The Rookery Boxset Read online

  THEROOKERY

  BOXST ONE

  B G DENVIL

  Copyright © 2020 by Gaskell Publishing

  All Rights Reserved, no part of this book may be

  Reproduced without prior permission of the author

  except in the case of brief quotations and reviews

  Cover design by

  It’s A Wrap

  Contents

  One Small Step

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Kettle Lane

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  The Piddleton Unrest

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Copplestone Curse

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Hobb’s Henge

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  By B G Denvil

  About the Author

  One Small Step

  One

  I don’t remember being born. I suppose I was too young.

  In a way, life started when I realised I could bounce into the air and stay there for a while. I didn’t call it flying, because the big people who I saw flying around every day did a lot more than I could. They swept up and disappeared into the clouds. Naturally, that depended on the clouds.

  My father used to clap his hands and tell me to see how much more I could manage. But my mother just scowled and told me I looked stupid and should realise I was making a fool of myself.

  “You’ll never be a real witch,” she said quite frequently. “Learn to read and write, and then sit quietly until you’re needed.”

  She couldn’t fly either. My father, who was sweet and kind, but was rarely seen, explained it to me. “Wizards,” he said, “are not all the same. We have grades. Strong. Middle and Weak. I am only a sad cuddlesome twenty. Quite enough to love you with, my little one. But too weak to fly or create wonderful spells.”

  “And Mama?”

  My father would always purse his lips. “Your mother is a fifty. Much stronger than myself, and naturally she makes it known.”

  “And the others? Like Whistle? And Ermengarde? And big Bertie?”

  “The average grade is sixty,” he told me. “Most of us sink below. Those with grades above sixty are the stronger of the wiccan folk. They fly. They achieve wonderful things. We admire them but cannot copy them.”

  So, of course, my next question was, “What’s my grade, Papa?”

  “I have no idea, my little kitten,” he said, on more than one occasion. “Your grade test is not set up until you’re ten years old.”

  At the time that seemed so far away. I must have been around three when I could absorb this sort of knowledge. I could remember earlier, but only snatches. I remember waking every day in a wooden cradle, and enjoying smoothing my finger along the sides. They were carved with runes. I taught myself those runes, and discovered their secrets. Rubbing them in order achieve nothing at all. But I found various other ways – up and down made me hungry. Then sideways stopped the hunger. The first on one side – then the last on the other side – well, that made my toes itch and made me bounce. That was when I started wanting to fly. I really thought I could. But was miserable when I found I couldn’t.

  I discovered quite a lot of interesting ins and outs before I could even speak. I remember most of them. But as I grew older, I lost most of the capability. It was sad. Aren’t you supposed to get better as you get bigger? I went the wrong way around.

  Well, that’s enough about me.

  Especially my failures, though there’s certainly enough of them to fill a prayer book.

  We all lived in the great big cottage called The Rookery. We weren’t crows, but there were enough of them around. The trees at the back were full of large black matted nests, and every year the crows built new ones, and when there was a lot of wind, the older ones blew away back into little twigs. That was handy for the crows because they could collect the same twigs for the new nests.

  Most of the crows talked, though not many bothered talking in our home. But they talked to me. I loved that.

  “Morning, Rosie. Did you sleep when the stars woke up?”

  “Rosie, girl. You got pokey eyes. I reckon you slept rough. You fall outta your nest?”

  “‘Tis gonna rain hard today, little Rose. That will help your petals grow.”

  No, I was not a rose nor a plant of any kind. I was not a crow nor any other sort of bird. I was a witch, a young one and probably a weak one, but a witch for all that, and my name was Rosie.

  “Stupid name,” said my mother. Evidently it hadn’t been her who had chosen it. Her name was Alice, and Papa’s name was Alfred, and the local village had a name too. Little Piddleton. Not that I went there often.

  Mother owned The Rookery. It was huge with rooms for lots and lots of witches and wizards of many grades, but they were all old. No other children like me. It was, as far as the village was concerned, a home for the old folk. Of course, the village wasn’t allowed to know we weren’t ordinary people, or they would have been terrified and dragged us off to be hanged.

  That’s what my mother said anyway. She quite enjoyed threats, and she hated humans. “Nasty boring lot,” she called them.

  I didn’t think she liked me much either, but I certainly wasn’t human.

  I was five when she taught me how to wash the steps and scrub the dirty bits. Then I learned how to wash the dishes after the dinner. She was the cook, but I heard a lot of our wiccans mutter about what a rotten cook she was. I never dared tell her. I used to watch her sometimes. She’d take a basin of water and mutter a couple of words like, “Mueslamkins and Poggywollop,” and stir the water until it turned into something dark and smelly. Then she would click her fingers and light a fire under the basin and make it bubble and boil. Next, she’d blow out the fire and pour
the contents of the basin into a large iron pot of more water. She added bits and pieces sometimes. A handful of parsley or honey sometimes got whopped on top. More stirring. More muttered words and sometimes a little stamp, or a clap of the hands.

  And finally, the water had become dinner and was served to all of us in the dining room. It always smelled worse than the original handful of weed. When I was a bit older, I was given the daily task of serving everyone. I had my own way of doing it, staggering around the table with this enormous heavy pot and a big wooden spoon, going, “Sorry. Not my fault. One spoonful or two?”

  Some of them would smile, click a few fingers and improve the food themselves so that a slosh of lukewarm murky brown gravy with pink lumps then turned into a thick tasty soup, or even a platter full of roast mutton.

  One day, Whistle called for me. Whistle Hobb was one of our most powerful wizards, and I’d heard Papa mutter that he was in the nineties. Since one-hundred was the maximum, and there was only the high judge who had actually reached one-hundred, so I was very impressed by a ninety and something.

  He lived on the top floor and had two rooms. Not able to fly, it always took me ages to run up all those stairs, and I’d arrive puffing. He used to open the door with a wide grin, saying, “Well, Rosie, my little plate of delight, come in. I have something to talk to you about.”

  This wasn’t a good start, in spite of the endearments. When anyone said they wanted to talk to me, especially Mother, it meant telling off and then punishment.

  But Whistle was Whistle, and he blew at the little table and a cup of bubbly sweet honey drink appeared. It was delicious – hardly surprising. Then he gave me a little hug, which I also loved, and told me to sit down.

  “I’ve been watching you growing up,” he said, as if he had an eye in the back of his head which could see every teeny little twitch I made, and hear every teeny little grunt.

  “That’s – um – very boring for you,” I muttered.

  “Not at all,” he said politely. “You’re a very interesting young lady. Have you any idea how old you are?”

  Well, I wasn’t that stupid. “I’m eight, sir.”

  “A good age,” he said, as if some were better than others. I later discovered that he was over two hundred years old. That was a pretty good age too. “Anyway,” he continued, “Can you fly yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Snap your fingers and make something change colour?”

  Once again, I shook my head.

  “Or when you really want something, can you make it after sitting quietly for an hour or so, concentrating on what you want?”

  “I can’t do anything like that,” I admitted. And he looked extremely disappointed. “I could do a few things when I was a baby,” I explained, “and I even started to sort of fly a tiny bit. But when I got to three, it all stopped.”

  Peering over at me as if I was a specimen, he said, “Why? What happened to stop it all?”

  Naturally I had no idea. “I just started working in the house for Mamma,” I said. “And everything else seemed to stop. I think I’m rather weak, like they are. Papa’s only a twenty.”

  Whistle seemed to lose interest, so I gulped down the rest of my honey drink and galloped back downstairs feeling very glum.

  But life was fun in so many ways. Up under the thatch lived the bats and an owl called Cabbage, and I went and sat up there with them quite often, chatting about all sorts of things. When I told Cabbage how I wished I could fly, she offered to take me flying on her back, but I was quite sure I was too heavy for that, and had to say no, even though it would have been a dream come true.

  Sitting up there under the thatch I used to get the back of my little blue smock very grubby. At first Mamma punished me for it. I got plenty of smacks and beatings, being made to do extra work, or was sent to my room and told to stay there and miss supper. She stopped doing that however, when she realised I couldn’t serve supper to the big table if I was locked in my room. At least I had a separate room, which I loved. Small – dark – no little toys – but I loved my own space. As a baby I had shared my mother’s bedchamber, but she got rid of me when I was three, and kicked me upstairs. Bliss!

  At the age of seven, I was ordered to start carrying two full buckets from the well every morning. Now, they were heavy. I had to do one first, then go back and pump the other. I tried to make some magic to help with that too, but nothing worked. Well, not everyone can be a really top grade witch, can they! With a father at twenty and a mother at fifty, I was hardly going to become a ninety-nine.

  My mother did help sometimes. I think she tried to be kind. At least, that’s what I liked to think. Sometimes she’d come to my bedroom in the evening after supper, and say magic things. She’d say, ‘Fifty, fifty, fifty’ over and over, making funny signs with her fingers. I assumed she was trying to make sure I wouldn’t be as weak as my cosy twenty grade father.

  Once she brought me a bedtime drink in a shiny red mug. Lovely hot milk with little squiggles of something that looked like bacon rind floating on top. As I drank it all up, she was staring hard at me. I felt a bit uncomfortable being stared at so closely, but the drink was nice. Mamma was muttering words as usual.

  However, that night I was horribly sick. She told me to clean it all up the next morning, but she never gave me another milk drink out of the red cup ever again. I was quite sorry, even though I’d sicked it all back.

  Two

  One day I went into the village. Not for the first time, I’d been a few other times, though it was usually quite boring. We never went to church, even when the bells rang on a Sunday.

  “We are wiccan folk,” everyone at The Rookery told me. “We do not enter churches. And we can never tell the human folk that we are not humans ourselves.”

  Anyway, sometimes when my mother went shopping in the village, she took me with her to carry stuff home. I often wondered why she bothered, since she usually prepared or meals with magic. But I suppose she liked getting out of the house. I waited for her across the pathway that surrounded the big central green, for that was where the market set up its stalls. Most of them sold food, but there was often a tooth puller with blood dripping from his pincers, which he waved in the air as he shouted, “You wants that rotten tooth out, master? You got a swollen jaw, mistress? Come to old master Bloggins, and he’ll have yer right in just one pull.”

  Thank goodness witches never needed tooth pullers. We could do it ourselves. Even I could do that.

  There were hens clucking across the green, and a couple of goats looking cross. There was a crow in a cage, and I secretly tiptoed over and opened the little door, and the crow flew out, leaving just one feather behind. I had to scurry away again before I was caught.

  Someone else was getting into trouble as well, since he was shouting about politics, whatever that was. I asked a woman nearby, “What does he mean?”

  “Ignore it,” she said. “Just politics.”

  He was shouting, “The man Edward who calls hisself king and lives in the palace in Westminster is a fraud and a criminal. He should be in his own cells in the Tower, for he’s no king of this land.”

  Well, I’d never even known we had a king, and had never heard of this Edward living so far away. Anyway, what did a king do, except wear a heavy crown and sit on a big chair? Very dull, I thought. And he have been boring because he was human.

  I wandered off to look at a stall selling puppets. They were so pretty and I wished I had one, but it was pointless asking my mother for anything like that.

  “Our king is Henry,” shouted that man. “York does not rule. We are a Lancastrian nation, and I call for the return of King Henry.”

  “He’s dead, I reckon,” shrugged another man.

  “The true king of England cannot die,” roared the first man.

  I asked the puppet seller, “What’s York? Who’s the king?”

  “We got a good king,” the man told me, holding out a puppet with wobbly wooden legs
for me to see. “Edward IV, he is, a good looking young fellow with a big brain and a big heart. I fought for him, and always will.”

  I liked learning new things so I was interested. “Does he wear that big white rose I keep seeing painted on walls and doors?”

  He nodded. “Stands for York and the king o’ the sun. Now, which one o’ my puppets is you gonna buy?”

  My turn to shake my head, “Sorry. None. No money.”

  “Well, run off then, brat,” he said, pulling his little people out of my way. “Go trouble some other poor chap over yer questions.”

  I thought that was a bit mean, but I walked off and went to play with a couple of boys who looked about my age over on the far grassy yard outside the church. They had a blown-up bladder, and were playing ball.