Orla and the Magpie's Kiss Read online

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Aftermath

  Copyright

  Dedicated to all those who love

  nature and adventure – and suspect

  there’s more to this world

  than meets the eye.

  “Why all the secrecy?” muttered Richard. He gave the Manila envelope in Orla’s hands an irritated glance then looked out of the window.

  The 16.33 to King’s Lynn was speeding through the industrial estates and Victorian terraces of north London: a damp, grey landscape of litter and advertising hoardings promising a better future. Shiny phones, greasy burgers and electric cars. Richard was admiring his reflection, oblivious.

  At last he shook his head in exasperation. “We’re being sent to Norfolk. Not Moscow.”

  Orla held up the envelope. DO NOT OPEN BEFORE 5 P.M. was written across the front.

  “We’ve waited a week, so we can hang on for a few more minutes,” she reasoned.

  Tom came down the aisle, hand over hand on the seats to keep himself upright. He was ten – eleven in July – and delighted to be on a train without a responsible adult telling him to sit down and behave.

  “Ticket collector’s coming,” he announced, sliding in next to Richard. He looked at Dave the dog: an eight-year-old Jack Russell terrier with legs even shorter than his temper. “That means you have to get off the seat, Dave.”

  Dave gave an exasperated snort and jumped onto the floor. The stick Orla carried everywhere was leaning against the carriage wall and he could see bubblegum stuck to the bottom of the table.

  “We’re not being sent to Norfolk,” argued Orla.

  “Yes, we are,” said Tom.

  “We had a choice,” she insisted, sweeping her curly red hair from her face. “We could have gone to Gran’s for the Easter holidays.”

  “Could we?” gasped Tom. “No one told me.”

  Richard scowled at Orla. “Could we?”

  Orla made the face she always made when an awkward explanation was needed. “Er, it was a couple of weeks ago when Mum and I talked about it. She said it would be good to get out of the city. You were at Cubs, Tom.” She glanced at Richard. “Can’t remember where you were.”

  “How old are you?” asked Richard with a sigh.

  “Thirteen.”

  “Exactly,” said Richard. “I’m sixteen, so I should have been consulted.”

  “But you weren’t there,” said Orla reasonably.

  Tom shook his head. “I can’t believe we missed the chance to stay at Gran’s.”

  “Norfolk will be more fun.”

  “No, it will not,” argued Richard. “Gran would have taken us shopping.”

  That was true. Gran would have paid for trainers and console games and phone accessories and argued with Mum about it later.

  “We’d have been surrounded by riches and died of boredom,” insisted Orla. “Is it five o’clock yet?”

  Richard held up his phone: 5:00:49. “Just open it and get it over with,” he muttered, gazing dejectedly out of the window again as a sign saying GasFrac: Energy as if by Magic slid past. Believe in the Power of Dreams said another.

  “I’m dreaming of going shopping with Gran’s credit card,” mumbled Richard as Orla slid a finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it straight across the top.

  “Boring,” she said. “You can’t say that about Uncle Valentine.”

  Richard’s expression was somewhere between dejection and depression. He looked like a prisoner en route to a Siberian gulag. “Uncle Valentine is a complete nutter,” he grumbled. “His house is actually called Psycho’s Creek. I don’t know what Mum was thinking.”

  “Sicow’s Creek,” corrected Orla. “It’s Old English for sea cows.”

  “Tickets, please,” a guard interrupted. She was wearing a badge that said Greater Anglia Travel Expert. Under that it said Ask Me Anything.

  “What’s the second highest waterfall in South America?” asked Tom, holding out his ticket.

  “I beg your pardon?” said the guard.

  “What’s the second highest waterfall in South America?” repeated Tom, eyes wide with fake innocence.

  “Arguably the Gocta Cataracts in Peru at seven hundred and seventy one metres,” she replied. “But it’s disputed. Would you like me to go into more detail, sir?”

  “Er, no,” stammered Tom, going red.

  “Fine,” said the guard. She glanced under the table. Dave growled. “Keep that dog off the seat, please, and enjoy your journey.”

  As the guard moved along the carriage, Richard brushed imaginary crumbs from his skinny jeans and gave Tom a sideways glare. “That was embarrassing,” he observed. He looked at Orla. “Right, what does this top-secret letter say?”

  “Uncle Valentine says if we miss the 18.50 Coasthopper bus from King’s Lynn we’ll have to sleep in the cemetery,” said Orla. “And we’re to let ourselves into the house because he’ll be out on the mussel shoals until moonrise. The generator is in the rope-house … blah-blah … over the bridge … blah … turn key … waffle … green button … et cetera … understood.”

  “You what?” Richard snatched the letter from Orla’s hand and scanned it with a rapidly deepening frown. “What are mussel shoals?”

  “Places where mussels live,” said Orla.

  Richard looked at Tom. “He’s a nutter,” he said.

  Tom nodded. He agreed completely.

  After she’d chosen a holiday with Uncle Valentine – whom she’d last seen when she was six – Orla had spent a fortnight studying maps of the territory. Sicow’s Creek stood alone in a vast tract of salt marsh with the North Sea on one side and woodland on the other. But there were clues in the surrounding place names that made her uneasy. Too many saints’ names. Too many ancient monuments and sacred spaces.

  Orla sighed, her breath fogging the window. Up until last summer she’d been fearless, or so she thought: happy to throw herself into any situation just to see what happened. She had always been curious, impatient and easily bored. Orla believed that life was a pretty amazing story and was scared only by the thought of not being part of it.

  Last August, though, her tendency to blunder in without a plan had very nearly doomed the entire family. The discovery of an amazing treasure in a Cornish wood had led her into a dark world of witchcraft and mortal danger, and pretty much the only reason she’d survived was curled up at her feet, his nose carefully tucked into his bum.

  Orla reached beneath the table to stroke Dave’s head. He sighed, and she smiled, dragging herself back to a world where Richard and Tom were happily reminding each other of incidents that proved Uncle Valentine’s eccentricity. Or Great-Uncle Valentine, technically speaking, since he was Dad’s dad’s brother.

  Tom grinned. “Remember the story about when his trousers caught fire?”

  “Or when the wheel came off the sidecar he built and he crashed his motorbike into that lady’s greenhouse?”

&nbsp
; Tom giggled. “Didn’t he build a submarine once?”

  Richard nodded. “The one that went down but couldn’t come up? The coastguard helicopter rescued him. It was on the news.”

  “See?” said Orla, grabbing the letter back from her older brother. “It’s got to be more exciting than watching TV at Gran’s house.”

  “One request, though,” said Richard. He checked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “That stick of yours gives me the creeps, so can we make a deal?”

  “It’s called a gwelen, and I only brought it in case of an emergency. But yes, I’m listening.”

  “No witchy stuff, please. Let’s just have a normal holiday.”

  “Total deal.” Orla nodded. She wanted nothing more.

  Under the table, Dave uncurled and stretched. It was impossible to get any sleep with all the giggling and prodding, and as head of household security and close protection specialist, he needed to see where he was going. He jumped up on the seat, then onto the table to admire the view, wiping dog snot all over the window.

  “Dave,” they all hissed.

  Orla laid down her coat to protect the seat and dragged him down to sit beside her. “You’re getting heavy, dog,” she muttered.

  “He’s out of shape,” said Tom. “Too many pies.”

  “Too much screen time,” added Richard.

  Dave felt himself getting hot under the collar. People always spoke about him as though he wasn’t there. But it was true: he had indeed spent much of the past few months lying on the sofa with Orla watching telly. He liked nature programmes, fly-on-the-wall documentaries about policemen and old Road Runner cartoons.

  “He deserves to take it easy,” said Richard. “He’s, like, fifty-six in human terms.”

  “Fifty-six?” cried Orla. She covered Dave’s ears. “Don’t listen to them, dog. You’re more like thirty-six.”

  “That’s still old,” said Tom.

  They had to run to catch the 18.50 bus from King’s Lynn, and the rain started falling as they rode east along the coast road. By the time they reached Taylan Mill – the nearest stop to Sicow’s Creek – they were the only passengers left on the bus.

  Orla was first off. The rain had passed and as she stood in the lane, she was hit by a gust of excitement at being somewhere new and unexplored. It was a familiar feeling: a tingling that started in her toes and crept up her spine to the nape of her neck. This, thought Orla, had to be the reason why explorers could never settle down. But there was something else, lurking at the back of her mind, like unfinished homework. A sense that her arrival had somehow been noticed. She tried her best to shake it off. Paranoia wasn’t a good look.

  “Middle of flipping nowhere,” sighed Richard, gazing up at the orange and purple sky. “Exactly as expected.” He frowned at the bright white light to the west. “Is that a stadium out there in the swamp?”

  “Why can’t we have holidays like normal people?” muttered Tom.

  Dave held his nose high, sniffing the air for clues. There was no shortage of intriguing smells. Salt, deer, fox, pheasant, rabbit, stagnant water, something dead – badger, probably – rotting fish, weird poo, diesel and a faint smell of burning. He sneezed and shook his head, tugging on the lead.

  “We’re going to die of boredom,” moaned Tom.

  “You said that about Cornwall,” pointed out Orla, “and you soon changed your mind.”

  Tom shuddered. “We agreed never to talk of Cornwall,” he said solemnly.

  Richard was holding his phone above his head in the strange way people do when they think an extra few inches will make a difference to reception. “There’s one bar and it’s not 4G,” he said at last. “Which way?”

  Orla pointed with her stick. “Down this track and across the salt marsh. It’s only a mile.”

  Richard looked sadly at his wheelie case. Four hours ago, at King’s Cross Station, it had been shiny and new. Now it was scuffed and dirty, and in a few minutes, he was going to have to drag it across a marsh. From somewhere in the gathering dusk a tawny owl screeched. Possibly with laughter.

  “I’m going to hate it here,” he muttered.

  Orla was sure that the last time she had seen Uncle Valentine he was living in a normal house, in a village. Now, though, the only buildings visible were four crooked-looking shacks of flint and weatherboard, raised on stilts and silhouetted against the embers of the sun.

  Uncle Valentine’s letter said he had placed oyster shells to mark the path across the marsh. When she’d read it, Orla had wondered how on earth she was going to spot a seashell in the mud, but there they were: small piles that glowed like cats’ eyes in the twilight. Dave was in front, using his lead to pull Orla in the right direction. Somewhere to their right, there was the distant sound of waves crashing on an unseen shore. To their left, the easily amused owl; and, every now and then, the indignant quacks of roosting ducks rudely awakened by their footsteps. Ahead, in the distance, that stadium blaze of searing white light that Orla thought was entirely inappropriate for such a deliciously desolate spot.

  “Maybe it’s a high-security prison,” muttered Richard, snatching at his case. There was a nasty cracking sound as the handle broke, then a soft squelch and a cry of shocked indignation.

  Orla sighed. Her brother’s bag lay on its back in a pool of mud, like a happy piglet.

  “Seriously?” wailed Richard, as though questioning a cruel god. The bag made a sucking noise as he dragged it from the mud and the three plodded on silently, like exhausted fugitives. At last they were there. Almost.

  “Is one of those Uncle Valentine’s actual house?” gasped Tom as it became clear that the dilapidated cabins they’d seen on the horizon were to be their home for the week. “I thought they were ruins.”

  “Must be,” said Orla. “Uncle Valentine said we had to turn the generator on to get power. It’s in that shed over the bridge.”

  “Off you go, then,” said Richard. “We’ll wait here.”

  Orla bent to release Dave’s lead, allowing him to carry out his risk assessment. He tiptoed across the bridge, his nose swinging left and right. When he stopped, Orla followed, over the ditch and up three steep steps to pull open the door. The generator, with its key and its big green button, was exactly where Uncle Valentine had said it would be. She turned the key to 1, pushed the button and watched lights flicker on in the house. It was such a thrill to be here, with days and days of exploration ahead, that she felt a rush of relief. Worrying was pointless.

  Like the generator shed, the house itself stood above the ground on thick trunks of bog oak. Richard was first to mount the steps up to the green door.

  “This is an exceptionally cool house,” said Orla, peering into the gloom beneath.

  “We should knock,” advised Richard.

  “Orla said he was out,” replied Tom.

  “I know,” said Richard. “But you don’t just go breaking in— Oh. Apparently you do.”

  Orla had barged past him, entering a kitchen with a low ceiling and a wooden floor. In the middle of the huge table, next to a bottle of rum, was a cardboard box with the word WELCOME written in big black letters.

  “Crisps,” announced Tom, peering inside the box as Orla locked the door. “And choccy and Dairylea triangles and Fanta and something in a brown bag … oh. Apples.” He pushed the bag to one side. “Biscuits. Monster Munch. Strawberry milk…”

  “Anything for Dave?” asked Orla. She looked around. “Where is he?”

  “He went upstairs to check for hostiles,” said Richard. He had mud in his hair and salt stains on his suede shoes, but no one thought it was a good idea to tell him. He popped a can of Fanta and took a long swig.

  “Nice clock,” he belched, running his fingers over a timepiece the size of a breeze block perched precariously on top of a narrow mahogany display case. It was just past 9.35 p.m., and outside night had fallen. “Looks like jade. Must be worth a packet.” He reached out to touch the clock then jumped backwar
ds as the display case went into an alarming wobble.

  “Careful,” warned Orla. “It’s too early to be smashing up the place.”

  She leaned her stick against the wall and grabbed an apple. It was soft and wrinkly, and smelled of wet grass. She rubbed it on her T-shirt, took a bite and pulled the Manila envelope from her pocket.

  “Our rooms are named after birds,” she said. “Tom’s in Coot; I’m in Nightjar; Richard, you’re in Greylag.”

  “Best get the disappointment out of the way, then,” sighed Richard. He headed for the stairs, followed by Tom. Orla unpacked Dave’s rations from her backpack – a value pack of Kitekat Fish Megamix in jelly – then followed.

  Dave was already in Nightjar, sniffing along the skirting boards as though he smelled a rat, his claws clicking on the floorboards. Orla dropped her backpack on the pink bedspread. A pile of books stood on the bedside table, topped by The Sunshine Story Book for Girls. The cover showed a rosy-cheeked girl with a flower in her hair hugging a soppy-looking Labrador. Orla raised an eyebrow. She switched off the light so she could see the night sky, but if there were any stars, they were too weak to punch through the white glare in the west.

  “Horrible light pollution,” she muttered to Dave. “Think of all the energy they’re wasting.”

  She reached into her backpack and pulled out a rag doll. It was no ordinary rag doll. This was Malasana, a crazy-haired gypsy in a torn dress. She came from Madrid, had magical powers and had once worked with Dave to save Orla’s life. You didn’t leave a doll like that at home when you went travelling.

  Orla looked first at Malasana, then at Dave. “Feels pretty safe here,” she whispered. “But you never know.”

  She dug into her backpack again and pulled out a tattered red notebook held together with sticky tape. Its front cover was adorned with a childish yet intricate pentagram, a five-pointed star, and surrounded by curious symbols drawn in silver Sharpie. A book of handwritten spells, collected and carefully recorded by a Cornish peller – or witch – called Miss Teague and given to Orla as a gift of protection. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, Orla always thought.

  She removed her spare clothes, her wash kit and a velvet bag containing a dried toad, a snakeskin her dad had sent from Africa, the bleached skull of a hare and a crow’s feather. These things were among the essentials if you suddenly needed to perform a conjuring or prepare a blasting so, like the spell book, she’d brought them just in case. They couldn’t be left lying around, though, so she hid them in the back of the bedside drawer, then slid her gwelen under the bed.