in the community must have made Biddy unpopular in some patriarchal circles, though, Jules thought. Charlie had refused to tell her much in advance, his darkeyes bright with pent-up knowledge, but Jules could see, from the occasional recorded date, that the book spanned some fifty years or more. Assuming Bridget started writing it as a young woman, she would have been in at least her sixties when it ended. So, why did it end? Did she die of old age? Surely she wouldn’t have beenoldold, but, she supposed, life expectancy was different then, even if you did have access to some basic health care.Physician, heal thyself,Jules thought with a little smile. She had started to feel close to this woman, her ancestor. All these thoughts and impressions were scrolling through her head as she read, making the occasional note in the margin about things she wanted to ask Charlie or Flo about, but then, as she got closer to the end, a different and disturbing narrative began to emerge.
Jules sat up straighter and put down her empty mug. Even the earlier parts of the book were disorganized, with no real order to the entries, but by about three-quarters of the way through, the order had become even more chaotic and the writing fragmented. Charlie had clearly done his best, but increasingly Jules was encountering passages where he had resorted to saying “indecipherable” or “page missing?” In other parts, Charlie had simply commented “incomplete” at a point that was clearly halfway through a remedy. Of course, it was perfectly plausible there were actual missing pages, Jules told herself. Charlie had studied the original more closely than Jules had, and she was under no illusions about the condition of the book.
Also, there was something else... Jules put down the transcript for a moment and took a deep breath. What was it? She was safely tucked up in her familiar little bed, in her favorite bedroom, with the hot, heavy weight of Merlin, who was curled up on her knees, purring. She shook her head, as if to physically clear it of negative thoughts.
