скачать книгу бесплатно
Tarquin had seen Mr Stock coming. He opened the door almost at once, holding himself up on one crutch. “Come in, Stockie, come in!”
Mr Stock entered, saying, “Good to see you, Tark. How’s things?”
To this, Tarquin replied, “I’d just put a pot of tea on the table. Isn’t that lucky now?” He turned, swinging himself on both crutches into the main room, all the space downstairs bar the kitchen.
Two cups on the round table by the windows, Mr Stock noticed. “Expecting my niece home, were you?”
“No, no, she’s not due yet. Expecting you,” Tarquin replied, puffing a bit as he got himself and his crutches arranged in the chair behind the teapot.
Joke? Or did Tarquin really have the Sight? Mr Stock wondered, getting out of his boots. Tarquin had nice carpets. Not to his taste, these dark Oriental things, but expensive. Besides, the poor fellow had a job and a half with a vacuum cleaner. Mr Stock had seen him, balanced on one crutch, with his stump of a leg propped over a chair, scraping and pushing for dear life. It didn’t do to tread dirt in. He put his boots near the door and sat facing Tarquin in his socks, wondering as usual why Tarquin had grown a beard. Mr Stock did not approve of beards. He knew it was not because of scars; but there it was, a little tufty dark grey beard on the end of Tark’s chin. Nor was it for convenience either. You could see the man had shaved round it carefully. Might as well shave the lot, but he didn’t.
Tarquin O’Connor had once been a jockey, a very good one and very well known. Mr Stock had placed many a bet on horses ridden by Tark and never been out of pocket. Tarquin had been rich in those days. Mr Stock’s much younger sister had had the best of everything, including expensive private medical care, before she died. Their daughter had had a costly education. But then Tarquin had had a truly terrible fall. Tark, as Mr Stock heard it, had been lucky to live, trampled and broken in all directions as he was. He’d never ride again. Nowadays, Tarquin lived on his savings and what he got from the Injured Jockey Fund, while his daughter, the story went, gave up all the millionaire jobs she might have had and stayed in Melstone to look after her father.
“How’s my niece doing?” Mr Stock asked, halfway down his second cup of tea. “These biscuits are good. She make them?”
“No.” Tarquin pushed the biscuits nearer to Mr Stock. “I did. As for Stashe, I wish she’d have a bit more faith in how I can manage and consider working further afield. She’d surely get something at the University, just for a start, so she would.”
“Where’s she working now then?” asked Mr Stock, who knew very well.
Tarquin sighed. “Still down at the Stables. Part time. And I swear Ronnie exploits her. He has her doing pedigrees and racing statistics on the computer, until I think she’s never coming home. She’s the only one there who understands the bloody machine.”
The computer. This was what had given Mr Stock his idea. He gleamed. “Wasting herself,” he pronounced. “Now my new fellow’s at the computer game too. Stuff all over, wires, papers. I’m not at all sure he knows what he’s doing.”
Tarquin’s tufted, waif-like face lifted towards him. Worried, Mr Stock was pleased to see. “But he does know he has the field-of-care to look after?” Tarquin asked anxiously.
Mr Stock turned the corners of his mouth down. And I wish he’d get on and do it, and leave me alone! he thought. “As to that, I couldn’t say. He’s walked up and down a bit, for what that’s worth. I think he thinks he’s here to write a book. Now, to get back to my niece—”
“But if he doesn’t know, someone ought to put him straight,” Tarquin interrupted.
“That’s right. Show him he has responsibilities,” Mr Stock agreed. “It’s not my place to. You could do it though.”
“Ah. No.” Tarquin slumped down in his chair at the mere thought. “I never met the man.” He stayed bowed over, considering. “We do need someone to sound him out,” he said. “See if he even knows what his job is here, and if he doesn’t know, to tell him. I wonder—”
“Your daughter could do it,” Mr Stock said daringly. “My niece,” he added, because Tarquin seemed astonished by the idea. “If we could persuade him he needs a secretary — and he does, I don’t doubt: he’s used to several of them at that University, I’m sure — and then tell him we have the very person, wouldn’t that suit?”
“It sounds a bit dishonest,” Tarquin said dubiously.
“Not really. She’s high-class stuff, our Stashe,” said Mr Stock. “She could do the job, couldn’t she?”
Pride caused Tarquin to sit straight again. “Degrees all over,” he said. “She’s probably too good for him.”
“And too good for the Stables,” Mr Stock prompted him.
“Wasted there,” Tarquin agreed. “All right, I’ll put it to her. Will Monday do?”
Bullseye! thought Mr Stock. “Monday it is,” he said.
At almost the same moment, Mrs Stock said to her sister, “Now don’t go putting ideas into Shaun’s head, mind, but you can tell him he’s really needed there. The place is crying out for someone to — ah — move furniture and so on. That man is really impossible as things stand.”
“Can I give him a job description?” asked Trixie.
“Jargon,” said Mrs Stock. “Anyway, someone’s got to do something and my hands are full. We’ll get on to it first thing Monday, shall we?”
In this way, plans were made for keeping Andrew under control. The trouble was, neither Mr nor Mrs Stock had thought very deeply about what Andrew was really like, or about what made Melstone such a special place, so it was not surprising that things took rather a different turn.
Mostly, this was because Aidan Cain turned up on Monday as well.
Chapter Two (#ulink_a6f85437-3ec2-5bef-a0b4-cbd213f6e473)
Aidan Cain got off the train at Melton and joined the queue for taxis. While the queue shuffled slowly forward, Aidan fetched out the old battered wallet that Gran had given him just before she died, and cautiously opened it. By some miracle, the wallet had contained enough money for Aidan’s half fare from London, plus a bacon sandwich and a chocolate bar. Now, the only things inside it were the two cash receipts for this food, a small one for the chocolate and a larger one for the sandwich. Gran had brought Aidan up not to cheat people, but the situation was desperate.
Still shuffling, Aidan took off his glasses and shut the wallet. Holding the glasses in his mouth by one sidepiece, he opened the wallet again and looked searchingly inside. Yes. The two flimsy receipts now looked exactly like a twenty-pound note and a ten-pound note. Aidan stared in at them for a moment with bare eyes, hoping this would fix them, and then put his glasses on again. To his relief, the two receipts still looked like money.
“I — I need to get to Melstone,” he said to the taxi driver when his turn came. “Er — Melstone House in Melstone.”
The taxi driver was not anxious to drive ten miles into the country for the sake of a kid. He looked over Aidan’s dusty brown hair, his grubby sweatshirt, his shabby jeans and his worn trainers, his pale worried face and his cheap glasses. “That’s twenty miles,” he said. “It’ll cost you.”
“How much?” Aidan asked. The thought of walking twenty miles was daunting, but he supposed he could ask the way. But how would he know the house when he got there? Ask again probably. It would take all day. Enough time for the pursuit to catch up with him.
The driver tipped his face sideways, calculating a sum it was unlikely that this kid would have. “Thirty quid?” he suggested. “You got that?”
“Yes,” Aidan said. In the greatest relief, he got into the taxi with his fingers crossed where the driver could not see them. The driver sighed irritably and set off.
It was quite a way. The taxi groaned and graunched through the town for so long that Aidan had to give up holding his breath for fear that the pursuit might stop it, but he only breathed easily when the taxi began making a smoother noise on a road between fields and woodlands. Aidan stared out at hedges laced with cow parsley and supposed he ought to be admiring the countryside. He had seldom been this far out of London. But he was too nervous to see it properly. He kept his fingers crossed and his eyes mostly on the meter. The meter had just clicked to £17.60 when they came to a village, a long winding place, where the road was lined with old houses and new houses, gardens and telegraph poles. Downhill they went, past a pub and a village green beyond it, with a duck pond and big trees, then uphill again past a squat little church surrounded by more trees. Finally, they turned down a side lane with a mossy surface and stopped with a croak outside a big pair of iron gates, overarched by a massive copper beech tree. The meter now read £18.40.
“Here we are,” the driver said, over the panting of the taxi. “Melstone House. Thirty quid, please.”
Aidan was now so nervous that his teeth were chattering. “The meter says — says eighteen pounds — pounds forty,” he managed to say.
“Out-of-town surcharge,” the driver said unblushingly.
I think he’s cheating me, Aidan thought as he climbed out of the taxi. It made him feel a little better about handing over the two cash receipts, but not much. He simply hoped they wouldn’t change back too quickly.
“Don’t give tips, eh?” the driver said as he took the apparent money.
“It — it’s against my religion,” Aidan said. His nervousness made his eyes blur, so that he had to lean forward to read the words ‘Melstone House’ deeply carved into one of the stone gateposts. So that’s all right! he thought as the taxi drove noisily away on down the lane. He pushed open one of the iron gates with a clang and a lot of rusty grating and slipped inside on to a driveway beyond. He was so nervous now that he was shaking.
It all seemed terribly overgrown beyond the gate, but when Aidan turned the corner beyond the bushes he came out into bright sunlight, where the grassy curve of driveway led up to an old, old sagging stone house. A nice house, Aidan thought. It had a sort of smile to its lopsided windows and there was a big oak tree towering behind it. He saw a battered but newish car parked outside the front door, which was promising. It looked as if old Mr Brandon must be at home then.
Aidan went under the creepers round the front door and banged with the knocker.
When nothing happened, he found the bell push buried among the creepers and pushed it. It went pongle-pongle somewhere inside. Almost at once, the door was thrown open by a thin lady with an imposing blonde hairstyle and a crisp blue overall.
“All right, all right, I was coming!” this lady said. “As if I haven’t enough to do— Who are you? I made sure you was going to be our Shaun!”
Aidan felt he ought to apologise for not being our Shaun, but he was not sure how to. “My — my name’s Aidan Cain,” he said. “Er — could I speak to Mr Jocelyn Brandon, please?”
“That’s Professor Hope these days,” the lady told him rather triumphantly. “He’s the grandson. Old Mr Brandon died nearly a year ago.” She didn’t add, “And now go away!” but Aidan could see that was what she meant.
He felt a horrible sick emptiness and a double shame. Shame that he had not known Mr Brandon had died, and further shame that he was now bothering an even more total stranger. Beyond that he had the feeling he had run into a wall. There was literally nowhere else he could go. He asked desperately, “Could I have a word with Professor Hope then?” It was all he could think of to do.
“I suppose you could,” Mrs Stock admitted. “But I warn you, he’s got his head in that computall and probably won’t hear a word you say. I’ve been trying to talk to him all morning. Come on in then. This way.”
She led Aidan down a dark stone hallway. She had a most peculiar bouncing walk, Aidan thought, with her legs wide apart, as if she were trying to walk on either side of a low wall or something. Her feet slapped the flagstones as she turned a corner and threw open a low black door. “Someone to see you,” she announced. “What was your name? Alan Cray? Here he is then,” she added to Aidan, and went slapping away.
“It’s Aidan Cain,” Aidan said, blinking in the great blaze of light inside the heaped and crowded study.
The man sitting at the computer beside one of the big windows turned and blinked back at him. He wore glasses too. Maybe all professors did. For the rest, his hair was a tangle of white and blond, and his clothes were as old and grubby as Aidan’s. His face struck Aidan as a bit mild and sheeplike. He seemed a lot older than someone’s grandson had any right to be. Aidan’s heart sank even further. He could not see this person being any help at all.
Andrew Hope was puzzled by Aidan. He knew very few boys and Aidan was not one of them. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
At least he has a nice voice, Aidan thought. He took a deep breath and tried to stop shaking. “I know you don’t know me,” he began. “But my gran — she brought me up — said — She — she died last week, you see—”
Then, to his horror, he burst into tears. He couldn’t believe it. He had been so brave and restrained up to now. He had not cried once, not even that awful night when he had found Gran dead in her bed.
Andrew was equally horrified. He was not used to people crying. But he could tell real distress when he saw it. He sprang up and babbled. “Hey, take it easy. There, there, there. I’m sure we can do something. Sit down, sit down, Aidan, get a grip and then tell me all about it.” He seized Aidan’s arm and sat him in the only empty chair — a hard upright one against the wall — and went on babbling. “You’re not from round here, are you? Have you come far?”
“L-London,” Aidan managed to say in the middle of being shoved into the chair and trying to take his glasses off before they became covered in salty tears.
“Then you’ll need something — something—” Not knowing what else to do, Andrew rushed to the door, opened it and bellowed, “Mrs Stock! Mrs Stock! We need coffee and biscuits in here at once, please!”
Mrs Stock’s voice in the distance said something about, “When I’ve moved this dratted piano.”
“No. Now!” Andrew yelled. “Leave the piano! For once and for all, I forbid you to move the damned piano! Coffee, please. Now!”
There was a stunned silence from the distance.
Andrew shut the door and came back to Aidan, muttering, “I’d get it myself, only she makes such a fuss if I disarrange her kitchen.”
Aidan stared at Andrew with his glasses in his hand. Seen by his naked eyes, this man was not really mild and sheeplike at all. He had power, great and kindly power. Aidan saw it blazing around him. Perhaps he could be some help after all.
Andrew tipped two computer manuals and a shower of history pamphlets off another chair and pulled it around to face Aidan. “Now,” he said as he sat down, “what did your grandmother say?”
Aidan sniffed and then swallowed, firmly. He was determined not to break down again. “She — she told me,” he said, “that if I was ever in trouble after she died, I was to go to Mr Jocelyn Brandon in Melstone. She showed me Melstone on the map. She kept telling me.”
“Ah. I see,” Andrew said. “So you came here and found he was dead. Now there’s only me. I’m sorry about that. Was your grandmother a great friend of my grandfather’s?”
“She talked about him a lot,” Aidan said. “She said his field-of-care was much more important than hers and she always took his advice. They wrote to each other. She even phoned him once, when there was a crisis about a human sacrifice two streets away, and he told her exactly what to do. She was really grateful.”
Andrew frowned. He remembered, when he was here as a boy, his grandfather giving advice to magic users from all over the country. There was a distraught Scottish Wise Woman, who turned up once at the back door. Jocelyn sent her away smiling. But there was also a mad-looking, bearded Man of Power, who had frightened Andrew half to death by leering in at him through the purple pane at breakfast time. Old Jocelyn had been very angry with that man. “Refuses to hand his field-of-care on to someone sane!” Andrew remembered his grandfather saying. “What does he expect, for God’s sake?” Andrew had forgotten about these people. They had been mysterious and scary interruptions to his blissful holidays.
Wondering if any of them had been this grandmother of Aidan’s, he asked, “Who was your grandmother? What was her name?”
“Adela Cain,” Aidan said. “She used to be a singer—”
“No! Really?” Andrew’s face lit up. “I’d no idea she had a field-of-care! When I was about fifteen, I used to collect all her records. She was a wonderful singer — and wonderful-looking too!”
“She didn’t do much singing when I was with her,” Aidan said. “She gave it up after my mum died and I had to come to live with her. She said my mother’s death had hit her too hard.”
“Your mother was a Mrs Cain too?” Andrew asked.
Aidan found himself a little confused here. “I don’t know if either of them were a Mrs,” he explained. “Gran didn’t like to be tied down. But she never stopped complaining about my mum. She said my dad was chancy folk and Mum should have known better than to take up with someone so well known to be married. That’s all I know really.”
“Ah,” said Andrew. He felt he had put his foot in it and changed the subject quickly. “So you were left all alone in the world when your grandmother died?”
“Last week. Yes,” said Aidan. “The social workers kept asking if I had any other family, and so did the Arkwrights — they were the foster family I was put with. But the — the real reason I came here was the Stalkers—”
Aidan was forced to break off here. He was not sorry. The Stalkers had been the final awful touch to the worst week of his life. Mrs Stock caused the interruption by kicking the door open and rotating into the room carrying a large tray.
“Well, I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this!” she was saying as she came face forward again. “It’s a regular invasion. First that boy. Now there’s Mr Stock and this one-legged jockey with that stuck-up daughter of his come to see you. And no sign of our Shaun.”
Mrs Stock did not seem to care that all the people she was talking about could hear what she said. As she dumped the tray across the books piled on the nearest table, the three others followed her into the study. Aidan winced, knowing that Mrs Stock thought he was an intruder, and sat back against the wall, watching quietly.
Mr Stock came first, in his hat as usual. Aidan was fascinated by Mr Stock’s hat. Perhaps it had once been a trilby sort of thing. It may once have even been a definite colour. Now it was more like something that had grown — like a fungus — on Mr Stock’s head, so mashed and used and rammed down by earthy hands that you could have thought it was a mushroom that had accidentally grown into a sort of gnome-hat. It had a slightly domed top and a floppy edge. And a definite smell.
After that hat, Aidan was astonished all over again at the little man with one leg, who energetically heaved himself into the room with his crutches. He should have had the hat, Aidan thought. He was surely a gnome, beard and all. But his greying head was bare and slightly bald.
“You know my brother-in-law, Tarquin O’Connor,” Mr Stock announced.
Ah, no. He’s Irish. He’s a leprechaun, Aidan thought.
“I’ve heard of you. I’m very pleased to meet you,” Andrew said, and he hurried to tip things off another chair so that Tarquin could sit down, which Tarquin did, very deftly, swinging his stump of leg up and his crutches around, and giving Andrew a smile of thanks as he sat.
“Tark used to be a jockey,” Mr Stock told Andrew. “Won the Derby. And he’s brought his daughter, my niece Stashe, for you to interview.”
Aidan was astonished a third time by Tarquin O’Connor’s daughter. She was beautiful. She had one of those faces with delicate high cheekbones and slightly slanting eyes that he had only seen before on the covers of glossy magazines. Her eyes were green too, like someone in a fairy story, and she really was as slender as a wand. Aidan wondered how someone as gnomelike as Tarquin could be the father of a lady so lovely. The only family likeness was that they were both small.
Stashe came striding in with her fair hair flopping on her shoulders and a smile for everyone — even for Aidan and Mrs Stock — and a look at her father that said, “Are you all right in that chair, Dad?” She seemed to bring with her all the feelings that had to do with being human and warm-blooded. Her character was clearly not at all fairylike. She was in jeans and a body warmer and wellies. No, not a fairy-tale person, Aidan thought.
Mrs Stock glowered at her. Tarquin gave her a “Don’t fuss me!” look. Andrew was as astonished as Aidan. He wondered what this good-looking young lady was doing here. He moved over to her, tipping another chair free of papers as he went, and shook the hand she was holding out to him.
“Stashe?” he asked her.
“Short for Eustacia.” Stashe twisted her mouth sideways to show what she thought of the name. “Blame my parents.”
“Blame your mother,” Tarquin told her. “Her favourite name. Not mine.”
“What am I supposed to interview you about?” Andrew asked, in the special, bewildered way he often found very useful.
“I’ve suggested her for your new secretary,” Mr Stock announced. “Part time I suppose. I’ll leave you to get on with it, shall I?” And he marched out of the room, pushing Mrs Stock out in front of him.
Mrs Stock, as she left, turned her head to say, “I’m bringing Shaun for you as soon as he turns up.” It sounded like a threat.
Andrew grew very busy giving everyone coffee and some of the fat, soft, uneven biscuits Mrs Stock always made. He needed time to think about all this. “I have to deal with this young lady first,” he said apologetically to Aidan. “But we’ll talk later.”
He treats me like a grown-up! Aidan thought. Then he had to balance his coffee on the bureau beside him in order to take his glasses off and blink back more tears. Everyone had treated him like a child, and a small one at that, after Gran died, the Arkwrights most of all. “Come and give me a cuddle like the nice little fellow you are,” had been Mrs Arkwright’s favourite saying. Her other one was, “Now don’t you bother your little head with that, dear.” They were very kind — so kind they were appalling. Aidan hurt all over inside just thinking about them.
Meanwhile, Andrew was saying to Tarquin, “You live in that cottage with all the roses, don’t you?” Tarquin, giving him a wry, considering look, nodded. “I admire them every time I pass,” Andrew went on, sounding desperate to say something polite. Tarquin nodded again, and smiled.
