The Pinhoe Egg (21 page)

“Oh, I wish it hadn't gone!” one of Marianne's smaller cousins wailed. “I wanted a go in it!”

Marianne shuddered. The thing looked even chancier than riding Mum's broomstick at night. She watched the Castle car stop by the Pinhoe Arms. It had all four tires thickly coated in spells against the broken pieces of glass in the road. Clever, she thought. Uncle Lester's car had three flat tires and several bicycles sticking out from underneath it. Millie got out from the driver's seat and hurried toward Chrestomanci, horrified at the state he was in. Jason sprang out from the other side. The back door opened to let out Joss Callow, to Marianne's surprise. Joss turned to help out Irene, who was holding Nutcase in her arms.

I think Nutcase really is going back to Woods House to live, Marianne thought, not sure whether she was sad or relieved. And really, some
of my uncles are so
slow
! she added to herself, as Uncle Cedric and Aunt Polly clopped massively downhill and Uncle Simeon came thundering uphill in his builder's van, both of them far too late to do any good.

There was almost a quiet moment after this, while Chrestomanci conferred quickly with Jason and Millie and Millie seemed to be trying to patch Chrestomanci up. Marianne looked up at the sign on the Pinhoe Arms that Uncle Charles had painted the year she was born. The unicorn was definitely Molly, and the griffin facing her was, equally definitely, Klartch's mother. Uncle Charles had
known
. Then why had he always pretended that things like unicorns and griffins didn't exist?

And where was Gaffer? Marianne wondered anxiously. He said he would come.

Chrestomanci looked round, checking up on everybody. “I need all the principals in this matter in the inn yard with me now,” he said.

The words caught Cat as he was halfway down the meadow. Chrestomanci was using Performative Speech, the enchanters' magic Cat had been wrestling with after he put Joe on the ceiling. He recognized it as he arrived with a jolt in the inn
yard with Syracuse. Klartch, draped across the saddle, was shot off backward as Syracuse made his usual objections to people using magic on him. Cat was carried off his feet for a moment, and it was Marianne who rescued Klartch with a quick levitation spell, and lowered him gently to the obbles.

“Thanks!” Cat gasped, and then had to turn the other way as, to his dismay, Joss Callow dodged up and grabbed Syracuse from the other side.

“I'll walk him back home for you if you like,” Joss said breathlessly, searching in his pocket for a peppermint.

Joss was not angry with him, Cat realized. Joss was extremely anxious to get away from here. Cat did not blame him. The people Joss spied
for
and the people Joss spied
on
were all here in the yard, and most of them were strong magic users.

“Thanks. Would you?” he said, and gave Syracuse over to Joss gladly, wishing he had the same excuse to leave. But Chrestomanci's eye was now on Cat, bright and vague. Cat looked back, appalled at all the blood on Chrestomanci and at how unwell Chrestomanci looked. He knew he should have stopped Mr. Farleigh firing that gun at all.

C
hrestomanci turned to have a word with Uncle Arthur, who had a black eye again. “Yes,” he said. “Find her something as much like a throne as you can. That may calm her down. And drinks all round on the Castle, if you please.” Cat could see Chrestomanci was feeling dreadful, but holding himself together by magic.

As Joss led Syracuse out of the inn yard, things settled down into a sort of open-air conference. Gammer Norah was given a mighty carved wooden chair from the Snug—where she sat and glared round aggressively—and sour Dorothea was given a smaller chair next to her. Various Farleigh cousins sat on barrels around them,
trying to look dignified. Cat and Marianne sat on crates with Klartch between them. Everyone else pulled around the weather-beaten benches and settles from beside the inn walls to sit in a rough circle, while Uncle Arthur hurried out again with a cushioned chair from the saloon bar for Chrestomanci. Chrestomanci sank into it gratefully.

Drinks began arriving then. Chris Pinhoe and Clare Callow came out with trays of mugs, followed by Aunt Helen and most of her boys with trays of glasses. But they were not the only ones giving out drinks. Cat saw a thin green nonhuman hand reach round Gammer Norah's chair to present her with a foaming mug.

“Not for me. I never drink anything but water,” Gammer Norah said, loftily pushing the mug aside.

The hand drew back so that it was out of Gammer Norah's sight, and the mug it held changed to a straight glass full of transparent liquid, which it held out to Gammer Norah again. A very quiet titter of laughter came from behind the chair as Gammer Norah seized the glass and took a hearty swig from it.

Cat was wondering what it really was in that glass, when two brownish purple hands pushed themselves between himself and Marianne, invitingly holding out glasses of something pink. Cat was going to take one, but Millie caught his eye and shook her head vigorously. “No, thank you,” Cat said politely.

Marianne looked at him and said, “No, thank you,” too. The hands drew back in a disappointed way. “Look what you did!” Marianne whispered to Cat. “They're
everywhere
!”

They were too, Cat realized, as he gratefully took a glass of real ginger beer from the tray Marianne's cousin John held out to him. The brownish purple hands were now offering what looked like beer to Uncle Charles and Marianne's dad. Marianne could not help giggling while she sipped her lemonade, when both men took the not-beer. Sour Dorothea was swigging from an enormous glass of not-water. At the gate of the yard, where a crowd of Pinhoes and Farleighs stood looking on, small half-seen shapes were flitting among legs and peering round skirts, and hands of strange colors were passing people glasses and mugs. Things that were almost like
squirrels skipped along the walls of the yard. Up on the inn roof someone invisible was playing a faint skirling tune behind one of the chimneys.

“Oh, well,” Cat said.

“I can't think what this Big Man thinks he's got to say to us,” Gammer Norah said to Dorothea, loudly and rudely. “
We
did nothing wrong. It was all those Pinhoes' fault.” She held out her empty glass. “More, please.” The green hand obligingly filled it with not-water again.

Chrestomanci watched it rather quizzically. “I am not,” he said, “in a very forgiving state of mind, Mrs.—er—Forelock. Your Gaffer did his best to shoot me this morning, when all I was doing was testing from the air the extent of your quite unwarranted misdirection spells. Let me make this clear to all of you: those spells are a misuse of magic that I am not prepared to treat lightly. It makes it worse that the fellow who shot at me—I presume to prevent me investigating—appears to be my own employee. My gamekeeper.” He turned to Millie in a bewildered way. “Why do we need a gamekeeper, do you know? Nobody at the Castle shoots birds.”

“Of course not,” Millie said, quickly taking up
her cue. “According to the records, the last people to go shooting were wizards on the staff of Benjamin Allworthy, nearly two hundred years ago. But the records show that, when the next Chrestomanci took over, everyone quite unaccountably forgot to dismiss Mr. Farleigh.”

Jason leaned forward. “More than that,” he said. “They increased his salary. You must be quite a wealthy lady these days, Mrs. Farleigh.”

Gammer Norah tossed her head, causing her bun to unroll even further. “How should I know? I'm only his wife, and his third wife at that, I'd have you know.” She pounded her broomstick on the cobbles of the yard. “None of that alters the fact that the poor man's turned into a stone tree! I want justice! From these Pinhoes here!” Her long eyes narrowed, and she glared along the row of Marianne's uncles and aunts.

All of them glared back. Uncle Arthur said, “We. Did. Not. Do. It. Got that, Gammer Norah?”

“We wouldn't know how,” Dad added in his pacific way. “We're peaceful in our craft.” He looked down and noticed the saw he was still carrying and became very embarrassed. He bent
the saw about, boing
dwang
. “We always cooperated,” he said. “We've lent Gaffer Farleigh our strength for the misdirections for eight years now. We lent him strength for one thing or another as long as I've been alive.”

“Yes, and what did your Gaffer
do
with it? That's what
I
want to know!” Marianne's mother asked, leaning forward fiercely. “If you ask me, he had the whole countryside under his thumb, doing what
he
wanted. And now I hear he's been at it for nearly two hundred years! Using
our
craft to lengthen his days, wasn't he?”

“Go it, Cecily!” Uncle Charles murmured.

“Never mind that!” Gammer Norah shouted, pounding with her broom again. “He's still unlawfully turned to stone! If you didn't do it, who
did
? Was it
you
?” she demanded, turning her long-eyed glare on Chrestomanci.

“I wonder what you mean by ‘unlawfully,' Mrs. Farlook,” Chrestomanci told her. “The man tried to kill me. But it was not my doing. When one has just been shot, it is very hard to do anything, let alone create statues.” He gazed around the inn yard in his vaguest way. “If the person who did it is here, perhaps he would stand up.”

Cat felt Chrestomanci using Performative Speech again and found himself standing up. His stomach felt as if it was dropping out of his body, ginger beer and all. “It was me, Mrs. Farleigh,” he said. His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “I—I was riding by the river.” The frightening thing was not so much that they were all witches here. It was the way they were all people he didn't know, gazing at him in accusing amazement. But behind Gammer Norah's chair, green and purple-brown hands were punching the air in joy. The ones like squirrels were bounding about on the walls. And behind the inn chimneys, the music changed to loud, glad, and triumphant. This helped Cat a great deal. He swallowed and went on, “I wasn't quick enough to stop him firing at the flying machine—I'm sorry. But after that he was going to shoot Klartch, then Syracuse, then me. It was the only way I could manage to stop him.”

“
You
?” said Gammer Norah, leaning incredulously on her broom. “A little skinny child like
you
? Are you lying to me?”

“Deep in evil,” Dorothea said. “They're all like that.”

“I was born with nine lives,” Cat explained.

“Oh, you're
that
one, are you?” Gammer Norah said venemously. She was going to hurl a spell at him, Cat knew she was. But Millie made a small, quick gesture and Gammer Norah's attention somehow switched back to the Pinhoes. “I don't see any of
you
looking very sorry!” she yelled at them.

This was true. Grins were spreading across most of the Pinhoe faces. Cat sat down again, hugely relieved, and gave Klartch's head a comforting rub.

Gammer Norah screamed, “And what about the rest of it? Eh? What about the rest?”

“What rest is this?” Chrestomanci asked politely.

“The frogs, the ill-wishing, the fleas, the nits, the ants in all our cupboards!” Gammer Norah yelled, pounding with her broomstick. “Deny all that
if
you can! Every time we sent a plague back on you, you did another. We sent you whooping cough, we sent you smallpox, but you still didn't stop!”

“Bosh. We never sent you anything,” Uncle Richard said.

“It was
you
sent
us
frogs,” Uncle Charles added. “Or is
your
mind going now?”

Cat felt his face grow bright and hot as he remembered sending those frogs away from Mr. Vastion's surgery. He was wondering whether to stand up and confess again, when Marianne spoke up, loudly and clearly. “I'm afraid it was Gammer Pinhoe sending all those things on her own, Mrs. Farleigh.”

Cat realized she was a lot braver than he was. She was the instant target of every Pinhoe there. The aunts glared at her, even more fiercely than they had glared at Gammer Norah. The uncles looked either contemptuous or reproachful. Dad said warningly, “I
told
you not to spread stories, Marianne!”

Mum added, “How
could
you, Marianne? You
know
how poorly Gammer is.”

And from the back, Great-Uncle Edgar boomed, “Now that's enough of that, child!”

Marianne went pale, but she managed to say, “It
is
true.”

“Yes,” Chrestomanci agreed. “It
is
true. We at the Castle have been checking up on all of you rather seriously for the last few weeks. Ever since
young Eric here pointed out to me the misdirection spells, in fact, we have had you under observation. We noted that an old lady called Edith Pinhoe was sending hostile magics to Helm St. Mary, Uphelm, and various other villages nearby, and we were preparing to take steps.”

“Though we did wonder why none of you tried to stop her,” Millie put in. “But it's fairly clear to me now that she must have bespelled all of you as well.” She smiled kindly at Marianne. “Except you, my dear.”

While the Pinhoes were turning to one another, doubtful and horrified, Gammer Norah kept beating with her broomstick. “I want justice!” she bellowed. “Plagues and stone trees! I want justice for both! I want—” She broke off with a gurgle as a green hand clapped itself over her mouth. A purple-brown hand firmly took away her broomstick.

Cat thought that most people there decided that Chrestomanci had shut her up. He was fairly sure only a few of them could see the hidden folks. But Chrestomanci could.

Chrestomanci swallowed a slight grin and said, “Presently, Mrs. Farago, although you may not
like the justice when you have it. There are a few serious questions I have to ask first. The most important of these concerns the
other
Gaffer in the case, the Mr. Ezekiel Pinhoe who was said to be dead eight years ago. Now a short while ago, I visited Ulverscote—”

“But you couldn't!” quite a number of Pinhoes protested. “You're not a Pinhoe.”

“I took the precaution of getting a lift with Mr. and Mrs. Yeldham here,” Chrestomanci said. “As you may know, Mrs. Yeldham was born a Pinhoe.” Beside him, Irene colored up and bent over Nutcase on her knee, as if she were not sure that being a Pinhoe was altogether a good thing. Chrestomanci looked over to where the Reverend Pinhoe was quietly sipping lemonade over by the inn door. “I called on your vicar—Perhaps you could explain, Reverend.”

Oh, it was
him
! Marianne thought. The day I met the Farleigh girls. He was in the churchyard.

The Reverend Pinhoe looked utterly flustered and extremely unhappy. “Well, yes. It is a most terrible thing,” he said, “but most impressive magic, I must admit. But appalling, quite appalling all the same.” He took an agitated gulp
of lemonade. “Chrestomanci asked me to show him Elijah Pinhoe's grave, you see. I saw no harm in that, of course, and conducted him to the corner of the church where the grave was—is, I mean. Chrestomanci then most politely asked my permission to work a little magic there. As I saw no harm in that, I naturally agreed. And—” The vicar took another agitated gulp from his glass. “You can judge my astonishment,” he said, “when Chrestomanci caused the coffin to emerge from the grave—without, I hasten to say, disturbing a blade of grass or any of the flowers you Pinhoe ladies so regularly place there—and then, to my further surprise, caused the coffin to open, without disturbing so much as a screw.”

The Reverend Pinhoe tried to take another gulp from his glass and discovered it was empty. “Oh, please—” he said. A blue-green hand emerged from behind the rain barrel beside him and passed him a full glass. The Reverend Pinhoe surveyed it dubiously, then took a sip and nodded.

“I thank you,” he said. “I think. Anyway, I regret to have to inform you that the coffin contained nothing but a large wooden post and three bags of extremely moldy chaff. Gaffer Pinhoe was
not inside it.” He took another sip from his new glass and turned a little pink. “It was a great shock to me,” he said.

It was a great shock to some of the aunts too. Aunt Helen and Great-Aunt Sue turned to each other and gaped. Aunt Joy said, “You mean someone
stole
him? After all we spent on flowers!”

Chrestomanci was looking vaguely around the yard. Cat knew he was checking to see who was surprised by the news and who was not. The Farleighs looked a little puzzled but not at all surprised. Most of the Pinhoe cousins were as surprised as Aunt Joy was and frowned at one another, mystified. But to Marianne's dismay, none of her uncles turned a hair, though Uncle Isaac tutted and tried to pretend he was upset. Dad took it calmest of all. Oh, dear! she thought sadly.

“A very strange thing,” Chrestomanci said. Cat could feel him using Performative Speech again. “Now who can explain this odd occurrence?”