“Ah,” observed the more sanguine Mrs Pearce, “but we mustn’t forget that cramps don’t usually come on until the third day and it’s not before the seventh that they vomit nails.” She turned to Mrs Gloss. “Did you say one toad or two?”
“According to my cleaning wo...”
The slamming of the minutes book on the table signalled Mrs Pentatuke’s wrathful rise to her feet.
She glanced down contemptuously at Mrs Framlington, then addressed the meeting.
“This is all absolutely out of order. I do not think that anybody fully realizes the seriousness of what has been going on. The secrets of our society are threatened. One of our sisterhood has been taken and none knows where. Meddlers and inquisitors will use her vanishing as an excuse to harass us and seek the source of our power and chain our spirits. Thus I tell. Thus I warn. We are all in great peril. There is but one course to take, and that without delay.”
Slowly and with every muscle and tendon from wrists to shoulders tensed, Mrs Pentatuke raised her arms until both long, outstretched forefingers pointed horizontally ahead.
“We must raise the Grand Master!”
For nearly a minute, they all stared in shocked silence at the statuesque figure.
Then an almost incoherent whisper came from Mrs Framlington. “Yes, but...”
She cleared her throat very delicately, and tried again.
“But we don’t...we don’t know who he is.”
Silence descended again.
So, gradually, did Mrs Pentatuke’s arms.
“He is the Grand Master,” she stated hollowly, as if from sleep. “If we call, He will come.”
“Do you really think we ought to?” asked Mrs Hall, looking round at her neighbours.
None offered an opinion.
Then a smooth-faced, chinless man with thin hair and protuberant eyes, who had said nothing up to then, shuffled to the edge of his chair and spoke. He was Jack Bottomley, landlord of the Freemasons’ Arms, and leading singer in perpetuity of the Flaxborough Amateur Operatic Society.
“This lady who’s missing,” rasped Mr Bottomley, in a voice whose original fruitiness had long since been dehydrated by perennial performance of The Desert Song. “I wonder if I could make a suggestion.”
“By all means,” said Mrs Framlington, eager for an excuse to put off the mess and trouble of a conjuration.
“Well, it might not work, of course, but I was reading just the other day in ‘B and C’ that if you can get hold of some hair of anybody you want to find and burn it in front of a mirror, that person will appear. I thought I’d better, you know, sort of mention it.”
Mr Bottomley cast down his glance. Off-stage and away from his pub counter, he was a shy and nervous man; necromancy was for him a refuge from fears of inadequacy—or so Mrs Gloss had said more than once.
“What edition?” Mrs Pentatuke snappily inquired. She had left the table and was standing before a tall, glass-fronted bookcase.
“Well, er, that one, actually.”
“Seventeen forty-three,” Mrs Pentatuke spoke with a brusqueness that reproached Mr Bottomley’s lack of precision. She opened the case and pulled out a book whose leather binding looked dry and powdery, as if it had been stored in cocoa. It was one of the most frequently consulted volumes in the Coven library, and known simply as ‘B and C’ in abbreviation of its full title: With Broom and Cauldron, Being The True Confessions of Goody Nixon.
Mrs Pentatuke licked a finger and sought first a place in the index and then a specified page. They watched the alert, oscillating eye behind the spectacle lens quickly devour print. She slammed the book shut.
“Exactly as I thought. It’s one of the virgin things. Out.”
She squeezed Goody Nixon back between A Chronicle of Demonology in the Eastern Counties, 1587-1694, by Albert and Theresa Home, and Partick’s Dictionary of Herbs and Tinctures.
“How do you mean?” asked Amy Parkin. She sounded not very friendly.
“I mean,” said Mrs Pentatuke, walking back to her seat, “that it only works with virgins. Anyway, we’d have to find the woman first to cut some of her bloody hair off, wouldn’t we?”
With the ill-advised persistence of a self-doubter, Mr Bottomley coughed and said: “But I don’t quite see how our lady secretary can be so sure that this won’t work, madame chairman. I mean, Miss Hillyard isn’t married, is she?”
Before Mrs Pentatuke could raise steam for a fitting retort, Mrs Framlington said kindly: “No, of course not, Mr Bottomley; but that is rather a good point about our not having any of her hair for the experiment. Don’t you think?”
Mr Bottomley shrugged and lapsed into despondency.
An impatient tapping was heard. It was being made by Mrs Pentatuke’s shoe against the leg of the table.
“We’re wasting time, you know,” she said, without looking at anyone in particular. “The sooner we have the protection of the Master’s power, the sooner we can be sure that our terrestial existence will not be harassed by policemen and newspaper spies. I have warned once, I have warned twice. Split the mandrake with grattle and grice!”
“Stew their balls in badger bile,” yelled Mrs Gooding, with alliterative fervour.
Mrs Pentatuke turned up her eyes.
“O Master, come soon among us!”
Mrs Gooding nodded violently.
“He is like a ramrod of fire! Go-orrrh!”
She let out her breath with a noise like a winded horse and gave an ecstatic shuffle with her posteriors. Mr Gooding bestowed on her a sidelong glance of mild proprietary curiosity.
Amy Parkin and Mrs Pearce were having an argument about pentagrams, which the latter insisted on calling pentagons.
Mrs Gloss had discovered a hand casually laid upon her shoulder from behind. It was that of Paracelsus Parkin and, as Mr Parkin leaned forward to pay closer attention to something the chairman was murmuring, the hand slid through the neck of her dress. Mrs Gloss kept very still and dignified.
So, too, did Mrs Hall, who now regretted having spoken about the happenings in the church—partly because her sparsity of information had made her look ineffectual in relation to Mrs Gloss, proud claimant to not merely one cleaning woman but a plurality; and partly because she feared that the conjuring of the Master, so forcefully advocated by Sister Pentatuke, would almost certainly entail a general casting off of garments, which she, Mrs Hall, did not much fancy in broad daylight.
“Sisters and warlocks,” cried Mrs Framlington, aware at last that no one had been taking any notice of her for the past five minutes, “I really must ask you to preserve a little order in this discussion...”