The Chrestomanci Series

by Jones, Diana Wynne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He was not there either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Irene turned towards him anxiously. “Are you quite sure, Cat? It’s awfully run down.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Jason meanwhile was rubbing his hand vaguely across the damaged end of the huge table. Cat could tell he was using a divining spell, but to the two elderly men who were rather tensely watching him, Jason probably looked like a man bored with womanish things like kitchens and stoves. “Seems to have got a bit bashed here, this table,” he said. “Was there some trouble getting it in here?”

  Edgar and Lester both flinched. “No, no, no,” Lester said, and Edgar added, “I am told – family tradition has it – that this table was actually made inside this room.”

  “Ah!” said Jason. Cat could feel him quivering, hot on the scent of something. “Someone else told me about this table, quite a few years ago now. A dwimmerman called Elijah Pinhoe.”

  Edgar and Lester both jumped, quite violently. Lester answered gravely, “Passed away. Passed away these eight years now.”

  “Yes, but am I right in thinking he actually lived in this house?” Jason said.

  “That’s right,” Edgar admitted. “Marianne’s grandfather, you know.”

  “Right! Great!” Jason said. He whirled round on Marianne as she came out of the empty pantry and seized her arm. “Young lady, come with me at once and show me where your grandfather’s herb bed was.”

  “We-ell,” said Marianne, who was wondering whether Nutcase had gone up to hide in the attics.

  “You do know, don’t you?” Jason said eagerly.

  Good gracious, he’s just like Gaffer, only young and cockney! Marianne thought. And he has lovely bright blue eyes. “Yes, of course I do,” she said. “It’s outside the conservatory, so that he could take the weak ones inside. This way.”

  Jason cheered and rushed them all outside. Irene laughed heartily at his enthusiasm. “He’s always like this about his herbs,” she told Cat. “We have to humour him.”

  Jason stopped in dismay when he saw the thistles and the grass. “I suppose it has been eight years,” he said, walking in among the weeds. Next moment he was down on his knees, quite forgetting his nice pale trousers, carefully parting a clump of nettles. “Hairy antimony!” he cried out. “Still alive! Well, I’ll be —! And this is button lovage and here’s wolfwort still going strong! This must be a strong spell on it, if it’s alive after eight years! The ground’s too dry for it really. And here’s – What’s this?” he asked, looking up at Marianne.

  “Gaffer always called it hare’s paws,” she said. “And the one by your foot – Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue! Do you know?” she asked Cat.

  Cat surprised himself and everyone else by answering, “Portulacca fulvia. Scarlet purslane’s the English name.” Evidently some of the herb lore he had been made to learn must have stuck in his brain somewhere. He rather thought it was Marianne’s strong magic that had brought the name up out of a very deep, bored sleep.

  “Yes, yes! And very rare. You get the green and yellow all the time, but the scarlet’s the really magic one and you almost never find it!” Jason cried out, crawling across to another clump of plants. “Pinwort, golden spindlemans, nun’s pockets, fallgreen – this is a treasure house!”

  Edgar and Lester were standing in the grass, looking helpless, prim and irritated. “Wouldn’t you like to see the rest of the house?” Edgar said at last.

  “No, no!” Jason cried out. “I’ll buy it even if the roof’s fallen off! This is wonderful!”

  “But I’d like to see it,” Irene said, taking pity on them. “Come and show me round.” She led the pair of them away through the conservatory.

  Marianne left Jason wrestling with a thistle and came over to Cat. “Will you help me look for Nutcase?” she asked him.

  “What does he look like?” Cat said.

  Marianne approved of this practical question. “Black,” she said. “Rather fat, and one eye greener than the other. His coat grows in a ruff round his neck but the rest of him is smooth, except his tail. That’s bushy.”

  “Have you tried a directional spell?” Cat said. “Or divining?”

  More practical questions, Marianne thought approvingly. There was no nonsense about Cat.

  “Nutcase is pretty well immune to magic,” she said. “I suppose he had to be, living with Gammer.”

  “But I bet he’s not immune to a spell making a luscious fish smell down in the hall,” Cat said. “Wouldn’t that fetch him out?”

  “Not fish. Bacon. He loves bacon,” Marianne said. “Let’s go and try.”

  They hurried through the house to the hall. It was empty, but they could hear hollow footsteps as Irene and the two great uncles trod about on bare floorboards somewhere in the distance. Here Marianne set the bacon spell, going slowly and carefully, as if she did not quite trust her powers. Cat, while he waited, fixed the image of a black cat with odd eyes and a ruff in his mind and cast about for Nutcase.

  “He went up,” he said, pointing to the stairs when Marianne had finished. “We could go and catch him coming down.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

  They went up to the next floor. “This is nice,” Cat said, l
ooking through an open door into a square, comfortable bedroom.

  The room was completely bare, but Marianne knew what Cat meant. “Isn’t it?” she agreed. “You know, Gammer kept it all so dark and dusty that I never saw what a nice house this really is.”

  Cat found himself saying, “I think she kept you dark and dusty too. You do know your magic is pretty well enchanter standard, do you?” What made me say that? he thought.

  Marianne stared at him. “Is it?”

  “Yes, but you just don’t trust it,” Cat said.

  Marianne turned away. Cat thought at first that she was upset, then that she didn’t believe him, until she said, “I think you’re right. It’s hard to – to trust yourself when everyone’s always telling you you’re too young and to do what you’re told. Thank you for telling me. I think Nutcase went to the attics. I’ve known he did all along really, but I didn’t trust it.”

  They went along the bare passage to another set of stairs which were half hidden by a huge wooden hutchthing that must have had a water cylinder inside. At any rate it was glopping and trickling as if it didn’t work very well. The stairs were dark and splintery, and the door at the top was half open, on to brown dimness. Uncle Charles must have left it open, Marianne thought, as her foot knocked against a row of paint tins just inside.

  Cat thought, There’s been a really strong “Don’t Notice” spell here! At least, it was more like a “Don’t Want to Know” when he came to think about it – as if somebody had really disliked this place. He wondered why. Marianne seemed to have broken the spell as she went inside.

  He followed Marianne into a glorious smell like the ghosts of mint sauce, turkey stuffing and warm spiced wine. This came, he saw, from bundles and bundles of dry herbs hanging from the beams in the roof, most of them too old and dry to be any good now. Nearly all the floor space was filled with boxes, bundles and old leather suitcases, but there were old fashioned chairs and sofas there too, rows of pointed boots, tin trunks and what looked like clumps of rusty garden tools. Everything was lit by a dim light coming in under the eaves of the house. Cat could see a dusty toy fort down by his feet, which made him feel sorry that he seemed to be too old for such things these days.