The Pinhoe Egg Page 20

  Marianne could not help staring at him, even while she was smiling back. He was so small, so bandy, and so brown. His hair grew in tufts round his bald head and his wrinkly face had two tufts of beard on it, just under his large ears. If there were such things as gnomes, Marianne thought, she would be sure he was one. But his smile was beaming, friendly, and full of pride in his gardening. Her own smile enlarged to beaming in reply. “You’ve done so much! In no time at all!”

  “It was the dream of my life,” he said, “to work in a country garden. Mistress Irene, bless her, promised me that I should, and she kept her promise as you see. I’ve hardly started yet. August’s not the best time to dig and sow, but I reckon that if I can get it all in good heart by the autumn, then when spring comes, I can really begin. They call me Mr. Adams, by the way. And you are?”

  “Marianne Pinhoe,” said Marianne.

  “Oh,” said Mr. Adams, “then you’re quite a personage around here, as I read it.”

  Marianne made a face. “Not so’s you’d notice. I—er—came looking for my cat.”

  “Nutcase,” said Mr. Adams. “In the house. He went past me into the conservatory five minutes ago. Before you go in, come and look how your grandfather’s herb bed’s coming along. It went against the grain with me to leave it till last, when it’s so near the house, but I had to wait for Mr. Yeldham to come and tell me which were the weeds. Awful lot of strange plants here.”

  He beckoned to Marianne so imperiously that she came nervously out from the archway, to find the big plot looking almost as she remembered it from Gaffer’s time: low cushions of plants round the edges, tall gangly ones near the middle, and medium-sized ones in between, each one carefully placed in sun or shade as it needed, and growing in different-colored earths that were right for them. The spicy whiffs of scent made her throat ache, remembering her Old Gaffer.

  She smiled down at Mr. Adams. She was a lot taller than he was. “You’ve made this almost how it should be, Mr. Adams. It’s wonderful.”

  “For my pleasure,” he said. “And to be worthy of Princess Irene.”

  Thoroughly surprised, Marianne said, “I call her that too!”

  Cat rode quite slowly along the river path, so that Syracuse waltzed and bounced, wanting to go faster. Even after galloping round the paddock before they set out, Syracuse was still bored by walking.

  They were going the same way that the river flowed, and Cat kept firmly remembering this. The water had already tried to deceive him twice by seeming to flow the other way. Last spring, when Mr. Saunders had been teaching him how you used witch sight, Cat had been rather bored. It had seemed so obvious. Now he was glad of those lessons. The lessons had not been so much about how you saw things truthfully when they were bespelled—Cat could do that standing on his head—but about how to keep seeing them when other spells were trying to distract you. Mr. Saunders, being the keen, fierce kind of teacher he was, had invented a dozen fiendish ways to take Cat’s mind off what he was seeing. Cat had hated it. But now it was paying off.

  Cat kept that river firmly under his witch sight and did not allow it to get away once. He did not look at the surrounding valley at all. Now he was warned, he could feel it swirling about, trying to suggest he was going the wrong way.

  Thanks to Syracuse, he could attend to the valley by smelling it instead of looking. The scents of water, rushes, willows, and the tall meadows had changed quite a lot in the short time since he had last come this way with Joss. The spiciness was damper, sadder, and smokier and smelled of summer giving way to autumn. Cat surprised himself by thinking that a year was really a short time. Things changed so fast. Which was silly, he thought, almost getting distracted, because you could do so much in a year.

  Mr. Farleigh was suddenly standing in front of them in the path.

  He was there so abruptly and unexpectedly—and so solidly—that Syracuse was startled into trying to rear. There was a difficult few seconds when Cat nearly fell off and Syracuse’s back hooves walked off the path and squelched among the rushes. Cat managed to keep himself in the saddle and Syracuse right way up, but only with a frenzy of magic and of spells he had no idea he knew. Mr. Farleigh watched his struggles sarcastically.

  “I told you not to come here,” he said, as soon as Syracuse’s front hooves were on the ground again.

  Cat was quite angry by then. It was an unusual experience for him. Up to now, when things happened that would have made most people angry, Cat had just felt bewildered. But now, he faced Mr. Farleigh’s pale-eyed glare and was surprised to find himself filled with real fury. The man could have hurt Syracuse. “This is a public bridle way,” he said. “You’ve no right to tell me not to use it.”

  “Then use it to go home on,” Mr. Farleigh said, “and I’ll not turn you back.”

  “But I don’t want to turn back,” Cat said with his teeth clenched. “How do you think you can stop me going on?”

  “With the weight of this whole county,” Mr. Farleigh said. “I carry it with me, boy.”

  He did, too, in some odd way, Cat realized. Though Syracuse was trampling and sidling, highly disturbed by the magic Cat had used, Cat managed a small push of power toward Mr. Farleigh. He met a resistance that felt as old as granite, and as gnarled and nonhuman as a tree that was petrified and turned to stone. The stony roots of Mr. Farleigh seemed to have twined and clamped themselves into the earth for miles around.

  Cat sat back in his saddle wondering what to do. He was not going to go tamely back to the Castle, just because a bullying witchmaster with a gun told him to.

  “Why don’t you want me to ride this way?” he asked.

  Mr. Farleigh’s strange pale eyes glowered at him from under his bushy brows. “Because you mess up my arrangements,” he said. “You have no true belief. You trespass and you trample and you unveil that which should be hidden. You try to release what should be safely imprisoned.”

  It sounded religious to Cat. He bent forward to pat Syracuse’s tossing head and wondered how to say that he had not done any of these things. As to Mr. Farleigh’s arrangements, he should just make them some other way! People should be allowed to ride where they wanted.

  He was just deciding that there was no way to say this politely, and he had opened his mouth to be rude, when he was interrupted by a most unusual set of sounds coming from somewhere behind his right shoulder. There were voices, chattering, singing, and murmuring, as if quite a large crowd of people were walking along the top of the meadows. This noise was mixed with a strange, shrill whispering, which was combined with creakings and clatterings and a wooden thumping. Cat’s head swiveled to see what on earth it was.

  It was the flying machine. It was coming slowly across the top of the meadow about a hundred yards away and about twenty feet in the air. And it was the most peculiar object Cat had seen in his life. To either side of it, a jointed set of broken tables slowly flapped. Something that looked like a three-legged stool whirled furiously on its nose. The rest of it looked like a tangle of broken chairs all loosely hooked together, with each bit of it working and waving and making little flaps of wood go in and out. It had a long feather duster for a tail. In the midst of it, Cat could just see the dismantled frames of two bicycles and two people on them, pedaling madly. And every bit of this strange contraption was calling out as it came, “I belong to Chrestomanci Castle, I belong to Chrestomanci Castle!” high, low, shrill, and steady.

  Mr. Farleigh said, in a voice that was almost a groan, “The very air is not safe from them!” Cat’s head whipped back to find Mr. Farleigh staring up at the machine in horror. As Cat looked, Mr. Farleigh pulled something on his gun and raised it.

  The gun barrel moved to track the flying machine and, before Cat could do more than put one hand out and shout, “No!,” Mr. Farleigh fired.

  Cat thought there was a yell from the machine. But the crack-bang! of the shot sent Syracuse into a panic. He squealed and reared in earnest. Cat found himself clinging to a vertical horse
and fighting to keep Syracuse’s trampling back hooves from going into the river. He saw everything in snatches, among flying horsehair and clods of mud and grass splashing into the water, but he saw Mr. Farleigh slam another cartridge into his gun and he saw, uphill, the flying machine tipping to one side so that one set of flapping tables almost brushed the grass.

  Then Syracuse came down, quivering with terror. Cat saw the flying machine right itself with a clap and a clatter. Then it was off, with astonishing speed, tables flapping, feather duster wagging, boys’ feet flashing round and round. It had slipped over the top of the hill and vanished from sight before Mr. Farleigh could raise his gun again.

  While Mr. Farleigh lowered his gun, looking grim and frustrated, Cat patted Syracuse and pulled his ear to quiet him. He said to Mr. Farleigh, “That would have been murder.” He was surprised that his voice came out firm and angry and hardly frightened at all.

  Mr. Farleigh gave him a contemptuous look. “It was an abomination,” he said.

  “No, it was a flying machine,” Cat said. “There were two people in it.”

  Mr. Farleigh paid no attention. He looked beyond Cat and seemed horrified again. “Here is another abomination!” he said. He lowered his gun farther and aimed at the path behind Cat.

  Cat snatched a look behind him. To his terror, he found that Klartch had followed them. Klartch was standing in the path with his beak open and his small triangular wings raised, obviously paralyzed with fear. Without having to think, Cat put out his left hand and rolled the barrel of Mr. Farleigh’s gun up like a party whistle or a Swiss roll.

  “If you fire now, it’ll blow your face off!” he said. He was truly angry by then.

  Mr. Farleigh looked grimly down at his rolled-up gun. He looked up at Cat with his bushy eyebrows raised and gave him a sarcastic stare. The gun, slowly, started to unroll again.

  Behind Cat, Klartch went “Weep, weep, weep!” Syracuse shook all over.

  What shall I do? Cat thought. He knew, as clearly as if Mr. Farleigh had just said so, that after he had shot Klartch, Mr. Farleigh would shoot Syracuse and then Cat, because Cat was a witness and Syracuse was in the way. He had to do something.

  He pushed at Mr. Farleigh with his left hand out and came up against flinty, knotty power, like an oak tree turned to stone. Cat could not move it. And the gun steadily unrolled. Mr. Farleigh stared at Cat across it, immovable and contemptuous. He seemed to be saying, You can do nothing.

  Yes, I can! Cat thought. I must, I will! Or Klartch and Syracuse will be dead. At least I’ve still got three lives left.

  The thought of those three lives steadied him. When Mr. Farleigh shot him, Cat would still be alive, on his eighth life, just like Chrestomanci was, and he could do something then. All the things he had been taught by Chrestomanci surged about in his head. There must be something Chrestomanci had said—Yes, there was! After Cat had sent Joe to the ceiling, Chrestomanci had said, “Even the strongest enchanter can be defeated by using his own strength against him.” So instead of pushing against Mr. Farleigh’s heavy, stony power, suppose Cat pushed with it? And quick, because the gun was nearly unrolled.

  Then it was not difficult at all. Cat pushed out hard with his left hand and made Mr. Farleigh into a petrified oak tree.

  It was a weird thing. It stood nine feet high, made of bent and twisted gray rock, and it had huge and knotty roots that had somehow delved and gouged their way into the earth of the path where it stood. It had a broken-looking hump at the top, which had probably been Mr. Farleigh’s head, and three lumpy, writhen branches. One branch must have been the gun, because the other two had stone oak leaves clinging to them, each leaf with a glitter of mica to it.

  Syracuse hated it. His front feet danced this way and that, trying to take him away from it. Klartch gave out another frightened “Weep, weep!”

  “It’s all right,” Cat said to both of them. “It won’t hurt you now. Honestly.” He got down from Syracuse and found he was shaking as badly as the horse was. Klartch crept up to him, shaking too. “I wish you hadn’t followed me,” Cat said to him. “You nearly got killed.”

  “Need to come too,” Klartch said.

  Cat had half a mind to take them all back home to the Castle. But he had promised to meet Marianne and they were well over halfway by now. And he could tell, by the sound of the river and the feel of the meadow, that Mr. Farleigh had been the center that held the misdirection spells together. They were so weak now that they were almost gone. It would be easy to get to Woods House, except for—Cat looked up at the ugly stone oak, looming above them. There would be no getting Syracuse past that thing, he knew. Besides, it was right in the path and a terrible nuisance to anyone trying to go this way.

  Cat steadied his trembling knees and sent the stone oak away somewhere else, somewhere it fitted in better, he had no idea where. It went with a soft rumble like thunder far off, followed by a small breeze full of dust from the path, river smell, and bird noises. The willows rattled their leaves in it. For a moment, there were deep trenches in the path where the stone roots had been, but they began filling in almost at once. Sand and earth poured into the holes like water, and then hardened.

  Cat waited until the path was back to the way it had been and then levitated Klartch up into Syracuse’s saddle. Klartch flopped across it with a gasp of surprise. One pair of legs hung down on each side, helplessly. Syracuse craned his head round and stared.

  “It’s the best I can do,” Cat said to them. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Marianne looked up gladly as Cat came across the stubbly lawn, leading Syracuse. She was sad to see that Joe was not with him, but at least Cat was here. She had begun to think he was not coming.

  “Friend of yours?” asked talkative Mr. Adams. “That’s a fine piece of horseflesh he’s got there. Arab ancestry, I shouldn’t wonder. What’s he got on the saddle?”

  Marianne wondered too, until Cat came near. She saw that Cat stared at Mr. Adams much as she had done herself. “Oh, you’ve brought Klartch!” she said.

  “He followed me. I had to bring him,” Cat said. He did not feel like explaining how lethal that had nearly been.

  “I love your horse,” Marianne said. “He’s beautiful.” She went boldly up to rub Syracuse’s face. Cat watched a little anxiously, knowing what Syracuse could be like. But Syracuse graciously allowed Marianne to rub his nose and then pat his neck, and Marianne said, “Ah, you like peppermints, do you? I’m afraid I—”

  “Here you are,” Mr. Adams said, producing a paper bag from an earthy pocket. “These are extra strong—he’ll like these. They call me Mr. Adams,” he added to Cat. “Been in Princess Irene’s family for years.”

  “How do you do?” Cat said politely, wondering how he would get a private word with Marianne with Mr. Adams there. While Marianne fed Syracuse peppermints, he hauled Klartch off the saddle and dropped him in the grass—with a grunt from both of them: Klartch was heavy and landed heavily. Mr. Adams stared at Klartch in some perplexity.

  “I give up,” he said. “Is it a flying bird-dog, or what?”

  “He’s a baby griffin,” Cat explained. He tried to smile at Mr. Adams, but the word flying made him terribly anxious suddenly about Roger and Joe, and the smile was more of a grimace. He didn’t think that Mr. Farleigh’s bullet had hit either of them, but it had certainly hit the flying machine somewhere, and one of them had yelled. Still, there was nothing he could do.

  “Shall I look after the horse for you while you go indoors?” Mr. Adams offered. “Second to gardening, I love tending to horses. He’ll be safe with me.”

  Cat and Marianne exchanged relieved looks. Marianne had been wondering how they were going to talk in private too.

  “I’ll look after this griffin fellow too, if you like,” Mr. Adams offered.

  “Thanks. I’ll take Klartch with me,” Cat said. He did not feel like letting Klartch out of his sight just then. He handed Syracuse over to Mr. Ada
ms and managed to thank him, although he was nervous again, knowing what Syracuse could be like. But Syracuse bent his head to Mr. Adams and seemed prepared to make a fuss of him, while Mr. Adams murmured and made little cheeping whistles in reply.

  It seemed to be all right. Marianne and Cat went to the open door of the conservatory, with Klartch lolloping after them. “Is something the matter?” Marianne said as they went. “You look pale. And you only talk in little jerks.”

  Cat would have liked to tell Marianne all about his encounter with Mr. Farleigh. He was almost longing to. But that strange thing happened in his head that made him so bad at telling people things, and all he could manage to say was, “I had a—a turn up with Gaffer Farleigh on the way.” And as soon as Marianne was nodding in perfect understanding, Cat was forced to change the subject. He leaned toward her and whispered, “Is Mr. Adams a gnome?”

  Marianne choked on a giggle. “I don’t know!” she whispered back.

  Cat was feeling much better and they were both trying not to laugh as they entered the conservatory. It was transformed. When Cat had last been here, the glass of the roof and walls had been too dirty to see through, and the floor had been coconut matting with dead plants standing about on it. Marianne could hardly remember it any other way. Now the glass sparkled and there were big green frondy plants, some of them with huge lilylike flowers, white and cream and yellow, which Jason must have brought here from his store. The floor that the plants stood on was a marvel of white, green, and blue tiles, in a gentle eye-resting pattern. There were new cane chairs. Best of all, a small fountain—that must have been covered up by the old matting—was now playing, making a quiet chuckling and misting the fronds of the plants. The smell this brought out from the flowers reminded them both of Irene’s scent.

  Marianne said wonderingly, “This must all have been underneath! How could Gammer have kept it all covered up?”