A huge thank you to everybody who bought or read Apprentice Witch! It makes me so happy to hear that people have been enjoying my work. You won’t have long to wait until the sequel, as Artisan Witch is coming out on June 14th, and is available for pre-order now. Here’s a preview of the first chapter:
“Reveal what is hidden!” Venus King called out with all the confidence she could muster, which to her surprise, was quite a lot. A moment later, the small wooden box before her exploded in a ‘poof’ of purple smoke and a moment later, a small lump of vibrant purple amethyst stone sat before her.
“Very good. You’ve mastered that spell,” her mentor Elsie Sherwood said as she hovered over her. Not literally hovering, of course. She might have been a ghost, but she didn’t float. In fact, her grey hair in a sensible bun and her brown vest and skirt over a white shirt were exactly the same as when she’d been alive. “Basic spells like this might not seem like much, but they’re useful for finding your keys or wallet.”
“I might need it for this upcoming job. I’m always losing my paintbrushes whilst I’m working,” Venus said as she picked up her amethyst pendant and reattached it in its regular place around her neck.
Venus had been struggling as a freelance artist for years, taking on whatever part time jobs she could find to make ends meet. But after moving to Moonrise Manor on the island of Cliffwood, her luck had changed. Not only did the island offer her plenty of natural landscapes to paint, the residents had noticed her paintings and were hiring her for more and more commissions. She was on a break from painting a mural on the wall of the local tea shop and was catching up on her magic lessons.
“I just hope I can remember the spell when that does happen,” she said as she rose from the floor of the ritual room, her knees slightly sore and aching from sitting on the wooden floor for so long.
“Don’t worry if you can’t remember them all,” Elsie said. “This isn’t like school. I’m not going to mark you down or give you tests.”
“That’s a lot coming from a former professor.”
“Maybe I am going a little easier on you than I did on my other students,” Elsie chuckled.
Not only had Elsie once been a professor of folklore, her family – the Sherwoods – had been practising magic since ancient times. In fact, they had built this impressive manor as a refuge for people persecuted during the witch hunts.
It seemed to Venus that Elsie knew magic inside out and backwards. It had been intimidating at first, but she knew it was from experience and practise. She was the ideal mentor to teach her magic. Elsie had been in great need of a student to pass on her knowledge to, as she could no longer use magic now that she was a ghost.
She had only been dead for about two months, since the day Venus had moved into her house as a lodger, in fact. Venus and her friends had been able to solve the mystery of who had murdered her, but she had chosen to stay on the mortal plane for a while longer. She claimed it was to teach Venus, but she knew that there were other things holding her to the world of the living. She just knew not to bring them up to her mentor.
“If this was school, at least I know I’d be good at this. Well, most of it, at least. I wasn’t much good at alchemy.” The results of her earlier alchemical experiments were still smouldering in the sink. “Elsie, do witches tend to specialise in a single area? Like you said that the Dee family are experts in glamour magic?”
She shuddered slightly at the memory of Elsie’s murderer, the head of an ancient magical society named the Circle of Wisdom, who she had miraculously been able to defeat even with her meagre magic.
“Yes, many do. It’s beneficial to focus your efforts on one area of magic over others.”
“But you don’t do that?”
“No, the Sherwoods have always studied many kinds of magic. Elemental magic, creative magic, voice manipulation. It’s all in our library. You can do the same or choose an area to specialise in. Many of my ancestors did. There was my second cousin Magnolia Sherwood who was a bard, using her music to manipulate sound waves. Or my great something grandmother Pearl Sherwood who made sculptures using enchanted sand. Your specialty can be anything you wish.”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know what my specialty should be.” Venus had been studying magic with Elsie for weeks now and had tried many different things. Some of them had worked and others had failed spectacularly. She had tried tarot cards, pendulums, and numerology, and had failed them all. Simple spells had gone better. So had sigils, since her experience from art school leant itself well to drawing them. She had even tried designing a few of her own, although she wasn’t confident enough yet to try them. But she still didn’t know yet if that should be her specialty.
“Well, you can take your time to find it. Not all magical disciplines are suited to everybody. Just like art, in fact.”
“True. Like when I spent a semester in a ceramics class before I decided that clay was not my medium. I just hated having to clean dried clay out from under my fingernails. And you should have seen how bad my pottery was.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you’re implying,” Elsie laughed.
She had been Venus’ mentor for long enough that she knew her student tended to underestimate herself and put herself down. She was clearly trying to compensate for that and boost her confidence. Venus appreciated it, as she needed the boost.
Even so, her confidence had grown in the few months she’d been living in Cliffwood. She knew it was because she was studying magic and had managed to solve the mystery of Elsie’s murder, two things she never would have dreamed herself to be capable of before. Her life had turned around in so many ways since finding the ad for the rented room online, even if she still couldn’t figure out who had put the ad there or how she had found it. She was getting more work and wasn’t struggling to pay rent. She was eating better with the fresh ingredients from the village shop and the weekly farmers’ market. She had even made more friends.
That last thought sent a slight pang through her heart. She pulled her phone out of her pocket for the dozenth time that afternoon and locked her eyes onto the screen. No new messages. She ran her fingers over the smooth stone of her amethyst pendant, the same way she always did when she was anxious.
“Are you still worried about him?” Elsie asked, not needing to be told who was on her mind.
“Yes. It’s been a week since I last saw him at the Beltane party. I know he’s busy with work after Rose escaped, but I didn’t think he’d be so quiet.”
She was talking about Andre Brookshield, the police detective who had helped her to solve Elsie’s murder. He had also become a close friend in that time. In fact, she suspected her feelings for him ran much deeper than just being friends, but she wasn’t ready to acknowledge or act upon them just yet.
It didn’t stop her from fretting about him. They had worked so hard to capture Rose Dee, the head of the Circle of Wisdom and Elsie’s murderer, but she had escaped whilst being transferred to the courthouse for her pre-trial hearing. There was a huge manhunt for her at that very moment. Practically every spare police officer in the country was looking for her.
They were still trying to figure out how she could have escaped from the police van – how the CCTV footage showed her being there one second and gone the next. Venus and her friends knew that the answer was magic. But of course, Andre couldn’t tell his bosses about her magic. Normal people weren’t supposed to learn or even know about it. The Circle of Wisdom had restricted it to only themselves for centuries. Besides which, the senior detectives would never believe him and he’d probably be kicked off the force as a crackpot.
“Venus, they’re talking about your boyfriend on the television again,” a low voice came from the living room.
She groaned inwardly as she hurried to the living room, Elsie drifting after her (not literally, of course). There she found already comfortable on the sofa a man only a foot tall with a shaggy red beard and hair sticking out from underneath a pointed red hat. His tweed jacket, overalls, and pointed shoes were what you’d expect to see on a garden gnome. That was Madfod, the manor’s resident brownie. He lived somewhere in the house that Venus still couldn’t figure out and did some of the cleaning in exchange for food. He hadn’t trusted Venus when she’d first moved in, until her cooking skills had won him over.
Next to him sat a black cat, who jumped onto Venus’ lap for attention the moment she sidled onto the sofa. This was Jade, Elsie’s pet. Or rather, her companion. Usually, Venus was more than willing to give the cat attention and fuss, but she was more focused on the television. She didn’t even have time to remind Madfod that Andre wasn’t her boyfriend.
All of them focused on the screen as they watched footage of Andre hurrying to the Canterbury police station. He ducked away from the small army of reporters bombarding him with questions and shoving microphones into his face.
“Andre Brookshield, the detective responsible for arresting Rose Dee, has refused to comment on the matter,” the newsreader said.
“Why are they blaming him? He’s the one who arrested her,” Madfod grumbled.
“We know, Madfod. Now shush, we’re trying to hear,” Elsie said, sitting on the arm of the sofa, her arms crossed over herself.
“The commissioner for Kent Police has stated that the search for Mrs Dee is ongoing and that they are confident that she will be found,” the reporter continued.
“If only that were true,” Elsie uttered, her normally friendly face taking on a darker edge.
They all knew what she was thinking. They could almost feel the guilt swirling inside her. There was no doubt that Rose was using magic to hide herself. Or at the very least, members of the Circle of Wisdom were hiding her. If Elsie could still use magic, she would have been able to conduct a ritual spell to find her. But she couldn’t.
Venus could use basic spells for finding lost things around the house. She could draw sigils onto her palm to give herself more confidence when she was painting. But she wasn’t nearly powerful enough yet to find another person who could be anywhere in the country, perhaps anywhere else in the world. That was why she had tried to use tarot cards and a pendulum to find her, but none of them had worked. The tarot cards always turned up inconsistent messages she couldn’t figure out and the pendulum just seemed to swing at random over whatever map she held it over. She had even tried reading tea leaves, but had only succeeded in getting tea stains on her favourite dress. Yet even if she was competent with either of them, she guessed that Rose’s magic would mask her hiding place from being discovered.
She had gotten away with not only murdering Elsie but also her own son, Alex Dee. Venus shuddered at the memory of watching her stab her own son and him falling to the ground dead, betrayed by his own mother in his last moments of life. She had relived that day over and over in her head, trying to think of what she could have done differently to save him. But she still knew that there was nothing she could have done. Not against a person as cruel as Rose.
“Hi, only me,” a cheerful, Welsh-accented voice came from the doorway. Normally, the sound of that voice with it’s almost sing-song lilt would have lifted Venus’ mood, but it couldn’t today. She heard footsteps on the wooden floors approaching until Diana Young stuck her head around the door, her green dyed hair falling over her round face. The side-swept hairstyle, jean shorts, and striped top wouldn’t make you believe that she was the curator of the village’s local history museum. Yet the sight of her usually never failed to make Venus smile. Her ever-happy face fell when she saw what they were watching. “They still won’t leave him alone.”
“Have you heard from him or Michael lately?” Venus asked her. Michael was Andre’s work partner.
“No, nothing in the past week.”
“Me neither,” Venus said, checking her phone again, already knowing she wasn’t going to see anything there. “I wish there was something I could do for him.”
“I doubt there’s anything that anyone can do for him now,” Diana said, settling on one of the empty chairs. “Not until they all get bored and move onto the next news story.”
“If we could only find Rose, at least that would take the attention and blame away from him.”
“Elsie, do you think the Circle of Wisdom has some kind of safe house somewhere?” Diana asked, turning to the ghost (she of course knew that Elsie was a ghost and about her magic). “Could that be where Rose is hiding?”
“I suspect so,” Elsie said, “but even I don’t know where it could be. Rose was a master of glamours. She was even able to hide her presence from me, and I knew her for years.”
“So she could be literally anywhere,” Venus sighed. “She could be hiding in plain sight just like last time and we would never know. She could be hurting more people right now.”
“Maybe, but you girls don’t need to worry yourselves about that. Leave it for more powerful witches. Just focus on yourselves for now,” Elsie said with a kind smile. But the corners of her mouth twitched, as if she’d tasted something bitter.
“I will,” Venus said, trying to return the smile, but couldn’t quite manage it either. The same guilt burned inside her. She wished there was something she could do, not just for Andre but for all of Rose’s victims.
“That’s enough of that,” Madfod said as the reporter changed topics to a technology expo. (Brownies didn’t trust technology. Madfod was always staring at Venus’ laptop and phone as if they were full of evil spirits. He only accepted the television because it entertained him.) He picked up the remote and changed the channel to a comedy show, letting out throaty cackles.
“Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about all of that,” Diana said, springing out of her seat and leading Venus to the parlour where it was quieter and they could talk properly. “I actually came to tell you some big news.”
“You finally got that new coffee maker for the break room?” Venus asked, her smile finally returning. A real smile this time.
“Even better. The Cliffwood Museum is now also going to be an art gallery!”
“Really? That’s amazing!”
“Yes, you inspired me. There are a lot of artists living in Cliffwood, but I realised how hard it is for you to have your work showcased and find commissions.”
“Don’t I know it.” Venus had only started receiving work from Cliffwood’s businesses after Declan, the chef at the local pub, had seen one of her paintings and commissioned her for a gift for his grandfather. If it hadn’t been for that, she would still be struggling to pay that month’s rent.
“So I thought this would be a perfect way to showcase local artists. You’re an important part of the island’s history, you know.”
“I’m not sure if that’s true, but I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
“There’s an anteroom next to the museum that’s been sitting empty for years, since it’s so old that the wood in the ceiling is rotting. But I finally found an investor who is providing the money to have it fixed up and renovated. You might know him, actually – Amon Kingsley. He’s also an artist. In fact, he moved to Cliffwood shortly before you did.”
“I don’t think I’ve met him.” Venus had gotten to know many of the other artists and creatives who were drawn to the island for its beauty and magic, but that name wasn’t familiar.
“Well, you will when the gallery opens. He’s already agreed to contribute one of his paintings. That’s why I came, actually. I wanted to ask if you’d also be willing to contribute a painting to the gallery opening, since you’re Cliffwood’s biggest rising artist.”
“I’m not sure if that’s true either, but I’d love to paint something for the gallery.”
“Are you sure you have time? I know you’ve been busy lately.”
“I’ll find the time. When is the gallery opening?”
“June 21st. Midsummer. It’s one of the biggest days on the Wheel of the Year, so I thought it would be the perfect day for a grand opening. There’s going to be a big party to celebrate. It will give a chance for all of the contributing artists to meet and mingle and perhaps find some potential buyers.”
“That sounds great. Oh, but will it be a formal party? I don’t really have any fancy dresses.”
“Maybe Elsie has something,” Diana said, pacing to the doorway. “Elsie?”
“Do you need something?” the ghost asked, appearing next to her as if she’d always been there. Venus still wasn’t sure how she managed to appear and disappear whenever she wanted to. She supposed it was a ghost thing.
“Not me. Venus needs a formal dress for a gallery opening. She needs to look good for her big debut!”
“I don’t have anything like that. I never needed any working in academia. But there might be some in my mother’s old things.” Elsie crossed to the cabinet, rifled through one of the drawers, and drew out a thick metal key. “They’re in the basement storage room. That’s where I put all of my parents’ things that I thought were too important to give to the charity shop. The room has a spell on it to preserve the things inside, so you don’t need to worry about moths.”
Venus took the key and went with Diana to the steps leading down to the basement.
“I know it’s strange to say this about a magical house with a literal ghost, but this place gives me the creeps,” Diana said as they descended into the darkness, lit only by a dim orange bulb.
“I feel the same way. I only come down here to use the laundry room. And even then, I try to finish and get out as quickly as I can,” Venus said as they slunk down the long narrow hallway, avoiding the creaking floorboards and the plaster peeling off the walls. It lacked all of the homey comforts of the rest of the house upstairs. It almost made Venus want to escape back up there where she knew it was safe and comfortable. “I always feel like I’m going to find the Phantom of the Opera down here.”
They found the storage room, unlocked it, and ventured into a room which made them both gasp. It was like an antique shop, full of ornaments, records, and boxes overloading with photos. Venus guessed that some of the things in the room were over a hundred years old. Probably even older. Many of them must have belonged to her ancestors, maybe even the ones who had built the manor. They had clearly been important to Elsie’s family once, which made them all the more precious. She could have spent hours sifting through them, but she didn’t want to feel like she was prying through their memories. She focused on searching for the dresses.
“Here they are,” Diana said, moving aside a few boxes and pulling a gown out of one of them. “Wow, Elsie’s mother had great taste.”
“She really did,” Venus said as she roamed over to inspect the dresses. There were gowns made of silk and other flowing fabrics. Between them were boxes of jewellery, hair accessories, and matching shoes. Every layer revealed something new, but she couldn’t make out any of them with only a dim lightbulb above their heads. “There are too many to choose from, and I can’t see properly down here. Let’s take them upstairs so we can sort them out properly.” She took the box in her arms, which was surprisingly heavy considering it only contained dresses.
“Just a moment,” Diana said, eyeing something at the side of the room. Venus should have guessed that her historian’s eye would have noticed something in this room. “These must be Mrs Sherwood’s paintings,” she said as she pushed aside some boxes to reveal a stack of canvases propped against a wall.
“You’re right,” Venus said, setting down the box of dresses to pore over them. Flicking through them, she saw they were mostly experiments or flawed paintings. They weren’t quite as good as the ones displayed upstairs, but they were still lovely. “She really was talented.”
“Too talented to have her artwork languishing in a basement.”
“I still don’t understand how she never became a professional, or at least why she wasn’t more well known. These are far better than anything I could make.”
“She had been painting for longer than you have, that’s all. But you’re right. These are incredible. They could be on the walls of a palace. Wow, look at this one!” Diana flipped to the last painting in the stack, carefully moving the others aside so they could see it properly.
It was made up of dozens of figures, frolicking in what appeared to be one of Cliffwood’s meadows.
“It’s amazing. Why would Elsie put this down here and not hang it up?”
“Let’s take it up with us and ask her,” Diana said, taking the painting in her arms and lifting it carefully. She was clearly used to moving exhibits in the museum and knew just how to handle the painting with care so that it wouldn’t be damaged.
They carried the box of dresses and the painting up the stairs, glad to be leaving the dismal basement. They propped the painting up on the parlour sofa so they could see it in the afternoon sunlight. Now Venus could see it had even more detail than she’d realised.
“How did it go?” Elsie asked, roving into the room. “Did you find-” She stopped when she saw the painting, staring at it as if her mother was standing in front of her. “You found my mum’s painting.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Venus said. “It reminds me of The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Venus had seen Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting on a trip to Spain and had spent over an hour staring at the figures prancing over a landscape, much like the ones in the painting before her. “Your mother must have spent months on it.”
“She did,” Elsie said, reaching out to stroke the signature at the bottom – Elizabeth Sherwood. “It was the last thing she painted before her arthritis got so bad that she couldn’t hold a brush anymore. She poured herself into it. She spent days at a time holed up in the studio. It almost seemed to drive her mad. Sometimes she forgot to eat or sleep until I reminded her. I suppose she knew that she wouldn’t be able to paint soon, so she poured her whole heart into making this. I suppose you could say it was her masterpiece.”
“It certainly is. Why didn’t you display it on the walls with the rest of her paintings?”
“I’m not sure. I just felt like I should put it in the basement…” Elsie said, her voice becoming far away and wistful. Just as quickly, it snapped back to normal. “But you’re right. It would look better up on the wall where everybody can see it. I don’t know why I kept it in the basement for so long. Madfod, fetch the toolbox.”
“Of course I have to do all the hard work,” the brownie grumbled.
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J.A. Arundel 