The Pinhoe Egg (8 page)

“I'm a designer really,” Irene explained. “I do book decorations and fabrics, tiles and wallpaper and so forth. I do surprisingly well with them.”

“But you're a witch too, aren't you?” Cat said. “These all have magic in.”

Irene went the pink of the wild roses in the design she was showing Cat. “Not exactly,” she said. “I always use real plants for my drawings, but I don't do anything else. The magic just comes out of them somehow. I've never thought of myself as a witch. My father, now, he could do real magic—I never knew quite what he did for a living, but Jason says he was a well-known enchanter—so maybe just a touch of it came down to me.”

Later still, Cat overheard Irene asking Millie why Cat was so mournful. He went away before he had to hear Millie explain about Syracuse.

“Huh!” Janet said, catching him on the schoolroom stairs. “In love with Irene, aren't you? Now you know how I feel.”

“I don't think I am,” Cat said. He thought he
probably wasn't. But it did strike him that when he was old enough to start being in love—pointless though that seemed—he would try to find someone not unlike Irene to be in love with. “She's just nice,” he said, and went on up to his room.

Irene's niceness was real, and active. She must have spoken to Jason about Cat. The next morning, Jason came to find Cat in the schoolroom. “Irene thinks you need taking out of yourself, young nine-lifer,” he said. “How do you feel about driving around with us this morning to look at a few houses for sale?”

“Won't I be in the way?” Cat asked, trying not to show how very much more cheerful this made him feel.

“She says she values your judgment,” Jason said. “She assures me, hand on heart, that you'll only have to look at a house to know if we'll be happy there or not. Would you say that's true?”

“I don't know,” Cat said. “It may be.”

“Come along, then,” Jason said. “It's a lovely day. It feels as if it's going to be important somehow.”

Jason was right about this, although perhaps not quite in the way he or Cat thought.

O
ver in Ulverscote, Nutcase was being a perfect nuisance to Marianne. Nothing seemed to persuade him that he was now living in Furze Cottage. Dad changed all the locks, and the catches on the windows, but Nutcase still managed to get out at least once a day. No one knew how he did it. People from all over the village kept arriving at Furze Cottage with Nutcase struggling in their arms. Nicola found him prowling in Ulverscote Wood. Aunt Joy sourly brought him back from the Post Office. Aunt Helen arrived at least twice with him from the pub, explaining that Nutcase had been at the food in the kitchen there. And Uncle Charles repeatedly knocked at the
door, carrying Nutcase squirming under one paint-splashed arm, saying that Nutcase had turned up in Woods House yet
again
.

“He must think he still lives there,” Uncle Charles said. “Probably looking for Gammer. Do try to keep him in. The wall's mended and I've nearly finished the painting. We put the back door in yesterday. He'll get locked in there when we leave and starve to death if you're not careful.”

Mum's opinion was that Nutcase should go and live with Gammer in the Dell. Marianne would have agreed, except that Gammer was always saying to her, “You'll look after Nutcase for me, won't you, Marianne?”

Gammer insisted that Marianne walk over to see her every day. Marianne had no idea why. Often, Gammer simply stared at the wall and said nothing except that she was to look after Nutcase. Sometimes she would lean forward and say things that made no sense, like “It's the best way to get pink tomatoes.” Most frequently Gammer just grumbled to herself. “They're out to get me,” she would say. “I have to get a blow in first. They have spies everywhere, you know. They watch and they wait. And of course they have fangs and
terrible teeth. The best way is to drain the spirit out of them.”

Marianne grew to hate these visits. She could not understand how Aunt Dinah put up with these sinister grumbles of Gammer's. Aunt Dinah said cheerfully, “It's just her way, poor old thing. She's no idea what she's saying.”

Nutcase must have learned the way to the Dell by following Marianne. He turned up there one day just after Marianne had left and got in among Aunt Dinah's day-old chicks. The slaughter he worked there was horrific. Uncle Isaac arrived at Furze Cottage, as Marianne was setting off to look for Nutcase, and threw Nutcase indoors so hard and far that Nutcase hit the kitchen sink, right at the other end of the house.

“Dinah's in tears,” he said. “There's barely twenty chicks left out of the hundred. If that cat gets near the Dell one more time, I'll kill him. Wring his neck. I warn you.” And he slammed the front door and stalked away.

Mum and Marianne watched Nutcase pick himself up and lick his whiskers in a thoroughly satisfied way. “There's no way he can go and live with Gammer after
this
,” Mum said,
sighing. “
Do
try to keep him in, Marianne.”

But Marianne couldn't. She doubted if anyone could. She tried putting twelve different confinement spells on Nutcase, but Nutcase seemed as immune to magic as he was to locks and bolts, and he kept getting out. The most Marianne could manage was a weak and simple directional spell that told her which way Nutcase had gone
this
time. If he had set off in any way that led toward the Dell, Marianne ran. Uncle Isaac very seldom made threats, but when he did he meant them. Marianne could not bear to think of Nutcase with his neck wrung, like a dead chicken.

Each time she found Nutcase was missing, Marianne's heart sank. That particular morning, when she got back from another useless visit to Gammer and found that Nutcase had vanished yet again, she hastened to work her weak spell and did not feel comfortable until she had spun the kitchen knife three separate times and it had pointed uphill toward Woods House whenever it stopped.

That's a relief! she thought. But it's not fair! I never get any time to
myself
.

Upstairs, hidden in Marianne's heart-shaped desk, her story about the lovely Princess Irene was still hardly begun. She had made some headway. She knew what Princess Irene looked like now. But then she had to think of a Prince who was good enough for her and, with all these interruptions, she wondered if she ever would.

As she set off uphill to Woods House, Marianne thought about her story. Princess Irene had a pale Egyptian sort of profile, massive clusters of dark curls and fabulous almond-shaped blue eyes. Her favorite dress was made of delicate crinkly silk, printed all over with big blue irises that matched her eyes. Marianne was pleased about that dress. It was not your usual princess wear. But she could not for the life of her visualize a suitable Prince.

Typically, her thoughts were interrupted all the way up the street. Nicola leaned out of a window to shout, “Nutcase went that way, Marianne!” and point uphill.

Marianne's cousin Ron rode downhill on his bike, calling, “Your cat's just gone in the pub!”

And when Marianne came level with the Pinhoe Arms, her cousin Jim came out of the yard
to say, “That cat of yours was in our larder. Our mum chased him off into the churchyard.”

In the churchyard, the Reverend Pinhoe met Marianne, saying, “Nutcase seems to have gone home to Woods House again, I'm afraid. I saw him jump off my wall into the garden there.”

“Thanks,” Marianne said, and hastened on toward the decrepit old gates of Woods House.

The house was all locked up by this time. Uncle Simeon and Uncle Charles had repaired the damage and gone on to other work, leaving the windows bolted and the doors sealed. Nutcase could not have gotten inside. Marianne gloomily searched all his favorite haunts in the garden instead. She wanted simply to go away. But then Nutcase might take it into his head to go down to the Dell by the back way, beside the fields, where Uncle Isaac would fulfill his threat.

Nutcase was not among the bushy, overgrown near-trees of the beech hedge. He was not sunning himself in the hayfield of the lawn, nor on the wall that hid the jungle of kitchen garden. He was not in the broken cucumber frame, or hiding in the garden shed. Nor was he lurking under the mass of green goosegrass that hid the gooseberry
bushes by the back fence. Big, pale gooseberries lurked there instead. They had reached the stage when they were almost sweet. Marianne gathered a few and ate them while she went to inspect Old Gaffer's herb bed beside the house. This had once been the most lovingly tended part of the gardens, but it was now full of thistles and tired elderly plants struggling among clumps of grass. Nutcase often liked to bask in the bare patches here, usually beside the catmint.

He was not there either.

Marianne looked up and around, terribly afraid that Nutcase was now on his way to the Dell, and saw that the door to the conservatory was standing ajar.

“That's a relief—Oh,
bother
!” she said. Nutcase had almost certainly gone indoors. Now she had to search the house too.

She shoved the murky glass door wider and marched in over the dingy coconut matting on the floor. The massed Pinhoes had forgotten to clear the conservatory. Marianne marched past broken wicker chairs and dead trees in large pots and on down the passage to the hall.

There were four people in the hall—no, five.
Great-Uncle Lester was just letting himself in through the front door. One of the other people was Great-Uncle Edgar in his tweed hat, looking unusually flustered and surprised. And as for the others—! Marianne stood there, charmed. There stood her Princess Irene, almost exactly, in her floating dress with the big irises printed on it to match her eyes. As she was a human lady and not part of Marianne's imagination, she was not quite as Marianne had thought. No one had the masses of hair that Marianne had dreamed up. But this Irene's hair
was
dark, though it was wavy rather than curly, and she had the right slender figure and exactly the right pale Egyptian profile. It was amazing.

Beside the Princess was a fair and cheerful young man with a twinkly sort of look to him that Marianne immediately took to. He was wearing a jaunty blazer and very smart, beautifully creased pale trousers, which struck Marianne as the sort of things a prince might put on for casual wear. He's just the Prince I ought to have given her! she thought.

There was a boy with them, who had that slightly deadened expression Joe often had when
he was with adults he didn't like. Marianne concluded that he didn't care for Great-Uncle Edgar, just like Joe. Since the boy was fair haired, Marianne supposed he must be the son of Irene and her Prince. Obviously the story had moved on a few years. Irene and her Prince were in the middle of living happily ever after and looking for a house to do it in.

Marianne walked toward them, smiling at this thought. As she did so, the boy said, “
This
one's the right house.”

Irene turned toward him anxiously. “Are you quite sure, Cat? It's awfully run-down.”

Cat was sure. They had visited two shockers, one of them damp and the other where the ceilings pressed down, like despair, on your mind. And then they had gone to look at what was advertised as a small castle, because Irene had hoped it would have a tower room like Cat's, only it had had no roof. This one felt—Well, Cat had been confused for a moment, when the bulky man with a hat like a tweed flowerpot had come striding up to them booming, “Good
morning
. I'm Edgar Pinhoe. Real estate agent, you know.” This man had looked at Jason and Irene as if they were
two lower beings—and they did seem sort of frail beside Edgar—and Jason had looked quite dashed. But Irene had laughed and held out her hand.

“How extraordinary!” she said. “My maiden name was Pinhoe.”

Edgar Pinhoe was astonished and dismayed. He stepped backward from Irene. “Pinhoe, Pinhoe?” he said. “I had instructions to sell this house to a Pinhoe if possible.” Upon this, he remembered his manners and shook Irene's hand as if he were afraid it would burn him, and dropped his superior, pitying look entirely. Cat realized that the man had been using some kind of domination spell on them up to then. Once it was gone, Cat was free to think about the house.

Jason said, “You might do that—sell it to a Pinhoe. My wife is the one with the money, not me.”

While he was speaking, Cat was feeling the shape of the house with his mind. It was all big, square, airy rooms, lots of them, and though it echoed with emptiness and neglect, underneath that it was warm and happy and eager to be lived in again. Over many, many years, people had
lived here who were friendly and full of power—special people—and the house wanted to be full of such people again. It was glad to see Irene and Jason.

Cat let them know it was the right house at once. Then he saw the girl walking up to them, as glad to see them as the house was. She was wearing villager sort of clothes, with the pinafore over them to keep them clean, the way most country girls did, but Cat did not think of her as a country girl because she had such very strong magic. Cat noticed the magic particularly, being used to Julia with her medium-sized magic and Janet with almost none at all. It seemed to blaze off this girl. He wondered who she was.

Edgar Pinhoe saw her. “Not now, Marianne,” he said. “I'm busy with prospective buyers. Run along home, there's a good girl.” His domination spell was back, aimed at Marianne. Cat wondered what good Edgar Pinhoe thought it would do, when his magic was only about warlock level and this girl's was pretty well as strong as Millie's. And Millie, of course, was an enchantress.

Sure enough, the domination bounced off Marianne. Cat was not sure she even noticed it.
“I'm looking for Nutcase, Uncle Edgar,” she said. “I think he got in through the conservatory door. It was open.”

“Of course it was open. I unlocked it so that these good people could look round the garden,” Edgar Pinhoe said irritably. “Never mind your wretched cat. Go home.”

Here the pinstriped man who had just come in said, in a fussy, nervous way, “Please, Marianne. You've no right to come into this house now, you know.”

Marianne's wide brown eyes turned to him, steady and puzzled. “Of course I've got the right, Uncle Lester. I know Gammer lived here, but the house belongs to my dad.” A very good idea struck her. She turned to Jason and Irene. She was longing to get to know them. “Can I help show you round? If we go into all the rooms, we're bound to find Nutcase somewhere. He used to live here with Gammer, you see, and he keeps coming back.”

“When he's not slaughtering day-old chicks,” Great-Uncle Lester murmured.

He was obviously about to say no, but Irene smiled and interrupted him before he could. “Of
course you can help show us round, my dear. Someone who knows the house would be really useful.”

“You'll know where the roof leaks and so on,” Jason said.

Both older men looked shocked. “I assure you this house is absolutely sound,” Edgar said. He added, with a slightly defiant look at Uncle Lester, “Shall we start with the kitchen, then?”

They all went along to the kitchen. It was newly painted, and Cat could see new cupboards down the far end. Irene stood looking down the length of the huge scrubbed table, which seemed to have been carefully mended and planed smooth at her end. “This is lovely and light,” she said. “And so much space. This table's enormous, and it still doesn't nearly fill the room. I can see Jane James loving it. We'd need to put in a new stove for her, though.”

She went over to the old black boiler and cautiously took up one of its rusty lids, shaking her head and sprinkling soot down her iris-patterned dress. Marianne knew that Gammer's old cooker was now stored in the shed on the Hopton road. She had never seen that stove used since the old
days before Gaffer died. She shook her head too and made her way down the kitchen, opening all the cabinets to make sure that Nutcase had not gotten himself shut inside one, and then looking into the pantry. Nutcase was not there either.