A Lover’S Potion and Other Stories

By Winsome Smith

Short stories are but a slice of life, yet they are complete, even in few words. Although the endings are not always happy, they are indeed endings. These slices of life take us to many times and places, where we meet people with a distinct set of problemsand sometimes, if they are very lucky, solutions.

A Lovers Potion is an imaginative walk through fantasy and fiction. In these collected stories, we visit a small shire where witchcraft mania runs wild. A peasant girl becomes pregnant with her aristocratic lover, who presents her with a gift of jewellery, confounding a team of modern archaeologists. There is even a girl with incredibly long hair, locked in a tower, but she is not what she seems.

Each story focuses on people and their fascination with one another. All human beings share desires, endeavors, and loyalties. Through actions, we reveal ourselves. The characters in these stories each long for somethingand in some cases, the characters arent human at all. Read of compassion, romance, and revenge in this riveting collection of wiles and whimsy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jan 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452526485

Winsome Smith

Winsome Smith is the author of twelve books, although short story is her favorite medium. She grew up in New South Wales, Australia, but her stories span the globe.

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Copyright © 2015 Winsome Smith.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-2649-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2648-5 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/07/2015

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

A Lover’s Potion

A Lucky Find

Let Down Your Hair

The Glass Eye of the Beast

The Curmudgeon

Comfrey

The Game

At Harringtons’ Place

The Baby and the Jinker

The Short Life of Cedric Fellowes

Cash and Calico

Justice

Compassion

Family Loyalty

Selma’s Birthday Present

Above the Clouds

Stan’s Music

Short Short Stories

Roadhouse

It Happens

Baby Love

Slow, Slow, Quick Quick, Slow

Fabulous

Angela’s House

Romances

Make Love Your Aim

Dear Cecil

It’s All Rubbish

To Thine Own Self Be True

To my brother Mick and sister-in-law, Daph.

And in loving memory of my brothers Rupert Kevin Hayes and Rodney Arthur Hayes.

Acknowledgements

Many of these stories have been published online in Narrator Magazine.

Some have appeared in print in Narrator International volume 1. ‘At Harringtons’ Place was shortlisted in the Toowoomba Literary Awards 2014 and appears in their anthology Northern Light.

Preface

A short story presents a slice of life; it is complete in itself and reaches a satisfactory ending, not always happy.

A short story can take you to many places and many times; past, present, and future.

In my stories, I have tried to share my fascination with people—their desires, endeavours, and loyalties. I have attempted to present diverse characters and to show their actions, sometimes loving, sometimes selfish. Some of the characters that reveal their thoughts are not human but they tell an interesting story, too.

I hope I have told these tales with compassion and humour. They are intended for your enjoyment and entertainment.

Winsome Smith, 2014

A Lover’s Potion

W hen Mistress Pettigrew’s butter would not churn, I had a great laugh, but Mistress Pettigrew was angry, especially when one of her hens died suddenly. Mistress Pettigrew raged around the village for a day or two declaring that non-churning butter could only be caused by witchcraft. She was a bad-tempered dame anyway, and I was glad when things went wrong for her.

Fear spread quickly through our village and the surrounding farmlands. Stories of witches had always been told, and we had heard that in other shires, witches had been burned.

Strange happenings were not new in our village. Young Eddy Makepeace ran into the tavern in great distress one bright sunny afternoon. He had been walking along one of the lanes admiring his shadow cast by the summer sun when he suddenly noticed another shadow walking right beside his—and there was no one there to cast that shadow.

Stories proliferated. Master Cooper was walking home from choir practice one moonlit night. The singers met only three nights every month, when there was enough moonlight for them to see their way. As he strode quickly past a hedgerow, he felt a sudden weight on his shoulder. He glanced to the left and saw a hand there. It grasped his shoulder for about a minute and almost caused him to stagger, but it was only a hand, nothing else.

When two of the village children came down with the spotted disease, people looked around for someone to blame, and suspicion fell upon my sister, Jennet. I believe the suspicion had begun some time before because my sister is so very beautiful. She has long raven hair and skin as white as milk. Heads turn as she walks past. People don’t notice me as much because I am very ordinary to look at; I have brown hair, a dull complexion and a pudding-plain face. My name is Isabel.

My sister lives by herself – very unusual in our village - in her own little cottage. Jennet lives alone because she likes to grow herbs and to distil them in her own kitchen. I live with our mother because she is old and needs looking after. My mother and I have a vegetable garden, and we are lucky enough to have a cow. Our mother had six children but only Jennet and I survived, and we have reached our twenties in good health.

Jennet is scholarly and has a serious nature. Few people here can read, but Jennet reads books. The wife of a previous parson liked Jennet and taught her to read and write. She is shy and does not always take part in ceremonies and games. She has never been in a maypole dance. Villagers regard all this as suspicious.

I, on the other hand, am lively and love a bit of mischief. At haymaking on the farm of Jed Wallace, I make the work into fun, and I love to sing rude songs. I once persuaded Josephine McDonald to gaze at her own reflection in the water of the pond. As she leaned over, I pushed her in. It was such a joke.

When a third child got the spotted fever, a group of village yokels marched on Jennet’s cottage and shouted that she was a witch. When she denied it, they reminded her that she could be tied to the rock at the seaside when the tide was coming in. If she drowned, only then would they believe that she was not a witch. If she survived, she was definitely a witch and would be punished, probably burned. Jennet was brave enough to tell them that only the district magistrate could impose trial by ordeal, and they relented but warned her to take heed.

I wish my sister hadn’t been so stubborn. She would visit the sick. She would assist at births. When someone was injured, she went to them with a pot of her healing balm. Wherever she went, she took a jar of healing or comforting potion because she insisted on trying to relieve suffering. I loved working with her as she distilled healing herbs in her kitchen, and I knew she only wished for good. We often pored over her books together, and learned about the herbs and other healing plants. We experimented with plants and we giggled together. I loved her and knew I would do anything for her.

I was standing at our cottage door one afternoon talking to Sam Spedding, the tanner, when another small mob of angry folk ran past. Sam had been courting me for a year, but I could not bring myself to love him. I liked him but did could not bear the thought of living at a tannery. He also had pockmarks, which spoiled his appearance, but he was an honest and decent man. He went to a lot of trouble to row across the river from his tannery to see me every month, and I appreciated that, but I just could not love him. I also dared not cross that wide river in his boat.

Sam and I ran along with the small crowd, and when we came to a crossroads, we saw some men building a pillory. The cry went up: Fetch Jennet the witch!

I had to save my