The Pinhoe Egg Page 17

  “She’s not sent us the stomachache so far,” Norma said. “Is that what you’re bringing us now?”

  Marianne knew they had a right to be angry. She began to say, “Look, I’m sorry—”

  That was a mistake. But then anything she said would have been, Marianne knew. Margot said, “Get her, everyone!” and all the girls threw down their bicycles and went for Marianne.

  She was kicked and punched and had her hair pulled, agonizingly. She tried to defend herself by making a bull-like rush at Margot, and went floundering among bicycles, tripping, crashing and being hit and pinched and scratched by any girl who could lay hands on her. Spell bags fell out of bicycle baskets and got trodden on. The air from hedge to hedge filled with strong white powder. Everyone was sneezing in it, but too angry to notice. Marianne threw punches in all directions, some of them magical, some with her fists, but this only made the Farleigh girls angrier than ever. She ended up crouching half underneath her own bicycle, while Margot jumped on it.

  “That’s right!” screamed the others. “Squash her! Kill her!”

  “Here, here, here!” Joss Callow said loudly, riding up behind the fight. “Stop that at once, you girls! You hear me?”

  Everyone turned round guiltily and stared at Joss Callow parking his bike meaningly against the hedge. Marianne stood up from under her bent bike. Her hair was all over her face and she could feel her lips swelling.

  “Now what was this all about?” Joss said. “Eh?”

  “She started it!” Margot said, pointing at Marianne. “The hateful little slime!”

  “Yes, look what she did to me!” Norma said, holding out a torn sleeve.

  “And she’s ruined my bike!” said another girl. “She’s disgusting!”

  They all knew Joss because his mother lived in Helm St. Mary. He knew them too. He was not impressed. “Funny thing,” he said. “I never see you girls except you’re making trouble. Six to one is cowards’ work in my book. Ride away home now.”

  “But we’ve got an errand to run—” Norma began, and stopped in dismay, looking at the burst spell bag under her feet. “Just look what she did to this!”

  “I don’t care what you think you’re doing here,” Joss said. “Go home.”

  “Who are you to tell us that?” Margot asked rudely.

  “I mean what I say,” Joss said. He nodded to each girl in turn and, as he nodded, each girl’s hairstyle writhed on her head and stood itself straight up in the air. Hairgrips and rubber bands pinged off into the road. In instants, the hairstyles had become long, upright bundles on the top of heads, with the little pigtails waving off to one side like feelers.

  All the girls clutched their heads. Several of them screamed. “I can’t go home like this!” Norma wailed.

  “People’ll laugh!” Margot screeched. She took a double handful of her bushy Farleigh hair and tried to pull it down. It sprang upright again through her fingers.

  “Yes,” Joss said. “Everyone who sees you will laugh like a drain. And serve you right. It’ll go down when you go into your own house, and not before. Now get going.”

  Sullenly, the girls picked up their bicycles and mounted them, snarling and complaining to one another when most of the mudguards proved to be loose. Norma said, among the clanking and clattering, “Why has he left her hair alone?”

  As they rode off, looking long headed and decidedly peculiar, Margot answered loudly, “He’s a mongrel half-Pinhoe, that’s why.”

  She meant Joss to hear, and he did. He was not pleased. When Marianne said, “Joss, they were angry because Gammer’s been putting spells on the Farleighs,” he simply scowled at her.

  “I’m not standing here to listen to accusations, Marianne,” he said. “I don’t care what it was about. I’ll straighten your bike for you, but that’s your lot.”

  He picked up Marianne’s bicycle and, with a few expert twists and bangs and the same number of well-directed stabs of witchcraft, he straightened the bent frame and twisted pedals and made the wheels round again. Tears in Marianne’s eyes distorted the sight of him putting the chain back on. Gammer has been so thorough! she thought. No one believes a word I say!

  “There,” Joss said, handing her the restored bike. “Now get wherever you were going, get your face seen to, and don’t try insulting any Farleighs again.” He picked up his own bike, swung his leg swiftly across the saddle, and rode away into the village before Marianne could think of what to say.

  She stood in the road for a moment, softly weeping in a way she thoroughly despised. Then she pulled herself together and took a look at the little burst bags and the white powder from them lying in a trail across the road and dusting the hedges on either side. Those girls had been bringing some fierce stuff to wish on the Pinhoes. From the sore feeling down her back, Marianne was sure it was another illness of some kind. Luckily, it was so fierce that whoever sent it had made it so that it did not work until someone said the right word, but, even so, Marianne knew she ought not to leave it here. Someone could say the right word accidentally at any time.

  Sighing, she laid her bike down and wondered how to deal with it. This was something Mum would have been better at than she was.

  There was one thing she could do that might work. Marianne had not tried it very often because Mum had been so alarmed when she discovered Marianne could do it.

  Marianne took a deep breath and, very carefully and gently, summoned fire. She summoned it to just the surface of the road and very tops of the leaves in the hedges. And in case that was not enough, she instructed it to burn every scrap of the powder wherever it was.

  Little blue flames answered her, flickering an inch high over road, grassy banks, and hedges. Almost at once, the flames filled with tiny white sparks, hissing and fizzing. Then the powder underneath caught fire and burned with a most satisfactory snarling sound, like a bad-tempered dog. The six little bags went up with six soft powdery whoomps and made clumps of flame that were more green than blue and sent up showers of the white sparks. Like a fireworks display, Marianne thought, except for the strong smell of dragon’s blood. When she called the flames back, every scrap of the powder was gone and there was no sign of the bags.

  “Good,” Marianne said, and rode onward.

  She must have been an alarming sight when she arrived at Great-Uncle Edgar’s house, what with her swollen mouth, scratched face, and wild, pulled hair. Her knees were scraped too, and one of her arms. Great-Aunt Sue exclaimed when she opened the door.

  “Good gracious, dear! Did you fall off your bicycle?”

  Aunt Sue was so crisp and starched and orderly and looked so sympathetic that Marianne found she was crying again. She held out the jar of balm and gulped, “I’m afraid it got cracked.”

  “Never mind, never mind. I haven’t finished the last one yet,” Aunt Sue said. “Come on in and let me see to your scrapes.” She led Marianne through to her neat and orderly kitchen, surrounded by Great-Uncle Edgar’s five assorted dogs, all of them noisily glad to see Marianne, where she made Marianne sit on a stool and bathed her face and knees with some of Mum’s herbal antiseptic. “What a mess!” she said. “Surely a big girl like you knows enough charms by now not to fall off a bike!”

  “I didn’t fall off.” Marianne gulped. “There were some Farleigh girls—”

  “Oh, come now, dear. You just told me you fell off,” Aunt Sue said. And before Marianne could explain, Aunt Sue hurried to fetch her a glass of milk and a plate of macaroons.

  Aunt Sue’s macaroons were always lovely, pale brown and crusty outside and softly white and luscious inside. Biting into the first one, Marianne discovered that one of her teeth was loose. She had to concentrate hard for nearly a minute to get it fixed back in again. By then she had completely lost her chance to point out to Aunt Sue that she had not said she had fallen off her bike, and that Aunt Sue had just assumed she had.

  Nothing could make it clearer that Aunt Sue was not going to listen to her properly. But Marianne tr
ied. “I met six Farleigh girls,” she said carefully, when the tooth was firm again. “And they told me that Gammer has been sending them ill-chance spells. They’ve had frogs and nits and ants in their cupboards, and now they’ve got whooping cough too.”

  Great-Aunt Sue looked disgusted. She passed both hands down her crisply flounced skirt and said, “There’s no believing how superstitious some of these country girls can be! It’s amazed me ever since I came to live in Ulverscote. Anything that’s caused by their own dirty habits—and the Farleighs are not a clean clan, dear—they try to blame on somebody’s use of the craft. As if anyone would stoop—and certainly not your poor grandmother! She can barely walk these days, so Dinah tells me.”

  Marianne knew it was no good then, but she said, “Gammer sits there and does spells, Aunt Sue. Little cunning things that Aunt Dinah doesn’t notice. The latest one was water.”

  “And what does she do with that? Cause a flood?” Aunt Sue asked, brightly and disbelievingly.

  “Yes,” Marianne said. “In all their houses. And mud in their washing.”

  Aunt Sue laughed. “Really, dear, you’re as credulous as the Farleighs. Anyway, this whooping cough is simply a natural epidemic. It’s all over the county now. Edgar tells me they have cases from Bowbridge to Hopton.”

  Spread by the widening rings of an ill-chance spell, before someone put a stop to the spell, Marianne thought. But she did not say so. There was no point, and she felt tired and sore and shaken. She sat quietly and politely on the stool and listened to Aunt Sue talking about all the things Aunt Sue always talked about.

  Aunt Sue’s two sons first, Damion and Raphael. Aunt Sue was very proud of them. They were both in Bowbridge, doing very well. Damion was an accountant and Raphael was an auctioneer. It was a pity they were both going bald so young, but baldness was in Aunt Sue’s family and it always came from the female, didn’t it?

  Then the dogs. Mr. Vastion said they were all too fat and needed more exercise. But, said Aunt Sue, how were they to get walked properly with Edgar so busy and the boys not at home anymore? Aunt Sue had enough to do in the house.

  Then the house. Aunt Sue wanted new wallpaper. It was a lovely house, and Aunt Sue had never stopped being grateful to Gammer for giving it to them when Gaffer died. Gammer was so generous. She had given Uncle Arthur the Pinhoe Arms, Uncle Cedric the farm, and let Isaac have the smallholding. But truly, Marianne, this place was almost as run-down as Woods House.

  Marianne looked round the bright, empty, efficient kitchen and wondered how Aunt Sue could think that. And for the first time, she wondered if all this property had been Gammer’s to give away. If Dad was the one the property came to, shouldn’t it have been Dad who gave it away? She thought she must ask Mum.

  Aunt Sue said that she had booked Uncle Charles, over and over, to redecorate the house, but Uncle Charles always seemed to have something more urgent to do. And Aunt Sue was not going to employ anyone else, because Uncle Charles used the craft in his work, which made him quicker and neater than anyone in the county. But now he had gone to redecorate Woods House. Why should a newcomer, even if she was a Pinhoe born, have the right to take up Uncle Charles’s time?

  By this time, Marianne had had enough. She did not want to hear either Uncle Charles or the lovely Princess Irene being gently criticized by Aunt Sue. She stood up, thanked Aunt Sue politely, and said she had to be going now.

  Meanwhile, Joss Callow arrived at the Pinhoe Arms, ready to report to Marianne’s father. As he was parking his bike in the yard, little blue flames broke out all over the front of him, hissing and fizzing and sending out small white sparks. They squirted from under his boots and even sizzled for a moment on the front wheel of his bicycle. Joss beat at them, but they were gone by then.

  “Have to do better than that, girls,” he said, naturally thinking it was a revenge from Margot Farleigh and her friends.

  Then he forgot about it and went into the Snug, where Harry Pinhoe was waiting for him and Arthur Pinhoe leaning through the hatch. “Search me what the Big Man’s up to just now,” he said, when he was comfortably settled with beer and pickled eggs. “He’s very busy with something, but I don’t know what. They’ve got all the old maps and documents out in their library and you can feel the magic they’re using on them, but that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Can’t Joe tell you?” asked Joe’s father, puffing at the pipe he allowed himself at these times.

  “That Joe,” said Joss, “is bloody useless, excuse my French. He’s never there. I don’t know what he does with his time, but I’m not the only one to complain. Mr. Frazier was about ready to blow his top yesterday when Joe went missing. And Mr. Stubbs was fit to kill, because he wanted an order taken to the butcher and Joe had vanished off the face of the earth.”

  Harry Pinhoe and Joe’s uncle Arthur exchanged sad shrugs. Joe was always going to be a disappointment.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” Joss said. “Young Cat Chant—Eric, the nine-lifer, you know—has hatched an abomination somehow. Griffin, I think. I saw it this morning. I hardly knew what it was at first. It was all fluff and big feet, but it’s got wings and a beak, so that’s what it must be.”

  Uncle Arthur shook his head. “Bad. That’s bad. We don’t want one of those out.”

  “Not much we can do, if it’s living in the Castle,” Harry Pinhoe observed, puffing placidly. “We’d have to wait to catch it in the open.”

  “And when I asked him, this young Eric said your Marianne gave him the egg,” Joss added.

  “What?!” Harry Pinhoe was disturbed enough to let his pipe drop on the floor. Groping for it, red in the face, he said, “That egg was stored safe in the attic. It should have been safe there till Kingdom Come. I put the workings on it myself. I don’t know what’s got into Marianne lately. First she goes round telling everyone that poor Gammer’s setting spells on the Farleighs, and now she does this!”

  “She said that about Gammer to me too,” said Joss. “She was in a hen fight with some Farleigh girls about it, out on the Helm road just now.”

  “Let her just wait!” Harry said. His face was still bright red. “I’ll give her what for!”

  All unknowing, Marianne free-wheeled down past the Pinhoe Arms, more or less at that moment. At the bottom of the hill, she braked, put one foot down, and stared. The expensive taxi from Uphelm was standing throbbing outside the house where Nicola lived. As Marianne stopped, Nicola’s dad, who ought to have been working on the Post Office wall, hurried out of the house carrying Nicola wrapped in a mass of blankets and got into the taxi with her. Marianne could hear the wretched, whooping, choking breathing of Nicola from where she stood.

  “Taking her to the hospital in Hopton,” old Miss Callow said, standing watching. “Doctor says she’ll die if they don’t.”

  Nicola’s mother, looking desperately anxious, hurried out of the house in her best hat, calling instructions over her shoulder to Nicola’s eldest sister as she left. She climbed into the taxi too, and it drove away at once, faster than Marianne had ever seen it go.

  Marianne rode on to Furze Cottage, almost crying again. It might have been the Farleighs who sent the whooping cough, but it was Gammer who had provoked them. As she wheeled her bike into the shed, she decided she would have to have another talk with Mum.

  But that all went out of her mind when Dad—red faced and furious—burst in through the front door as Marianne came through the back and began shouting at her at once. He began with, “What do you mean, giving away that egg?” and went on to say that Marianne was a worse disappointment than Joe was and, having torn her personality to shreds, accused her of spreading evil talk about Gammer. Finally he sent her to her room in disgrace.

  Marianne sat there with Nutcase, doing her best to stop the tears trickling off her face onto Nutcase. “I was only trying to be brave and truthful,” she said to Nutcase. “Does this happen to everyone who tries to do the right thing? Why does no one believe me?” She knew she would
have to talk to Joe. He seemed to be the only person in the world who might listen to her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The griffin became very lively that day. He was also growing an odd small tuft of feathers on his head, like an untidy topknot.

  “I think that is going to be his crest,” Chrestomanci said when Janet asked. “I believe all griffins have one.” Chrestomanci seemed to be taking as much interest in Klartch as everyone else. He came into the playroom—in a more than usually embroidered dressing gown—while Janet, Julia, and Cat were finishing breakfast, and kneeled down to inspect Klartch all over. “Accelerated growth,” he said to Klartch. “You have a lot of magic, don’t you? You’ve been held up in your egg for years, and you’re trying to make up for lost time, I imagine. Don’t overdo it, old fellow. By the way, where is Roger?”

  Cat knew Roger was in that shed with Joe by now. Roger had snatched a piece of toast and raced away eating it, to get on with rebuilding the flying machine. But he had not said that was what he was going to do. Cat held his tongue and let Julia and Janet tell Chrestomanci that they had no idea where Roger had gone. Luckily Chrestomanci seemed satisfied with this.

  As soon as Chrestomanci had sailed away again, Klartch invited everyone for a romp. Cat was not sure how Klartch did this, but it was not long before all four of them were rolling about on the floor and leaping from the sofa to the chairs in a mad game of chase. This was when they discovered that griffins could laugh. Klartch laughed in small, chuckling giggles when Julia caught him, rolled him over, and tickled him, and he laughed in long hoots when Cat and Janet chased him round the sofa. Then Janet jumped on him and Klartch dodged. His long front claws caught in the carpet and tore three large strips out of it.

  “Oh—oh!” they all said, Klartch included.