The Pinhoe Egg (9 page)

Jason meanwhile was rubbing his hand vaguely across the damaged end of the huge table. Cat could tell he was using a divining spell, but to the two elderly men who were rather tensely watching him, Jason probably looked like a man bored with womanish things like kitchens and stoves. “Seems to have got a bit bashed here, this table,” he said. “Was there some trouble getting it in here?”

Edgar and Lester both flinched. “No, no, no,” Lester said, and Edgar added, “I am told—family tradition has it—that this table was actually made inside this room.”

“Ah!” said Jason. Cat could feel him quivering, hot on the scent of something. “Someone else told me about this table, quite a few years ago now. A dwimmerman called Elijah Pinhoe.”

Edgar and Lester both jumped, quite violently. Lester answered gravely, “Passed away. Passed away these eight years now.”

“Yes, but am I right in thinking he actually lived in this house?” Jason said.

“That's right,” Edgar admitted. “Marianne's grandfather, you know.”

“Right! Great!” Jason said. He whirled round on Marianne as she came out of the empty pantry and seized her arm. “Young lady, come with me at once and show me where your grandfather's herb bed was.”

“We-ell,” said Marianne, who was wondering whether Nutcase had gone up to hide in the attics.

“You
do
know, don't you?” Jason said eagerly.

Good gracious, he's just like Gaffer, only young and Cockney! Marianne thought. And he has lovely bright blue eyes. “Yes, of course I do,” she said. “It's outside the conservatory, so that he could take the weak ones inside. This way.”

Jason cheered and rushed them all outside. Irene laughed heartily at his enthusiasm. “He's always like this about his herbs,” she told Cat. “We have to humor him.”

Jason stopped in dismay when he saw the thistles and the grass. “I suppose it
has
been eight years,” he said, walking in among the weeds. Next moment he was down on his knees, quite
forgetting his nice pale trousers, carefully parting a clump of nettles. “Hairy antimony!” he cried out. “Still alive! Well, I'll be—! And this is button lovage and here's wolfwort still going strong! This must be a strong spell on it, if it's alive after eight years! The ground's too dry for it, really. And here's—What's this?” he asked, looking up at Marianne.

“Gaffer always called it hare's paws,” she said. “And the one by your foot—Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue! Do
you
know?” she asked Cat.

Cat surprised himself and everyone else by answering, “
Portulaca fulvia.
Scarlet purslane's the English name.” Evidently some of the herb lore he had been made to learn must have stuck in his brain somewhere. He rather thought it was Marianne's strong magic that had brought the name up out of a very deep, bored sleep.

“Yes, yes! And very rare. You get the green and yellow all the time, but the scarlet's the really magic one and you almost never find it!” Jason cried out, crawling across to another clump of plants. “Pinwort, golden spindlemans, nun's pockets, fallgreen—this is a
treasure house
!”

Edgar and Lester were standing in the grass,
looking helpless, prim, and irritated. “Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the house?” Edgar said at last.

“No, no!” Jason cried out. “I'll buy it even if the roof's fallen off! This is
wonderful
!”

“But
I'd
like to see it,” Irene said, taking pity on them. “Come and show me round.” She led the pair of them away through the conservatory.

Marianne left Jason wrestling with a thistle and came over to Cat. “Will you help me look for Nutcase?” she asked him.

“What does he look like?” Cat said.

Marianne approved of this practical question. “Black,” she said. “Rather fat, and one eye greener than the other. His coat grows in a ruff round his neck but the rest of him is smooth, except his tail. That's bushy.”

“Have you tried a directional spell?” Cat said. “Or divining?”

More practical questions, Marianne thought approvingly. There was no nonsense about Cat. “Nutcase is pretty well immune to magic,” she said. “I suppose he had to be, living with Gammer.”

“But I bet he's not immune to a spell making a
luscious fish smell down in the hall,” Cat said. “Wouldn't that fetch him out?”

“Not fish. Bacon. He loves bacon,” Marianne said. “Let's go and try.”

They hurried through the house to the hall. It was empty, but they could hear hollow footsteps as Irene and the two great-uncles trod about on bare floorboards somewhere in the distance. Here Marianne set the bacon spell, going slowly and carefully, as if she did not quite trust her powers. Cat, while he waited, fixed the image of a black cat with odd eyes and a ruff in his mind and cast about for Nutcase.

“He went up,” he said, pointing to the stairs when Marianne had finished. “We could go and catch him coming down.”

“Yes,” she said. “Let's.”

They went up to the next floor. “This is nice,” Cat said, looking through an open door into a square, comfortable bedroom.

The room was completely bare, but Marianne knew what Cat meant. “Isn't it?” she agreed. “You know, Gammer kept it all so dark and dusty that I never saw what a nice house this really is.”

Cat found himself saying, “I think she kept
you
dark and dusty too. You do know your magic is pretty well enchanter standard, do you?” What made me say that? he thought.

Marianne stared at him. “
Is
it?”

“Yes, but you just don't trust it,” Cat said.

Marianne turned away. Cat thought at first that she was upset, then that she didn't believe him, until she said, “I think you're right. It's hard to—to trust yourself when everyone's always telling you you're too young and to do what you're told. Thank you for telling me. I think Nutcase went to the attics. I've known he did all along really, but I didn't trust it.”

They went along the bare passage to another set of stairs that were half hidden by a huge wooden hutch thing that must have had a hot-water tank inside. At any rate it was glopping and trickling as if it didn't work very well. The stairs were dark and splintery, and the door at the top was half open, on to brown dimness. Uncle Charles must have left it open, Marianne thought, as her foot knocked against a row of paint tins just inside.

Cat thought, There's been a really strong “Don't Notice” spell here! At least, it was more
like a “Don't Want to Know” when he came to think about it—as if somebody had really disliked this place. He wondered why. Marianne seemed to have broken the spell as she went inside.

He followed Marianne into a glorious smell like the ghosts of mint sauce, turkey stuffing, and warm spiced wine. This came, he saw, from bundles and bundles of dry herbs hanging from the beams in the roof, most of them too old and dry to be any good now. Nearly all the floor space was filled with boxes, bundles, and old leather suitcases, but there were old-fashioned chairs and sofas there too, rows of pointed boots, tin trunks, and what looked like clumps of rusty garden tools. Everything was lit by a dim light coming in under the eaves of the house. Cat could see a dusty toy fort down by his feet, which made him feel sorry that he seemed to be too old for such things these days.

The place turned a corner, he saw, and went on out of sight. There was something exciting round there.

Cat was stepping forward in the narrow space between the piles of junk, to find out just what it was round that corner, when Marianne said, “Nutcase
was
here.”

“How do you know?” said Cat.

Marianne pointed to what was left of a mouse, lying beside the paint cans. “He always only eats the front end and leaves the tail,” she said.

This gave Cat the perfect excuse to explore the attic. He edged his way on along the strip of floor between the bundles and boxes.

“But he's not here now,” Marianne said.

“I know, but I need an excuse,” Cat said, and shuffled on. Marianne followed him.

The first recognizable thing they met as they turned the corner was a box of Christmas ornaments, really old-fashioned ones: carved wooden angels, heavy round glass balls, and masses of thick golden paper stamped into shapes and letters.

“Oh, I remember these!” Marianne cried out. “I used to help Gaffer put them on the tree in the hall.”

She knelt by the box. Cat left her shaking out the gold paper, so that it fell into a long
MERRY CHRISTMAS
and an equally long
YULETIDE IS COME
, and groped his way onward. It was darker in this part of the attic and there were no more herbs, but Cat was now convinced that there was
something truly precious and exciting stored down near the end. He shuffled and groped—and occasionally put an arm up over his face as something that did not seem quite real fluttered at his head. His feeling grew, and grew, that there was something enormously magical along there, something so important that it needed to be protected with nearly real illusions.

He found it right at the end, where it was so dark that he was in his own light and could barely see it at all. It was large and round and it sat in a nest of old moth-eaten blankets. At first Cat thought it was just a football. But when he put his hands on it, it seemed to be made of china. The moment Cat touched it, he knew it was very strange and valuable indeed. He picked it up—it was quite heavy—and shuffled carefully back to where Marianne was kneeling beside the box of decorations.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked her. He found his voice was shaking with hidden excitement, like Jason's when he knew that this was the herbman's house.

Marianne looked up from laying a row of golden bells out on the floor. “Oh, is that still
here? I don't know what it is. Gammer always said it was one of Gaffer's silly jokes. She said he told her it was an elephant's egg.”

It
could
be an egg, Cat supposed. He turned the thing round under what little light there was. It was
possibly
more pointed at one end. Its smooth, shiny surface was mauvish and speckled with darker mauve. It was not particularly lovely—just strange. And he knew he had to have it.

“Can—can I have it?” he said.

Marianne was doubtful. “Well, it's probably Gammer's,” she said. “Not mine to give.” But if everyone hadn't forgotten the attics, she thought, it would have been cleared out with all the other things up here and probably thrown away. And the house was Dad's really, together with all the things left in it. In a
way
, Marianne had a perfect right to give some of the junk away, since nobody else was going to want it. “Oh, go on, take it,” she said. “You're the only person who's ever been interested in the thing.”

“Thanks!”
Cat said. Marianne could have sworn that his face literally glowed, as if a strong light had been shone on it. For a second his hair looked the same gold as the Christmas bells.

Great-Uncle Edgar's voice floated up to them, peevish and distant, from somewhere downstairs. “Marianne! Marianne! Are you and the boy up there? We want to lock the house up.”

Marianne bundled the bells back into the box, in a strong, high chiming. “Lord!” she said. “And I've still not found Nutcase! Let's hope that bacon spell fetched him down.”

It had. When they clattered down the bare stairway to the hall, Cat carefully carrying the strange object in both arms, the first thing they saw was Nutcase's smug face peering at them over Irene's shoulder. Nutcase's tail was wrapped contentedly over Irene's arm, and he was purring. Irene was walking about the hall with him, saying, “You big fat smug thing you! You have no morals at all, do you? You wicked cat!” Jason was watching her with an admiring smile and a brown patch of earth on both knees.

“I knew she was bound to be a cat person!” Marianne said, at which the faces of both great-uncles turned up to her, irritably. Cat put a good strong “Don't Notice” around the thing he was carrying.

Great-Uncle Lester had enough magic to
know that Cat was carrying
something
, but he must have thought it was the box of Christmas decorations. “Has Marianne given you those?” he said. “Rubbishy old stuff. I wouldn't be seen dead with those on my tree.” Then, while Cat and Marianne both went red trying not to laugh, Uncle Lester turned to Jason. “If you and your good lady can be at my office in Hopton at eleven tomorrow, Mr. Yeldham, we'll have the paperwork ready for you then. Marianne, collect your cat and I'll give you a lift down to Furze Cottage.”

A
ll the way back to Chrestomanci Castle, Jason and Irene were far too excited at having actually bought a real house, with a bed full of rare herbs, to pay much attention to Cat and the strange object he was holding on his knees. When they got to the Castle, there was no one to ask Cat what it was or to tell him he shouldn't have it. There was some kind of panic going on.

Staff were rushing anxiously around the hall and up and down the stairway. Tom, Chrestomanci's secretary, was with Millie beside the pentacle on the floor. As Cat went past carrying his object, Tom was saying, “No,
none
of the usual spells have been tripped. Not one!”

Millie replied, “And I'm quite certain he didn't leave by this pentacle. Has Bernard finished checking the old garden yet?”

It seemed nothing to do with Cat. He carried the object carefully away by the back stairs and on up to his room. His room was in a mess, as if Mary, the maid who usually did the bedrooms, had been sucked into the panic too. Cat shrugged and took his new possession over to the windows to have a good look at it.

It was the chilly sort of mauve that his own skin went when he was too cold for too long. It was heavy and smooth and not at all pretty, but Cat still found it the most exciting thing he had ever owned in his life. Perhaps this feeling had something to do with the mysterious dark purple spots and squiggles all over its china surface. They were like a code. Cat thought that if only he knew this code, it would tell him something hugely important that nobody else in the world knew. He had never seen anything like this thing.

But the mauve color kept making him think it was too cold. He carefully put a spell of warmth around it. Then, because it looked as if it would break rather easily, and he knew how careless
Mary could be, he surrounded the warmth with a strong protection. To keep it properly safe beyond that, he made a sort of nest for it out of his winter scarf and hat and put the lot on his chest of drawers so that he could look at it from wherever he was in the room. After that, he had to tear himself away from it and go down to the playroom for lunch.

Cat had meant to tell them all—or Roger at least—that he had just been given this amazing new object, but the three of them looked so worried that he said, “What's the matter?”

“Daddy's disappeared,” Julia said.

“But he's
always
disappearing!” Cat said. “Whenever someone calls him.”

“This is different,” Roger said. “He has a whole string of spells set up so that the people here know who's called him and roughly where he's gone—”

“And,” said Janet, who was still glum and red-eyed over Jason, “there are more spells to say if he's run into danger, and none of them have been set off.”

“Mummy thinks he might not have had any clothes on when he went,” Julia chipped in.
“Today's dressing gown was thrown over a chair and none of the rest of his clothes seem to have gone.”

“That's silly,” Cat said. “He can always conjure clothes from somewhere.”

“Oh, so he can,” said Julia. “What a relief!”

“I think it's
all
silly,” Cat told her. “He must have forgotten to set off the spells.” He got on with his lunch. It was liver and bacon, and the smell reminded him of Marianne's spell. He thought about that cat, Nutcase. Cats were queer animals. This one had struck him as unusually magical.

“Oh, I wish you weren't so
calm
about things!” Janet said passionately. “You're even worse than Chrestomanci is! Can't you
see
when things are serious?”

“Yes,” Cat said, “and this isn't.”

But by suppertime, when Chrestomanci had still not reappeared, even Cat was beginning to wonder. It was odd. When Cat thought about Chrestomanci, he had a calm, secure feeling, as if Chrestomanci was quite all right, wherever he was, but possibly wishing he could be there to supper; but when he looked at Millie, he saw
desperate worry in her face, and in all the faces round the table, even Jason's. Cat almost began thinking he ought to worry too. But he knew that would make no difference.

Still, when he went to bed that night and lay staring proudly at the big speckled mauve sphere sitting in his scarf across the room, Cat found himself hanging a piece of his mind out to one side, so that he would know in his sleep if Chrestomanci came back in the night. But all that piece of his mind caught was Syracuse, out in the paddock under the moon, wistfully eating grass and wondering why Cat had deserted him.

In the middle of the night, he had a strange dream.

It started with something tapping at his biggest window. Cat turned over in his sleep and tried to take no notice, but the tapping grew more and more insistent, until he dreamed that he woke up and shambled across the room to open the window. He could see a face through the glass, upside down, looking at him with shining purple-blue eyes. But he never saw it clearly, because a great white moon was directly behind it, dazzling him.

“Enchanter,” it said, muffled by the glass. “Enchanter, can you hear me?”

Cat put his hand on the catch and slowly pushed the window open. The face retreated upward to give the window room to open. Cat heard its feet shuffle on the roof and what were probably its wings flap and spread for balance. By the time he had the window wide open, he knew that a great shadowy dragonlike thing was sitting on the round turret roof above him.

“What do you want?” he said.

The face came down again and put itself through the window upside down. It was huge. Cat backed away from it, feeling a faint, dreamlike brush of what seemed to be feathers against his ear.

“You have my child in there,” the creature said.

Cat looked over his shoulder to where the moonlight gleamed softly off the strange object nestling in his scarf. He had no doubt that this was what the creature was talking about. “Then it's an egg?” he said.

“My egg,” the great pointed mouth said.

With a dreadful feeling of loss and desolation, Cat said, “You want it back?”

“I can't take it,” the creature answered sadly. “I'm under a sundering spell. I can only get free at full moon nowadays. We put the egg outside the spell, and I wanted to be sure that my child was in safe hands. It should be buried in warm sand.”

There was no difficulty about that. Cat turned toward the gleaming egg and converted his warmth spell into a warm sandy one. “Is that right? What else should I do?”

“Let it live free when it hatches,” the creature replied. “Give it food and love and let it grow.”

“I'll do that,” Cat promised. Even in his dream he wondered how he would do it.

“Thank you,” the great beast said. “I will repay you in any way I can.” It withdrew its head from the window. There was a slight shuffling overhead. Then a great shadow dropped past the window on enormous outspread wings and wheeled away across the moon as noiselessly as an owl.

Cat staggered sleepily toward the egg, wondering how else he could fulfill the creature's trust. In his dream, he doubled the amount of warm sand, made trebly sure that no one could knock it down or disturb it and, as an afterthought, covered it all
over with love and friendship and affection. That should do it, he thought, wriggling down into his bed again.

He was quite surprised in the morning to find the window wide open. As for the egg, he could warm his hands on it from a yard away. It must have been one of those real dreams, Cat thought as he went off for his shower. Chrestomanci had said that they happened to enchanters.

When Cat came back, the redheaded maid, Mary, was in his room, glaring at the egg. “You expect me to dust that thing?” she said angrily.

“No,” Cat said. “Don't touch it. It's a dragon's egg.”

“Mercy me!” Mary said. “As if I'd go near it! I've enough to do with the place in this uproar as it is.”

“Is Chrestomanci still missing?” Cat asked.

“Not a sign of him,” Mary said. “They've all been sitting in the main office doing spells to find him all night. The cups of tea and coffee I've taken in there for them, you wouldn't believe! Lady Chant looks like death this morning.”

Cat was sorry that Millie was so upset. In the middle of the morning, when there had been no
further news, he went along to the main office to tell Millie that Chrestomanci was all right—or, not
quite
all right, he thought, feeling around in the distance as he went. There was a bit of something wrong, but no danger.

Millie was not in the office when he got there. “She's gone to lie down,” they told him. “You mustn't disturb her, dear, not when she's so worried.”

“Then could you tell her that Chrestomanci's more or less all right?” Cat said.

He could tell that they did not believe he could possibly know. “Yes, dear,” they said, humoring him. “Run along now.”

Cat went away, feeling sad, as he always did when this kind of thing happened. As he went, he remembered that “Run along” was exactly what Marianne's two great-uncles had said to her. And he had told Marianne that this was undermining her—Cat stopped short halfway along one of the Castle's long pale green corridors. He realized that he knew how Marianne was being made to feel unsure of herself because exactly the same thing was always happening to him. He wondered if he should go back to the office and
insist
on being allowed to find Chrestomanci for them.

But why should they
allow
him to do something they couldn't do for themselves?

Cat stood and thought. No, if he insisted or even asked, someone would forbid him to try. The obvious thing was to go and
get
Chrestomanci and bring him back, without any fuss or bother or asking. And why not do it straightaway? Cat stood until he had fixed in his mind precisely where in the dim distance Chrestomanci was. Then he launched himself and shot over to the place.

He hit a barrier that was like an old, wobbly fence. The fence swayed and shot him back with a
twang
. The next second, he was back in his own tower room with all the breath knocked out of him.

Cat sat on his carpet and gasped. He was truly indignant. He
knew
he should have gotten to Chrestomanci. And that barrier was so shoddy. It was made of magic, but it was like rusty barbed wire and old chicken netting. It ought to have been a pushover.

All the same, his next thoughts were for the dragon's egg sitting on his chest of drawers. He
could have hurt it or cracked it, arriving back with such violence. He got up and anxiously put his hands on it.

It was not cracked. It was warm and peaceful and comfortable, basking in the hot sand spell, enfolded in the spells of affection. Cat could feel the life in it through his fingers. It was almost purring, like Nutcase in Irene's arms. So
that
was all right. Now he had to get to Chrestomanci. He sat on his bed and considered.

The mistake had been to dive straight at the barrier, straight at Chrestomanci, he decided. It must have been designed to throw you off if you did that. Yes, it
was
. It had been made to throw you off and throw you off the scent too. But Cat now knew the barrier was there, and he knew Chrestomanci was somehow behind it. That ought to mean he could sneak up to it and perhaps slip through it sideways. Or it was so shoddy that he could even break it, if that was the only way to get through. And he was fairly sure that being a left-handed enchanter gave him an advantage. That barrier felt as if it had been constructed by right-handed people who had been—
rather long ago—very set in their ways. He could take them by surprise if he was clever.

Cat got up and sauntered out of his room and down the spiral stair. Keeping his mind deliberately vague, in case the barrier people expected him to try again, he made his way down through the Castle and out beside the stables. Here he had a wistful moment when he longed to go and talk to Syracuse, but he told himself he would do that afterward, whatever Chrestomanci said, and sauntered on toward the hut where Roger and Joe met to talk machinery. They were in there at that moment. He heard Roger say, “Yes, but if we patent
this
, everyone will try to use it.” Cat grinned and sidled in among their “Don't Notice” spells. Now it was not even his own magic that was hiding him. Then he launched himself again.

This time, he went quite gently and left side first. Holding his strong left hand out in front of him, he felt at the barrier as he floated up to it, until he found a weak place. There, quite quietly, he bent a section of what seemed to be chicken wire aside and popped through the space.

He felt a thump as his feet hit a roadway and he opened his eyes.

He was standing on a road that was more of a mossy track than a road. The huge trees of an old wood stood on either side of it, making an archway where the road vanished into distance.

He smelled bacon cooking.

Cat thought of Marianne's bacon spell and grinned as he looked for where the scent was coming from. A few yards on, there was an old man in a squashy felt hat sitting by a small fire on the grass verge, busily frying bacon and eggs in an old black frying pan. Beyond the old man was an ancient, decrepit wooden cart, and beyond that, Cat could just see an old white horse grazing on the bank. All his pleasure and triumph at fooling the barrier vanished. This was not Chrestomanci. What had happened?

“Excuse me, sir,” he said politely to the old man.

The old man looked up, revealing a little fringe of gray-white beard, a brown seamy face, and a pair of very wide, shrewd brown eyes. “Good afternoon to you,” the old man said pleasantly, and he gave Cat a humorous look because it
was
by now after midday. “What can I do for you?”

“Have you seen an enchanter anywhere around here?” Cat asked him.