The Pinhoe Egg (12 page)

Cat climbed over the griffin and Mopsa and got out of his somewhat smelly pajamas, while Millie once more aimed the dropper at the griffin's desperate beak. It spat the milk out. “Oh, well,” Millie said. “They're going to have to
change your bedding anyway. I've told Miss Bessemer. It's lucky I thought to bring it a clean blanket. Are you ready yet?”

Cat was just tying his boots. He had dressed all anyhow, in his old suit trousers and the red sweater he wore to ride in. Millie had done much the same. She was in a threadbare tweed skirt and an expensive lace blouse, and too worried about the griffin to notice. She spread out the fluffy white blanket she had brought and Cat tenderly lifted the griffin onto it. It was shivering. And it continued shivering even when it was wrapped in the blanket.

They left Mopsa finishing the milk Millie had brought and hurried down to the main door of the Castle. Millie had not bothered to wake the Castle chauffeur. She had brought the long black car round to the front of the Castle before she came to wake Cat. The griffin was still shivering when Cat got into the passenger seat with it, and it went on shivering while Millie drove the short distance down into Helm St. Mary and along to the vet's surgery on the outskirts of the village.

Cat liked Mr. Vastion at once. He wore glasses like little half-moons well down on his nose and
looked humorously at Cat and Millie over them. “Now what have we here?” he said. His voice was a gloomy kind of moan, with a bit of a grunt to it. “Bring it in, bring it in,” he told them, waving them through to his consulting room, “and put it down here,” he said, pointing with a thick finger at a high, shiny examining table. When Cat carefully dumped the bundle of blanket on the table, Mr. Vastion unwrapped it in a resigned way, moaning, “What a parcel. Is this necessary? What have we in here?”

To Cat's surprise, the griffin seemed to like Mr. Vastion too. It stopped shivering and looked up at him with its great golden eyes. “Weep?”

“And
weep
to you too,” Mr. Vastion grunted back at it, unwrapping. “You shouldn't coddle them, you know. Not good for any animal. Now—Oh, yes. You have a fine boy griffin here. Small still, but they grow quite quickly, you know. Does he have a name yet?”

“I don't think so,” Cat said.

“Quite right,” Mr. Vastion moaned. “They always name themselves. Fact. I read up about griffins before you got here. Just in case this wasn't a complete hoax. Very rare things in this
world, griffins. First one I've ever seen, actually. Just a moment.”

He paused, holding the griffin down with one expertly spread hand, while, with the other hand, he picked up a frog that had somehow appeared on the table and threw it out of the window.

“Damn nuisance, these frogs,” he moaned, while he turned the griffin this way and that, feeling its stomach and its ribs and its legs and examining both sets of claws. “They've got a plague of frogs here,” he explained. “Came to me and asked me to get rid of them. I asked them what I was supposed to do—poison the duck pond? Told them to get rid of the things themselves. They're Farleighs. Should know how. But there's no doubt too many frogs are a pest. They get in everywhere. And they strike me as half unreal anyway. Some magician's idea of a joke, I'd say.” He held the griffin's beak open and looked down its throat. “Fine voice in there, by the look of it. Now let's have you over, old son.”

Mr. Vastion set the griffin on its feet and unfolded the little triangular stubs of its wings. He felt round the bottom of them. “Plenty of good flight muscles here,” he grunted. “Just need
a bit of growing and fledging. The feathers will come, along with the proper coat at the back end. You'll find this fluff will drop out as he grows. Just what were you worrying about?”

“We don't know what to give him to eat,” Cat explained. “He doesn't like milk.”

“Well, he wouldn't, would he?” Mr. Vastion moaned. “The front half of him's bird. Look.”

He turned the griffin deftly over on its side, where it lay peacefully. Cat could see that it liked this firm handling. Mr. Vastion slid his hand over the creature's beak, and then upward, so that its small tufty ears were flattened.

“Now you've got the contours,” he grunted. “Reminds me of nothing so much as an osprey. Or a sea eagle, even more. Magnificent birds. Huge wingspan. Take that as your guide, but chop the food up small or he'll choke. Sea eagles do take fish, but they take rabbits even more. Easier to catch. I expect this fellow will be quite happy with minced beef. But he'll want raw vegetables chopped into it too, to keep him healthy. I'd better show you. Hold him for me a minute, Lady Chant.”

Millie put both hands on the peacefully lying griffin. “He's so thin and weak!”

Mr. Vastion gave out a long moan. “Of
course
he is. Just hatched. All newborn creatures are like this. Skinny. Feeble. Bags under their eyes. Excuse me a moment. I'll get him some puppy food.” He left the room in the sort of shuffling plod that seemed to be his way of walking.

Another frog landed on the table while they waited. Cat picked it up and, like Mr. Vastion had done, threw it out of the window. A flopping feeling on his feet showed him two more frogs that had somehow landed on his boots. In the dim light down there, parts of them glowed transparent green, with touches of red. Cat saw Mr. Vastion had been quite right. These frogs were only partly real. He bent down and collected both frogs in his left hand, just as Mr. Vastion shuffled back into the room. The baby griffin leaped up from under Millie's hands with its beak wide open, going, “Weep, weep, weep!” in such excitement that it seemed about to leap right off the table. Cat quickly sent all the frogs back to where they came from and dived to catch the griffin.

“That's right,” Mr. Vastion grunted. He was holding a large handful of raw mince mixed with shredded carrot. They watched him put the meat
into his bunched-up fingers, so that his hand was roughly beak shaped. “Like this, see,” he moaned, and popped the handful expertly down the griffin's throat. “Think you can do that?”

The griffin swallowed, clapped its beak, and looked soulfully up at Mr. Vastion. “Weep?”

“In a bit, fellow. Lady Chant will take you home and give you a square meal there,” Mr. Vastion moaned. “Bring him back again if you're worried. That will be ten and sixpence, Lady Chant.”

They got back into the car again, Cat carrying the griffin without the blanket. Millie tossed the blanket into the backseat, saying, “I think we were worrying too much, Cat. Raw meat! Thank goodness he told us!” She drove off, around the village green and up the long driveway to the Castle, where she did not stop at the main door; she drove on around to the kitchen door and stopped outside that.

Cat was surprised at how many people were crowded into the kitchen to meet them. Mr. Frazier, the butler, opened the kitchen door to them. Mr. Stubbs, the head cook, met them as they came in, surrounded by his apprentices,
and asked anxiously just what it was that griffins ate.

“Raw mince,” Millie said, “with grated carrots—and chopped parsley, I think, for clean breath.”

“I rather thought that might be it,” Mr. Stubbs said. “Eddie, fetch out that minced rabbit. Joan and Laurie, grate us some carrots, and Jimmy, you chop parsley. And you'll be wanting breakfast yourselves while you feed him, I guess. Bert, coffee, toast.”

Miss Bessemer the housekeeper was there too, hurrying to spread newspaper on a table for Cat to put the griffin down on. “A basket in your room?” she asked Cat. “I've found you a nice roomy one. And we'll bespell the lining until he's house-trained, dear, if you don't mind.”

As the mince arrived, the baby griffin stood up on wobbly legs, whirling its stringlike tail and going “Weep!” again. A crowd surrounded the table to watch. Cat saw Joe the boot boy, Mary, Euphemia and two other maids, several footmen, all the kitchen staff, Mr. Frazier, Miss Bessemer, nearly all the Castle wizards, Roger, Janet, Julia, Irene, Jason, and Mopsa, looking possessive. He even caught a glimpse of Chrestomanci, in a
purple dressing gown, at the back of the crowd, watching over people's heads.

“We don't get a griffin every day,” Millie said. “You feed him, love. He came to you, after all.”

Cat took up a fistful of meat, made his fingers into a beak, and posted the lump down the griffin's expectant throat. “Oh, bless!” someone murmured as the griffin swallowed, looked pleased, and looked up for more. “Weep?” That plateful went in no time. Cat had only time to snatch a piece of toast before there was a further, louder “Weep,
weep
!” and Mr. Stubbs had to fetch more meat. The baby griffin ate all the rabbit there was, followed by a pound of minced steak, and then went “Weep!” for more. Mr. Stubbs produced smoked salmon. It ate that. By this time its scrawny stomach was round, and tight as a drum.

“I think that will do,” Millie said. “We don't want him ill. But he obviously needs a lot.”

“I sent an order down to the butcher, ma'am,” Mr. Stubbs said. “I can see it's going to be quantities. Every four hours, if you ask me, if he's anything like a human baby.”

“Oh, help!” Cat said. “Really?”

“Pretty certainly,” Mr. Frazier said, suddenly
revealing himself as a bird fancier. “Your fledgling bird eats its own weight in food daily, and often more. Better weigh it, Mr. Stubbs. You may need to increase your order.”

So the kitchen scales were fetched and the griffin was discovered to weigh over a stone already, sixteen pounds, in fact. It objected to being weighed. It wanted to go to sleep, preferably in Cat's arms. While Cat carried it away upstairs, with its beak contentedly resting on his shoulder and Mopsa following watchfully, Mr. Stubbs did sums on the back of an old bill. The total came to so much that he sent Joe down to the butcher's to double his first order.

Joe stopped to exchange an urgent look with Roger before he left. “I'll wait,” Roger said. “Promise.”

“Get
going
, Joe Pinhoe!” Mr. Stubbs said. “You lazy layabout, you!”

O
ver in Ulverscote there was suddenly a plague of frogs.

Nobody had seen the like before. There were thousands of them, and there was a sort of green-redness to them if you saw them in the shade. They got in everywhere. People trod on them when they got out of bed that morning and found them in the teapot when they tried to make tea. About the only inhabitant of the village who enjoyed the plague was Nutcase. He chased frogs all over Furze Cottage. His favorite place to hunt them into was Marianne's bedroom. Then he killed them on Marianne's bedside rug.

Marianne picked up the strange, small black
remains. The frogs seemed to shrink when they were dead and die away into something dark and dry with holes in. Not real, she thought. There was a smell coming off them that she knew. Where had she smelled that particular odor before? She knew Joe had been there when she smelled it. Was it when they stole the stuffed ferret? No. It was before that. It was when Gammer had sent that blast of magic at the Farleighs.

That's it, Marianne thought. These are Gammer's.

She went downstairs and put the dry remains into the waste pail. “I'm going round to see Gammer,” she told Mum.

“Does she want you
again
?” Mum said. “Don't be too long. I'm still finding jars with mildew in them. We're going to have to scald the lot out.”

Though the wave of bad luck had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the effects of it were still there, in the mildew, in half-healed cuts, sprained ankles, and—this seemed to be the final thing the spell had done—an outbreak of whooping cough among the smaller children. Dismal coughing came from most of the houses Marianne passed on her way to the Dell. But the right kind of red
bricks were just now being delivered at the Post Office as she went by.

Aunt Joy was standing on her lawn above the broken wall, watching the delivery. “I may have my bricks,” she grumbled to Marianne, “but that's as far as it goes. Your uncle Simeon's too busy doing the renovations at Woods House, hobbling around with a stick, if you please! All for that new woman who says she's a Pinhoe. If he can do it on one leg for
her
, why not for
me
? As if my money wasn't as good as hers!”

There was a lot more on these lines, but Marianne only smiled at Aunt Joy and went on. As Dad often said, if you stayed to listen to Aunt Joy, you'd be there a week and she still wouldn't have finished grumbling.

There were frogs in the lane all the way to the Dell, and the pond in front of the cottage was a seething, hopping mass of them. The ducks had given up trying to swim and were sitting grumpily on the grass.

“I don't know what we've done to deserve this,” Aunt Dinah said, opening the door for Marianne. “Anyone would think we'd offended Moses or something! Go on in. She's been asking for you.”

Marianne marched into Gammer's crowded living room. “Gammer,” she said.

Gammer's ruined face turned up to her. “I'm not in my right mind,” Gammer said quickly.

“Then you shouldn't do magic,” Marianne retorted. “There's frogs all over the village.”

Gammer shook her head as if she were saddened by the way people behaved. “What's this world becoming into? Those shouldn't be there.”

“Where should they be, then?” Marianne challenged her.

Gammer shook her head again. “No need to take on. Little girls shouldn't worry their heads over such things.”

“
Where
?” Marianne said.

Gammer bent her face down and pleated her freshly starched skirt.

“
Where
?” Marianne insisted. “You sent those frogs somewhere, didn't you?”

Very reluctantly, Gammer muttered, “Jed Farleigh should have left me alone.”

“Helm St. Mary?” Marianne said.

Gammer nodded. “And all over. There's Farleighs in all the villages over there. I forget the names of those places. I don't remember so well
these days, Marianne. You have to understand.”

“I do,” said Marianne. “You sent frogs to Helm St. Mary, right outside Chrestomanci Castle, so that they were almost bound to notice, and you made the Farleighs so angry that they ill-wished us and sent the frogs right back. Aren't you ashamed, Gammer?”

“That's Jed Farleigh all over,” Gammer said. “Hides out over there, thinks he's safe from me. And they're spying on me all the time, spying and lurking. It wasn't me, Marianne. It was Edgar and Lester. I didn't tell them to do it.”

“You know perfectly well that Edgar and Lester would
never
send anyone frogs!” Marianne said. “I'm disgusted with you, Gammer!”

“I have to defend myself!” Gammer protested.

“No, you don't, not like
this
!” Marianne said, and stormed out among the frogs, down the lane and past the stack of new bricks. Feeling angrier and braver than she had ever been in her life, she stormed on down Furze Lane and into the shed behind Furze Cottage. There, Dad and Uncle Richard were trying to saw wood without cutting frogs in half. “Gammer did these frogs,” she told them.

“Oh, come now, Marianne,” Dad said. “Gammer wouldn't do a thing like that!”

“Yes, she would. She
did
!” Marianne said. “She sent them to Helm St. Mary, but the Farleighs sent them back here and did an ill-wishing on us because Gammer made them so angry. Dad, I think we're in the middle of a war with the Farleighs without knowing we are.”

Dad laughed. “The Farleighs are not that uncivilized, Marianne. These frogs are just someone's idea of a joke—you can see they're creatures bewitched from the way they glow. Run along and don't worry your head about them.”

Whatever Marianne said after that, Dad simply laughed and refused to believe her. She went indoors and tried to tell Mum.

“Oh,
really
, Marianne!” Mum said, holding a kettle with a cloth round the handle, amid clouds of steam. “I grant you Gammer's mad as a coot these days, but the Farleighs are sane people. We
cooperate
with them around the countryside. Just get your hair tied up and give me a hand here and
forget
about the beastly frogs!”

Marianne spent the rest of the day boiling kettles in a sort of angry loneliness. She did not trust
Gammer simply to stop at frogs. She knew she had to get someone to believe her before the Farleighs got so angry that they did something terrible, but Dad and Mum seemed to have closed their minds. Some of the time, she was tempted just to keep quiet about Gammer and let bad things happen. But she had started being brave now, and she felt she had to go on. She wondered who else might believe her. Someone who might stop Gammer and explain to the Farleighs. Apart from Uncle Charles, she could think of no one, and Uncle Charles was working up at Woods House with Uncle Simeon. I'll talk to him when he gets off work, she decided. Because I think it really is urgent.

By that afternoon, the frogs had become such a nuisance that Uncle Richard took action. He harnessed Dolly the donkey to the cart and filled the cart with bins and sacks. Then he called in all Marianne's cousins, all ten of them, and the troop of them went round the houses collecting frogs. They were handed frogs by squirming fistfuls everywhere. For those people who were too old or too busy with the whooping cough to collect frogs for themselves, the boys went in and tipped frogs
out of tea caddies and scooped frogs out of cupboards, shoes, and toilets, while the rest hunted frogs in the gardens. They came joyfully out again with squirming, croaking sacks and dumped them in the cart. Then they went on to the next house. They caught two hundred frogs in the vicarage and twice that number in the church. The only place with more frogs was the Dell.

“Stands to reason,” Uncle Richard said, refusing to believe a word against Gammer. “There's a pond at the Dell.”

When, finally, the cart was piled high with bulging sacks and croaking bins and there was hardly a loose frog to be seen, they took Dolly down Furze Lane to the river and tipped all the frogs in. Uncle Richard scratched his head over what happened then. Every frog, as it hit the running water, seemed to dissolve away to nothing. The cousins could not get over it.

“Well, they say running water kills the craft,” Uncle Richard told Mum and Marianne, when he came to Furze Cottage for a cup of tea after his labors, “but I'd never believed it until now. Melted away into black like foam, they did. Astonishing.”

Here, Marianne looked round and noticed that
Nutcase was missing again. “Oh,
bother
him!” she wailed, and hurried to the table to set the knife spinning. It was still whirling round and round when there was a knock at the front door.

“See who that is, Marianne!” Mum called out, busy pouring hot water on the tea.

Marianne opened the door. And stared. A very tall, thin woman stood there, carrying a basket. She had straight hair and a flat chest and she wore the drabbest and most dust-colored dress Marianne had ever seen. Her face was long and severe. She gazed at Marianne, and Marianne was reminded of a teacher about to find fault.

Before Marianne could ask what this stranger wanted, the woman said, “Jane James. From Woods House. Wrong way to make your acquaintance, I know, but did you know your cat walks through walls? He was in my kitchen eating the fish for Mr. Adams's supper. Doors all shut. Only explanation. Don't know how you'll keep him in.”

“I don't either,” Marianne said. She looked up at the grim face and found it was full of hidden humor. Jane James evidently found the situation highly amusing. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'll come
and fetch him back at once.”

“No need,” said Jane James. She opened the basket she was carrying and turned Nutcase out of it like a pudding onto the doormat. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, and went away.

“Well I'll be—!” Uncle Richard said, as Marianne shut the front door. “Quite a touch of the craft in that woman, if you ask me!”

“And no
wonder
we can't keep that cat in!” Mum said, putting the teapot on the table.

Nutcase sat on the doormat and glowered at Marianne. Marianne glowered back. They can believe Jane James that Nutcase walks through walls, but they can't believe
me
about Gammer, she thought. “You,” she said to Nutcase, “you're as bad as Gammer! And I can't say worse than that!”

 

Meanwhile, back at the Castle, Cat was trying to get used to the way he had to feed a baby griffin every four hours—at least, it was usually only about three and half hours before the griffin woke, with its stomach all flat and thin again, and went “Weep, weep, weep!” for more food. He was carrying it to the kitchen yet again—and it felt a good deal heavier than it was when it first
hatched—when Julia stopped him on the stairs.

“Can I help you feed him?” she asked. “He's just so sweet! Janet wants to help too.”

Cat realized that this was exactly what he needed. He said quickly, “We can have a feeding rota, then. You can feed him in the day, but I'll have to look after him at night.”

In fact, as he soon discovered, a surprising number of people wanted to help feed the griffin. Miss Bessemer wanted to, and so did Mr. Stubbs and Euphemia. Millie wanted to, having, as she said, a personal interest in this griffin. And Irene, when she was not over in Ulverscote seeing to the alterations to her new house, begged to have a turn as well.

At first Cat found himself sitting over the person feeding the griffin as possessively as Mopsa did. He knew it was happier when he was beside it. But when the griffin seemed perfectly used to somebody else putting lumps of meat into its beak, Cat—rather guiltily—sighed with relief and went off to ride Syracuse. Before long, he only had to feed the griffin during the nights.

He went up to his room every night carrying two large covered bowls of meat, each with a
stasis spell on it to keep it fresh. By the third night he was—well,
almost
—used to being woken at midnight and again at four in the morning by the griffin's “Weep, weep, weep!” If this did not wake Cat, then Mopsa did, pushing her cold nose urgently into Cat's face and treading heavily on his stomach.

What he never seemed to get used to was how sleepy he was during the day.

On the third night, Mopsa as usual woke him at midnight. “All right. I know, I
know
!” Cat said, rolling out from under Mopsa's nose and feet. “I'm coming.” He sat up and switched on the light.

To his surprise, the griffin was still heavily asleep, curled in its basket with its yellow beak propped on the edge, making small whistling snores. But there was something tapping on his big window. It was exactly like that strange dream he had had. I think I know what that is! Cat thought. He got out of bed and opened the window.

An upside-down face stared at him, but it was human.

Cat stared back, finding this hard to believe.

“Can you give us a bit of help?” the face asked, rather desperately. “It's raining.”

Because it was upside down, it took Cat a moment or so to recognize that the face belonged to Joe the boot boy. “How did you get
there
?” he said.

“We made this flying machine,” Joe explained, “but we didn't get it right. It crashed on your roof. Roger's up here too, wedged like.”

Oh, my lord! Cat thought.
That's
what they've been up to in that shed! “All right,” he said. “I'd better bring you in here. Let yourself go loose.”

By using a spur-of-the-minute mixture of conjuring and levitation, Cat managed to pull Joe off the roof and bend him around through the window and into his room. Unfortunately, this seemed to dislodge the crashed flying machine. As Joe flopped heavily onto Cat's carpet, there was a set of long sliding sounds from above, followed by a cry of horror from Roger. Cat was only just in time to catch Roger as he fell past the window and to levitate him inside too.