“That’s disgusting,” Sibyl told the dog affectionately as she shakily sat at the edge of the bed.
Her dog came forward, his whole body moving in opposite tandem with his fiercely wagging tail. He nudged her trembling hand and she sat there, petting her pup and trying to get control of her panic.
Something, she knew from years of experience with this type of thing, was terribly, horribly wrong.
“I need to call Mom,” she announced to Mallory and he just looked at her, all of his earlier mood gone, currently in blissful dog world as she scratched behind his ears.
She opened the drawer to her bedside table, took out the calling card that was her lifeline to home and grabbed the phone. She carefully dialled the numbers on the card and then added the memorised numbers that she knew would ring the phone in her parents’ house in Boulder, Colorado.
“Mom?” her voice was just as shaky as Sibyl felt and even though thousand of miles separated mother and daughter, Marguerite Godwin heard the tremulous tone.
“My goddess, Sibyl, what’s wrong?”
“Oh Mom, I just had the most terrible dream.”
And then, Sibyl started crying.
Sibyl Godwin had led a charmed life.
She was born to Albert Godwin, an Englishman, a professor of Medieval History and an amateur archaeologist and Marguerite Den, a hippy, a follower of Wicca and a hopeless romantic. Her parents loved each other with a love that just made your toes curl with happy delight at the sight of it.
Bertie and Mags had two daughters, Sibyl and Scarlett. Sibyl, named thus because Mags thought it was appropriately witch-sounding. Scarlett, after Mags’s idol and the best romantic heroine in the history of woman (which, at worst, was only a few short days after the beginning of the history of man, if one believed that sort of thing), Scarlett O’Hara.
Mags and Bertie loved their daughters with a love that was a shining testimony to all that was good and right about parenthood.
Even if they were just a tad bit weird and a much larger bit eccentric.
Mags, Sibyl and Scarlett happily followed after Bertie from teaching post to teaching post, at the University of Arizona, UNLV, UCLA, UC Berkeley (which Mags adored) and, finally, he gained tenure at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Mags spent a lot of time communing with Native Americans, opening sacred circles in the mountains or the dessert depending on where they lived (often she would simply resort to their backyard which frightened (or annoyed) the neighbours because she would do this skyclad, or utterly naked), doting on her small family and fretting after her two daughters.
Not that there was a great deal to fret over, Sibyl and Scarlett were both bright, vivacious, thoughtful and had wonderful senses of humour.
Sibyl did have a bit of a temper (or more than a bit on occasion and an explosive bit on other occasions).
And Scarlett had a penchant for collecting and discarding men (not on occasion but all the time).
Sibyl, Mags was convinced, was a clairvoyant, often having strange, vivid dreams of events that came true. Mags was certain these were premonitions if only her daughter would just learn to read them. Mags tried to help Sibyl channel this extraordinary power but Sibyl didn’t have any interest (much to Mags’s everlasting chagrin).
Further concerning Mags and Bertie was that Sibyl, from a very early age, had the deep belief that she would one day meet her one and only true love. A knight in shining armour, kind, loyal and strong, her soulmate, heartmate and helpmate. Sibyl knew to the depths of her very soul that one day she would meet this man who would turn her world golden and provide her with all the joy and happiness she could endure.
Scarlett was, luckily (in Bertie and Mags’s opinion), a lot more down-to-earth.
Nevertheless, there were two more worries for the Godwins.
Both of their girls’ hearts were way too open (and easily broken).
Then there was the way the girls looked.
And that was all Marguerite’s fault.
There was a reason stodgy, bookish Bertie Godwin fell for flamboyant Marguerite Den.
He’d told her straight out one day, “You’re sex on legs, woman.”
If Mags had been any other kind of woman, that might have been offensive. But considering the fact that she adored her red-haired (then), tall, straight-backed, thin, balding (now), brilliant, adorable husband, she found it the highest of compliments.
Easy to feel complimented by your very own husband, much harder to deal with when all the men who looked at your daughters obviously felt the same way.
If Bertie had hair, he would have lost it after years of tearing it out worrying about his daughters. Even though he was a pacifist (he couldn’t have married his hippy wife if he was not) and found all firearms distasteful, that didn’t mean he didn’t eventually resort to resting a shotgun by the side of his front door whenever one of his daughters was picked up for a date (desperate times, desperate measures, as it were).
Both girls were elegantly tall but they were not slender.
They were curvy.
Very curvy.
Sibyl had a tumble of shining, golden, thick, waving hair, warm hazel eyes and peaches and cream skin with freckles dancing across her nose. Scarlett had a mass of curly, equally thick, auburn hair, flashing blue eyes and freckles dancing everywhere.
Scarlett had poured her big heart into medical school.
Sibyl had poured her big heart into everything.
Bertie worried fiercely about his first born. She seemed not to be able to find her calling and the longer she waited for her true love, the more restless she became.
She’d graduated from university with a degree in languages, speaking three. She took this knowledge and went straight to work for Customs and Immigration, trying to help struggling, poverty stricken foreigners in their efforts to get into the country. Red tape, small minds and politics frustrated her out of that job.
She’d gone back to school to become a social worker and quickly threw herself into a job helping victims of domestic violence. That job nearly tore her apart, literally, when she became personally involved in her caseload. She parted ways with the charity, able to see that she was incapable of establishing appropriate boundaries considering she wanted to fight everyone’s battles.
Bertie didn’t even want to remember what happened with the people at the animal shelter.
This carried on for years, until Sibyl finally walked into their home in Boulder and asked Bertie and Mags if she could move to Brightrose Cottage.
Brightrose Cottage was where the Godwins would spend a goodly amount of their school holidays. The cottage was located in a small clearing of a dense wood that seemed somehow removed but was still very close to the small seaside town of Clevedon in the beautiful English county of North Somerset. Bertie had bought the house run down and derelict. Even though surrounded by trees, the clearing allowed cheerful shafts of sunlight to penetrate and warm the nearly ancient, ruin. Even in disrepair, Bertie had fallen in love with the place and its location and happily anticipated the work ahead of him in restoring it.
While Scarlett and Mags trundled off to Glastonbury, Bristol or other hippy hot spots, Bertie, with Sibyl a constant at his side, got down to the business of bringing Brightrose back to its original charm.
Under the creaking, warped stairwell they’d uncovered the arched remains of a window that dated back to the early 1400s and together they designed the stained glass that would be refit. They’d painstakingly refinished the wide-planked floors and Jacobean doors. They’d run the thick, coarse ropes up the stairs to act as period-fitting banisters. They’d fitted the heavy wrought iron sconces to the walls and chandelier over the huge, gleaming, round dining room table. They’d scrubbed years of dust, grime and soot off the stones of the inglenook fireplaces in the living room and the dining room and the vast hearth in the kitchen. In all the rooms they’d patched, primed and painted the plaster. On occasion, they uncovered and exposed secret alcoves, embedded beams and Somerset brick. They’d scoured the local antique stores and dragged back heavy pieces of furniture, carefully bringing them back to their former glory and positioning them perfectly around the house. They’d refitted the awkward kitchen to be a cook’s (or, Bertie’s, to be precise) dream and built a lovely Summer House in the garden for Mags’s potions and witch paraphernalia.