Mum put her head round my bedroom door the next morning.
‘Are you awake?’ she whispered.
I sat up and looked at Cassie, who was stirring in her sleeping bag on the floor in the light from the landing – it was still really dark in my room because of the board over the window. ‘We are now.’
‘There’s a surprise for you in the kitchen.’
‘Is it the cat?’
‘Come and see.’
I slid out of bed and gave Cassie a kick. ‘Cass, the cat’s back.’
She stuck her head out of the sleeping bag and gave me a sleepy smile. ‘Cool.’
We both ran downstairs in our pyjamas and there was the cat, still wearing her paper collar, wolfing down a tin of tuna Mum had put on a paper plate on the floor. ‘She came back,’ I said, delighted.
‘She did.’
The cat looked up and mewed and I bent down and scratched her head. ‘Can we keep her? She obviously wants to live here.’
Mum sighed dramatically but I knew she didn’t mean it. ‘I think we should take her to a vet and make sure she’s not microchipped, but yes, we can keep her if she doesn’t belong to anyone else.’
‘She’s a witch’s cat,’ Cassie said with a gleam in her eye. ‘Black with green eyes.’
‘All cats have green eyes, don’t they?’ said Mum. ‘Not just the ones who belong to witches.’
‘Do you know that black cats are always the last ones to be adopted at shelters because people think they’re unlucky,’ I said. ‘But I think she’s lucky because if it wasn’t for her, I’d have been squashed under that tree branch.’
‘Maybe we should name her Lucky,’ Mum suggested.
I looked at the cat. ‘No, she doesn’t look like a Lucky. She needs a witchy name.’
‘Alice,’ said Cassie.
‘God no, I don’t want to make the real Alice angry,’ I said with a shiver.
Cassie laughed. ‘What about Hazel? That’s a good name for a witch.’
‘Or Sootica? From that book you liked when you were little?’ Mum added.
The cat had finished her tuna and was nudging me with her nose. I picked her up. ‘What’s your name?’ I said. The cat stared at me unblinkingly with her green eyes.
‘What’s Hermione’s cat called in Harry Potter?’ Cassie said. ‘Thea would know. She’s bloody obsessed.’
‘Crookshanks. But he’s a boy.’
‘Oh well.’
‘How about Hermione?’ Mum said. ‘She’s clearly very clever, like her namesake.’
‘Hermione,’ I said. The cat purred loudly. ‘I love it. Hello Hermione.’
‘Let me take some pictures,’ Cassie said, pulling out her phone. ‘She’s totally Instagrammable.’
‘Just the cat. None of Jem,’ Mum warned.
‘Muuum. Cassie uses so many filters I’d be unrecognizable anyway.’
‘It’s fine,’ Cassie said. I’d told her about Mum’s obsession with the evils of social media and she had been totally cool with it, but I was still a bit embarrassed. ‘Take one of me, Jem.’
She took Hermione from me and held her up, pouting for the camera. I took a few pics, and she did her thing, adding hearts and filters on top of filters until she was happy. Mum looked on, frowning. ‘Cassie, you’re much more beautiful in real life than in these pictures,’ she said.
Cassie grinned. ‘There are two versions of me – the Instagram/TikTok me and the real me,’ she explained. ‘I don’t let one affect the other.’
‘As long as you don’t compare the real-life you to the social-media version of everyone else,’ Mum warned. ‘That’s when it gets tricky.’
‘I’m too clever for that,’ Cassie said and Mum laughed. ‘Actually, we should post about the witch bottles,’ Cassie added. ‘There’s a local residents’ group on Facebook that my mum is on. Perhaps we could ask if anyone knows anything.’
‘Are you on Facebook?’ I said doubtfully. ‘I thought that was for old people.’
‘Oh yes, it totally is,’ Cassie said. ‘I’m not on it.’ We both looked at Mum and she pretended to look shocked.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I’m old so I must be on Facebook?’
‘Are you?’ I doubted it, given how much she hated social media and not surprisingly, Mum shook her head.
‘I’m not.’
‘I’ll ask my mum to post something about the bottles,’ Cassie said.
Mum frowned but she didn’t say no, which I was pleased about. ‘You need to get dressed, girls, because it’s a school day.’
Cassie and I ran around like mad things, getting showered and dressed, and fussing over Hermione, who followed us upstairs, until we were ready to go to school with the first witch bottle I’d found tucked safely in my bag, wrapped in one of Mum’s dusters.
The day dragged but eventually we got out. Unlike most days, we didn’t hang around and chat with our friends; instead we went straight to the museum.
It was right in the centre of town, not far from the place where Mum volunteered, and next to the library. Mum met us outside, because she wanted to know about the bottle too. At least, that was what she said. I knew that actually she was nervy about me meeting strangers. Cassie knew everyone in the museum, and soon we were sitting in a large room full of books and pictures and filing cabinets, with a woman called Heather. She was wearing lots of bright knitwear, a matching woolly hat, and had her nails painted vibrant purple, and she was almost speechless with joy when I got the witch bottle out of my bag. We’d left Alice’s love note and the broken bottle at home; I felt that was a bit too private to share.
‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘May I?’
I shrugged and she picked it up, turning it over in her hands. ‘This is wonderful. Where did you find it?’
‘It was sort of buried in my window frame,’ I told her. ‘A tree broke the window in the storm and we found it.’
She nodded. ‘They were often in frames, or under fireplaces, or over doors,’ she said.
‘What were they for?’ I asked.
‘Protection.’
‘From witches?’ Mum said, puzzled. ‘But the witches lived in our house. At least that’s what we’ve heard. Honor Seton and her daughter Alice.’
Heather went a bit red with excitement. ‘You live in the witch’s cottage? By the sea?’
‘We do. Thistle Cottage.’
‘It’s one of the oldest houses in the town, you know?’ Heather said. ‘So I’m not surprised there was a witch bottle there.’ She turned the bottle round in her fingers. ‘As far as I know, women would use these bottles to protect themselves from attacks.’
‘Women?’ I said. ‘Witches?’
Heather shrugged. ‘There’s no such thing as witches.’
I sighed. ‘So what—’
‘These bottles were a superstition. Like not walking under a ladder.’
‘Black cats being unlucky,’ said Cassie with a grin.
‘Crossing your fingers when you don’t mean what you’re saying,’ said Mum, winking at me. I always did that when I promised I was going to tidy my room, or that I’d absolutely done all of my homework.
‘Exactly,’ Heather said. ‘The women would make a bottle as a sort of lucky charm, to “catch” the bad luck that was coming their way.’
‘We found Honor Seton’s name on a list of accused witches,’ Mum added.
Heather nodded, her face serious. ‘There were several witch-hunts round here. Hundreds of women – and a few men – put to death.’
‘So maybe Alice was worried that would happen to her and her mum?’ I said, feeling so sad for poor Alice. ‘Maybe she wanted to keep them safe.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Did it work?’ Cassie asked. Her eyes were huge. ‘Did Alice and Honor get put to death? Or did the bottle protect them?’
‘Well, the ironic thing is, making a bottle like this would be considered proof that the woman was a witch. Anything ungodly like this would have been enough. Later on, people who were frightened of witchcraft adopted the superstition themselves and used witch bottles to protect themselves from spells. But at the time your Alice was around, making a bottle like this was a risky move. She must have been desperate.’
‘Do you think they were killed?’ I said. I felt close to tears which was a bit silly.
‘I don’t actually know,’ Heather said. ‘But I can certainly try to find out for you. It’s for a school project, is it?’
‘We need to find lessons from history that we can apply to the present day,’ Cassie parroted.
‘Witch-hunts are perfect for that. All this “be kind” stuff that’s around right now? If only it had existed back then.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Mum. She leaned forward in her seat, looking straight at Heather.
‘Most of the witch-hunts started as whispering campaigns,’ Heather explained. ‘Rumours about women who were doing things in a different way.’
‘Casting spells,’ said Cassie but Heather shook her head.
‘Not as such, though that would have been some of the charges put against them. They could have been early pharmacists, using herbal medicines to cure people of common ailments. Or midwives, delivering babies. Or sometimes they were just women who had money of their own and a bit of independence. They were always regarded with suspicion.’
Mum shivered and I edged my chair closer to hers. ‘So they weren’t actual witches?’ I asked.
Heather laughed. ‘Of course not. There were no witches back then, just as there are none now. It was more like a social contagion. People accusing other people before they could be accused. Pointing fingers. Spreading rumours. Nasty gossip.’
‘We could totally link that with the present day,’ said Cassie, who was busy typing everything Heather was saying into her phone. ‘It’s basically school life.’
Mum looked a bit pale. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Fine.’ She gave me a tight smile. ‘It’s just not very nice to hear about these poor women, is it?’
‘It was a dark time,’ Heather agreed. ‘Shall I find you some books that might help with your project?’
‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘We need all the help we can get I reckon. Don’t you think, Cass?’
Cassie didn’t answer because she was taking a selfie by a shelf filled with books that looked hundreds of years old. I laughed. ‘She agrees,’ I said.
Mum pushed her chair back. ‘I think I might run to Asda and get some cat food, if you’re all right here?’ she said.
I gave her a questioning look. We’d agreed we were both going to get cat stuff together. But she didn’t look like she was enjoying this very much, so I didn’t argue. ‘See you at home then?’ I said.
Mum thanked Heather, said goodbye to Cassie and me, then picked up her bag and hurried out of the room without looking back.
When we had bags full of books, and Heather had promised to find out all she could about the Setons, Cassie and I went for a hot chocolate at the centre’s café.
‘So, your mum was totally weird there, right?’ she said when we’d sat down.
I made a face. ‘She was. Not sure why.’
‘Really?’ Cassie looked at me, her eyes roaming my face.
I winced. I’d not mentioned our life in Edinburgh much, and I’d never told Cassie why we’d moved. But maybe it was time to be honest. If she didn’t want to be friends with me afterwards, then perhaps she wasn’t the girl I thought she was. I took a deep breath. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise not to freak out?’
‘Okaaaaaay.’
‘And if you don’t want to be my friend once I’ve told you, could you please just be honest and not pretend it’s all fine and then ghost me?’
‘Jem, what is this?’
‘Promise?’
‘Yes, I promise.’
‘And please don’t tell anyone else what I tell you. Well, maybe your mum. But no one at school … please.’
‘Jem.’ Cassie looked straight at me, serious for once. ‘You’re my BFF. Nothing you can say will change that.’
I thought perhaps she was wrong but I smiled. ‘Okay. Well, do you remember Alistair Robertson? The breakfast television presenter?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Cassie. ‘Wasn’t he some sort of perv? Did he go to prison?’
I nodded. ‘He did. He went to prison for sexual assault and attempted rape.’
‘Urgh. What’s that got to do with you? He didn’t …’ She grimaced. ‘Hurt you?’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, he didn’t. Not in that way.’ I took another breath. ‘He’s my dad.’
Cassie’s jaw dropped. ‘Shit, Jem,’ she said. ‘Shit.’
‘I know.’
‘There was a lot of stuff said about him, and my mum, online when he went to prison. Some of it was accurate. Lots of it wasn’t. It was weird. Mum got a lot of the blame even though she didn’t have a clue what Dad was doing.’
‘That’s why she’s funny about social media,’ Cassie said.
‘That’s why.’
‘Shit,’ Cassie said again. ‘That’s rough.’
‘It wasn’t nice. It’s why we moved. There was a lot of gossip, online and in real life. Mum got death threats. Rape threats. They put our address on Twitter and told people to go round. They took photos of me going to school and posted them online. Mum was scared all the time. So was I. We had to sell our house. And I had to leave my school.’ My words were tumbling over each other. I’d never really spoken about all this with anyone except Mum. And I never wanted to worry her by telling her how awful I’d found it all. ‘Mum wanted to get away from it all, but not go too far, because my grandparents are in Edinburgh, and my dad’s got a brother who’s really nice – much nicer than my dad – and I’ve got cousins and stuff. And we’d lost so much that she didn’t want to lose anything else …’ My voice cracked and I stopped talking.
Cassie got up from her seat and for a horrible moment I thought she was going to walk out and leave me sitting alone at the café table like a lemon. But she didn’t. She came round to my side and put her arms round me. ‘Mate,’ she said. ‘Poor you.’
I thought I was going to cry and I didn’t want to. ‘Don’t be nice,’ I growled.
‘No wonder you’re such a freak,’ Cassie said cheerfully. ‘Shall we get some biscuits to go with our hot chocolate?’