CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE UPPER HAND

In a titanic battle for power over a queen who should have died centuries ago Griselda summons a spell from nowhere.

Some vital matters in the affairs of men (or women) are decided by the slightest of things or the fleetest of moments and what happened next in the affairs of Griselda Entwhistle was one of those.

She was, to all intents and purposes, in a dead faint (or worse) and falling towards the hard stone floor in the lecture room when in that tiniest of moments before hitting it she managed to see, through the corner of her eye, the delicate fingers of the leotard-clad student's right hand, and before she hit the hard ground with an almighty thump she knew who her opposition most probably was.

It was with a huge amount of self will that she overcame the numbing pain of the fall, and started to rise almost immediately. And as she rose she made herself taller, more witch-like, more like a harridan from old tales, than ever. She needed to dominate now more than she ever had, and she was determined that no leotard-draped anachronism was going to get in her way. And the word anachronism was, in her mind, the right one.

The girl in front of her, she could see quite clearly as she rose up, had six fingers on her right hand. And there was one thing, probably the only thing, that she remembered from school history. King Henry the V111's second wife had six fingers on her right hand too, according to spiteful rumours at the time. The fact had fascinated her when she was growing up because she, too, had once had six fingers on her right hand. The smallest one had been removed by an inquisitive surgeon when she'd been in her younger years, much against her own will it must be said, but he'd done it any way, and as far as she was concerned she still had that sixth finger. She could feel it sometimes, on that right hand, and the feeling was akin to the best of all physical sensations. That finger could be tickled and pleasured, but not being really there it couldn't be hurt, and that was a definite bonus in days when youngsters were still being thrashed across the hand if they breathed out of place.

That sixth finger had marked her out, in the eyes of the superstitious, as a future witch, and that was something she heartily approved of even though she had suspected for most of her life that it might well be untrue. For most of her years she had been a crotchety old woman even when she'd been young, the sort who had always seemed old and set in her ways. It was, after all, only in her old age that she had discovered that things she had always wanted to be able to do were, in fact, possible.

She fixed the brazen young leotard-clad woman with her most fearful eyes, and then smiled.

“Well, mistress Boleyn, I presume,” she purred. “It's so good to see that you managed to keep your head when all about you were losing theirs! And such a pretty head it is too!”

“So you know who I am,” spluttered the six-fingered girl.

Griselda inclined her head, smiling. “I presume some innocent waif or stray took your place on the block when the time came for you to have a close hair-cut,” she said, quietly. “I presume you have been plagued by guilt ever since? Think of it: more than five hundred years of guilt! It must have fair got your knickers in a twist! Is that why you wear a leotard?”

“You know nothing!” spat the newly-revealed Anne Boleyn. “I was queen of all this realm and favourite of podgy Hal, and I intend to live for as long as it takes me to become queen again!”

“That might be quite a long time,” suggested Griselda. “But I don't object to ambition, for that's what it is. You're a witch and you married a king, but being young and shallow you lacked the spells to hang on to him! Not so bright, really.”

“Just a moment there!” intervened a snappy Miss Damienne Bustthruster. “I'm in charge here and I won't have this kind of behaviour in my lecture!”

“I'm afraid you're wrong because Professor Stroggleoff will tell you that I'm the one in charge here!” snapped the Boleyn woman. “After all, if nothing else I'm the oldest by far! And I can say that now that you ...” here she gesticulated in the direction of Griselda Entwhistle “... now that you've blown my cover!”

“Your sixth little pinky did that,” sniffed Griselda. “I don't know why you imprison yourself in a dump like this! That Professor bloke is a creep to start with, and you're pretty enough to make it just about anywhere.”

“Pretty never did anything for a woman!” hissed Miss Damienne Bustthruster. “A woman is a great deal more than pretty! She's intelligence, artfulness, plenty of stuff besides simply pretty...”

“That's true. Just look at me!” murmured Griselda, her gnarled old features forming a virtually toothless grin.

“Silence!” ordered Anne Boleyn. “I stay here because here is where I get my tincture of life! Without Professor Stroggleoff and his skills I'd grow old and die before my time, and I'm not going to do that! So that's the way it's going to stay!”

“I've long suspected there was something special about you,” began Miss Bustthruster slowly. “I've worked here long enough to notice you don't seem to grow any older as the years pass, and follow the same courses year after year as if you were constantly failing your exams, which you never seem to sit. But if you've got your hands on a tincture of life I want a taste of it!”

“So you meddlesome Entwhistle!” roared Professor Stroggleoff, who'd been uncharacteristically quiet in a corner of the room, “You've opened Pandora's box and set free one of the greatest secrets this world has ever known! Look at all these students gawping as if they'd never heard anything like it, and they probably haven't! My dearest Anne and I have kept this secret for five hundred and more years, and we intend to keep it for five hundred more! So I'll deal with you now, just you see if I don't.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” murmured Griselda. “As you can see, your puppet queen couldn't hold me down even though she tried really hard, though she did reveal me in my true shape, which is embarrassing for a soul when all she really wants to be is a sex-kitten...”

Griselda saw that the Professor was at it again. He had found another gnarled and twisted wand from somewhere and was waving it in the air like a mad conductor, frenetically reaching some unheard climax of a symphony inside his head. Then, when he seemed to be thrashing his arms until they might fly off his shoulders he pointed it vaguely and shivering in her direction and uttered some sounds that had nothing to do with any words that Griselda had ever heard. They had about the a guttural nature, like an old rook cawing from the roof of his world, yet they combined to make a sort of cold, callous sense.

She felt the power of those words, though. It came as a shock to her when she realised she was on the receiving end of some kind of magic beyond her understanding of the meaning of the word magic. She didn't know, of course, whether she could muster the strength and the will to fend it off, but she knew she must try. This situation was brand new to her and she sought through the weird assortment of accumulated knowledge that was scattered like lost gems in her ancient mind.

Then the words came into her head from nowhere. She had certainly never heard them before, or if she had they had never been in this order or with this power, but she knew deep down in her being that they were words of power. They were the kind of words her ancestor witches might have muttered together over iron cauldrons as they stirred magic out of horrible slimy things boiling away as midnight approached. Ignorant of what they really might be and where they might have come from she uttered them, anyway, loud and clear and powerful:

“Tickling t*****s, take me to the trees of Targon,” she declaimed.

And there and then and without so much as a by-you-leave she drifted into the air, through a closed window as if it were open, drifting like a gossamer doll in an almost breeze, and out beyond the University grounds, and nobody, no professor, no superannuated Tudor queen, no power in that room, could stop her.

Somehow Griselda Entwhistle had the upper hand!