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“What’s it say?” Aidan asked, while Mrs Stock pushed Shaun out of the way as if he were some of the living room furniture and started to clear the table.
“First,” Andrew read out in a slightly strangled voice, “Shaun’s Triumph—”
“I never!” Mrs Stock exclaimed, in the middle of putting on bright pink rubber gloves.
“Second,” Andrew read on, “Perfect Secretary, and third, Monopod. Third place means something with one leg. If you take that to mean Tarquin O’Connor, it all sounds surprisingly apt. I’m driving into Melford this morning, Mrs Stock. Can you write me a grocery list?”
Shaun cleared his throat anxiously. “What do I do, Professor Hope?”
Andrew had no idea of what Shaun should do, or could do. He toyed with the notion of getting Stashe to find work for Shaun when she arrived, but decided that this was not fair on either of them. He thought quickly. Where could Shaun do no harm? “Er — um. The old shed in the yard needs clearing out, Shaun. Think you can do that?”
Shaun beamed eagerly and made an effort to look clever. “Oh, yes, Professor. I can do that.”
“Come with me then,” Andrew said. Thinking that Aidan might have better ideas about what Shaun could do, he asked Aidan, “Like to come too?” Aidan nodded. Mrs Stock was going round the kitchen like a whirlwind, making him feel very uncomfortable.
The three of them went outside into a light drizzle of rain. They were just crossing the front of the house to get to the yard when a small car came hurtling up the drive and stopped, in a scatter of wet gravel. It was Tarquin’s specially adapted car, with Tarquin driving it. The passenger door opened and Stashe leaped out. Andrew stared a little. Stashe had chosen to dress like an official secretary today. Gone were yesterday’s wellies and body warmer. She was wearing a neat white shirt with a short dark skirt and high-heeled shoes. Andrew had to admit she looked pretty fabulous, particularly about the legs. Pity she was crazy.
“I’ll get straight on with sorting that computer, shall I, Professor?” she called out, and went dashing through the rain and in through the front door before Andrew could answer.
Tarquin, meanwhile, was levering himself out of the driver’s seat and assembling his crutches. “Can I have a short word with you, Professor, when you’ve a moment?” he said. “Short but important.”
“Certainly,” Andrew replied. The word would be something on the lines of Don’t-you-go-messing-about-with-my-daughter, he thought. Understandable. It must be worrying having a beautiful, mad daughter. “Wait for me in the living room, if you would. I won’t be a minute. I have to set Shaun to work.”
Tarquin nodded and crutched himself to the front door. Andrew, Aidan and Shaun went on round to the yard where the broken-down old shed stood. Andrew always wondered what it had been built for. An artist’s studio perhaps? It was old, built of bricks of a small, dark red kind that you hardly ever saw nowadays, with its roof in one slope. Someone had, long ago, given these bricks a thin coat of whitewash, which had largely worn off. The shed would have been big enough — just — for a stable or a coach house, except that it had no windows and only one small, quaintly arched door. Its roof leaked. Someone, long ago, had draped several layers of tarpaulins across the tiles to keep the wet out. Nettles grew in clumps against its walls.
Andrew forced the stiff door open on to a dimness stacked with bags of cement (When had his grandfather needed cement? Andrew wondered) pots of paint (Or those either?) and old garden seats. In the middle stood the huge old rusty motor mower that only Mr Stock had the knack of starting.
Shaun stumbled against the mower and barked his plump shin. “Ow,” he said plaintively. “Dark in here. Can’t see.”
“One moment.” Andrew went outside again, where he stood on tiptoe among the nettles and just managed to reach the corner of one of the tarpaulins. He dragged. The whole lot came down on his head in a shower of plaster bits, twigs and nameless rubbish.
Inside the shed, Aidan exclaimed and Shaun stood with his mouth open. There was a window there, slanting with the roof. It was made of squares of coloured glass, just like the top half of the kitchen door and obviously just as old. Unlike the glass of the back door, though, these panes were crusted with ancient dirt and cracked in places. Spiderwebs hung from them in strands and thick bundles, swaying in the breeze from the door. But it still let in a flood of coloured light. In the light, Aidan saw that the walls of the shed were lined with wood, old, pale wood, carved into dozens of fantastic shapes, but so dusty that it was hard to make out what the shapes were. He took his glasses off to investigate.
Outside the shed, Andrew trampled his way out from the tarpaulins and they fell to pieces under his feet. He took off his glasses to clean them, ruefully realising that he had just destroyed quite a large number of his grandfather’s spells. Or his great-grandfather’s. Possibly his great-greatgrandfather’s spells too.
“Come and look!” Aidan shouted from inside.
Andrew went in and looked. Oak, he thought. He patted the nearest panel. Solid oak, carved into patterns and flowers and figures. Old oak. The brick walls outside were just a disguise for a place of power. “My goodness!” he said.
“Cool, isn’t it?” Aidan said.
Shaun, who had eyes only for the motor mower, said, “Church, this is.”
“Well, not exactly,” said Andrew, “but I know what you mean.”
“Professor,” Shaun said urgently, “I can mend this mower. Make it work. Honest. Can I do that?”
“Um,” said Andrew. He thought of how jealously Mr Stock guarded his knack with this mower. But he had not the heart to disappoint Shaun. The lad was looking at him so eagerly and so desperately trying to seem cleverer than he was. “Oh, very well,” he said. He sighed. This probably meant sixty-two cabbages tomorrow, but what did that matter? “Mend the mower, Shaun. And — listen carefully — after that, your work will be to clean up this place properly. Do it very gently and carefully and make sure you don’t break anything, particularly that window up there. You can take days and days if you want. Just get it how it should be. OK?”
Shaun said, “Yes, Professor. Thank you, Professor.” Andrew wondered if he had listened, let alone understood. But there was no doubt that Shaun was pleased. When he was pleased, he waved his hands about like a baby, with his fat fingers spread out in several directions, and beamed.
“Can I help him?” Aidan asked. He wanted to know what this shed really was.
“For ten minutes,” Andrew said. “We’re going into Melton to buy you some clothes, remember.”
He left Shaun and Aidan to it. Beating dust and old spells out of his hair and slapping them out of his jeans as he walked, he went to the house to receive Tarquin’s lecture.
Tarquin was sitting in a straight-backed chair with the stump of his leg propped across the piano stool. That stump, Andrew thought, must hurt him quite a lot.
“No, it doesn’t,” Tarquin said, just as if Andrew had spoken. “At least, the half that’s still with me doesn’t hurt at all. It’s the missing half that gives me gyp. Most of the time it’s pins and needles from the lost knee down. Just now, it’s giving me cramp in the calf that isn’t there. I can’t seem to convince it that there’s nothing there to give me cramp with. Stashe keeps telling me I ought to try hypnotism, but I don’t like the idea of someone getting into my head and giving me, like, secret orders. The idea doesn’t appeal at all, so it doesn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t like that either,” Andrew agreed. He felt he could almost see the sinewy missing half of Tarquin’s leg, spread out across the piano stool with its calf muscles in a tight, aching ball. Quite a telepathist, Tarquin. “What did you want to speak to me about?”
“Ah. That.” Tarquin suddenly looked embarrassed. “Stockie and Stashe both seem to think I’m the best person to speak to you, the Lord knows why, and I thought I’d better do it before I lost my nerve for it. Forgive me for asking. Were you actually here when your grandfather died?”
Not what I expected! Andrew thought. “No,” he said. “I was driving along a road quite near, not knowing he was dead, and I saw his ghost. Then I drove straight here.”
Tarquin gave him an intent look. “And how did he seem — his ghost?”
“Rather urgent,” Andrew said. “He was trying to give me a paper of some kind, with a big seal on it, but when I tried to take it, my hand went right through it. I thought it was his will, but that was quite a different shape when the lawyer produced it.”
“Ah,” said Tarquin. “We thought as much. You don’t know. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll start looking for that document right now. It must be his field-of-care he was trying to hand on to you. It will tell you clearer than I can what you ought to do.”
“What I ought to do about what?” Andrew asked.
Tarquin looked embarrassed again and wriggled on his chair. “That’s what I don’t truly know,” he admitted. “I’m not a magician like Jocelyn Brandon was. I just have unofficial knacks, you might say — growing roses and knowing horses and such — but he was the real thing, Jocelyn, so he was, even if he had got old and a bit past it by the time I moved here. What I do know is that all round here, in a radius of ten miles or more, is strange. And special. And Jocelyn was in charge of it. And he was trying to hand the responsibility on to you.”
“But I’m not a magician, any more than you are!” Andrew protested.
“But you could be,” Tarquin said. “It seems to me that you could train yourself a little. You have the gift. And you need to find that document. I’ll tell Stashe to help you look for it when she’s sorted that computer. And you can count on me for any help you need — explaining or advising, or whatever. I’d be grateful to help, to tell the truth. I need my mind taken off my lost career sometimes, something cruel.”
Tarquin meant this, Andrew could see. Though the life of a jockey was something Andrew could barely imagine himself, he could tell it had been as thrilling and absorbing as his own work on his book. And he wondered how he would feel if he had somehow lost both hands and couldn’t write that book, or any other books, ever. “Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” said Tarquin. “Now I’d better be going.” He looked suddenly relieved. “Cramp’s gone!” he said. “Virtual cramp, I should say. Cleared off like magic. So I’ll be off now, but feel free to ask me anything about Melstone that you think I’ll know.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_11712cf6-1b19-58c9-bcdb-f46ded21f294)
Andrew drove off to Melton with his mind full of what Tarquin had told him. Beside him, Aidan, who was not used to cars, was having trouble with his seat belt.
“Push until you hear it click,” Andrew told him.
This added Aidan to his thoughts. And these Stalkers Aidan told him about. Andrew supposed he could protect Aidan from them and give him a holiday until the social workers arrived. Otherwise he was not sure what could be done. And meanwhile it seemed Andrew was supposed to be looking after his grandfather’s field-of-care. Now he came to think of it, although he had always known there was such a thing, he had very little idea what a field-of-care was. He had never understood quite what it was that his grandfather did. Probably that document his grandfather’s ghost had tried to give him would make all that clear. But where was the wretched thing? He had never set eyes on it while Jocelyn was alive. He would have to hunt for it, and it was going to interrupt the work on his book. Everything was going to interrupt him. Andrew’s heart ached with his need to write his book. This was, after all, why he was employing Stashe.
And that brought his thoughts around to money. He was now employing two extra people and buying Aidan clothes, among other things. Luckily — and not entirely thanks to Mr Stock — Melstone House produced a lot of its own food; but that was a drop in the ocean, really, at the rate Aidan ate… Andrew began to wonder how soon he was going to be bankrupt.
Brooding on these things, Andrew drove past the new houses at the end of the village and past the football field, and on into the countryside. A couple of miles further on, there came the familiar little jolt, as if the car had for a second caught on some elastic. Aidan jumped.
“What was that?”
“We’ve just passed the boundary between the strange part my grandfather looked after and the normal places,” Andrew told him.
“Funny,” Aidan said. “I didn’t notice it when I was coming.”
“You probably had other things on your mind,” Andrew said.
This was true, Aidan realised. He had been twitching all over, in case the Stalkers followed him, in case the taxi driver noticed about the money, in case old Mr Brandon couldn’t help him. His whole mind and body had been roaring with nerves. Now his curiosity was aroused. “How big is this strange part?” he wanted to know.
“I’m not sure,” Andrew said. “Tarquin O’Connor has just been telling me it has a ten mile radius, but I’m not sure it’s that big, or not regularly. The boundary this side of the village is only two miles out. The boundary on the road to the University is probably five miles away, but that’s all I know, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you know where the rest of it is that’s not on the roads?” Aidan asked.
“Not really,” Andrew admitted. He remembered long hikes with his grandfather, but he rather thought they had all been inside the boundary. The area of strangeness — if this was Jocelyn’s field-of-care — must actually be pretty big.
“You need a map,” Aidan said. “It would be really interesting to walk all round it, not on the roads, and see where it goes.”
Andrew thought. Tarquin had seemed to be saying that it was Andrew’s job to look after this area of strangeness in some way. “Not just interesting,” he said. “I think it’s necessary. Walking the bounds is something I’ll need to do.”
“I could help,” Aidan said. “I could take a map and do it like a project for you, if you like.”
He sounded as eager as Shaun. Andrew smiled. “We could make a start this weekend,” he said. “You’ll definitely need a raincoat.” He turned the windscreen wipers on as the rain came down again.
Aidan sat quietly, thinking. Andrew was being amazingly kind. Clothes cost a lot. Gran was always complaining about how much clothes cost and how quickly Aidan grew out of them. Another of Gran’s constant sayings was that one should never let oneself get into debt to anyone. “Debts get called in,” she said. Yet here was Aidan relying on Andrew to buy him a raincoat and other things. He felt very guilty. Andrew owned a big house and a car — where Gran had never been able to afford either — and he had at least four people working for him, but Aidan looked across at Andrew’s old zip-up jacket and his elderly jeans and could not help wondering if Andrew really was rich at all. And the only thing Aidan could do to pay Andrew back was to make a map of his field-of-care. That seemed pretty feeble.
It was still raining when they reached Melton and Andrew drove into the car park of the biggest supermarket. Aidan had another attack of guilt. Andrew was buying food for him too. Gran always worried about how much food cost. He felt so guilty that, in a weird mixture of hope and despair, he fetched out his old, flat, empty wallet and looked inside it.
He gasped. He went grey and dizzy with sheer surprise.
Andrew, in the act of getting out of the car, stopped and asked, “What’s the matter?”
Aidan had whipped off his glasses to make sure this was real. He was holding the glasses in his mouth while he slid the big wad of twenty-pound notes out of the wallet. There was masses. And the money was still there to his naked eyes. “Money!” he mumbled round his glasses. “This wallet was empty just now, I swear!”
Andrew sat down again and shut the car door. “May I look?” he said, holding out his hand.
Aidan passed the wallet over. “Somebody must have filled it somehow,” he said as he put his glasses on again.
Andrew felt the soft, old leather fizz faintly against his fingers. He remembered his grandfather explaining what this fizzing meant. “A fairly strong enchantment,” he said, “worked in while the wallet was being made. How did you come by this?”
“Gran gave it me,” Aidan said. “Last week, a couple of days before she — she died. She said I might as well have it, because it was the only thing my dad had ever given my mum — apart from me, of course.”
“And when did your mother die?” Andrew asked, slowly passing the miraculous wallet back.
“When I was two — ten years ago,” said Aidan. “Gran said that my dad had vanished off the face of the Earth before I was even born.” He took the wallet back and removed his glasses again to count the money.
“So would you say,” Andrew asked, thinking about it, “that the wallet fills with money when you need it?”
“Um.” Aidan looked up, surprised. “Yes. I suppose. I know it was empty when Gran gave it me. But it had my trainfare in it the night before I came here. And then the taxi money. Bother. I lost count.” He went back to counting twenty-pound notes.
“Then it looks as if you’re required to buy your own clothes,” Andrew said, in some relief. “Tell me, do you always take your glasses off to count money?”
Aidan lost count again. “No,” he said irritably. Must Andrew keep interrupting? “Only to see if something’s real — or magical — or real and magical. Or to keep it there if it’s only magical. You must know how it works. I’ve seen you do it too.”
“I don’t think I— How do you mean?” Andrew asked, startled.
“When you’re working with magic,” Aidan explained. “You take your glasses off and clean them when you want people to do what you say.”
“Oh.” Andrew sat back and let Aidan get on with counting. The boy was right. Times out of mind, he remembered himself cleaning his glasses while he forced that Research Assistant to do what she was told for once. He had got treats out of his parents the same way. And — he could not help grinning — he had once passed a French oral exam by cleaning his glasses at a particularly terrifying examiner. He supposed that was cheating really. But the man had frightened him into forgetting English as well as French. The real question was, how did it work?
Thinking about how, Andrew took a trolley and went into the supermarket with Mrs Stock’s list, in that state of mind that caused Mrs Stock to say, “Professors! World of his own!” Aidan also took a trolley and went to the other end of the store where the clothes were.
Aidan was expecting to have the time of his life. He had never bought clothes on his own before. He had never had this much money before. He was all prepared to lash out. But, to his surprise, he found himself almost passionately spending the money as economically as he could. He hunted for bargains and things that said “Two for the price of one”. He did sums frantically in his head as he went round the racks and shelves (it did not help that most things were So Many Pounds, ninety-nine pence). He saw the perfect pair of trainers and he painfully did not buy them because they cost too much of his money. He took ages. He put things in his trolley and then took them out again when he found something cheaper. He almost forgot pyjamas. He had to go back for some, because he knew he would need them when he sneaked outside tonight to see what it was that ate the vegetables. He bought a fleece to go over the pyjamas and a zip-up waterproof for warmth. He nearly forgot socks. He ended up with a high-piled trolley and just two pence left in the wallet. Relief! He had got his sums right. Pity about those perfect trainers though.
It was just as well he took so long. Andrew took longer. He spent much of the time standing in front of shelves of bacon or sugar, either staring into space, or taking his glasses off and putting them on again to see if the bacon or sugar looked any different. They looked blurred, but that was all. But whoever heard of enchanted bacon anyway? So how did it work? Was it, Andrew mused, that bacon to the naked eye had the possibility of being enchanted? Would this make it the real world? Then when you put your glasses back on, maybe you could see more clearly, but the glasses blocked out the reality. Was that it? Or was it something else entirely?
By the time Andrew had finally managed to put all the things Mrs Stock needed into his trolley and then pay for them, Aidan was waiting outside in the drizzle, wondering if he had found the right car.
The drizzle stopped while they drove back to Melstone, but Andrew was still more than usually absent-minded. He really was a professor, Aidan thought, looking across at Andrew’s creased forehead and intent stare. He hoped they didn’t hit anything.
They turned into the driveway of Melstone House and nearly hit Shaun.
Shaun was standing just beyond the bushes, doing his baby arm-waving thing, with his fingers out like two starfish. Shaun probably never realised how near he came to death. Andrew slammed on his brakes so hard and so quickly that Aidan looked at him with respect.
“What is it, Shaun?” Andrew asked, calmly leaning out of his window.
“I did it, Professor! I did it!” Shaun said. “She sings. She sings sweet. Come and see!” He was red in the face with pride and excitement.
Realising that Shaun must be talking about the motor mower, Andrew said, “Move out of the way then, and I’ll park the car.”
Shaun obediently backed into the bushes and then ran after the car. As soon as Andrew and Aidan had climbed out, he led them at a trot to the strange shed. Inside it, the motor mower was standing under the coloured window in a ring of rust. Shaun seemed to have polished it.
“Pull the starter. Hear her sing,” Shaun pleaded.
Dubiously, Andrew bent and took hold of the handle on the end of the starter wire. Normally, this felt as if you were trying to pull a handle embedded in primordial granite. On a good day, you could pull the handle out about an inch, with a strong graunching noise. On a bad day, the handle would not move however hard you pulled. On both good and bad days, nothing else happened at all. But now Andrew felt the wire humming out sweetly in his hand. When it reached the critical length, the engine coughed, caught and broke out into a chugging roar. The mower shook all over, filling the shed with blue smoke. Shaun had worked a miracle. Andrew felt total dismay. He knew Mr Stock would be furious.
“Well done, Shaun,” he said heartily, and tried to calculate how long it would be until Mr Stock felt moved to mow the lawns. “Er…” he bellowed above the noise of the mower, “how long is it until the Melstone Summer Fete? How do I turn this thing off?”
Shaun reached forward and deftly twitched the right lever. “Two weeks,” he said in the resounding silence. “Not for two weeks. I thought everyone knew that.”
“Then we should be safe from the Wrath of Stock until then,” Andrew murmured. “Good work, Shaun. Now you can get on and clean this shed up.”
“Can’t I mow the grass?” Shaun pleaded.
“No,” Andrew said. “That would be most unwise.”
Shaun and Aidan were both disappointed. Aidan had thought that taking turns with Shaun at chugging about with the mower would have been fun. Shaun looked sadly around the rubbish in the shed. “What do I do with the cement bags?” he said.
The cement bags had been there so long that they had set like a row of hard paper-covered boulders. “Better bury them,” Andrew said over his shoulder as he pushed Aidan out of the shed. “Come on, Aidan. We have to unload the car.”
As they crossed the front lawn to the car, Aidan looked meaningly at the grass. It was all tufts and clumps. It had a fine crop of daisies, buttercups and dandelions, and several mighty upstanding thistles. If ever a lawn needed mowing…
