ENCHANTED GLASS

Diana Wynne Jones

HarperCollins Children’s Books

To Farah, Charlie, Sharyn and all who attended the Diana Wynne Jones conference without me.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Titles by Diana Wynne Jones

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

When Jocelyn Brandon died — at a great old age, as magicians tend to do — he left his house and his field-of-care to his grandson, Andrew Brandon Hope. Andrew himself was in his thirties. The house, Melstone House, was a simple matter of making a will. But it had been old Jocelyn’s intention to pass the field-of-care on in the proper way, personally.

He left it rather too late. He knew Andrew could reach him very quickly. If you climbed to the top of Mel Tump, the hill beyond the house, you could see the University where Andrew taught as a dark blue clot on the edge of the great blue-green plain, only half an hour’s drive away. So, when he realised he was on his deathbed, Jocelyn commanded his housekeeper, Mrs Stock, to telephone for his grandson.

Mrs Stock did telephone. But the truth is, she did not try very hard. Partly, she did not take the old man’s illness seriously; but mostly, she did not approve of the old man’s daughter for marrying a Hope (and then dying of it). She therefore also disapproved of the daughter’s son, Andrew Hope. Besides, she was waiting for the doctor and didn’t want to be on the phone when she should be answering the door. So when she had worked her way through the intricate University switchboard system and arrived at the History Department, and then to a person who described herself as a Research Assistant, who told her that Dr Hope was in a committee meeting, she simply gave up.

Andrew Hope was driving in the general direction of Melstone that evening, returning from a site connected with his research. His Research Assistant, not having the least idea where he was, had simply told Mrs Stock the lie she told everyone. Andrew had reached the curious dip in the road where, as he always said to himself, things went different. It was blue gloaming and he had just switched his headlights on. Luckily, he was not going fast. A figure was suddenly there, dashing into his headlights’ glare, dark and human and seeming to wave.

Andrew trod on his brakes. His car wove about, wheels howling, in a long, snaking skid, showing him horrendous detail of grass and blackthorn on both sides of the road, violently lit by his headlights. It followed this by going up and over and down off something sickeningly squashy. Then it stopped.

Andrew tore open his door and jumped out. Into something squashy. This proved to be the ditch in which his nearside wheel was planted. Horrified, he squelshed out and around the bonnet and peered underneath the other three wheels. Nothing. The squashy lump must have been the wet bank between the road and the ditch. Only when he was sure of this did Andrew look round and see the human figure standing waiting for him in the beam of the headlights. It was tall and thin and very like himself, except that its hair was white, its back a little bent and it did not wear glasses like Andrew did. Jocelyn’s eyesight had always been magically good.

Andrew recognised his grandfather. “Well, at least I didn’t kill you,” he said. “Or did I?”

This last question was because he realised he could see the white line in the middle of the road through his grandfather’s body.

His grandfather shook his head, grinned a little and held something out towards him. Andrew could not see it clearly at first. He had to go nearer, remove his glasses and peer. The thing seemed to be a folded paper with some kind of black seal on one corner. The old man shook it impatiently and held it out again. Andrew cautiously reached for it. But his fingers went right through it and grew very cold. It was like putting his hand for an instant into a freezer.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll come to the house and get it, shall I?”

His grandfather gave the paper in his hand a look of keen exasperation, and nodded. Then he stepped back a pace, enough to take him out of the tilted beams of the headlights, and that was all. There was only dark road in the dip.

Andrew stepped outside the light himself to make sure his grandfather was gone. Finding that he was, Andrew put his glasses back on and retrieved his right shoe from the mud in the ditch. After that he stood thinking, watching the right front wheel of his car sinking slowly deeper into the grassy ooze.

He thought movements of sky and earth, time and space. He thought Einstein and skyhooks. He thought that the position of the wheel in the ditch was only a temporary and relative fact, untrue five minutes ago and untrue five minutes from now. He thought of the power and speed of that skid, and the repelling power of the ditch. He thought of gravity reversing itself. Then he knelt down with one hand on the grassy mud and the other on the wheel and pushed the two apart. Obediently, with some reluctant sucking and squelshing, the car moved out of the ditch and over the bank and bumped down in the road. Andrew sat himself in the driving seat to put his shoe back on, thinking ruefully that his grandfather would simply have stood in the road and beckoned to get the same result. He would have to work at the practical side of magic a bit more now. Pity. He sighed.

After that, he drove to his grandfather’s house. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” he said, when Mrs Stock opened the door to him.

Mrs Stock nodded and redeemed what little conscience she had by saying, “But I knew you’d know.”

Andrew walked through the front door and into his inheritance.

There was of course a great deal of business involved, not only in Melstone and in Melton, the town nearby, but also in the University, because Andrew decided almost at once to leave the University and live in Melstone House. His parents had left him money and he thought that, with what old Jocelyn had left him, he had enough to give up teaching and write the book he had always wanted to write. He wanted to give the world a completely new view of history. He was glad to leave the University, and particularly glad to leave his Research Assistant. She was such a liar. Amazing that he had wanted to marry her a year ago. But Andrew felt he had to make sure she was safely shunted to another post, and so he did.

One way or another, it was nearly a year before Andrew could move in to Melstone House. Then he had to make sure that the various small legacies in his grandfather’s will were paid, and he did that too; but he was vaguely puzzled that this will, when he saw it, was quite a different size and shape from the paper his grandfather’s ghost had tried to give him. He shrugged and gave Mrs Stock her five hundred pounds.

“And I do hope you’ll continue to work for me just as you did for my grandfather,” he said.

To which she retorted, “I don’t know what you’d do if I didn’t. You live in a world of your own, being a professor.”

Andrew took this to mean yes. “I’m not a professor,” he pointed out mildly. “Just a mere academic.”

Mrs Stock took no notice of this. To her mind this was just splitting hairs. Everybody at a university was to her a professor, unless they were students of course, and therefore even worse. So she told everyone in Melstone that old Jocelyn’s grandson was a professor. Andrew soon became accustomed to being addressed as “Professor”, even by people who wrote to him from elsewhere about details of folklore or asking questions about magic.

He went to give Mr Stock the gardener his legacy of five hundred pounds. “And I do hope you’ll continue your admirable work for me too,” he said.

Mr Stock leaned on his spade. He was no relation to Mrs Stock, not even by marriage. It was simply that a good half of the people in Melstone were called Stock. Both Mr and Mrs Stock were extremely touchy on this matter. They did not like one another. “I suppose that old bossyboots says she’s carrying on for you?” Mr Stock asked aggressively.

“I believe so,” Andrew said.

“Then I’m staying to see fair play,” Mr Stock said and went on banking up potatoes.

In this way, Andrew found himself employing two tyrants.

He did not see them this way of course. To him the two Stocks were fixtures, his grandfather’s faithful servants, who had worked at Melstone House since Andrew had first visited the house as a child. He simply could not imagine the place without them.

Meanwhile, he was extremely happy, unpacking his books, going for walks and simply being in the house where he had spent so many fine times as a boy. There was a smell here — beeswax, mildew, paraffin and a spicy scent he could never pin down — which said Holidays! to Andrew. His mother had never got on with old Jocelyn. “He’s a superstitious old stick-in-the-mud,” she said to Andrew. “Don’t let me find you believing in the stuff he tells you.” But she sent Andrew to stay there most holidays to show that she had not exactly quarrelled with her father.

So Andrew had gone to stay with old Jocelyn and the two of them had walked, over fields, through woods and up Mel Tump, and Andrew had learned many things. He did not remember old Jocelyn teaching him about anything magical particularly; but he did remember companionable nights by the fire in the musty old living room, with the curtains drawn over the big French windows, when his grandfather taught him other things. Old Jocelyn Brandon had a practical turn of mind. He taught his grandson how to make flies for fishing, how to mortice joints, and how to make runestones, origami figures and kites. They had invented riddles together and made up games. It was enough to make the whole place golden to Andrew — though he had to admit that, now he was living here, he missed the old man rather a lot.

But owning the place made up for that somewhat. He could make what changes he pleased. Mrs Stock thought he should buy a television for the living room, but Andrew disliked television so he didn’t. Instead, he bought a freezer and a microwave, ignoring the outcry from Mrs Stock, and went over the house to see what repairs were needed.

“A freezer and a microwave!” Mrs Stock told her sister Trixie. “Does he think I’m going to freeze good food solid, just for the pleasure of thawing it again with rays?”

Trixie remarked that Mrs Stock had both amenities in her own house.

“Because I’m a working woman,” Mrs Stock retorted. “That’s not the point. I tell you, that man lives in a world of his own!”

Great was her indignation when she arrived at the house next day to find that Andrew had moved all the furniture around in the living room, so that he could see to play the piano and get the best armchair beside the fire. It took Mrs Stock a whole morning of grunting, heaving and pushing to put it all back where it had been before.

Andrew came in from inspecting the roof and the outhouse in the yard after she had gone, sighed a little and moved everything to where he wanted it again.

Next morning, Mrs Stock stared, exclaimed and rushed to haul the piano back to its hallowed spot in the darkest corner. “World of his own!” she muttered, as she pushed and kicked at the carpet. “These professors!” she said, heaving the armchair, the sofa, the table and the standard lamps back to their traditional places. “Damn it!” she added, finding that the carpet had now acquired a long slantwise ruck from corner to corner. “And the dust!” she exclaimed, once she had jerked the carpet flat. It took her all morning to clean up the dust.

“So you’ll just have to have the same cauliflower cheese for lunch and supper,” she told Andrew, by way of a strong hint.

Andrew nodded and smiled. That outhouse, he was thinking, was going to fall down as soon as his grandfather’s magic drained from it. Likewise the roof of the house. In the attics, you could look up to see cobwebby patches of sky through the slanted ceilings. He wondered whether he could afford all the necessary repairs as well as the central heating he wanted to install. It was a pity he had just spent so much of his grandfather’s remaining money on a new computer.

In the evening, after Mrs Stock had gone, he fetched a pizza out of his new freezer, threw away the cauliflower cheese and, while the pizza heated, he moved the living room furniture back the way he wanted it.

Dourly, the next day, Mrs Stock moved it back to where tradition said it should be.

Andrew shrugged and moved it back again. Since he was employing the method he had used on his ditched car, while Mrs Stock was using brute force, he hoped she would shortly get tired of this. Meanwhile, he was getting some excellent magical practice. That evening, the piano actually trundled obediently into the light when he beckoned it.

Then there was Mr Stock.

Mr Stock’s mode of tyranny was to arrive at the back door, which opened straight into the kitchen, while Andrew was having breakfast. “Nothing particular you want me to do today, so I’ll just get on as usual,” he would announce. Then he would depart, leaving the door open to the winds.

Andrew would be forced to leap up and shut the door before the wind slammed it. A slam, as his grandfather had made clear to him, could easily break the delicate coloured glass in the upper half of the door. Andrew loved that coloured glass. As a boy, he had spent fascinated hours looking at the garden through each different-coloured pane. Depending, you got a rose-pink sunset garden, hushed and windless; a stormy orange garden, where it was suddenly autumn; a tropical green garden, where there seemed likely to be parrots and monkeys any second. And so on. As an adult now, Andrew valued that glass even more. Magic apart, it was old, old, old. The glass had all sorts of internal wrinkles and trapped bubbles, and its long-dead maker had somehow managed to make the colours both intense and misty at once, so that in some lights, the violet pane, for instance, was both a rich purple and a faint lilac grey at one and the same time. If a piece of that glass had broken or even cracked, Andrew’s heart would have cracked with it.

Mr Stock knew that. It was his way of ensuring, like Mrs Stock, that Andrew did not make any changes.

Unfortunately for Mr Stock, Andrew went over the grounds as carefully as he went over Melstone House itself. The walled vegetable garden was beautiful. Mr Stock’s great ambition was to win First Prize in all the vegetable classes at the Melstone Summer Fete, either from his own garden down the road or from Andrew’s. So the vegetables were phenomenal. But for the rest, Mr Stock was content merely to mow lawns. Andrew shook his head at the flower garden and winced at the orchard.

After a couple of months, while he waited for Mr Stock to mend his ways and Mr Stock went on as usual, Andrew took to leaping up as soon as Mr Stock appeared. Holding the precious door open ready to shut again after Mr Stock left, he would say things like, “I think today would be a good time to get rid of all those nettles in the main flowerbed,” and, “Give me a list of the shrubs we need to replace all the dead ones and I’ll order them for you,” and, “There’ll be no harm in pruning the apple trees today: none of them are bearing fruit.” And so on. Mr Stock found himself forced to leave his vegetables, often for days on end.

Mr Stock took his revenge in his traditional manner. The following Monday, he kicked open the back door. Andrew was only just in time to stop it crashing against the inside wall, even though he had cast aside his toast and leaped to the door handle at the sight of Mr Stock’s hat silhouetted through the coloured glass.

“You’ll need both hands,” Mr Stock said. “Here.” And he placed a vast cardboard box loaded with vegetables in Andrew’s arms. “And you’re to eat these all yourself, see. Don’t you let that old bossyboots go pinching them off you. And she will. I know her greedy ways. Puts them in her bag and scuttles off home with them if you give her the chance. So you eat them. And don’t try chucking them away. I’ll know. I empty the bins. So. Nothing particular you want me to do today. I’ll just get on, shall I?”

“Well, actually there is,” Andrew said. “The roses need tying in and mulching.”

Mr Stock glared at him incredulously. This was rebellion.

“Please,” Andrew added in his usual polite way. “I’ll be—!” said Mr Stock. And turned and trudged away.

Andrew, very gently, nudged the door closed with his foot and dumped the cardboard box beside his toast. It was that or drop it, it was so heavy. Unpacked, it proved to contain six enormous onions, a bunch of twelve-inch carrots, a cabbage larger than Andrew’s head, ten peppers the size of melons, a swede like a medium-sized boulder and a vegetable marrow like the body of a small crocodile. The spaces were carefully packed with overripe peapods and two foot runner beans. Andrew grinned. This was all the stuff that would not be up to the standard of Melstone Fete. He left a few of the most edible things out on the table and packed the rest back in the box, which he hid in the corner of the pantry.

Mrs Stock found it of course. “He’s never palmed his rejects off on us again!” she pronounced. “The size of them! All bulk and no taste. And what am I to do for potatoes? Whistle? Really, that man!” Then she took her coat off and went to put the furniture back again. They were still at that.

The next day, Mr Stock kicked the door open on behalf of a box full of fourteen lettuces. On Wednesday, for variety, he accosted Andrew as Andrew went out to check the state of the garden walls and presented a further cardboard box containing ten kilos of tomatoes and a squash like the deformed head of a baby. On Thursday, the box contained sixteen cauliflowers.

Andrew smiled nicely and accepted these things, staggering a bit under their weight. This had happened when his grandfather annoyed Mr Stock too. They had often wondered, Andrew and his grandfather, if Mr Stock collected cardboard boxes and stored them ready to be annoyed with. Andrew presented the tomatoes to Mrs Stock.

“I believe you had better make some chutney,” he said.

“And how do you expect me to find time for that, when I’m so busy—” She broke off, mildly embarrassed.

“Moving the furniture in the living room?” suggested Andrew. “Perhaps you could bring yourself to leave it for once.”

Mrs Stock found herself making chutney. “World of his own!” she muttered over her seething red, vinegary saucepan, and occasionally, as she spooned the stuff into jars, and it slid out and pooled stickily on the table, “Professors! Men!” And, as she got her coat on to leave, “Don’t blame me that the table’s covered in jars. I can’t label them until tomorrow and they’re not going anywhere until I have.”

Once he was alone, Andrew did as he had done every evening that week. He heaved the latest box out of the pantry and carried it outside to where the lean-to of the woodshed made a flattish slope level with his head. With the help of a kitchen chair, he laid the vegetables out up there. Too high for Mr Stock to see, his grandfather had remarked, or Mrs Stock either.

Tomatoes, squash and cauliflowers, were all gone in the morning, but the marrow remained. Careful looking showed a slightly trampled place in the grass beside the woodshed, but Andrew, remembering his grandfather’s advice, enquired no further. He took the marrow back and tried to cut it up to hide in the freezer. But no knife would penetrate the crocodile skin of the thing and he was forced to bury it instead.

Friday brought a gross of radishes from Mr Stock and five bloated aubergines. It also brought Andrew’s new computer. Finally. At last. Andrew forgot house, grounds, radishes, everything. He spent an absorbed and beatific day setting up the computer and beginning the database for his book, the book he really wanted to write, the new view of History.

“Would you believe, it’s a computall now!” Mrs Stock told her sister. She never could get that word right. “Sitting there all day, patter-patter, like dry bones, fair gives me the creeps. And if I ask him anything, it’s, ‘Do as you think best, Mrs Stock’. I could have given him the boiled teacloths for lunch and he wouldn’t have noticed!”

Well, he was a professor, Trixie pointed out, and professors were well known to be absent-minded. And in her opinion, men were all children at heart anyway.

“Professors! Children!” Mrs Stock exclaimed. “I tell you, it’s worse than that. The man needs a minder to keep him in order!” Then she went quiet, struck with an idea.

Mr Stock looked proprietorially in through the window of Andrew’s ground-floor study. He surveyed the new computer and the explosion of thick books and papers around it, on the desk, draping off it, on the chairs, floor, everywhere, and the chaos of wires and cables around these. He was struck with an idea too. The man needed someone to keep him in order, someone to stop him interfering with those who had real work to do. Hm.

Mr Stock, thinking deeply, dropped round at his brother-in-law’s cottage on his way home.

It was a very pretty cottage, thatched roof and all, although Mr Stock never could see why a man in Tarquin’s condition should put up with an old place just because it looked good. Mr Stock much preferred his own modern bungalow with its metal frame windows. Tarquin’s windows were all crooked and didn’t keep the draught out. But Mr Stock could not avoid glowering jealously at the garden. Tarquin O’Connor had some kind of touch, even if it was only with flowers. The roses that lined the path to the front door now. Mr Stock could not approve these romantic, old-fashioned sort of roses, but he had to admit they were perfect of their kind, healthy, big clusters of cups, rosettes, whorls, and buds and buds coming on. More prizes at the Fête for Tark, for sure. And the bushes so well controlled that not one thorny branch strayed to catch a visitor coming between them to the door. While beyond them — well — a riot. Scents in the air. Enviously, he knocked on the door.

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

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.

“Oh, you don’t have to do the polite,” Stashe protested. “Let’s get on and talk business — or don’t you approve after all, Dad?”

“Oh, I like him well enough,” Tarquin said. “But I don’t think the professor quite wants us. Bit of a recluse, aren’t you?” he said to Andrew.

“Yes,” said Andrew, taken aback.

Aidan hooked his glasses across one knee, drank his coffee and stared, fascinated. To his naked eyes, here were three strongly magical people. He had been right to think leprechaun about the brave, shrewd little man with one leg. He almost was one. He was full of gifts. But quite what that made Stashe into, Aidan could not tell. She was so warm. And direct as a sunray.

“Oh, do cut the cackle, both of you!” she was saying now. “I’d make you a good secretary, Professor Hope. I’ve every possible qualification, including magical. Dad’s taught me magic. He’s quite a power, is Dad. Why don’t you take me on for a week’s trial, no strings, no bad feelings if we don’t suit?”

“I — er…” said Andrew. “I suppose I hesitate because I already have two strong-minded employees. And there’s money—”

Stashe put her head back and laughed at the ceiling beams. “Those Stocks,” she said. “Don’t like change, either of them. They’ll come round. Meanwhile, say yes or no, do. I’ve told you how much I’d charge. If you can’t afford it, say no; if you can, say yes. I think you’ll find I’m worth it. And then you can get back to this poor kid sitting here eating his heart out with worry.”

All three turned to look at Aidan.

Tarquin, who had evidently been watching Aidan all along without seeming to look, said, “In several kinds of trouble, aren’t you, sonny?” Stashe gave Aidan a blinding smile, and Andrew shot Aidan a startled look that said, “Oh dear. As bad as that.” Tarquin added, “Who’s chasing you, as of now?”

“Social workers, I suppose. They may have brought the police in by now,” Aidan found himself answering. The little man was really powerful. Aidan had meant to stop there, but he seemed compelled to go on. “And at least three lots of Stalkers. Two lots of them had some kind of fight in the foster family’s garden the night before last. The Arkwrights called the police, but the sergeant said it was probably cats. It wasn’t though. We all saw shadowy sort of — people. They disappear by daylight. That’s why I ran away at sunrise this morning.”

There was a short silence, then Andrew said, “Aidan’s grandmother died last week and told him before she died to come to Jocelyn Brandon if he was in trouble. And of course my grandfather is dead too.”

After another short silence, Stashe said, “Have some more coffee.”

“And give him another biscuit,” Tarquin added. “Had any breakfast, did you?”

Aidan thought he was going to cry again. He managed to stop himself by saying, “I had money for a bacon sandwich.”

“Good,” said Tarquin. “These Stalkers. Haunts, were they? That sort of thing?”

Aidan nodded. “Three kinds. They seemed to know exactly where I was.”

“Difficult,” said Tarquin. “You can’t really expect the police to be much help there. You need to hide, sonny, to my mind. My house has not got as much protection as this one has, but you’d be welcome to stay with me. I could use the help.”

Before Aidan could say anything, Stashe gave her father a scornful look and bounced out of her chair. “Yes, Dad,” she said. “I can just see you trying to fight a bunch of haunts by waving one crutch at them! We need a proper decision here. There must be a way to keep the kid safe. Is that today’s paper I see there?”

Andrew, who was holding the biscuits out to Aidan and slowly coming to his own decision, looked vaguely round and said, “Mrs Stock did bring the paper in here I think.”

Stashe was already pulling the newspaper out from under the tray. She tossed most of it impatiently on the floor among the history pamphlets and took out the sports section, which she spread out. “Where do they put the racing results in this rag? Oh, here, right at the end. Let’s see. Kempton, Warwick, Lingfield, Leicester — lots to choose from. What won the first race at Kempton then? I always go to the first one they give.”

Aidan and Andrew both stared at her. “Why do you want to know?” they said, almost together.

“Advice,” said Stashe. “Predictions. I always use the racing results as an oracle. I do first race and last in the first track on the list, and then the last race in the last one.”

“You can’t be serious!” said Aidan.

“Works for her,” Tarquin said, perfectly seriously. “I’ve never known her fail.”

“Oh, look here!” Andrew said. “A horse that won yesterday, far away from here, can’t have anything to do with—”

He stopped as Stashe read out, “The two-oh-five at Kempton: first, Dark Menace, second, Runaway, third, Sanctuary. That seems to outline the situation pretty well, doesn’t it? Last race now. First, Aidan’s Hope, second, Hideaway, third, The Professor. I think that settles it. Professor Hope, he has to stay here with you.”

Andrew was sure that Stashe was making the names up. “I don’t believe this!” he said and took the paper off her. But they were all there, in print, just as she had read them out.

“Read out the last race at Leicester now,” Tarquin said to him. “She uses that as the clincher.”

Andrew moved the paper along and his eyes widened. He read out, in a fading, astonished voice, “First, Real Danger, second, Flight to Hope, third, Eustacia’s Way. Look here,” he said, “most horses have names like Bahajan King, or Lord Hannibal, or something in Arabic. What do you do when one of those comes up?”

“Oh, that’s simple,” Stashe said sunnily. “Depending if one of those without meaning comes first, second or third, they give you a question mark to the prophecy or advice. They say, ‘This might work’ or ‘This is the best I can tell you’ — things like that.”

This girl is mad, Andrew thought. Barking. But I do need help with the computer.

“She’s quite sane,” Tarquin put in helpfully.

Andrew’s mouth opened to contradict this. But at that moment Mrs Stock put her face round the door. “Here’s our Shaun,” she announced. “And you’re employing him as handyman here. If you don’t and you hire that Stashe instead, I’m leaving and you can just find yourself another housekeeper!”

Everyone stared at her. Trying not to laugh, Andrew took his glasses off and slowly cleaned them with his handkerchief. “Don’t tempt me, Mrs Stock,” he said. “Don’t tempt me.”

Mrs Stock bridled. “Is that a jo —?” she began. Then it dawned on her that it might not be a joke. She gave Andrew a slanting, upwards look. “Well, anyway,” she said, “this is our Shaun.” She pushed a bulky young man into the room.

Shaun was probably about eighteen. It took Andrew — and Aidan too — only a glance to see that Shaun was what people in Melstone called “a bit in the head” or, Aidan thought, what the Arkwrights would call “mentally challenged”. His face and body were fat in that way that showed that his body was trying to make up for his brain. His eyes looked tight round the edges. He stood there, perplexed and embarrassed at the way everyone was looking at him, and twisted his plump thumbs in his T-shirt, ashamed.

“He can do most things,” Mrs Stock asserted, pushing her way in after Shaun. “Provided you explain them to him first.”

Mr Stock had been prudently lurking outside the study windows to see how Stashe got on. Now he stuck his face, and his hat, through the nearest opening. “I am not,” he said, “having that lummock-de-troll glunching about this place! Trod on all my tomatoes he did, last year.”

And suddenly everyone was shouting at one another.

Shaun gave vent to a great tenor bellow. “Was not my fault, so!” Stashe shouted at her uncle to keep his nose out of things, and then turned and shouted at Mrs Stock. Mrs Stock shouted back, shriller and shriller, defending Shaun and telling Stashe to keep her bossy, managing face out of Professor Hope’s business. Tarquin bounced in his chair and yelled that he was not going to sit there to hear his daughter insulted, while Mr Stock kept up a rolling boom, like a big bass drum, and seemed to be insulting everyone.

Aidan had never heard anything like this. He sat back in his hard chair and kept his mouth shut. Andrew rolled his eyes. Finally, he put his glasses back on and marched to his desk where he found his long, round, old-fashioned ruler, swung it back and banged it violently against the side of his computer. CLANG!

The shouting stopped. Andrew took his glasses off again, in order not to see the incredulous way they all looked at him.

“Thank you,” Andrew said. “If you’ve all quite finished arranging my affairs for me, I shall now tell you what I have decided. Shaun, you can work here for a week’s trial.” He was sorry for Shaun and he thought a week wouldn’t hurt anyone. “That suit you?” he asked. Shaun gave him a relieved, eager nod. “And you, Stashe,” Andrew went on, “since you know your way around computers, you can come for a month’s trial. I need a database set up and a lot of documents tapped in and something’s gone wrong with this computer.” Probably a lot more, he thought, now that he had hit the thing. “Is that OK?”

Mrs Stock glowered. Stashe, looking perky and triumphant, said, “I can do Tuesdays, Fridays and Mondays. When do I start?”

“She works down the Stables on the other days,” Tarquin explained.

“Then start tomorrow,” Andrew said. “Nine-thirty.”

Aidan was greatly relieved. Up to now he had thought Andrew was the kind of person that everyone pushed about.

“Mr Stock,” Andrew continued, “I’m sure you have work to do. And Mrs Stock, can you make up the bed in the front spare room, please? Aidan will be staying here until we can sort out what he ought to do.”

“Oh, thanks!” Aidan gasped. He could hardly breathe, he was so relieved and grateful.

Chapter Three

Andrew was anxious to question Aidan further, but he had to leave that until the evening when Mr and Mrs Stock had left. Aidan fell into an exhausted sleep anyway, as soon as Mrs Stock had shown him to the spare room.

Downstairs, things were very unrestful. Mr Stock was enraged at the way Mrs Stock had thrust Shaun into the household. Mrs Stock could not forgive Mr Stock for producing Stashe. She was fairly annoyed with Andrew too. “I do think,” she told her sister, “that with all I have to do, he didn’t ought to have taken in that boy. I’ve no notion how long he’ll be staying either. World of his own, that man!”

As always when she was annoyed, she made cauliflower cheese.

“I’ll eat it,” Aidan said, when Andrew was about to throw it away.

Andrew paused, with the dish above the waste-pail. “Not pizza?” he asked, in some surprise.

“I can eat that too,” Aidan said.

Andrew, as he put the offending cauliflower back in the oven, had a sudden almost overwhelming memory of how much he had needed to eat when he was Aidan’s age. This brought with it a flood of much vaguer memories, of things old Jocelyn had said and done, and of how much he had learned from the old man. But he was unable to pin them down. Pity, he thought. He was fairly sure a lot of these things were important, both for himself and for Aidan.

After supper, he took Aidan into the living room and began to ask him questions. He started, tactfully, with harmless enquiries about school and friends. Aidan, after he had looked round the room and realised, with regret, that Andrew did not have a television, was quite ready to answer. He had plenty of friends, he told Andrew, and quite enjoyed school, but he had had to give all that up when the social workers had whisked him off to the Arkwrights, who lived somewhere out in the suburbs of London.

“But it was nearly the end of term anyway,” Aidan said consolingly. He thought Andrew was probably worried about his education, being a professor.

Andrew secretly made a note of the Arkwrights’ address. They were surely worrying. Then he went on to questions about Aidan’s grandmother. Aidan was even readier to answer these. He talked happily about her. It did not take Andrew long to build up a picture of a splendidly quirky, loving, elderly lady, who had brought Aidan up very well indeed. It was also clear that Aidan had loved her very much. Andrew began to think that Adela Cain had been as wonderful as he had thought she was himself, in the days when he collected all her records.

Now came the difficult part. Andrew looked around the long, peaceful room, where the French windows were open on the evening sunlight. A fine, sweet scent flowed in with the sunset, probably from the few flowers Mr Stock had spared time to plant. Or was it? Aidan had taken his glasses off and looked warily at the open windows, as if there might be a threat out there, and then looked relieved, as if the scent was a safe one. Now Andrew remembered that there was always that same sweet smell in here, whenever the windows were open.

He was annoyed. His memory seemed to be so bad that he needed Aidan to remind him of things he ought to have known. He decided to treat himself to a small drink. It was so very small, and in such a small glass, that Aidan stared. Surely there was no way such a little sip of a drink could have any effect at all? But then, he thought, you did take medicine by the spoonful, and some of that was quite strong.

“Now,” Andrew said, settling himself in the comfortable chair again, “I think I must ask you about those shadowy pursuers you mentioned.”

“Didn’t you believe me?” Aidan asked sadly. Just like the social workers and the police, he thought. They hadn’t believed a word.

“Of course I believe you,” Andrew assured him. He knew he would get nothing out of Aidan unless he said this. “Don’t forget that my grandfather was a powerful magician. He and I saw many strange things together.” They had too, Andrew realised, though he couldn’t for the life of him think what they had seen. “When did you first see these creatures?”

“The night Gran died,” Aidan said. “The first lot came and stood packed into our back yard. They were sort of tall and kingly. And they called my name. At least, I thought they were calling me, but they were really calling out ‘Adam’—”

“They got your name wrong?” Andrew said.

“I don’t know. A lot of people get it wrong,” Aidan said. “The social workers thought my name was Adam too. And I went charging off to Gran’s bedroom to tell her about the Stalkers and—” He had to stop and gulp here. “That’s how I found she was dead.”

“What did you do?” Andrew asked.

“Dialled 999,” Aidan said desolately. “That’s all I could think of. The Stalkers vanished away when the ambulance arrived. I didn’t see them again until they turned up outside the Arkwrights’, with the other two lots that fought one another. That was two nights later. I suppose I’d mostly been sitting in that office, while people phoned about what to do with me, until then, and they couldn’t get at me. They don’t come indoors, you know.”

“I know. You have to invite them in,” Andrew said. “Or they try to call you out. And you weren’t fool enough to listen to them.”

“I was too scared,” Aidan said. He added miserably, “The other two lots got my name wrong too. They called out ‘Alan’ and ‘Ethan’. And the Arkwrights got it wrong too. They kept calling me ‘Adrian’ and telling me to forget all about Gran.”

What a strange and unhappy time Aidan must have had of it, Andrew thought, full of strangers who couldn’t even get his name right. And it did not sound as if Aidan had been given any time for grief, or even been invited to his grandmother’s funeral. People needed to grieve. “Can you describe any of these Stalkers in more detail?” he asked.

But this Aidan found very hard to do. It wasn’t just that they always appeared by dark, he explained. He just couldn’t find words for how strange they were. “I suppose,” he said, after several failed attempts, “I could try drawing them for you.”

Andrew found himself glancing out of the windows at the red sunset. He had a very strong feeling that drawing the creatures was a bad idea. “No,” he said. “I think that could be a way of calling them to you again. My grandfather kept his lands pretty safe, but I don’t think we should take any chances.” He put his tiny glass down and stood up. “Let’s drop the subject until daylight now. Come and help me get rid of Mr Stock’s punishment while we can still see.” He led the way back to the kitchen.

Aidan could not really believe that vegetables might be a punishment, until Andrew led him to the pantry and pointed to the boxes. Then he believed all right.

“I’ve never seen so many radishes together in my life!” he said.

“Yes, several hundreds, all with holes in,” Andrew said. “You carry them and I’ll take the swedes and cabbages.”

“Where are we taking them?” Aidan wanted to know, as they each heaved up a box.

“Round to the woodshed roof. It’s too high for Mr Stock to see,” Andrew explained. “I never ask what it is that comes and eats them.”

“Must be a vegetarian — a dedicated vegetarian,” Aidan panted. Radishes in such bulk were heavy. Then, as he staggered round the corner to the blank side of the house and saw the woodshed, a high and ramshackle lean-to, he added, “A tall, dedicated vegetarian.”

“Yup,” said Andrew, dumping his box on the ground. “But, as my grandfather always said, you really don’t want to know.”

But Aidan did want to know. While Andrew fetched the usual kitchen chair and stood on it on tiptoe to roll cabbages on to the woodshed roof, and then handfuls of radishes that came, many of them, pattering straight down on to the grass, Aidan felt quite scornful of someone who refused to find out about something as odd as this. Could the vegetarian be something that flew? No, because what Aidan could see of the grass, as he collected fallen radishes, was quite trampled here. A giraffe? Something like that. Andrew at full skinny stretch on the chair, with one arm up planting a swede up there, must measure a good fifteen feet. Or three metres, say.

“Where did your grandfather say this eating-creature came from?” he asked.

Andrew swung round and pointed with the big purple swede. “From over Mel Tump,” he said. “Pass me the rest of the radishes now, will you?”

Aidan turned round. The garden petered out here, into a low hedge with wire in the gaps. Beyond were red-lit meadows, several of them, that stretched all the way to a sunset-pink hill about a mile away. The hill was all bristly with bushes and little stunted trees. Full of hiding places, Aidan thought, scooping up radishes. Didn’t the professor ever go and look? Curiosity ran about inside him, like an itch. Aidan swore to himself that he would look, would solve this mystery. Find out. But not tonight. He was still dead tired.

He was so tired, in fact, that he went off to bed as soon as they were back indoors. The last thing Aidan remembered as he went up the dark, creaking stairs was Andrew saying from the hall, “I suppose we’ll have to get you a few more clothes.”

It was almost the first thing Andrew said the next morning too, when Aidan had sleepily found his way down to the kitchen where Andrew was eating toast.

“I need to go into Melton anyway,” Andrew said. “You could do with something to keep the rain off at least.”

Aidan looked to see if it was actually raining. And he saw, really saw for the first time, the coloured panes in the back door. While Andrew was putting more bread in the toaster and politely finding Aidan some cereal, Aidan took his glasses off and stared at the window. He had never seen anything so obviously magical in his life. He was sure that each different-coloured pane of glass was designed to do something different, but he could not see what. But the whole window did something else too. He itched with curiosity almost as strongly as he had last night. He wanted to know what it all did.

Andrew noticed Aidan taking his glasses off. He intended to ask Aidan about that. While they were having breakfast, Andrew wondered what magical talents Aidan had, and how strong these were, and how to put the question to Aidan in a way that was not nosy or offensive.

But just then he had to throw the cereal packet down on the table and rush to the door as Mr Stock’s hatted outline appeared behind the coloured glass.

Mr Stock had thought carefully. He was still very angry with Mrs Stock and he wanted to annoy her by not producing any vegetables at all today. On the other hand, he was pleased with Andrew for giving Stashe a job — though why Andrew had to take in this runaway kid as well Mr Stock could not see. What the racing results suggested were just Stashe’s nonsense to his mind.

So that morning, he marched into the kitchen without a word, nodded to Andrew, but not to Aidan, and slapped down a very small baby’s shoebox beside the cereal. The box contained a tiny bunch of parsley.

Andrew shut the door behind Mr Stock and burst out laughing. Aidan thought of all those radishes last night and got the giggles. They were still laughing on and off when Mrs Stock arrived, bringing the day’s paper and carefully pushing Shaun in front of her.

“You have to explain to him carefully, mind,” she said.

“Fine,” said Andrew. “Just a moment. I want to look at today’s racing results.”

“I don’t approve of betting,” Mrs Stock said, taking off her coat and getting out her crisp blue overall.

“Wasn’t that stuff about racing results all nonsense?” Aidan asked.

“Probably,” Andrew said as he opened the paper. “But I want to test it out. Let’s see. First race at Catterick—” He stopped and stared.

“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

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…

“Don’t ask,” Andrew said. “Mr Stock will be busy full time until the Fete, stretching beans and pumping up potatoes. He collects First Prizes. He also prides himself on being the only one who can start that mower. I hope, by the time the Fête’s over, that the mower will have reverted to its old form. Otherwise I shall get mountains of dead lettuce.”

“I understand,” said Aidan. “I think.”

“And yard-long carrots,” Andrew said bitterly.

They unloaded the groceries and took them to the kitchen. Then Aidan went back for his own bulging bags. While he was hauling them up to his room, he heard a noise that sounded like the mower. Shaun must have disobeyed Andrew, he thought, looking out of the landing window. But the noise turned out to be Tarquin O’Connor’s adapted car arriving to take Stashe home for lunch. Good! Aidan thought. There was a huge electric torch on the windowsill of Andrew’s study. Once Stashe was out of the way, Aidan intended to go in and borrow it. He was going to need it for tonight.

Aidan liked the room he had been given. He liked its size and its low ceiling and its long, low window that showed that the walls were three feet thick. He wondered if that window had at one time been several arrow slits. Melstone House was certainly old enough. Above all, Aidan was charmed by the way the creaky wooden floor ran downhill to all four walls. If he put the marble he happened to have in his pocket down in the middle of the room, it rolled away to any one of the walls, depending how he dropped it.

To his dismay, Mrs Stock was in the room, tidying repressively. Being forbidden to move the living room furniture, Mrs Stock was taking out her feelings on the spare room. She glowered at Aidan and his carrier bags.

“Moving in for a long stay, are you?” she said. “You’ve got enough for a lifetime there. I hope you’re grateful to Professor Hope. He isn’t made of money, you know.”

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