Enchanted Glass (10 page)

“Now go to bed,” Andrew said. “Or I’ll tell Groil you want him to eat you.”

A
idan went to bed, where he slept sweetly. Andrew, on the other hand, had a disturbed night, full of restless dreams, in which he was constantly searching for the things his grandfather had told him. In the dreams, he was always looking for his grandfather to ask him and his grandfather was never there. Once or twice he found Stashe instead, but she just said airily, “It’s all on the computer,” and went away. So then, Andrew dreamed, he looked on the computer and found information that was like coloured smoke and, like smoke, the knowledge escaped through his fingers when he grasped at it. At one point he half woke himself up, saying, “I suppose I have to work this out myself then.” This annoyed him, because it was going to interfere with his book. He finally woke up into a warm, grey morning, relieved that the night was over.

In the normal way, Andrew would have got down to work on his book. But he needed Stashe, in order to start, and Stashe was not coming that day. Andrew grumbled to himself over breakfast, “Wasted day, wasted day.”

“Why don’t we take a map and walk the boundary then?” Aidan suggested.

“Good idea!” Andrew said.

Since Mrs Stock was late that day — if she was coming at all after her row with Mr Stock — Andrew and Aidan made themselves sandwiches and left Mrs Stock a note. Andrew discovered that he and Aidan took the same size in shoes — Aidan was obviously going to end up pretty tall — so Andrew, rather grudgingly, lent Aidan his second-best walking boots. They took waterproofs, found the map and set off across the damp, grey fields towards Mel Tump.

Aidan enjoyed it hugely. He had not expected to, being a city boy and not used to rough walking. In fact, when they crossed the ragged hedge opposite the woodshed, he was certain he was not going to enjoy this. Entering the first field gave him a queer, nervous feeling.

“It doesn’t feel nearly so safe out here,” he said to Andrew.

“No, it probably isn’t,” Andrew said. “I think I remember my grandfather saying that Melstone House and its grounds are a sort of safety zone. But don’t let that
worry you. He owned — and I own now — all these fields, and the hill, and that wood over there. I rent them out for pasture, but they’re all still mine.”

Aidan wondered what it felt like to have a spread of land like this that actually belonged to you. Rather good, probably.

He did not enjoy the next bit either, when they met Wally Stock, the farmer who pastured his cows and sheep in Andrew’s fields. Wally was short and red-faced and gloomy. He wore a flat, gloomy hat and he was a great talker. Aidan stood impatiently by while Wally tried to persuade Andrew to take a whole sheep for his freezer as part payment for renting Andrew’s fields. Andrew knew this was a tax dodge and he was not willing; but then he looked round at Aidan, fidgeting beside him, and thought about how much Aidan ate. He agreed to the sheep and tried to walk on. But Wally was by no means finished.

“You heard about the shenanigans on the Fête Committee?” he asked. Andrew said No, he hadn’t. “Proper row,” said Wally. “That Mrs Fanshaw-Stock throwing her weight around over the bouncy castle until two of the committee walks out. No one knew what to do at first. But then they bring the vicar in, proper enough, to make up the numbers, and the vicar says to ask Mr Brown—”

“Mr Brown?” Andrew asked.

“Mr Brown down at the Manor,” Wally explained. “Proper recluse, he is, worse than you are, Professor. Surprised the hell out of everyone when Mr Brown agreed. Nobody knows what good he’ll be, but there you go. At least we’ve got a proper celebrity to open the Fete. Well known. Cooks all over the telly. He’ll draw people in all right. With any luck, we’ll make a profit this year, provided we get good weather. Weather’s been terrible this year. Fit to ruin me, what with the price of milk being so low and the supermarkets paying peanuts for lamb.”

“He always says he’s being ruined,” Andrew said to Aidan when Wally had promised to deliver the sheep next month and they were at last able to walk away.

“Oh, hey!” Wally called after them.

Andrew turned back, hoping Wally had not overheard him. Aidan sighed.

“I heard,” Wally said, “from that Stashe — working for you now, ain’t she? — that her dad’s got him a false leg after all. Went to a new specialist, I heard. Did you hear that?”

Andrew said he had heard. “Honestly!” he said, when Wally finally allowed them to walk away. “Does everyone in Melstone know everything we do?”

They walked across two fields and through a gate on to Mel Tump. It was here that Aidan truly began to enjoy
the walk. Mel Tump, close to, was a fascinating mass of little green paths running this way and that among strong-scented bushes. Aidan got a feeling that people had been very busy here. Perhaps Groil was one of them. Aidan looked and looked as they climbed, in case Groil was curled up somewhere, under a bush or in one of the surprising grassy hollows, but there was no sign of him. There were rabbits and birds, but nothing out of the ordinary. From the top of the Tump, you could look out over the winding stretch of the village and over Melstone House, half hidden by its two great trees, the oak tree and the copper beech. There was even a glimpse of the distant chimneys of Melstone Manor, where the reclusive Mr Brown lived. Looking over the other way, you saw mile after mile of deep green countryside.

“There’s no way you can see the boundary,” Aidan said, putting his glasses on after experimenting with them off.

“You never can,” Andrew said. “We’ll have to do it by trial and error.”

They went down the hill and across country to the one piece of the boundary Andrew was sure of: the dip in the road where he had met old Jocelyn’s ghost. When they came to it, warmed by walking and cooled by the slight, moist wind, Aidan was thinking, This is the life! He felt
rather let down to find just an ordinary road with occasional cars rushing along it.

When there were no cars coming either way, Andrew led the way down the bank, to cross the road just beside the dip where the ghost had been. Going as slowly as he dared, in case someone was speeding, he wove up and down the slight rise in the road, until he had it fixed in his mind what the boundary felt like. The side where the field-of-care was felt like what he now thought of as normal: deep and slightly exciting. The other side—

“Oh!” Aidan exclaimed. “It’s all boring and dangerous this side! Like standing on a runway in the path of an aeroplane. Flat, but you’re lucky you’re not dead.”

“Right. We look for that feeling. Then we know we’re just outside the boundary,” Andrew said.

There was a gate in the hedge opposite. Beyond it was a field of nearly ripe wheat with the remains of a cart track running beside it.

“It looks,” Andrew said, “as if there was once a path here. If there’s a path all round the boundary, that will make it all much easier.”

It was not that easy. There
was
, or had been, a path most of the way, but whoever owned the land there had ploughed the path up, or taken out the hedges to make larger pastures, and in these places it was truly difficult.
Aidan, as he swerved from deep-and-exciting to flat-and-dangerous, hoped no one was watching them. They must look mad, the two of them carefully zigzagging across a wide green meadow. Andrew was more worried that some farmer would see them swerving about in the field of maize they came to next, madly rustling through and trying not to spoil the crop.

They came to a small river, where there had been a bridge. But it was broken, and the whole river was fiercely fenced off with barbed wire and thick bushy trees.

“It almost looks as if someone doesn’t want us to do this,” Aidan said.

“It does rather,” Andrew agreed, wondering if his grandfather had had enemies he did not know about. “Let’s eat the sandwiches.”

They ate lunch sitting on the bank of the river, further up into flat-and-dangerous, where there was a sandbank that Andrew thought might help them cross the water. While Aidan cheerfully munched his way through more than half the sandwiches, Andrew got out the map and marked in the boundary as they had found it so far. It was surprisingly regular, a steady curve that seemed to be the beginning of a large oval emanating from Melstone House near its centre. He was tempted to mark in the rest of the oval by guess and go home. But that felt like
cheating. He was, now he was doing it, quite convinced that his responsibility to the field-of-care meant that he had, personally, to walk every step of its boundary. All the same, he pencilled in where he
thought
it went on the map. It would be interesting to see if it did as he predicted.

They crossed the river by jumping from the sandbank and got rather wet doing it. Then they walked downriver to the broken bridge and went on from there.

On this stretch, the path must once have run between two hedges and then been forgotten. They now had to struggle through the middle of a hedge, where brambles tore at their clothes, branches whipped their faces, crab apples clouted their heads and nettles tried to sting through to their legs. The pair of them forced their way on for miles, hot and out of breath, while their hair filled with seeds, until Aidan’s new fleece no longer looked new and their boots were heavy with mud.

Then it was suddenly different. They staggered out into a proper lane with a fence on the other side of it. A notice fixed to the fence said:

“What does that mean?” Aidan gasped. He took his fleece off and shook seeds out of it.

“It’s where they exercise the racehorses,” Andrew said. He leaned on the fence and looked at the long stripes of green turf running from right to left across their way. “You know,” he said, “this boundary must be very old. I can see I’m supposed to look after half these gallops, but not the other half. They must run right across our boundary. That wouldn’t make sense unless the gallops are much newer.” He climbed the fence and swung over on to thick, thick cushiony grass. “Come on, Aidan. We’ll have to do a bit of trespassing.”

Aidan quailed. Suppose someone called the police…

“I’m sure it’s all right,” Andrew told him. “They only ride the horses out in the early morning, I know that. I’ll be surprised if we see anyone at all.”

He strode off, dropping divots of seed-filled mud from his boots as he went. Aidan followed him, cringingly. The green spaces were only divided from one another by lines of longer grass full of wild flowers. They spread out over the hillside roughly in the shape of a bunch of bananas, so open and exposed that Aidan expected the two of them to be seen and shouted at any second. And, in a way, he was right.

The boundary curved more abruptly here towards the
end of the village, making the narrow end of the oval Andrew had predicted. They traced it up a steep hill and slantwise down again, to where they could see red brick buildings that were obviously the Stables and the big house that went with those, down among trees in the distance. Here someone on a horse came thundering up the turf towards them. Aidan turned round and looked desperately about the empty grass for somewhere to hide. He wondered whether to throw himself flat.

But Andrew was waving cheerfully at the rider. The rider waved back and thudded happily up to them. The horse gave a protesting sort of snort as it was pulled up. Stashe, on its back, looking surprisingly glamorous in a hard hat, smiled down at them.

“Hello, you two,” she said. “Lost? Or just doing a bit of trespassing?”

“The latter,” Andrew said in his most professor-like way. “We’re tracing the boundary of my field-of-care.” He was terribly pleased to see Stashe so unexpectedly, but not quite sure how to show it.

“Oh!” said Stashe. “Is
that
what it is? It sort of plucks at you, doesn’t it? All in a slant across the gallops. If you need to walk every inch of it though, I’m afraid you’ve got problems. It goes right through Ronnie Stock’s house. Dad says Melstone Grange must have been built long after the
Brandons set up their field-of-care. But not to worry,” she said quickly, seeing how dismayed Andrew looked. “There’s race meetings all over today. Ronnie and Mrs Ronnie
and
the assistant trainer are all away at them. Meet me by the big gates and I’ll see what I can do. But I must give poor Flotsam a
bit
of exercise first!”

She shouted the last sentence over her shoulder as the horse galloped off. Andrew shrugged. “We might as well go on,” he said.

It became a little dreamlike for Aidan after that. They followed the boundary down the hill, then out of the gallops into a beautifully cared for garden, where it went through one corner of a rose bed. They had just reached tall iron gates that seemed to open on to the stable yard, when Stashe came galloping up on the other side of the garden wall. She hitched the horse to a ring in the wall there, gave it a lump of sugar and — Aidan winced — a kiss on its great nose, and slipped through the gate to join them.

“This way,” she said, and led them into the large, well-kept house. “Do you think you could carry those boots of yours?” she said as they went. “I don’t think Ronnie would appreciate all that mud on his carpets.”

So they traced the boundary in their socks. It was better like that, Aidan found. The boundary fizzed under his feet from beneath Ronnie Stock’s carpets. They were obviously
very expensive carpets. Aidan thought they were hideous — which, he decided,
proved
they must be good carpets, in the way that nasty things
were
, like white of egg being good for you. But it felt very queer to be following the fizz through someone’s majestic living room, and then into a big hall, resplendent with chandeliers and more nasty carpets. And then to come to a dead end in a downstairs cloakroom.

“Oh dear,” Aidan said, hard up against a toilet with blue flowers all over it.

“Use it while we’re here,” Andrew said. “The boundary must run under the wall. We’ll pick it up again outside.” He looked, rather irritably, at Stashe. She was in fits of laughter.