A Power to Charm Read online

  A POWER

  TO

  CHARM

  BY

  FRANCES MURRAY

  Perhaps, because there are so many Anglosajóns who have lived for a time in Spain and so many still living there now, it is more than usually necessary to stress that the characters in this book are entirely imaginary. Only one is drawn from life and, he, poor fellow, will never know I have set him down on paper and if he did he would not care. The village is an amalgam of Pueblos Blancos to be found all over southern Andalucia and comprises a number of their features and inconveniences and, one hopes, their charm. Its inhabitants, human and animal, are wholly mine. Any resemblance to anyone you may know, is entirely coincidental.

  Frances Murray

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE 5

  CHAPTER TWO 11

  CHAPTER THREE 17

  CHAPTER FOUR 26

  CHAPTER FIVE 36

  CHAPTER SIX 46

  CHAPTER SEVEN 56

  CHAPTER EIGHT 69

  CHAPTER NINE 81

  CHAPTER TEN 90

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 98

  CHAPTER TWELVE 106

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 115

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN 125

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN 138

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN 146

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 159

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 173

  CHAPTER NINETEEN 186

  OTHER BOOKS BY FRANCES MURRAY 198

  Cast-list for A Power to Charm 199

  CHAPTER ONE

  Agnes and Andalucia.

  Once upon a time there was a witch called Agnes. At the time when this story begins she did not know she was a witch. This may sound strange but it is true all the same. Unless someone tells you you are a witch and explains how witchcraft works you may be a witch and not know it, which is an interesting thought.

  Of course Agnes did not look like the sort of witches you read about in Grimm or see portrayed on television and videos or movie cartoons for they are nothing like real witches. Agnes' nose was neat and straight, her hair was tidy, she had no hump and she dressed just like everybody else so that no one ever noticed what she was wearing. In fact, very few people ever noticed her at all. When she was a baby she looked just like any other baby, at school she was the one in the class whose name no one can ever remember when they look at the class photograph years later. Even when she at school her teachers hardly ever remembered her name. She was never at the bottom of the class and she was never at the top. This suited Agnes very well. Even when they do not know they are witches, witches prefer not to be noticed.

  Her mother had been called Agnes too and she was also a witch but she had known perfectly well what she was for her mother, also called Agnes, had told her. It was a great pity she had married a man who thought that witchcraft was all hokum. He was tall and imposing and handsome and even witches can be at the mercy of their hormones. It was an even greater pity that when Agnes was born her mother died, the victim of a misunderstanding between an Indian doctor and a Nigerian midwife who were communicating in English, a tongue foreign to both. Her father, Durward, was somewhat put out by this event but not unduly grieved. He had tired of Agnes before they had been married a year. She had realized, even sooner. that under all that physical splendour was a pompous, self-important, intolerant boor, which was doubtless why he had tired of her.

  As well as being a boor Durward was also very close-fisted. When Agnes died he decided to sell his flat, repay the mortgage, bank the profit (which was considerable) and move back in with his mother. His mother was a widow and surreptitiously enjoying that state of affairs very much as her husband had been just like his son. The very last thing she wanted was to have Durward back, having hoped when he married that she had seen the last of him. However, she had a healthy fear of what the neighbours might think and reluctantly accepted his decision. After all, who was to look after her poor little granddaughter if she did not? Durward may have been Conservative in his politics but he was not a man to change nappies and warm bottles and attend to midnight cries.

  So, he obtained free accommodation and a built-in baby-minder and found his pleasures elsewhere. Agnes grew up seeing very little of him. Her grandmother managed to extract enough money from her son to feed and clothe the child at the cost of having to endure his grumbling about such an imposition. When Agnes was twelve her grandmother died of a neglected cancer and in her Will she took her revenge for she left the house and its contents to Agnes, not to her son, and he was exceedingly put out by this. However, he reflected that as Agnes was a minor there was no need to let her know about her legacy until she came of age and in the meantime he treated the house as if it were his own. Agnes, however, was perfectly well aware of what her grandmother had done. She became her father's unpaid housekeeper and endured his acid criticisms, but she knew.

  Despite her domestic duties Agnes did well at school. She earned a place at a revered university but was bullied by her father into accepting one at a lesser institution near their home so that she could continue to look after him. Despite that she obtained a good degree in Mathematics. Witches, like musicians, are often good mathematicians. She became a teacher and as the school, which he selected, was close to her home she remained her father's housekeeper.

  Agnes proved to be a good teacher and she never had any bother with her classes though the school where she taught was full of young people who thought they might bully any teacher they chose. And they chose to bully a good many. Agnes proved unbullyable. The first-year classes she drove to learn everything (and it was much) they had failed to learn in junior school and they chanted tables, added and subtracted and multiplied and divided until after a strenuous month they all knew what they should have known when they entered senior school. Agnes defied received wisdom and set her classes outrageous and outmoded tests in mental arithmetic. Her drawer filled up every year with confiscated calculators. Once she had inculcated the basics she defied current educational fashion and streamed her classes. She divided them into those who enjoyed mathematics, those who knew they needed to know some and those content to be innumerate. Her Upper stream (she actually called it that) wrestled with Euclid, x and y axes and associated matters. The Middle stream practised and honed the lesser skills. The Bottom (yes, she called it that) played counting games. When required, her classes sat (and passed) examinations. In some cases mathematics was the only examination they did pass. When they left school her lowest stream could astound the customers in the local by the speed at which they could calculate a score at darts.

  The educational authorities found themselves at a standstill where she was concerned because she managed her three streams without difficulty and she laughed at all efforts made to persuade her that such methods were archaic and, moreover, damaging to the self-esteem of the children (er, students) that she taught. She pointed out that her methods, if archaic, were successful and that was more than could be said for the current fashion. Nor did Agnes have any problems with misbehaviour in her classes, which might have given the pundits reason to enforce reform. They were forced to accept her success which they did with an exceedingly bad grace.

  Elsewhere in the school the situation was very different. The school suffered from 'gang culture' (if that is the appropriate word) and these gangs were united in one thing, if in no other, to resist all efforts to educate them and to prevent as far as they could the education of others. The turnover in staff was as alarming as it was inconvenient and the pass-rate for examinations abysmal. Except in Mathematics. They did quite well in Mathematics.

  When the gang-leaders interrogated Agnes's classes, demanding scornfully and often painfully why they paid so much heed to a mere woman and then suggesting ways in which her classes might be disrup
ted and her influence reduced the victims merely looked puzzled and said they didn't know. When Agnes was asked the same question by harassed staff-members, fleeing the noise and disruption of their class-rooms, she also said she did not know. And the strange thing was that she really did not know. And neither did her classes. All she had to do to subdue any rash pupil who defied her, she said, was just to look at them. That seemed to be enough. The head-teachers, there were quite a number of different head-teachers while Agnes was at this school, were accustomed to spy on her and watch what she was doing to find out her secret. However, that was really all she did. She turned her head and looked and any misbehaviour ceased as if it had never been. The students affected never remembered what had occurred. One of the head-teachers, the fourth since Agnes had been appointed, came closest to solving the mystery when he said,

  “It's magic, it has to be!”

  Inevitably, Agnes was promoted and became Head of the Mathematics Department a week before her twenty eighth birthday. Her predecessor had displayed alarming symptoms in his final term: he was discovered hiding in the stationery cupboard on several occasions and he twitched and jumped whenever anyone spoke to him unexpectedly. The two terms which followed her appointment she did not enjoy. Administration does not appeal to witches.

  For the summer break after her promotion Agnes decided it was high time she had a holiday, a real holiday, not just a break from school during which she was expected to do the extra cleaning and housework it was difficult to manage in term time. She booked a package holiday in Spain and told her father she would be away for three weeks. Durward, recently returned from a holiday in the Caribbean was affronted and angry. He was the kind of man who, because he had fathered a girl, thought she should look after him, cook and clean for him as well as wash and mend his clothes without more reward than she could put by from the rather niggardly housekeeping allowance he gave her. When she had started to teach he had ceased the allowance, thinking that she could now afford to buy the food but she had told him that unless she was paid this allowance she would find herself digs and he could find himself a housekeeper. The allowance had been resumed.

  On this occasion he demanded that she find (and pay for) someone to take her place for the three weeks she would be in Spain but she took no notice, merely leaving him a list of cheap restaurants within a bus-ride and the name and address of someone who would 'oblige' for a (considerable) consideration. He had sulked for several days but she ignored him. She had had a good deal of practice in ignoring his sulks for he sulked a great deal. The day after school broke up she ordered a taxi and went to Gatwick and boarded a plane with the other people who had booked on the same package and flew to Andalucia. She had always wanted to go to Andalucia.

  She arrived and was lodged in an hotel, not unlike a waffle-iron stuck in the sand. From there she could either spend the day on the beach, baking and swimming, or go on bus-tours. Like many witches Agnes did not love deep water so mostly she went with the bus-tours. The third tour was to a place called Jerez de la Frontera which, she discovered, was pronounced Hereth. There, with enormous pleasure she watched a display of riding and driving which featured the most splendid of Andalucian horses. Agnes had always liked horses and when she was a small girl had wished to learn to ride but her father had lied and said he could not afford it. When the tour-guide announced to the bus-party eating a cut-price lunch near a sherry bodega that anyone not interested in the making and drinking of sherry might visit a stud-farm near-by, she at once volunteered to go.

  Only two others wished to join her so, instead of taking the bus the courier hired a taxi and they were trundled the twenty-five kilometres, (Spanish ideas of near and far are elastic) to the stud-farm. The taxi was old, uncomfortable and hot, the road was bad but the stud-farm was everything Agnes could have hoped. There were mares and splendid cuddly little foals, there were strutting stamping stallions and there were leggy yearlings and skittish two-year-olds being lunged and readied for riding. Also there were adorable furry donkeys because the stud bred mules as well as horses. Agnes was utterly besotted by all she saw.

  She also saw a man. He was called Juan-José and he was the owner of the stud. He bred horses and trained them for circuses and displays. He bred and trained horses for show-jumping. He also bred mules because they were still in demand in the campo, which is what the Spaniards call the real country. He watched her for a long time before he came over and introduced himself. He watched the way the mares looked at her and came eagerly to greet her and brought their foals for her to see. He saw that she had no fear of them, nor of any of the beasts and he said to himself. 'This is the wife for me!'

  He woke the courier who was asleep in the taxi and made enquiries.

  The very next day he came in his battered 4X4 to the waffle-iron hotel, separated her from the others who were bound for another bus-trip, this time to Granada, and bore her off to his home in a small hill-village not far from the stud-farm where he introduced her to his mother. His mother looked closely at Agnes and then she laughed because she too was a witch and knew at once what Agnes was and saw also, that Agnes did not understand. Not yet. Her son was a wizard but like a lot of wizards his skill was limited to one area. In his case it was horses. He could do anything with horses or mules or donkeys, even the worst of them.

  Agnes spent a pleasant day. His mother after an hour invited her to stay for the rest of her holiday and Agnes accepted. She could not have explained why. Compared with the waffle-iron the house was far from comfortable. It was August and it was hot and there was not so much as an electric fan in the house. Her bedroom had only one tiny window and that did not open and the lavatory was outside and down a long flight of steps. However, this did not matter compared to the feeling Agnes had of being at home. Now she knew what it was to feel at home she knew the little converted council house in which she had lived all her life had never felt like her home. She ignored the senior courier's pleadings and well-meant advice when she returned to the hotel for her belongings though she thanked her prettily for her concern.

  At the end of the fortnight Agnes wrote to the school and resigned her post. There was time before the new term for them to find another teacher and she would not be in the country to work out her notice. She told the senior courier she was going to stay in Spain which caused a considerable upset because the tour companies like to count them all out and count them all back and worry in case they are sued. Finally, she wrote to her father for whom she had kept house ever since she was twelve and told him he should marry the woman he was visiting as she was not coming back. She was getting married instead. He was very surprised as well as very angry because he thought those visits were a complete secret but Agnes had an inconvenient habit of knowing such things which does not, of course, surprise us.

  She also told him he might continue to dwell in her house but in future he must pay her rent, both for the house and for the furniture. She specified the amount (she was a mathematician) she specified the bank where the rent was to be paid (she was also very practical) and told him that if it was not paid regularly she would advertize the house for sale. She knew her father very well.

  Durward was furious. He raged to the solicitor who had handled his mother's Will and was told that Agnes was wholly within her rights. In time, he realized that if he was to stay there he would have to pay though he did not come to this realization until after six months when he hoped she would have forgotten the matter. At the end of that time she send him a draft of the advertisement she meant to insert in the house agent's window and he paid up. He did not marry as she advised, he married someone else who made him uncomfortable and unhappy but that was nothing to do with Agnes, nor, indeed, with us.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Wedding in the Village

  Agnes went to live in this small village of tiny whitewashed houses built higgledy-piggledy on a very steep hill with one single narrow road, which climbed up to the Plaza, the only level piece of ground the
re was in the village, squeezed between the church and the presbytery and then wiggled its way between the houses downhill and so out on the north side. Higher up, the alley-ways were much too narrow for cars. At one time donkeys and mules had carried people and things up and down the village but by the time that Agnes came there to live, there were only a few donkeys and mules left and most of the villagers had bought motor-bikes or motor-scooters.

  Agnes's husband-to-be was called Juan-José los Caballos. He had a string of other names but because most Spanish men are called either Juan or José or Paco (which mysteriously enough is short for Francisco) or Manuelo they have to have nicknames to distinguish them from the other Juans and Josés and Pacos and Manuelos. Juan-José did so well as a horse-dealer they called him John-Joseph the Horses. But, as we know, he was a wizard and his powers related to horses. In fact, his mother had much greater powers than he did but she had managed to keep them secret. Her by-name in the village was Maria Perno, partly because she had worked as a seamstress before she was married and because she was always seeing pins and picking them up which is a habit with witches as well as with seamstresses. She had lived alone with Juan José since her husband had been killed working in the cork-oak forest. Her two daughters had married two American brothers and gone to live in the United States. Neither of them were witches.