The Pinhoe Egg (17 page)

He came back to himself to find Irene hugging him. “You're very quiet, Cat. Is something wrong?” she asked. There were scents around Cat of spice and flowers. Irene always smelled lovely.

“I shall miss you,” Cat said truthfully. “May I come and visit you later today, or will you be too busy?”

“Oh, what a nice idea!” Irene said. “Be our first visitor, Cat. I'm longing to show off what we've done to the house. But make it after midday so that we can unpack a little first.”

Cat grinned a trifle anxiously as he shook hands with Jason. How soon would Joss notice that missing horseshoe? He hadn't yet. Perhaps the shoe hadn't really come off. It was often quite hard to tell if magic had worked or not.

He came to the door with everyone else and watched as Jason and Irene climbed into the small blue car. They could not have fitted Cat into it
anyway. There was luggage strapped all over it and more piled into the backseat, with Jason's herb boxes on top of that. They drove off in a waft of blue smoke, herb scent, and Irene scent, waving joyously as they vanished down the drive.

“I think they'll be very happy,” Millie said. “And I'm longing to see their house. I think I shall drive over there as soon as they're settled in.”

She won't get there, Cat thought, without a Pinhoe to take her. I wonder what will happen then. He was edging away as he thought, wondering more about that horseshoe than about Millie. As soon as no one was looking at him, he turned and ran for the stables. It was nowhere near eleven yet, but he had to know.

He got there just as Joss was leading the big brown horse out through the stableyard gate. “Cast a shoe,” Joss called over his shoulder to Cat. “I have to get him down to the blacksmith before we can ride out. So don't hold your breath. We could be gone hours if the forge is busy. I'll send someone to tell you when I'm back. All right?”

“All right,” Cat said, trying not to look as relieved and joyful as he felt.

M
arianne was having even more difficulty getting away than Cat was. She was in such disgrace at home that Mum was making her do all sorts of chores in order to keep Marianne under her eye.

“I'm not having you going round spreading any more tales,” Mum said. “If you've cleaned your room, you can come and sort these herbs and worts for me now. Throw out any leaves and berries that look manky. Then put worts in this bowl and just the fresh tips of the leaves in that one. And I want it done right, Marianne.”

As if I was four years old again! Marianne thought. I
know
how to sort herbs, Mum! It looked as if she was
never
going to get out of the
house today. The only good thing about today was that, thanks to Mum's lotions, Marianne's bruises and scrapes had almost disappeared in the night. But what was the good of that when she was a prisoner? Marianne sighed as she spread the fresh green bundles of plants apart on the table. Nutcase jumped up beside her and rubbed sympathetically against her arm. Marianne looked at him. Now
there
was an idea. If she could persuade Nutcase to wander off again…

“Go and visit Woods House, Nutcase,” she whispered to him. “Why don't you? You
like
going there. Go on. As a favor to me? Please?”

Nutcase moved his ears and twitched his tail and stayed sitting on the table. But I live
here
now, he seemed to be saying.

“Oh, I
know
you do, but pay a visit to Woods House anyway,” Marianne said. She opened the side window and put Nutcase out through it.

Two minutes later, Nutcase came in through the back door with Mum when she brought in an armful of plants and unloaded them in the sink to be cleaned. He jumped onto the drainboard and gave Marianne a smug look.

As soon as Mum had gone out into the garden again, Marianne picked Nutcase up and carried him through the house to the front door. She opened the door and dumped him on the path outside. “Go to Woods House!” she whispered fiercely to him.

Nutcase's reply was to sit in the middle of the tiny front lawn, stick a leg up, and wash. Marianne shut the front door, hoping he would leave when he was ready.

Five minutes later, Nutcase came in through the back door again, with Mum and another bundle of herbs.

This is
hopeless
! Marianne thought, while Mum ran water in the sink. I shall just have to walk off without an excuse and get into worse trouble than ever. Wasn't there
any
way she could tempt Nutcase to Woods House? Could she do something like the bacon spell she had tempted him with, the time she gave Cat the egg? But I can't do that from
here
, she thought, right at the other end of the village. Or could she? When she looked at Woods House in a special, witchy way, she could feel that the bacon spell was still there. It only needed reactivating. But could she manage
to start it up again from here, strongly enough to tempt Nutcase all the way from Furze Cottage? No, I'm not strong enough, she thought.

But Cat had said she
was
. He had said she had nearly enchanter-strength magic but just didn't trust herself. He had made her bold enough to get into this trouble. Surely she could be bold enough to get herself out of it.

All right, she said to herself. I'll try.

Marianne nipped the last fresh leaf tips into the bowl and concentrated. And concentrated. And trusted herself and concentrated some more. It was odd. She felt as if each new push she gave herself spread her mind out, wider, and then wider still, until she almost seemed to be hovering beside the faded remains of the bacon spell in the hall of Woods House. She gave it a flip and brought it to life again, and then a further flip to make it stronger—or she hoped she did. It was so hard to tell for sure.

But look at Nutcase!

Nutcase's head went up and then went up farther, until he was nose upward, sniffing. Marianne watched him, hardly daring to breathe. Nutcase gave himself a shake and got up and stretched,
front legs first, then back legs. Then, to Marianne's acute amazement, Nutcase really did walk through the kitchen wall. He trod toward the wall, steadily and deliberately, but when his head touched the whitewashed bricks, he didn't stop. He didn't even slow down. He walked on. His head disappeared into the wall, then his shoulder ruff, then most of his body, until he was just a pair of black, walking hind legs and a tail. The legs walked out of sight and left only the bushy, waving tail. Then there was only the tip of the tail, which vanished with a jerk, as if Nutcase had given a pull to fetch it through. Marianne was left staring at the bricks of the wall. There was no sign of the place where Nutcase had gone through. Well, well! she thought.

She gave Nutcase ten minutes to get on his way. Then, when Mum came in from the garden again, she said, “Mum, have you got Nutcase?” She was surprised how natural she sounded.

Mum said, “No. I thought he was with you. Oh—
bother
!”

They searched the house as they always did, then Dolly's stall, because Dolly and Nutcase seemed to have struck up a friendship, and then
they went to Dad's work shed and asked if Nutcase was there. Of course Nutcase was in none of these places. Mum said, “Better go after him quick, Marianne. If he gets down to the Dell again and your uncle Isaac finds him, there'll be hell to pay. Hurry. Get a wiggle on, girl!”

Marianne shot out of Furze Cottage, delighted.

At the top of Furze Lane, the men building the Post Office wall all pointed uphill with their thumbs, grinning. “Off again. Went that way.”

It was a relief that Nutcase had not suddenly decided to visit the Dell instead. Marianne turned uphill. There was no Nicola to shout to her where Nutcase had gone, but Nicola's mum was standing in her doorway. She pointed uphill and nodded to Marianne.

Marianne hovered backward on one foot for a second. “How's Nicola?”

Nicola's mother put one hand out and made swaying motions with it. “We're hoping.”

“Me too!” Marianne said, and went on, past the grocer, past the Pinhoe Arms and then the church.

The big gates to Woods House, when she came to them, seemed really strange, newly mended,
newly painted, and shut. Marianne had never known those gates to be shut since Gaffer died. It felt odd to have to open one half of the gates and slip round it into the driveway. The overgrown bushes there seemed to have been cut back a bit. They gave Marianne a sight of the front door long before she was used to seeing it. A small, battered blue car was parked outside.

Oh, they're here! Marianne thought. She suddenly felt a total trespasser. This was not one of the family houses anymore. She had had no business arranging to meet Cat here. And she would have to knock at the front door—which was now painted a smooth olive green—and ask for Nutcase.

Marianne found she could not face doing this. She sheered away round the house into the garden, hoping Nutcase had gone to sun himself there. She could always say, quite truthfully, that she was looking for Gammer's cat if anyone asked, and it was always possible that Cat would see her out of one of the windows—always supposing Cat was here, of course.

The garden was transformed.

Marianne stood for a moment in amazement,
looking from the smoothly trimmed square shape of the beech hedge to the lawn that was almost a lawn again. Someone had scythed and then mowed the long grass. It still had a stubbly gray look, but green was pushing through in emerald lines and ovals, showing where there had once been flower beds. Marianne went along the trim hedge, pretending to look into it for Nutcase, and marveling. The gooseberry bushes at the end, where the wood began, had been cleared and pruned, along with the old lilac trees behind them. No sign of Nutcase there. But there had been currant bushes there all these years, and Marianne had never known, and a stand of raspberry canes that still had raspberries on them. When she turned alongside the canes—keeping to the edges just like a cat might—she saw that the long flower bed against the wall that hid the vegetable garden actually had flowers in it now: long hollyhocks, asters, dahlias, and montbretia mostly at this time of year, but enough to make it look like a flower bed again.

She slipped guiltily round the end of the wall and found that the vegetable garden was most transformed of all. It was like Uncle Isaac's
professional market garden. Everything was in neat rows in moist black earth, pale lettuces, frilly carrots, spiky onions. A lot of the beds were plain black earth with string stretched along, where seeds had not yet come up. And—Marianne stared around—she had not known that the walls had roses trained along them. They had always seemed a mass of green creeper. But this had been pared away and the roses tied back, and they were just now coming into bloom, red and peach colored and yellow and white, as if it were June, not nearly September.

Marianne crunched her way timidly down a newly cindered path toward the house. I'm looking for my cat when somebody asks. When she reached the archway beside the conservatory, she peered cautiously through.

The little man energetically digging in Old Gaffer's herb patch drove his spade to a standstill beside the tall mugwort and smiled at her. “Made a bit of a change here,” he remarked to her. “How do you like it?”

Marianne could not help staring at him, even while she was smiling back. He was so small, so bandy, and so brown. His hair grew in tufts round
his bald head and his wrinkly face had two tufts of beard on it, just under his large ears. If there were such things as gnomes, Marianne thought, she would be sure he was one. But his smile was beaming, friendly, and full of pride in his gardening. Her own smile enlarged to beaming in reply. “You've done so
much
! In no time at all!”

“It was the dream of my life,” he said, “to work in a country garden. Mistress Irene, bless her, promised me that I should, and she kept her promise as you see. I've hardly started yet. August's not the best time to dig and sow, but I reckon that if I can get it all in good heart by the autumn, then when spring comes, I can
really
begin. They call me Mr. Adams, by the way. And you are?”

“Marianne Pinhoe,” said Marianne.

“Oh,” said Mr. Adams, “then you're quite a personage around here, as I read it.”

Marianne made a face. “Not so's you'd notice. I—er—came looking for my cat.”

“Nutcase,” said Mr. Adams. “In the house. He went past me into the conservatory five minutes ago. Before you go in, come and look how your grandfather's herb bed's coming along. It went
against the grain with me to leave it till last, when it's so near the house, but I had to wait for Mr. Yeldham to come and tell me which were the weeds. Awful lot of strange plants here.”

He beckoned to Marianne so imperiously that she came nervously out from the archway, to find the big plot looking almost as she remembered it from Gaffer's time: low cushions of plants round the edges, tall gangly ones near the middle, and medium-sized ones in between, each one carefully placed in sun or shade as it needed, and growing in different-colored earths that were right for them. The spicy whiffs of scent made her throat ache, remembering her Old Gaffer.

She smiled down at Mr. Adams. She was a lot taller than he was. “You've made this almost how it should be, Mr. Adams. It's wonderful.”

“For my pleasure,” he said. “And to be worthy of Princess Irene.”

Thoroughly surprised, Marianne said, “I call her that too!”

 

Cat rode quite slowly along the river path, so that Syracuse waltzed and bounced, wanting to go faster. Even after galloping round the paddock
before they set out, Syracuse was still bored by walking.

They were going the same way that the river flowed, and Cat kept firmly remembering this. The water had already tried to deceive him twice by seeming to flow the other way. Last spring, when Mr. Saunders had been teaching him how you used witch sight, Cat had been rather bored. It had seemed so obvious. Now he was glad of those lessons. The lessons had not been so much about how you saw things truthfully when they were bespelled—Cat could do that standing on his head—but about how to
keep
seeing them when other spells were trying to distract you. Mr. Saunders, being the keen, fierce kind of teacher he was, had invented a dozen fiendish ways to take Cat's mind off what he was seeing. Cat had hated it. But now it was paying off.

Cat kept that river firmly under his witch sight and did not allow it to get away once. He did not look at the surrounding valley at all. Now he was warned, he could feel it swirling about, trying to suggest he was going the wrong way.

Thanks to Syracuse, he could attend to the valley by smelling it instead of looking. The scents of
water, rushes, willows, and the tall meadows had changed quite a lot in the short time since he had last come this way with Joss. The spiciness was damper, sadder, and smokier and smelled of summer giving way to autumn. Cat surprised himself by thinking that a year was really a short time. Things changed so
fast
. Which was silly, he thought, almost getting distracted, because you could do so much in a year.

Mr. Farleigh was suddenly standing in front of them in the path.

He was there so abruptly and unexpectedly—and so solidly—that Syracuse was startled into trying to rear. There was a difficult few seconds when Cat nearly fell off and Syracuse's back hooves walked off the path and squelched among the rushes. Cat managed to keep himself in the saddle and Syracuse right way up, but only with a frenzy of magic and of spells he had no idea he knew. Mr. Farleigh watched his struggles sarcastically.

“I told you not to come here,” he said, as soon as Syracuse's front hooves were on the ground again.

Cat was quite angry by then. It was an unusual
experience for him. Up to now, when things happened that would have made most people angry, Cat had just felt bewildered. But now, he faced Mr. Farleigh's pale-eyed glare and was surprised to find himself filled with real fury. The man could have hurt Syracuse. “This is a public bridle way,” he said. “You've no right to tell me not to use it.”