The Pinhoe Egg (10 page)

“The only one I've seen is you,” the old man said. “Care for some lunch?”

It was early for lunch, but Cat found that launching himself at the barrier had made him ravenous, and the smell of that bacon made him even hungrier. “Yes, please,” he said. “If you can spare it.”

“Surely. I'm just about to put in the mushrooms,” the old man said. “You like those? Good. Come and sit down then.”

As Cat went over to the fire, the horse beyond the cart raised its head from grazing to look at him. There was something odd about it, but Cat did not properly see what, because he went to sit down then and the old man said, quite sharply, “Not there. There's a thriving clump of milkwort there I'd like to keep alive, if you please. Move here. You can miss the strawberries, and silverleaf and cinquefoil never mind being sat on much.”

Cat moved obediently. He watched the old man fetch out a knife that had been sharpened so much that it was thin as a prong and use it to slice up some very plump-looking mushrooms.

“You have to put them in early enough to catch the taste of bacon, but not so early that they go rubbery,” the old man explained, tossing the mushrooms hissing into the pan. “A fine art, cooking. The best mushrooms are sticky buns, the ones the French call cèpes, and best of all are your truffles. It takes a trained dog or a good pig to find truffles. I've never owned either, to my sorrow. Do you know the properties of the milkwort I stopped you sitting on?”

“Not really,” Cat said, somewhat surprised. “I know it was supposed to help mothers' milk, but that's not true, is it?”

“With the right spell done, it's perfectly true,” the old man said, turning the mushrooms. “Your scientific herbalists nowadays always neglect the magics that go with the properties, and then they think the plants have no virtue. A great waste. Change the spell from womanly to manly, and your milkwort does wonders for men too. Pass me over those two plates there beside you. And what's the special virtue of the small fern beside your foot?”

Cat picked up the two wooden plates and passed them over while he inspected the fern.
“Invisibility?” he said doubtfully. Now he came to look, the grassy verge was a mass of tiny plants, all different. And the wild strawberries almost underneath him were ripe. He felt as he often did with Syracuse, as if he was being given a whole new way of looking at the world.

The old man, pushing bacon, eggs, and mushrooms onto the plates with a wooden spatula, said, “Not invisibility so much as a very good ‘Don't Notice.' You can be a tree or a passing bird with some of this under your tongue, but you have to tell it what you need it to do. That's mostly how herb magic works. Tuck in and enjoy it.”

He passed Cat a full plate, still sizzling, with a bent knife and a wooden fork lying across it. Cat balanced the plate on his knee and ate. It was delicious. While he ate, the old man went on telling him about the plants he was sitting among. Cat learned that one plant made your breath sweet, another cured your cough, and that the small pink one, ragged robin, was very powerful indeed.

“Handled one way, it slides any ill-wishing away from you,” the old man said, “but if you pick it roughly, it brings a thunderstorm. It's not
good to be rough with any living thing. Handle it the third way, and ask for its help, it can bring strong vengeance down on your enemy. Has the egg hatched yet?”

“No, not yet,” Cat said. Somehow it did not surprise him that the old man knew about the egg.

“It will soon, once it's warm and being loved,” the old man said. He sighed. “And its poor mother can set her mind at rest at last.”

“What—what's it going to be?” Cat asked. He found he was quite nervous about this.

“Ah, it will bring its own name with it,” the old man answered. “Something weak and worried and soft, it will be at first, that's certain. It'll need all your help for a while. Finished?” He held out his big brown hand for the plate.

“Yes. It was really good. Thank you,” Cat said, passing the plate, knife, and fork over.

“Then you'd better be going after your Big Man,” the old man said. Cat, in the middle of standing up, stared at him. The old man looked slightly ashamed. “My fault for distracting you,” he said. “I was very desirous of meeting you, you see. Your Big Man's not far away.”

Cat could feel Chrestomanci quite near. He thought the old man must be pretty powerful to have distracted him from knowing until now. So he thanked him again and said good-bye, rather respectfully, before he set off along the mossy road.

As he passed the cart, the old white horse once more raised her head to look at him. Cat found himself facing a most unhorselike pair of interested blue eyes with a tumble of white mane almost across them. Sticking out from that swatch of white horsehair was quite a long pointed horn. It was pearly colored, with a spiral groove around it.

He turned to the old man incredulously. “Your horse has got—your horse is a unicorn!” he called out.

“Yes, indeed,” the old man called back, busy with his fire.

And the horse said, “My name is Molly. I was interested to meet you too.”

“How do you do,” Cat said respectfully.

“Not so bad, considering how old I am,” the unicorn said. “I'll see you.” She went back to grazing again, tearing up mouthfuls of grass and tiny flowers.

Cat stood for a moment, sniffing the smell of her. It was not quite like a horse. She smelled of incense, almost, together with horse smell. Then he said, “See you,” and went on his way.

About a hundred yards down the road, he found he needed to turn off and plunge into the wood to the right. He waded through bracken and crunched across thorny undergrowth, until he came to clearer ground under some bigger trees. There he found an open space, knee-deep in old leaves. As Cat waded into the leaves, Chrestomanci came wading out into the space as well from the opposite direction. They stopped and stared at one another.

“Cat!” said Chrestomanci. “What a relief!”

He was wearing clothes Cat had never seen him in before, plus fours with thick knitted socks and big walking shoes, and a sweater on his top half. Cat had never seen Chrestomanci in a sweater before, but as he was also carrying a walking stick, Cat supposed that these were what Chrestomanci thought of as clothes for walking in. He had never seen Chrestomanci in need of a shave before, either. It all made him look quite human.

“I came to get you,” Cat said.

“Thank heavens!” Chrestomanci replied. “There seemed no reason why I should ever get out of this wood.”

“How did you get in?” Cat asked him.

“I made a mistake,” Chrestomanci admitted wearily. “When I set off, my aim was simply to check up on what you told me about the roads, by walking to Ulverscote Wood if I could. But when I found myself repeatedly walking back to the Castle, whatever direction I took, I got irritated and pushed. I got to the wood with a bit of a fight, but then I couldn't get
out
. I must have been walking in circles for twenty-four hours now.”

“This isn't really Ulverscote Wood,” Cat told him.

“I believe you,” Chrestomanci said. “It's a sad, lost, empty place whatever it is. How do we get home?”

“There's a funny sort of a barrier,” Cat told him. “I think they put you behind it if you break their turn-you-back-to-the-Castle spell, but I'm not sure. It's pretty old and rusty. Just start a slow teleport to the Castle and I'll try to get us through.”

“I've tried that,” Chrestomanci said wryly.

“Try again with me,” Cat said.

Chrestomanci shrugged, and they set off. Almost at once, they were up against the barrier. It seemed much more real from this side. It looked almost exactly like chicken wire and old corrugated iron that was grown all over with brambles, goosegrass, and thickly tangled honeysuckle. In among the tangle Cat thought he saw swags of bright red briony berries and the small pink flowers of ragged robin. Aha! he thought, remembering what the old man had told him. A slide-you-off spell. He turned himself left side foremost and scratched about among the creepers to find a join. While he groped, he felt Chrestomanci being slid away backward. Cat had to seize hold of Chrestomanci's walking stick with his other hand and drag him forward to the place where he
thought
he could feel two pieces of corrugated iron overlapping. Luckily, before they were both swept away backward again, Chrestomanci saw the overlap too and helped Cat force the two pieces apart. It took all the strength of both of them.

Then they squeezed through. They arrived,
panting and strung with creepers, halfway up the Castle driveway, where Cat found he still had hold of Chrestomanci's walking stick.

“Thank you,” Chrestomanci said, taking his stick back. He needed it to walk with. Cat saw he was limping quite badly. “Lord knows what that barrier was really made of. I refuse to believe such strong magic can be simply chicken fencing.”

“It was the creepers, I think,” Cat said. “They were all for binding and keeping enemies in. Have you hurt your ankle?”

“Just some of the biggest blisters of my life,” Chrestomanci said, pausing to pull a long strand of clinging goosegrass off his sweater. “I've been walking for a day and a night, in shoes I'm beginning to hate. I shall throw the socks away.” He limped on a few steps and started to say something else, in a way that seemed quite heartfelt, but before he could begin, Millie came dashing down the driveway and flung her arms round Chrestomanci.

Millie was followed by Julia, Irene, Jason, Janet, and most of the Castle wizards. Chrestomanci was engulfed in a crowd of people, welcoming, exclaiming, asking where he had
been, congratulating Cat, and wanting to know if Chrestomanci was all right.

“No I am
not
all right!” Chrestomanci said, after five minutes of this. “I have worldwide blisters. I need a shave. I'm tired out and I haven't had anything to eat since breakfast yesterday. Would
you
feel all right in my position?”

Saying this, he vanished from the driveway in a cloud of dust.

“Where's he gone?” everyone said.

“To have a bath, I imagine,” Millie said. “Wouldn't
you
? Someone go and find him some foot balm while I go and order him something to eat. Cat, come with me and explain how on earth you managed to find him.”

 

An hour later, Chrestomanci summoned Cat to his study. Cat found him sitting on a sofa with his sore feet propped on a leather tuffet, shaved and smooth again and wearing a peach satin dressing gown that put Cat in mind of a quilted sunset. “Are you all right now?” Cat said.

“Perfectly, thank you, thanks to you,” Chrestomanci replied. “To continue the conversation we were about to have when the welcoming
hordes descended, I can't stop thinking about that barrier. It's a real mystery, Cat. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was around your age, I was dragged off on the longest, wettest walk of my life up to then. Flavian Temple marched me right across Hopton Moor almost to Hopton. I set Hopton Wood on fire. There were no turn-you-round spells then and no kind of barrier. I know. I would have welcomed either of them heartily. Temple and I walked miles in a straight line, and nothing stopped us.”

“The barrier looked quite old,” Cat said.

“Twenty years can grow a lot of creepers,” Chrestomanci said, “and a lot of rust. Let's take it that the barrier is no older than that. The real puzzle is, why is it
there
?”

Cat would have liked to know that too. He could only shake his head.

Chrestomanci said, “It may only apply to Ulverscote Wood, of course. But I see I shall have to investigate the whole thing. The real reason I asked you in here, Cat, is to tell you that I can't, after the way you rescued me, keep you apart from that wretched horse any longer. The stableman tells me its feet are sounder than mine are.
So off you go. There's just time for a ride before supper.”

Cat hurtled off to the stableyard. And there would have been time for a ride, except that Syracuse saw Cat coming and hurdled the paddock gate, and hurdled Joss with it as Joss tried to open the gate. Syracuse then dashed several times round the yard and jumped back into the paddock, where he spent a joyous hour avoiding the efforts of Joss, Cat, and the stableboy to catch him. After that, there was no time left before supper.

“N
o she is
not
!” Gammer shouted, so loudly that the Dell's crowded little living room rang all over with the noise. “Pinhoes is Pinhoes and make sure you look after Nutcase for me, Marianne.”

“I don't understand you, Gammer,” Marianne said boldly. She thought Cat had been right to say she was downtrodden, and she had decided to be brave from now on.

Gammer chomped her jaws, breathed heavily, and stared stormily at nothing.

Marianne sighed. This behavior of Gammer's would have terrified her a week ago. Now she was being brave, Marianne felt simply impatient. She wanted to go home and get on with her story. Since
her meeting with Irene, the story had suddenly turned into “The Adventures of Princess Irene and Her Cats,” which was somehow far more interesting than her first idea of it. She could hardly wait to find out what happened in it next. But Aunt Joy had sent Cousin Ned down to Furze Cottage to say that Gammer wanted Marianne
now
, and Mum had said, “Better see what she wants, love.” So Marianne had had to stop writing and hurry round to the Dell. Uselessly, because Gammer was not making any sense.

“You
have
got Nutcase, have you?” Gammer asked anxiously.

“Yes, Gammer.” Marianne had left Nutcase sitting on the drainboard, watching Mum chop herby leaves and peel knobby roots. She could only hope that he stayed there.

“But I'm not having it!” Gammer said, switching from anxiety to anger. “It's not true. You're to contradict it whenever you hear it, understand?”

“I would, but I don't know what you're talking about,” Marianne said.

At this, Gammer fell into a real rage. “Hocum pocum!” she yelled, beating the floor with her stick. “You're all turned against me! It's
insurpery, I tell you! They wouldn't tell me what they'd done with him. Put him down it and pull the chain, I told them, but
would
they do it? They lied. Everyone's
lying
to me!”

Marianne tried to say that no one was lying to Gammer, but Gammer just yelled her down. “I don't
understand
you!” Marianne bawled back. “Talk
sense
, Gammer! You know you can if you try.”

“It's an insult to Pinhoes!” Gammer screamed.

The noise brought Aunt Dinah striding cheerfully in. “Now, now, Gammer, dear. You'll only tire yourself out if you shout like that. She'll fall asleep,” Aunt Dinah said to Marianne, “and when she wakes up she'll have forgotten all about it.”

“Yes, but I don't know what she's so angry about,” Marianne said.

“Oh, it's nothing, really,” Aunt Dinah said, just as if Gammer was not sitting there. “It's only that your aunt Helen was in here earlier. She likes to have all your aunts drop in, tell her things, cheer her up. You know. And Helen was telling her that the new lady that's just bought Woods House is a Pinhoe born and bred—”

“She is
not
!” Gammer said sulkily. “
I'm
the only Pinhoe around here.”

“Are you, dear?” Aunt Dinah said cheerily. “And where does that leave the rest of us?”

This seemed to be the right way to treat Gammer. Gammer looked surprised, ashamed, and amused, all at once, and took to pleating the clean, clean skirt that Aunt Dinah had dressed her in that morning. “These are not my clothes,” she said.

“Whose are they, then?” Aunt Dinah said, laughing. She turned to Marianne. “She'd no call to drag you over here for that, Marianne. Next time she tries it, just ignore it. Oh, and could you ask your mum for more of that ointment for her? She gets sore, sitting all the time.”

Marianne said she would ask, and walked away among the chickens and the ducks, taking care to latch the gate behind her. Joe was always forgetting to shut the gate properly. Last time Joe forgot, the goats had gotten out into everyone's gardens. The things Aunt Joy had said about Joe! Marianne discovered herself to be missing Joe far more than she had expected. She wondered how he was getting on.

“Mum,” Marianne asked, as she came into the herby, savory steam of the kitchen in Furze
Cottage. Nutcase, to her relief, was still there, sitting on the table now, among the jars and bottles waiting to be filled with balms and medicines. “Mum,
is
Mrs. Yeldham a Pinhoe born and bred?”

“So your great-uncle Lester says,” Mum said. Her narrow face was fiery red and dripping in the steam. Wet curls were escaping from the red-and-white checked cloth she had wrapped round her head. “Marianne, I could use your help here.”

Marianne knew how this one worked: help Mum, or she would get no further information. She sighed because of her unfinished story and went to find a cloth to wrap her hair in. “Yes?” she said, once she was hard at work beating chopped herbs into warm goose grease. “And?”

“She really is a Pinhoe,” Mum said, carefully straining another set of herbs through a square of muslin. “Lester went up to London and checked the records in case he did wrong to sell her the house. You remember those stories about Luke Pinhoe, who went to London to seek his fortune a hundred years ago?”

“The one who turned his Gaffer into a tree first?” Marianne said.

“Only overnight,” Mum said, as if that excused
it. “He did it so that he could get away, I think. There must have been quite a row there, what with Luke refusing to be the next Gaffer, and his father crippling both his legs so that he'd have to stay. Anyway, they say that Luke stole his father's old gray mare and rode all night until he came to London, and the mare made her way back here all on her own. And Luke found an enchanter to mend his legs—and that must be true, because Lester found out that Luke set up as an apothecary first, which would have been hard to do as a cripple. He'd have been more likely to have been begging on the streets. But there he was, dealing in potions because he was herb-cunning, like me. But Luke seems to have found out quite soon that he was an enchanter himself. He made himself a mint of money out of it. And his son was an enchanter after him, and
his
son after that, right down to this present day, when William Pinhoe, who died this spring, had only the one daughter. They say he left his daughter all his money and two servants to look after her, and
she's
the Mrs. Yeldham who bought Woods House.”

While Mum paused to spoon careful measures of fresh chopped herbs into the strained water,
Marianne remembered that Irene had talked about someone called Jane James, who must have been her cook. It did seem to fit. “But why is Gammer so angry about it?”

“Well,” Mum said, rather drily, “I
could
say it's because she's lost her wits, but between you and me and the gatepost, Marianne, I'd say it's because Mrs. Yeldham's more of a Pinhoe than Gammer is. Luke was his Gaffer's eldest son. Gammer's family comes down from the second cousins who went to live in Hopton. See?” She covered her bowl with fresh muslin and went to put it in the cold store to steep.

Marianne started to lick goose grease from her fingers, remembered in time that it was full of herbs you shouldn't eat, and felt rather proud of being a Pinhoe by direct descent—or no!
Her
family descended from that Gaffer's
second
son, George, who had been by all accounts a meek and rather feeble man, and did just what his father told him. So Irene was more Pinhoe than Marianne—“Oh, what does it
matter
?” she said aloud. “It was all a hundred years ago!” She looked round for Nutcase and was just in time to catch him sneaking through the window Mum
had opened to try to get rid of the steam. Marianne grabbed him and shut the window. “No, you mustn't,” she told Nutcase as she put him on the floor. “Some of them move into Woods House today. They won't want
you
.”

As everyone in Ulverscote somehow knew—without anyone's precisely being
told
—Irene's two servants arrived that morning. They came in a heavy London van that took two cart horses to pull it, bringing some basic furniture to put into the house. The good furniture was supposed to arrive later, when the Yeldhams moved in. Uncle Simeon and Uncle Charles went up there in the afternoon to see what alterations were going to be required.

They came away chastened.

“Massive job,” Uncle Simeon said, in his untalkative way, when the two of them arrived in Furze Cottage to report to Dad and drink restorative tea. “And the new stove and water tank to come from Hopton before we can even start.”

“That Jane James!” Uncle Charles said feelingly. “You can't put a foot wrong there. Proper old-time servant. All I did was think the two of
them was married and—ooh! And there was he, little trodden-on-looking fellow, but you have to call him
Mister
Adams,
she
says, and show proper respect. So then I call her
Miss
James, showing proper respect like she told me, and she shoots herself up and gathers herself in like an umbrella and ‘I'm Jane James, and I'll thank you to remember it!' she says. After that we just crawled away.”

“Got to go back, though,” Uncle Simeon said. “The Yeldhams come to see what's needed tomorrow, and
she
wants you to start on the whitewash, Charles.”

 

Irene and Jason were indeed due to set off to confer with Pinhoe Construction Limited in Woods House that next day. Irene took a deep breath and invited Janet and Julia to go with them. “Do come,” she said. “Whatever Jane James has done to it, I know it's going to look a depressing mess still. I need someone to tell me how to make it livable in.”

Janet looked at Julia and Julia looked at Janet. It was more a sliding round of eyes than a proper look. Irene seemed to hold her breath. Cat could see Irene knew the girls did not like her for some
reason, and it obviously worried her. At length, Julia said, not altogether politely, “Yes. Please. Thank you, Mrs. Yeldham,” and Janet nodded.

It was not friendly, but Irene smiled with relief and turned to Cat.

“Would you like to come too, Cat?”

Cat knew she was hoping he would help make the girls more friendly, but Syracuse was waiting. Cat smiled and shook his head and explained that Joss was taking him for a ride beside the river in half an hour. And Roger was not to be found. Irene looked a little dashed, and only Janet and Julia went with Jason and Irene to Ulverscote.

In the normal way, all Ulverscote would have come out to stare at them. But that day only a few people—who had all had the presence of mind to call on the Reverend Pinhoe in order to stare over the vicarage wall—caught sight of the four of them getting out of Jason's car. They all told one another that the fair-haired girl looked as sour as Aunt Joy, and what a pity, it just showed you what they were like at That Castle, but Mrs. Yeldham did credit to the Pinhoe family. A real lady. She was born a Pinhoe, you know.

The rest of the village was in the grip of a
mysterious wave of bad luck. A fox got into the chick pen at the Dell and ate most of the baby chicks that Nutcase had not accounted for. Mice got into the grocer's and into the pantry at the Pinhoe Arms. The wrong bricks were delivered to mend the Post Office wall.

“Bright yellow bricks I am
not
having!” Aunt Joy screamed at the van men. “This is a Post Office, not a sandcastle on a beach!” And she made the men take the bricks away again.

“Before I could even take a look at them too!” Uncle Simeon complained. He was in Dr. Callow's surgery when the bricks were delivered, with a sprained ankle. He had been forced to send his foreman, Podge Callow, to consult with the Yeldhams in his place. Besides Uncle Simeon, the surgery was crowded with sprains, dislocations, and severe bruises, all to Pinhoes and all of them acquired that morning. Uncle Cedric was there, after falling from his hayloft, and so was Great-Uncle Lester, who had shut his thumb in his car door. Almost all of Marianne's cousins had had similar accidents, and Great-Aunt Sue had tipped boiling water down her leg. Dr. Callow had to agree with her that this spate of injuries was not natural.

Down at Furze Cottage, Mum was trying to deal with further cuts and scrapes and bruises, working under great difficulty, as she said to Marianne. Half of her new infusions had got mildew overnight. Marianne had to sort the bad jars out for her before they infected the rest. Meanwhile, Uncle Richard, carefully carving a rose on the front of a new cabinet, let his gouge slip somehow and plowed a deep bloody furrow in the palm of his other hand. Mum had to leave her storeroom yet again and sort him out with a wad of cobwebs and some lotion charmed to heal.

“I don't think this is natural, Cecily,” Uncle Richard said while Mum was bandaging his hand. “Joy shouldn't have cursed Gammer like that.”

“Don't talk nonsense,” said Dad, who had come in to make sure his brother was all right. “I stopped Joy before she started. This is something else.”

Dad was about the only person who believed this. As the bad luck spread to people who were only distantly related to Pinhoes, and then to people who had no witchcraft at all, most of Ulverscote began to blame Aunt Joy. Aunt Joy's
face, as Mum said, would have soured milk from a hundred yards away.

The bad luck extended to Woods House too. There, to Jane James's annoyance, the man installing the new stove dropped it on his foot and then mystified her by limping away into the village saying, “Mother Cecily will fix me up. Don't touch the boiler till I get back.”

While Mum was dealing with what she suspected was a broken bone in this man's foot, Marianne discovered—mostly by the severely bad smell—that the whole top shelf of jars in the storeroom had grown fuzzy red mold. And Nutcase disappeared again.

Nutcase reappeared some time later in the hall of Woods House, just in time to trip Uncle Charles up, as Uncle Charles crossed the hall carrying a ladder and a bucket of whitewash. Uncle Charles, in trying to save himself, hit himself on the back of the head with the ladder and dropped the bucket of whitewash over Nutcase.