The Piddleton Unrest Read online

  The Piddleton Unrest

  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

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  It’s A Wrap

  Contents

  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

  A preview of Hobb’s Henge

  By B G Denvil

  About the Author

  One

  The small white cat was more fluff than fur as it sat by the chimney, staring from huge golden eyes. With a coat softer than a tea cosy and toes more energetic than sunbeams, anyone trying to stroke it would lose their hand in its depths. She was called Rosie and enjoyed sitting beside the chimney, where the sun turned the roof to golden thatch.

  The cottage known as The Rookery belonged to her, but Rosie took time off when she wished, since she had re-employed Dipper, the original gardener, now with a vigorous new assistant. Plod Ironside was no plodder, and in magical power he was an enthusiastic forty-nine. Three maids bustled around the kitchen, by the size of Isa Dimples, it was clear that she enjoyed her own wonderful cooking.

  Stretched in the sun, Rosie adored the August sun bath, swiped away the occasional bee, but kept her ears pricked. Then the tap, tap of feet in a hurry forced her to sit up. First, she yawned, and then leapt from thatch to windowsill, from window to door, and from there to the stable courtyard.

  On arrival, she rubbed herself against Edna’s ankles, purred and reluctantly changed.

  Returning to Rosie the girl from Rosie the cat was always a reluctant jolt, but it was an exercise she was frequently required to do. So now it was Rosie the girl who spoke. However, her voice always took a little longer to change, so her words were brief. “Something’s wrong?”

  Edna was out of breath and a little tired of bending to stroke the cat, only to find herself facing the young woman. “Mandrake,” she announced, “has been arrested.”

  “In Little Piddleton?”

  “Yes, by the village green.”

  Mandrake was not one of her favourites but that didn’t matter. She was cross that any human would have the effrontery to arrest a wizard. “Whatever it was, did he do it?”

  Edna, shaded beneath her hat of blossom and feather—a vivid mixture of tangled beauty with very little of herself visible below—held onto it and shook her head with vehemence. “Certainly not. However could you think such a thing?”

  “Well I don’t know what it is he didn’t do yet.”

  “What he didn’t do,” insisted Edna, “is murder the sheriff.”

  Having no answer, Rosie simply stared. “I’ve never met the sheriff,” she said at last. “Was he vile? Why suspect Mandrake?”

  There was a considerable age difference between Edna, their close friend, Peg, and Rosie herself, since both Peg and Edna had lived for around two hundred years and more, whereas Rosie was only twenty-five years old. Yet Rosie was a ninety-eight on the magical power table, which made her age in years completely irrelevant. However even with a ninety-eight up her sleeve, Rosie was puzzled.

  “No more puzzled than I am,” Edna insisted. “I shall find Peg.”

  “Why?” Rosie saw no reason why three puzzled women would be any more use than two.

  “Because,” said Edna, “she was with him.”

  Which made a difference after all.

  Peg was extremely small with a hunched back, tiny feet, tiny thin hands, straggly white threads of hair over a small head, squinty black eyes and a prominent nose with a quirky little twist at the end. Yet Mandrake, who looked considerably younger than his hundred and eighty-six years, wasn’t too bad looking, and clearly enamoured of Peg. She kept denying her feelings for him, but no one believed her.

  “So where is she now?”

  “Probably seething in her room while working out spells to free Mandrake and kill off the assistant sheriff.”

  But Peg was sitting in the kitchen over a tankard of ale, which is where Rosie and Edna found her. Looking up, Peg smiled, clicked her fingers for two more tankards and then drooped back down again. Rosie and Edna obediently sipped, and finally, bored with the silence, Peg said, “I presume you want to know. We were in the Juggler and Goat, sitting on the benches outside since the weather is so delightful, when suddenly the door flew open and this fat old man staggered out waving his arms. He looked boss-eyed and completely sloshed. But he groaned and tumbled directly over Mandrake’s feet and onto his lap. Mandrake laughed, as he usually does about everything, and just thought the man too drunk to stand. But then we both realised he was twitching as he spat buckets of blood all over Mandrake’s new doublet. The poor man was dying. If I’d realised quicker, I might have saved him, but by the time I jumped up in horror, the body flopped over and went limp. Quite dead. Not surprising really, since there was a large knife sticking out of his throat. Mandrake pulled it out and looked at it, when along hops that wretched Dickon Wald. What he sees is a man holding a sharp knife dripping blood, with the body dead over his knees. Well, I suppose the deduction wasn’t too hard.”

  “At least for a human,” Edna muttered. “And that particular human is hardly capable of thought.”

  “Are any of them?” Peg demanded.

  “I’ve had some experience,” Rosie said, thinking of Dickon’s infatuation some time ago. “I suppose I should go straight to the village. But they’re not keeping poor Mandrake in a cell, are they?”

  “Yes, they are,” Peg sniffed. “And it’s so frustrating because he could click his fingers and escape in a flash. But that would be a double confession – first of all, he’s guilty of murder – and secondly, he’s guilty of witchcraft. So I told the poor boy to stay in his cell, and perhaps just nip back home at night for a comfy sleep when no one’s looking at him.”

  “And he’s supposed to have killed someone he’s never even met.”

  Rosie stared out of the kitchen window at the sunshine. Nests still adorned the trees of The Rookery, though their nesting had finished long since, and the birds were off on their daily scurrying for food. The roof cavity beneath the thatch was the home of the local bats, and they had no intention of moving during the daylight hours. One of the maids was occasionally sent up there to clear the guano, in case it became too heavy for the roof. Besides, it was good manure for the vast sloping gardens. Cabbage and Dodger, however, were never disturbed and continued, as owls do, to sleep during the hot days and fly out to hunt at night.

  The large cottage itself was a muddle of up and down and up further, with rooms hanging onto the top of winding steps, while others spread themselves in the main building accessible via the principal staircase. Edna, living on the top floor, had created a long narrow balcony for herself where she could watch the stars.

  Having taken over and enlarged her mother’s previous apartment, Rosie had cheerfully redecorated and entirely renewed all furniture. But her windows, on the ground floor, looked out on the three graves which had previously so altered her life. The final grave continued to stink its threats, and in spite of a hundred finger
clicks, the stink refused to disappear. Each time Rosie breathed free and was delighted to think her spells successful, a creeping visit of that same old stink would come wafting under the door.

  She had thought of moving to the stables. But loving her rooms inside made Rosie too comfortable to face the bother of moving outside. One day, she thought, before reaching the comfortable middle age of one hundred, she might do something about it.

  And now there was Mandrake, another killing, and almost positively the work of some wretched human.

  Two

  Walking along Kettle Lane into the village of Little Piddleton, Rosie, Peg and Edna could have been mistaken for normal human beings, except perhaps as somewhat eccentric, they had quickly decided it was safer not to fly. Edna, by far the tallest, walked at one end, Rosie in the centre, and the shortest, by far, Peg, on the other side. So they enjoyed the August sunshine and appeared simply to be on their way to the village for their usual shopping.

  Nobody took any notice of these arrivals; they had been seen often enough as, apart from the usual shopping, the Juggler and Goat was the only tavern for many miles, and a favourite destination of many, including Rosie. They therefore aroused no curiosity until they arrived at the sheriff’s office, which stood firmly closed.

  Peg, with tiny hands but very strong knuckles, knocked on the door, and within seconds Dickon Wald answered it, pulling the door open with a studied look of fierce determination, which was quickly lost as he recognised Rosie. She managed a very bright smile.

  “I’m delighted to see you again, Dickon,” she said, although quite untrue, “however, I am not delighted to discover you have a friend of mine in custody. Poor Mandrake, he really isn't capable of killing anybody, you know." Rosie stared beseechingly at the human face looking back at her.

  Without the compromise of a return smile, Dickon looked at the three women before him and shook his head. "I almost caught the wretched man in the act of murder," he said. "With the knife in his hand, and the body in his lap, who else could have been culpable?"

  "Have you," Edna interrupted with hostile contempt, "bothered to question the customers who were in the tavern at the time? Because it is quite clear to us that Mandrake had been sitting outside with his friend Peg, who is here beside me, enjoying their cups of ale, when your poor sheriff staggered, already half dead, from the open doorway. Clearly it was somebody inside who had already ground the knife into his throat."

  "Madam, if you think I'm such an idiot not to have bothered asking a single question at the scene of the crime, then you are much mistaken. I am now the sheriff, although I have been the sheriff's assistant for quite some years, as you may remember. I have helped in tracking the wicked killer in your old people’s home already. But clearly, nobody in the tavern had any idea that poor Sheriff Gill had been wounded, nor had he argued with anybody. He left the premises to come back to his office, where I was waiting, in perfect health. There was no attack until after he had left the tavern."

  "Oh, bother," said Rosie. "They are lying. Obviously if one of them had attacked your sheriff, they weren't going to tell you about it. How many people were there in the tavern at the time?"

  Young Dickon world stared, frowned, turned away and said, "I have no intention of discussing police matters with the public."

  Not in the least concerned by having the sheriff’s door shut in her face, although Rosie had once been attracted to this young and stalwart human, she had since discovered how utterly boring the creature was. Instead she turned to her friends with a determined nod, “Time for the Goat. I need a drink, and we all need answers.”

  The arrest had evidently taken place comparatively early, so now late afternoon, the tavern customers were an entirely different crowd. However, as the three women sat in their favourite corner, stools squashed together to keep their conversation private, they peeped around, taking note of anyone seemingly in the least bit interesting.

  The trouble was, none of them ever found humans in the least interesting.

  Rosie marched up to the tavern keeper, who she already knew. “Hello, Bob,” she said. “Were you on duty this morning?”

  Bob turned bright red, a difficult accomplishment since the tavern was low ceilinged and lacked windows, keeping it permanently dark unless a great fire was built across the inglenook. No flames today, of course, since the August sunshine was still bright outside in spite of the hour. But he shook his head with rather frantic vehemence.

  “I suppose you’ve been threatened,” sighed Rosie. “But you must know exactly who did it, and it would have been he who threatened you. I sympathise. But I won’t see a friend of mine arrested and hanged for murder when I know, and you know, he’s entirely innocent.”

  With his mouth firmly shut as though padlocked, the tavern keeper managed to smile and lean over to one side. Rosie followed the hinted suggestion. There was a crowd of four young men in the opposite corner, a sweet-looking boy with his girl, and another man chatting with a woman who was presumably his wife.

  Once they had all finished their cups of ale, Edna wandered over to tavern owner and managed a huge smile of encouragement. “Three cups of your best wine,” she ordered, and then lowered her voice. “And could you possibly tell me whether the man who didn’t like your sheriff is present at this moment?” She looked hopefully at Bob, but he had hurriedly turned away and was filling the three cups with the wine she had ordered.

  When he turned back, he muttered, “I’ll bring these cups over to your table, mistress.”

  Edna followed him, and once he bent to set the cups on the table, and Edna squeezed in to sit again, Bob muttered in a very low voice, “No he ain’t, but his friend is.”

  Rosie, Edna and Peg walked back home once they had finished their wine, enjoying the first cool twilight and the very first tiny spark of the rebirthing stars. At least they felt they had achieved one tiny titbit of knowledge. They were easily able to remember the faces of those few who were there.

  Once back in The Rookery, Peg turned to Edna. “Well,” she huffed, “there were four of those nasty looking fellows, so clearly the murderer’s friend was one of them. Yes, yes, I know all humans look fairly unpleasant, but these were worse than usual.”

  “At least one their group,” Edna agreed.

  “So we have to find out exactly who they are, but more importantly, find out who the other friend is, the one in the tavern this morning, with his knife thrust through the sheriff’s throat.”

  “But that,” sighed Edna, “means going back endlessly to that wretched tavern.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it.” Rosie smiled. “But don’t complain, we’re doing it for Mandrake.”

  Mandrake did not return to The Rookery that night, which surprised everyone. It was therefore the following morning, the three ladies marched off again heading for the sheriff’s office and the cell beneath.

  “Just a quick visit,” said Rosie with her usual encouraging smile.

  Dickon glowered. His new important promotion seemed to have made quite an impression. “Well, quick it will have to be,” he said, taping his fingertips together. “This prisoner is a dangerous man, and I’ll not have him imagining he can get away with it.”

  “Certainly not,” Edna said, glaring down at the new sheriff beneath her hat, where some of the imitation lilac petals were falling over her nose. “We shall discover his innocence or guilt.”

  “Forget innocence,” Dickon growled. “This terrible creature has committed a crime of rare wickedness. He will hang at the end of the week.”

  Shocked by the threatened speed, Rosie, Edna and Peg scurried down the tiny narrow and unlit stairs to the two cells dug underground. Dickon opened the padlock on one, and the women hurried in. They heard the door locked behind them. For a moment they could see nothing in the absolute darkness.

  “It stinks too,” said Peg, flicking her fingers to produce a massive candle flame, lighting the entire room.

  Not that there was much to light. T
he cell was tiny, the floor beaten earth, the walls thick and dirty rock, and apart from a threadbare blanket and a small pile of straw, there was nothing else in the room.

  Except for Mandrake of course. He sat on the straw, a quill in one hand and paper in the other, the small pot of ink on the ground at his feet. He looked impeccable.

  “I take it,” said Rosie sounding rather sour, “you didn’t spend the night here?”

  “Of course not,” smiled Mandrake, not bothering to get up. “I’ve been working out a few new spells. Killing this idiot boy sheriff might be one of them.” He patted the straw beside him. “May I invite you all to come and sit on my wonderful new settle, ladies? Perhaps not the most expensive, but certainly unique. And by the way, I spent last night at the Roman Baths about a thousand years ago. Most interesting, but I admit going back in time is always a touch risky. I started to fade. So I came back and walked on that beach over the hill. I saw a number of those gigantic fish things that leap out of the water and then fall back in with a huge splash. Quite a fun night.”

  “And now you’re trying to get a spell that will keep you back in time for longer?”

  “Yes,” grinned Mandrake. “How did you know?”

  Rosie said, “Ninety-eight – remember?”

  “Humph,” said Mandrake. “Trouble is, this horrid little place stinks, and it’s damned uncomfortable. I can’t very well bring in chairs and a four-poster bed, can I? I imagine your friend Dickon might notice.”

  “He’s not my friend anymore,” said Rosie.

  Peg interrupted. “Go roaming every night, if you wish,” she said, “but it would make more sense to come back and sleep in your Rookery bedchamber. Just don’t forget not to do anything to let the idiot sheriff know we aren’t human.”