‘Hello!’ said Carmen, eager to get out of the conversation. She was going to head over to him, but he pushed his way through the crowd.
‘Bronagh! Thank you so much for the invitation.’
‘You know each other?’
‘Happy solstice, Sister Witch,’ said Oke courteously.
‘Happy solstice, Brother Quaker,’ said Bronagh, nodding her head.
‘I like the cloak,’ said Oke in his deep voice. The purple set off Carmen’s dark hair, even though she immediately giggled and would have renounced it had Bronagh not been standing there doing Fierce Witch Face. He noticed, though, the flush that spread across her face, and the slight twitch she made to the cape as she turned around.
‘I brought more!’ came a voice behind Oke, and Dahlia, the girl from the coffee shop, appeared with two more goblets.
‘This is so delicious, Bronagh,’ she said, her face flushed. ‘We should serve it in the coffee shop.’
‘You’d get shut down by the procurator fiscal,’ said Bronagh, patting her arm. ‘And we need you.’
The girl smiled, then caught sight of Carmen for the first time and turned pinker. She blushed easily, obviously.
Carmen froze to the spot and looked at them both.
Oke read her look immediately and wanted to explain but couldn’t think of a way around it. He knew Dahlia had a crush on him – he taught enough undergraduates to recognise the signs – and she had obviously known he’d been invited to the party along with everyone else from the Quaker meeting house, and had hovered in the freezing cold waiting for him to walk past so they could ‘accidentally’ arrive together. Now Carmen would think he was even more of a creep than she did already, sneaking up on her in the hall of mirrors, which he deeply regretted, and, that having crashed and burned, having moved straight on to the next girl who worked in a shop in the same street.
This was more or less exactly what Carmen was thinking. Well. At least she knew it really had just been about the voucher. She sniffed and tried to look dignified, which is quite tricky when you’re wearing a purple velvet cloak.
‘Cor, you were with Blair Pfenning weren’t you?! Is he here?’ said Dahlia.
‘He’s in LA,’ said Carmen, bullishly sounding as if she knew his schedule. It was a ridiculous piece of showing off – who exactly was she trying to impress?
Oke relaxed. Right. So she was seeing that other guy. Okay. Fine. Not that he was terribly interested in Dahlia but he’d hated upsetting Carmen. But he was being ridiculous to think that she was thinking about him at all. The people who dated the Blairs of this world and those who dated the Okes very rarely interacted. He told himself very strongly to pack away those feelings.
‘Dahlia,’ said Bronagh, ‘come here, I have a present for you.’
‘Wow!’ said Dahlia happily, for whom this was turning into an excellent evening. Oke nodded to Carmen, then followed her too, naturally curious. Carmen hugged her glass like she didn’t care and looked around the party. As well as the alternative-looking crowd, it was also full of your typically successful-looking Edinburgh women: glossy, perfectly dressed, slender and well-off. She was half-surprised not to see Sofia among them; she would fit in right away, which wasn’t exactly what you would expect from a dark little occult shop at the bottom of Victoria Street.
‘Who are all these women?’ she whispered to Mr McCredie, who was in deep conversation with a very short man with a very long beard all the way down his front and gold-rimmed spectacles.
Mr McCredie gave a sideways look around the room. ‘Oh, those are those glossy working mother types, always perfect, never a hair out of place. Bronagh told me about them. She says they’reallwitches. No other way you could conceivably “have it all” apparently.’
He went back to his conversation while Carmen frowned. This was all too strange for words. Although if it were true, it would explain a lot.
Suddenly a large figure loomed in front of her, teetering on tiny shoes.
‘Miss Hogan,’ she said, and Carmen flinched. It couldn’t be.
It was. Mrs Marsh stood there, a burgundy dress stretched across that formidable singular bosom.
Carmen’s first thought was ‘Iknewshe was a witch’ followed by an irresistible urge to call Idra.
‘Mrs Marsh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise you were one of the coven.’
Mrs Marsh sniffed.
‘This nonsense. Not at all. I work for the university settlement office at the bottom of the street. Showing Victoria Street solidarity.’
Carmen gave a meaningful look to Mr McCredie, which he caught. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘It looks like this entire street gets involved even when they don’t want to.’
Mr McCredie blinked and came over, and Carmen had to introduce him, much as she was terrified of her old scary boss infecting her new lovely one. Mr McCredie, a gentleman as ever, immediately bore Mrs Marsh off for a drink.
