The Pinhoe Egg (14 page)

She pedaled past the last few houses and came
between the hedges, where the road bent. And there, coming toward her, were six other cyclists, all girls. As soon as they saw Marianne, they stopped and swung their cycles sideways in a herring-bone pattern, blocking the road. Marianne recognized the one in front as Margot Farleigh and the next one as Margot's cousin Norma. She didn't know the names of the others, but she knew they were all Farleighs too, and probably best friends with one another because they all had the same hairstyle, very smooth and scraped back, with one little thin dangling plait down one cheek. Oh dear! she thought. She could smell, or feel—or whatever—that each girl had a spell of some kind in the basket on the front of her bike.

“Well, look who's here!” Margot Farleigh said jeeringly. “It's Gammer Pinhoe's little servant!”

“Off to Helm to put another ill-chancing on us, are you?” Norma asked.

“No, I'm not,” Marianne said. “I never put a single ill-chance on anyone.”

This caused a chorus of jeering laughs from all six girls. “Oh, didn't you?” Margot said, pretending to be surprised. “My mistake. You didn't bring us frogs, then, or fleas, or nits?”

“Or the rashes, or the flu and the whooping cough, I suppose?” Norma added.

At this, the rest began calling out, “Nor you didn't put ants in our cupboards, did you?” and “What about all the mud in our washing?” and “What made Gammer Norah swell up, then?” and “So you didn't make Dorothea fall in the pond—like hell you didn't!”

Marianne sagged against her bicycle, thinking, Oh lord! Gammer
has
been busy! “No, honestly,” she said. “You see, Gammer's not right in her head, and—”

“Oh? Really?” Margot drawled.

“Excuses, excuses,” said Norma.

“She's right enough in her head to flood all Farleigh houses knee deep in water!” Margot said. “
All
our houses, from Uphelm to Bowbridge. Not anyone else's, mark you. Our Gammer Norah's in a raving rage about it, let me tell you.”

“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 tried. “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.