The Pinhoe Egg Read online

  Cat shuddered. As Joss rode up, he turned and asked him, “What’s this for?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Joss said. “It’s just—Oh, good morning, Mr. Farleigh.”

  Cat looked back in the direction of the grisly framework. An elderly man with ferocious side whiskers was now standing beside it, holding a long gun that pointed downward from his right elbow toward his thick leather gaiters.

  “It’s my gibbet, this is,” the man said, staring unlovingly up at Cat. “It’s for a lesson. And an example. See?”

  Cat could think of nothing to say. The long gun was truly alarming.

  Mr. Farleigh looked over at Joss. He had pale, cruel eyes, overshadowed by mighty tufts of eyebrow. “What do you mean bringing one like him in my wood?” he demanded.

  “He lives in the Castle,” Joss said. “He’s entitled.”

  “Not off the rides,” Mr. Farleigh said. “Make sure he stays on the cleared rides. I’m not having him disturbing my game.” He pointed another pale-eyed look at Cat and then swung around and trudged away among the trees, crushing leaves, grass, and twigs noisily with his heavy boots.

  “Gamekeeper,” Joss explained. “Walk on.”

  Feeling rather shaken, Cat induced Syracuse to move on down the ride.

  Three paces on, Syracuse was walking through the missing depths that the wood should have had. It was very odd. There was no foreground, no smooth green bridle path, no big trees. Instead, everywhere was deep blue-green distance full of earthy, leafy smells—almost overpoweringly full of them. And although Cat and Syracuse were walking through distance with no foreground, Cat was fairly sure that Joss, riding beside them, was still riding on the bridlepath, through foreground.

  Oh, please, said someone. Please let us out!

  Cat looked up and around to find who was speaking and saw no one. But Syracuse was flicking his ears as if he, too, had heard the voice. “Where are you?” he asked.

  Shut behind, said the voice—or maybe it was several voices. Far inside. We’ve been good. We still don’t know what we did wrong. Please let us out now. It’s been so long.

  Cat looked and looked, trying to focus his witch sight as Chrestomanci had taught him. After a while, he thought some of the blue distance was moving, shifting cloudily about, but that was all he could see. He could feel, though. He felt misery from the cloudiness, and longing. There was such unhappiness that his eyes pricked and his throat ached.

  “What’s keeping you in?” he said.

  That—sort of thing, said the voices.

  Cat looked where his attention was directed and there, like a hard black portcullis, right in front of him, was the framework with the dead creatures nailed to it. It seemed enormous from this side. “I’ll try,” he said.

  It took all his magic to move it. He had to shove so hard that he felt Syracuse drifting sideways beneath him. But at last he managed to swing it aside a little, like a rusty gate. Then he was able to ride Syracuse out round the splintery edge of it and on to the bridle path again.

  “Keep your horse straight,” Joss said. He had obviously not noticed anything beyond Syracuse moving sideways for a second or so. “Keep your mind on your road.”

  “Sorry,” said Cat. As they rode on, he realized that he had really been saying sorry to the hidden voices. Even using all his strength, he had not been able to help them. He could have cried.

  Or perhaps he had done something. Around them the wood was slowly and gently filling up with blue distance, as if it were leaking round the edge where Cat had pushed the framework of dead things aside. A few birds were, very cautiously, beginning to sing. But it was not enough. Cat knew it was not nearly enough.

  He rode home, hugging the queer experience to him, the way you hug a disturbing dream. He thought about it a lot. But he was bad at telling people things, and particularly bad at telling something so peculiar. He did not mention it properly to anyone. The nearest he came to telling about it was when he said to Roger, “What’s that wood like over on that hill? The one that’s farthest away.”

  “No idea,” Roger said. “Why?”

  “I want to go there and see,” Cat said.

  “What’s wrong with Home Wood?” Roger asked.

  “There’s a horrible gamekeeper,” Cat said.

  “Mr. Farleigh. Julia used to think he was an ogre,” Roger said. “He’s vile. I tell you what, why don’t we both go to that wood on the hill? Ulverscote Wood, I think it’s called. You ride and I’ll go on my bike. It’ll be fun.”

  “Yes!” said Cat.

  Cat knew better than to mention this idea to Joss Callow. He knew Joss would say it was far too soon for Cat to take Syracuse out on his own. He and Roger agreed that they would wait until it was Joss’s day off.

  Chapter Six

  Cat was interested to see that Joss seemed to want to avoid Mr. Farleigh too. When they rode out after that, they went either along the river or out into the bare upland of Hopton Heath, both in directions well away from Home Wood. And here too, going both ways, Cat discovered the background felt as if it were missing. He found it sad, and puzzling.

  Roger was hugely excited about going for a real long ride. He tried to interest Janet and Julia in the idea. They had now cycled everywhere possible in the Castle grounds and round and round the village green in Helm St. Mary too, so they were ripe for a long ride. The three of them made plans to cycle all of twelve miles, as far away as Hopton, although, as Julia pointed out, this made it twenty-four miles, there and back, which was quite a distance. Janet told her not to be feeble.

  They were just setting out for this marathon, when a small blue car unexpectedly rattled up to the main door of the Castle.

  Julia dropped her bike on the drive and ran toward the small blue car. “It’s Jason!” she shrieked. “Jason’s back!”

  Millie and Chrestomanci arrived on the Castle steps while Julia was still yards away and shook hands delightedly with the man who climbed out of the car. He was just in time to turn around as Julia flung herself on him. He staggered a bit. “Lord love a duck!” he said. “Julia, you weigh a ton these days!”

  Jason Yeldham was not very tall. He had contrived, even after years of living at the Castle, to keep a strong Cockney accent. “No surprise. I started out as boot boy here,” he explained to Janet. He had a narrow, bony face, very brown from his foreign travels, topped by sun-whitened curls. His eyes were a bright blue and surrounded by lines from laughing or from staring into bright suns, or both.

  Janet was fascinated by him. “Isn’t it odd,” she said to Cat, who came to see what the excitement was. “You hear about someone and then a few days later they turn up.”

  “It could be the Castle spells,” Cat said. But he liked Jason too.

  Roger morosely gathered up the three bicycles and put them away. The rest crowded into the main hall of the Castle, where Jason was telling Millie and Chrestomanci which strange worlds he had been to and saying he hoped that his storage shed was still undisturbed. “Because I’ve got this big hired van following on, full of some of the weirdest plants you ever saw,” he said, with his voice echoing from the dome overhead. “Some need planting out straightaway. Can you spare me a gardener? Some I’ll need to consult about—they need special soil and feed and so on. I’ll talk to your head gardener. Is that still Mr. McDermot? But I’ve been thinking all the way down from London that I need a real herb expert. Is that old dwimmerman still around—the one with the long legs and the beard—you know? He always knew twice what I did. Had an instinct, I think.”

  “Elijah Pinhoe, you mean?” Millie said. “No. It was sad. He died about eight years ago now.”

  “I gather the poor fellow was found dead in a wood,” Chrestomanci said. “Hadn’t you heard?”

  “No!” Jason looked truly upset. “I must have been away when they found him. Poor man! He was always telling me that there was something wrong in the woods round here. Must have had a presentiment, I suppose. Perhaps I can talk with his w
idow.”

  “She sold the house and moved, I heard,” Millie said. “There’s some very silly stories about that.”

  Jason shrugged. “Ah, well. Mr. McDermot’s got a good head for plants.”

  Roger gloomed.

  The van arrived, pulled by two cart horses, and everyone from the temporary boot boy to Miss Rosalie the librarian was roped in to deal with Jason’s plants. Janet, Julia, the footmen, and most of the Castle wizards and sorceresses carried bags and pots and boxes to the shed. Millie wrote labels. Jason told Roger where to put the labels. Cat was told, along with the butler and Miss Bessemer the housekeeper, to levitate little tender bundles of root and fuzzy leaves to places where Mr. McDermot thought they would do best, while Miss Rosalie followed everyone round with a list. Anyone left over unpacked and sorted queer-shaped bulbs to be planted later in the year. Roger knew there was no question of cycling anywhere that day.

  He almost forgave Jason that evening at supper when Jason kept everyone fascinated by telling of the various worlds he had been on and the strange plants he had found there. There was a plant in World Nine B that had a huge flower once every hundred years, so beautiful that the people there worshipped it as a god.

  “That was one of my failures,” Jason told them. “They wouldn’t let me take a cutting, whatever I said.”

  But he had done better in World Seven D, where there was a remote valley full of medicinal crocuses. At first the old man who owned the valley could not think of anything he wanted in exchange for the bulbs, and he warned Jason that the crocuses were very bad for your teeth. Jason got round the old man and got a sackful of the crocuses by enchanting sets of false teeth for the old man and his family. And then he told of the mountain in World One F that was the only place in all the worlds where a dark green ferny plant grew that actually cured colds. Naturally, the man who owned the mountain was very rich from selling these plants—minus their roots, so that no one else could grow any—and quite determined that nobody else was going to get hold of one. He had guard beasts and armed men patrolling the mountain night and day. Jason had sneaked in at night, under heavy spells, and dug up several before he was spotted and forced to run for it. The guards pursued him right through World Two A before Jason skipped to World Five C and they gave up. There were now three of those plants at Chrestomanci Castle, in the care of Mr. McDermot.

  “And we’ll plant some of the rest tomorrow,” Jason said gleefully.

  Janet and Julia and most of the others were still helping Jason that next day. But that day was Joss Callow’s day off. Roger looked at Cat. Cat went to the stables, where he fed Syracuse peppermints and saddled him up and led him through all the people busy around Jason and his shed. “I’m just going to ride him round the paddock,” he explained. And he did that. He knew Syracuse would be unmanageable unless he had had a bit of exercise first.

  Half an hour later, Cat and Roger were on the road to the distant hills.

  Joss Callow meanwhile cycled down to Helm St. Mary, where he dropped in to see his mother, so that if anyone asked he could truthfully say he had been to visit his mother. But he only stayed half an hour before he pedaled on to Ulverscote.

  In Ulverscote, Marianne’s dad finished his work at mid-morning by packing the donkey cart with a set of kitchen chairs and sending Dolly the donkey and Uncle Richard off to deliver them in Crowhelm. Harry Pinhoe then walked up to the Pinhoe Arms to meet Joss. The two of them settled comfortably in the Private Snug with pints of beer. Arthur Pinhoe leaned amiably in through the hatch from the main bar, and Harry Pinhoe lit the pipe that he allowed himself on these occasions.

  “So what’s the news?” Harry Pinhoe asked, puffing fine blue clouds. “I hear the Family came back.”

  “Yes, and bought a horse,” Joss Callow said. “Got diddled properly over it.” Harry and Arthur laughed. “Me included,” Joss admitted. “Wizard who sold it put half a hundred spells on it to make it seem manageable, see. About the only one who can ride it is the boy they’re training up to be the next Big Man, and he gets on with it a treat. Odd, though. He doesn’t seem to use any magic on it that I can see. But what I was getting round to with this was about Gaffer Farleigh. He turned up when I was out with the boy in Home Wood and gave us both a proper warning off. Seemed to think the boy was likely to interfere with our work. What do you think?”

  Harry and Arthur exchanged looks. “Some of that may be about the row he had with Gammer,” Arthur suggested, “before Gammer got took strange. All us Pinhoes are dirt to the Farleighs at the moment.”

  “They’ll get over it,” Harry said placidly. “But we can’t have that boy riding all over the country. We’ll have to stop that.”

  “Oh, I will,” Joss assured him. “He’s not going out without me any day soon.”

  Harry chuckled. “If he does, the road workings will take care of it.” They drank beer peacefully for a while, until Harry asked, “Anything else, Joss?”

  “Not much. Usual stuff,” said Joss. “The Big Man got straight back to work when he wasn’t buying horses and bicycles—magical swindle in London, some coven in the Midlands giving trouble, Scottish witches fussing about funds for Halloween, row of some kind two worlds away over the new tax on dragon’s blood—business as usual. Oh, I nearly forgot! That enchanter’s back from collecting plants all over the Related Worlds. The young one that used to be so thick with Old Gaffer. Jason Yeldham. He was asking after Gaffer. How much of an eye ought I to keep on him?”

  “Shouldn’t think he’d be much trouble,” Harry said, emptying vile black dottle from his pipe into the ashtray. He scraped round the pipe bowl and thought about it. He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s not likely to come bothering us here, now Gaffer’s gone all these years ago. I mean, it’s all studying and book learning with him, isn’t it? It’s not like he uses the herbs the way we do. No need to interfere with him. But stay alert, if you follow me.”

  “Will do,” said Joss.

  They asked Arthur for more beer and refreshed themselves with pork pies and pickled onions for a while. After a bit, Harry remembered to ask, “How’s Joe doing, then?”

  Joss shrugged. “All right, I suppose. I scarcely ever see him.”

  “Good. Then he’s not in trouble yet,” Harry said.

  Then Joss remembered to ask, “And how’s Gammer settling in?”

  “She’s fine,” Harry said. “Dinah looks after her a treat. She sits there and no one can get any sense out of her, not even our Marianne, but there you go, she’s happy. She makes Marianne go round there every day and tells Marianne she has to look after that cat of hers every time, but that’s all. It’s all peace this end, really.”

  “I’d better go and pay my respects to her,” Joss said. “She’s bound to find out I was here if I don’t.” He drained off the rest of his beer and stood up. “See you later, Harry, Arthur.”

  He picked up his bicycle from the yard and coasted his way downhill through the village, nodding to the occasional Pinhoe who called out a greeting, shaking his head at the piles of brick and earth where the table had run into the Post Office wall. Wondering why nobody had done anything yet about mending that wall, he turned into Dell Lane and shortly arrived at the smallholding, where geese, ducks, and hens ran noisily out of his way as he went to knock at the front door.

  “Come to see Gammer,” he said to Dinah when she opened it.

  “Now there’s an odd thing!” Dinah exclaimed. “She’s been on about you all this morning. She’s said to me over and over, ‘When Joss Callow comes, you’re to show him straight in,’ she said, and I’d no idea you were even coming to Ulverscote!” She dived back in and opened the door on the right of the tiny hallway. “Gammer, guess who! It’s Joss Callow come to see you!”

  “Well, they all say that,” Gammer’s voice answered. “They look and they spy on me all the time.”

  Joss Callow paused in the front doorway. Partly he was wondering what you said to that, and partly he was shaken b
y the strength of the spells Harry Pinhoe had put up to stop Gammer getting out. He pulled himself together and pushed his way through into the tiny front room, full of teapots and vases and boxes that people had thought Gammer might want. Gammer was sitting in an upright armchair with wings that almost hid her ruined face and tousled white hair, with her hands folded on the knee of her clean, clean skirt. “How are you today, then, Gammer?” he said heartily.

  “Not so wide as a barn door, but enough to let chickens in,” Gammer answered. “Thank you very much, Joss Callow. But it was Edgar and Lester who did it, you know.”

  “Oh?” said Joss. “Really?”

  While he was wondering what else to say, whether to give her news from the Castle or talk about the weather, Gammer said sharply, “And now you’re here at last, you can go and fetch me Joe here at once.”

  “Joe?” Joss said. “But I can give you news of the Castle just as well, Gammer.”

  “I don’t want news, I want Joe,” Gammer insisted. “I know as well as you do where he is and I want him here. Or don’t you call me Gammer anymore?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Joss said, and tried to change the subject. “It’s a bit gray today, but—”

  “Don’t you try to put me off, Joss Callow,” Gammer interrupted. “I’ve told you to fetch me Joe here and I mean it.”

  “But quite warm—a bit warm for cycling, really,” Joss said.

  “Who cares about the weather?” Gammer said. “I said to fetch Joe here. Go and get him at once and stop trying to humor me!”

  This seemed quite definite and perfectly sane to Joss. He sighed at the thought of a lost afternoon at the Pinhoe Arms, chatting to Arthur and maybe playing darts with Charles. “You want me to cycle all the way back to Helm St. Mary and tell Joe to come here, do you?”

  “Yes. You should have done it yesterday,” Gammer said. “I don’t know what you young ones are coming to, arguing with the orders I give. Go and fetch Joe. Now. Tell him I want to speak to him and he’s not to tell anyone else. Go on. Off you go.”