Charming or What? (Witch-in-Training, Book 3) Read online

  “The fourth rule is missing,” Jessica told Miss Strega. “I wonder what it is?”

  “Never mind, it can’t be that important. Anyway, it all sounds pretty impressive.”

  Jessica didn’t answer. “Too many hard words,” she was thinking. “Oracles, Incantations, Talismans. Aaarrggh.”

  When Jessica arrived in the Music Room the following morning, she found Pelagia sitting in the middle of the floor, painting her toenails Electric Red.

  “Good morning, me dear. We’ll start our first Incantation as soon as the band is here and my nails have dried. Please leave the door open.”

  A few moments later, Jessica was rather startled when a procession of instruments began to drift in, in twos and threes, like an orchestra arriving for a morning rehearsal, and set about tuning themselves. There were lutes and flutes, zithers and round-bellied mandolins, fiddles and fiddlesticks, tubas, cymbals, castanets, a huge kettledrum, two conch horns, a glockenspiel, a bazooka and a didgeridoo.

  “A Charm or Incantation,” Pelagia began, shouting over the crashing cymbals and the throbbing of the didgeridoo, “is a combination …” The rest of her words were drowned out by the kettledrum.

  What?” yelled Jessica, cupping one ear with her hand.

  Pelagia’s bracelets rattled. “Can I PLEASE have a bit of shush?” she demanded. She struck her music stand with her conductor’s baton (which was, Jessica noticed, exactly like a magic wand). All the instruments fell silent.

  “As I was saying, a Charm or Incantation is a combination of words to make magic. The best ones are always set to music. Do you play a musical instrument?”

  “The recorder,” said Jessica, wincing, “but not very well.”

  “Just stick to the singing then,” said Pelagia. “Now, today, as every day, our first task is to make up an Incantation to keep everyone safe at sea. Is there much traffic out there?”

  Jessica looked out of the window. “Lots and lots. There are a few wind surfers and WHOA, one of them is heading directly for a barge full of coconuts. Then, there are two goblins riding a green inflatable crocodile and a boat that’s pulling some young witches along on a floating banana. OH MY! WHOOPS! That was a near miss! Those goblins DELIBERATELY tried to capsize the banana. Then there’s a pair of water-skiers. OH DEAR! One of them has just come off her skis. And a two-witch canoe race has just started from Lesser Charm pier but, OH GOLLY! Miss Strega is lolling about on a Lilo and drifting right into the middle of them. And WOW! Is that a shark fin, near where the wizard is laying lobster pots.”

  “Lots of trouble brewing by the sound of it. There’s no time to lose.” Pelagic, tapped her music stand with her baton. “Line up, everyone. Jessica, you lead. You’ll find the words just form themselves. On the count of three. One, two, three.”

  At once, the orchestra began drumming and strumming, jamming and slamming, banging and clanging, tooting and fluting. Berkeley, usually a solo singer, joined in enthusiastically too as Jessica intoned:

  “Wey-hey-hey,

  Roll and go-oh-oh,

  Clip along smartly, not too slow-oh-oh.

  Gentle waves will rock you,

  No mean wind will knock you,

  As long as ALL of you,

  Give way to Charm.”

  “And fol de rol, and a bottle of rum,” Pelagia added with a flourish of her baton while the kettledrum brought everything to an end with a fantastic drum roll.

  Jessica and Pelagia rushed to the window. Beneath them, everyone happily fished, sailed, floated, skied, swam, canoed or just lolled in perfect harmony.

  “Charming!” Pelagia declared. “Take a bow, Jessica. That will surely keep them all from colliding with one another for the time being. Now, I must reset the Charms for the cleaning and cooking equipment in the kitchen. It’s very time-consuming but I have to do it every day, just like the Safety-at-Sea Incantation. I’ll see you in the Art Room in five minutes and we’ll make a start on Talismans.”

  Chapter Five

  The days flew past. Jessica invented a new Incantation every morning. She made an abracadabra charm to hang around her neck to protect her from toothache:

  A b r a c a d a b r a

  A b r a c a d a b r

  A b r a c a d a b

  A b r a c a d a

  A b r a c a d

  A b r a c a

  A b r a c

  A b r a

  A b r

  A b

  A

  She learned to keep a nutmeg in her pocket to prevent hair tangles – a Charm you might find very useful if you have long plaits like Jessica. (Fortunately Berkeley rather liked the smell so didn’t mind that her pocket was getting a bit crowded what with the nutmeg, the lucky pebble, the pocket fluff bedding and the store of bird seed.)

  She began to tell fortunes: reading the lines on Miss Strega and Pelagia’s palms and also looking closely at hornbill droppings! The Easy Ways to Charm Your Home class was brilliant. Jessica learnt to order cold drinks and snacks to fly to her with a snap of her fingers. She could also charm her hammock to lower and raise itself when she wanted to get in or out of bed.

  Oracles were tricky though. They were special places where people could go to ask important questions like, “Should I get my hair cut?” But the answer was always in riddles. For example, when Jessica asked the Mynah Bird Oracle, “Will Berkeley be upset if I get a second mascot?” it had replied: “Three into two won’t go. Put down your nought. Three into twenty goes six times and two over. Bring down your nought. Three into twenty goes six times and two over. Bring down your nought …” It went on and on like that for hours, until everybody was going crazy and screaming PLEASE BE QUIET. In the end, Miss Strega put a Silent Spell on it.

  But the best thing of all about Charm School was making Talismans. It was like making models in plasticine or papier maché, only more useful. If you made a spider Talisman, for instance, and put it in your bathroom, then no spiders with skinny legs could sit in your wash basin or crawl out of the plughole of your bath.

  One busy morning, Jessica made three spider Talismans; one each for her mum, Pelagia and Miss Strega who all hated spiders. Then she went in search of lunch.

  Jessica found Pelagia and Miss Strega in the kitchen, supervising a picnic hamper filling itself up with roast chicken and hard-boiled eggs, tuna sandwiches, home-made coconut biscuits, peaches and bottles of lemonade. Felicity was sitting on top of the fridge, her tail flicking furiously at the feast floating by. Berkeley was pecking crumbs off the floor.

  “This afternoon,” Pelagia announced with a loud rattle of charm bracelets, “we are going on a witch hunt on Charm Minor.” She pointed out of the window at the tiniest island in the Archipelago.

  “Fantastic,” Jessica cheered. “I’ll fetch my broomstick.”

  “No need, me dear. No one ever travels by broomstick around here. We’ll take the Tub.”

  The Tub turned out to be Pelagia’s boat. Of course it was not like any old rowing boat. In the first place, it was round and flat-bottomed, a bit like something that Jessica’s mother might plant flowers in.

  Miss Strega looked at it with horror. She rubbed her chin and tapped her nose. “I’m a broomstick kind of person, me,” she said but Jessica immediately hopped in and reached for the oars.

  “Can I row? It looks easy peasy.”

  Pelagia jangled her bracelets but said nothing.

  In fact, rowing was not easy peasy. Jessica soon found herself going round and round in circles. And the more she tried to stop making circles, the more circles she made. It was terribly embarrassing. She even thought about activating her Super-Duper De-Luxe Guaranteed-Invisibility-When-You-Need-It Gape.

  Then she had an idea. “Perhaps the Tub is spooked. Perhaps Pelagia has put a Talisman or a Charm on it.”

  She set down the oars, held her lucky pebble Charm tightly in one hand and carefully chose her words:

  “Talisman, talisman, come to my aid,

  Undo the charm Pelagia’s
made.”

  Instantly, the oars began to slice cleanly through the sea, splish, splash, bowling along at a cracking pace towards Charm Minor.

  “Well spotted, Jessica,” said Pelagia approvingly, reaching under her seat and picking up a little wax model of someone rowing the Tub. “Ever since a shipwrecked goblin turned up here once and tried to steal the Tub, I’ve kept this Talisman on board so that no one but me can use it. If they do, they just go round and round in circles all day. So, you’ve earned your first pin.”

  “Oh goody,” said Jessica but she couldn’t help wondering if the goblin was the same one that she had once ejected into the sea.

  As they pulled into the harbour on Charm Minor, Pelagia jumped on to the pier and secured the boat’s mooring rope. Miss Strega, Jessica, Felicity and Berkeley clambered unsteadily on to dry land, all of them looking a bit green.

  “There’s a lot to be said for flying,” Miss Strega muttered. “You should try it. I can send you a besom if you like. £4.99 or £8.00 for two.”

  Pelagia just smiled. “Now, Jessica, let’s start the witch hunt before we have our picnic. We’ll give you ten minutes and then we’re coming to find you.”

  “You’re hunting me?” said Jessica.

  “Of course, you’re it, aren’t you? Now, off you go, chop, chop, me dear. And remember,” she shouted as Jessica ran off, “Charming is the name of the game.”

  Jessica ran along the long flat sandy beach. “Nowhere to hide here,” she thought.

  She gazed up at the tall trunks of the coconut palms. “Impossible to climb,” she decided.

  She scrunched up her eyes and searched in vain for a building. “There is absolutely nothing to hide in and nothing to hide behind.”

  Far off, she could hear Pelagia and Miss Strega shouting: “Coming to get you, ready or not.”

  In desperation, she peered into a cleft in the rock face on the beach. “You couldn’t really call this a cave, it’s just a big crack,” she said aloud to Berkeley. “If you ask me, Charm Minor is a silly place to have a witch hunt.”

  Suddenly, a hornbill poked her huge red and yellow beak out of a tree hollow and squawked bad-temperedly. “You’ve woken me up. Do you know how long it takes for me to get to sleep in this hot cramped scratchy nest?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Jessica said politely. “Are you from this island?”

  “I’ve been hanging around here all summer, all summer,” the hornbill screeched.

  “Then, perhaps you could suggest somewhere for me to hide? You see, my personal trainers are on a witch hunt and I don’t know where to go.”

  “Charming is the name of the game,” shrieked the hornbill. “Charming is the name of the game.”

  Jessica twisted the end of her plait around her finger and pondered. Then she tapped her nose in a Miss Strega-like kind of way and drew her lucky stone Charm from her pocket again.

  “Perhaps I can conjure up a hiding-place” she thought. “Would you mind if I used a corner of your nest-opening for a while, Ms Hornbill?”

  Hours later, Miss Strega abruptly sat down in the shade of a palm tree and threw off her shoes.

  “That’s it,” she declared, massaging her feet. “I’m not going another step. The girl has vanished.” Pelagia slumped down beside her.

  “Imagine two professionals like us being beaten by a witch-in-training!”

  Above them, Ms Hornbill squawked. “Go away, private property, sling your hooks.”

  Miss Strega and Pelagia looked up at the tree and its noisy inmate. Both reeled back in horror at the sight that met them.

  A thick spider’s thread hung in long swinging loops from the entrance of the hornbill’s nest. It trapezed over their heads across the beach to the cliff face. There it spread across the mouth of the not-very-good cave in an elaborate, perfectly-formed web. Right in the middle, a huge black hairy spider with bulging eyes and hefty shoulders looked back inquisitively at them.

  Miss Strega’s hand flew to her chin. “Well, tickle my toes with a peacock feather if that isn’t the most hideous …”

  “the biggest …”

  “the blackest …”

  “the cheekiest spider in the whole wide world.” Pelagia finished the sentence. “It’s obviously been there for yonks. At least since that hornbill built her nest weeks ago.”

  From behind the spider’s web, there came an odd little explosion.

  “Did you hear that?” asked Miss Strega. “A sort of sneezy giggle?”

  “A bit of a choke mixed with a titter?” replied Pelagia.

  They clambered to their feet and began to tiptoe away from the beach.

  “Da-da-da! Gotcha!” shouted Jessica, jumping out from the not-very-good cave behind the web. “It wasn’t a real spider. And not a real web. They’re magic. I just conjured them up so you wouldn’t see me in this tootsy cave. Only Ms Hornbill and her nest are real.”

  “Shiver me timbers,” declared Pelagia, blinking. “The bird-in-the-nest, the nest-in-the-tree, the web-from-the-branch, the spider-at-the-cave-door Charm. I am most impressed. We’ll have to give you another pin for that. That makes the final score today: Witch-in-training – two; Witch trainers – zero.”

  Chapter Six

  One afternoon, Jessica found herself alone. Berkeley had made friends with a flute and was in the Music Room. Pelagia had gone to visit Josephine who had just hatched her egg. Felicity and Miss Strega had decided to do some advertising and were flying up and down the beach with a huge banner attached to the end of the broomstick. It streamed out behind them as they zipped between the islands.

  Jessica sat in the garden thinking. And what she was thinking about was Rule Number Three:

  The Lighthouse Control Room is strictly OUT OF BOUNDS.

  Ever since she had spotted that treasure chest beneath Pelagia’s hammock, she had been itching to look inside it.

  “No one will ever know,” she thought as she tiptoed towards the spiral staircase. “It’s not as if I’m going to take anything.”

  The Control Room was Pelagia’s private quarters. It was also her Centre of Operations where she lit the beacon at night to keep passing ships from straying on to the rocks. There was a big round table in the centre of the room, covered in nautical charts. There was a shiny brass telescope standing on a tripod in front of the large plate glass window that opened on to a look-out platform. Around the walls, banks of monitors winked and blinked and made little beeping noises. Pelagia’s hammock was strung up between two upright poles. The shiny mahogany sea chest lay underneath.

  Jessica knew she should not be there. She knew that poking about in other people’s belongings was completely wrong but she couldn’t help herself. She raised the lid of the chest.

  It was stuffed from top to bottom with treasure, strings of pearls that still smelt of the sea and masses of gold coins with scary men’s heads on them. There were maps and charts, too, with skulls and crossbones on them … and the words X MARKS THE SPOT. Underneath everything, there was a bright blue cloth bag tied at the neck with a silver string. It squirmed and sighed when Jessica picked it up as if it held something alive …

  … and as soon as she began to undo the string, strange noises began to well up from the bottom of the bag. In no time at all, the Control Room was filled with the most tremendous roaring and shrieking and huffing and puffing. Pelagia’s hammock began to swing wildly. Maps and charts blew off the table. The doors on to the terrace banged open. One by one, out of the bag, came all the cross, bad-tempered winds that had ever blown around the earth, all of them howling and yelling and screaming as they escaped. Jessica, with her cape flapping around her face, tried to stuff the bag back into the chest but it had got tangled around one of her wrists. Suddenly she was picked up like a leaf in an autumn storm and carried off through the open doors – and she didn’t even have her broomstick!

  “Help!” she roared as a gale blew her clean off the lighthouse. “Help!” she roared again as a hurricane tossed he
r from one end of the Archipelago to the other, and back again.

  With her free hand, Jessica felt in her pocket for Berkeley. “Aren’t you supposed to protect me in storms?” she protested. But of course Berkeley wasn’t there. He was in the Music Room trilling away with the magic flute.

  Luckily, all the sea traffic was still under the spell of the morning incantation so it carried on sailing and surfing and skiing and fishing, completely unaware of the hullabaloo above its head.

  Only Miss Strega realized what was going on and Fast-Forwarded towards Jessica. Jessica saw her coming. She saw that Miss Strega was bearing down on her like a witch on the warpath. The last time she had seen Miss Strega look so angry was the day she had turned Jessica into a pumpkin. (Of course Jessica had turned Miss Strega into a wasp, first, so she had every right to be cross.)

  “Please don’t transform me into something nasty,” she thought as the North wind hurled freezing rain at her and flung her into a spin above Charm Minor. Grabbing the ends of her Super-Duper De-Luxe Guaranteed-lnvisibility-When-You-Need-lt cape, she pleaded, “I need invisibility. I need it right now.”

  Immediately, a hot little monsoon breeze caught her and dumped her into the top leaves of a swaying coconut palm. Miss Strega screeched to a halt beside it.

  “Jessica, I know you’re there. Reappear at once. I don’t want to have to say it again. Moonrays and marrowbones, Jessica! You will be very sorry if you don’t reappear.”

  Jessica reappeared.

  “Let go of the bag,” Miss Strega ordered. “Jessica, let go of the bag. Drop the bag, Jessica. Yes, on the sand.”

  Jessica undid the string from her wrist and flung the bag as far away as she could. At Miss Strega’s command, all the winds scuttled back into it. Then she flew her broomstick around the palm tree and hauled Jessica on to it.