“Excuse me, sir,” he said politely to the old man.
The old man looked up, revealing a little fringe of greywhite beard, a brown seamy face and a pair of very wide, shrewd brown eyes. “Good afternoon to you,” the old man said pleasantly, and he gave Cat a humourous look because it was by now after midday. “What can I do for you?”
“Have you seen an enchanter anywhere around here?” Cat asked him.
“The only one I’ve seen is you,” the old man said. “Care for some lunch?”
It was early for lunch, but Cat found that launching himself at the barrier had made him ravenous, and the smell of that bacon made him even hungrier. “Yes, please,” he said. “If you can spare it.”
“Surely. I’m just about to put in the mushrooms,” the old man said. “You like those? Good. Come and sit down then.”
As Cat went over to the fire, the horse beyond the cart raised its head from grazing to look at him. There was something odd about it, but Cat did not properly see what, because he went to sit down then and the old man said, quite sharply, “Not there. There’s a thriving clump of milkwort there I’d like to keep alive, if you please. Move here. You can miss the strawberries, and silverleaf and cinquefoil never mind being sat on much.”
Cat moved obediently. He watched the old man fetch out a knife that had been sharpened so much that it was thin as a prong and use it to slice up some very plump looking mushrooms.
“You have to put them in early enough to catch the taste of bacon, but not so early that they go rubbery,” the old man explained, tossing the mushrooms hissing into the pan. “A fine art, cooking. The best mushrooms are sticky-buns, the ones the French call cepes, and best of all are your truffles. It takes a trained dog or a good pig to find truffles. I’ve never owned either, to my sorrow. Do you know the properties of the milkwort I stopped you sitting on?”
“Not really,” Cat said, somewhat surprised. “I know it was supposed to help mothers’ milk, but that’s not true, is it?”
“With the right spell done, it’s perfectly true,” the old man said, turning the mushrooms. “Your scientific herbalists nowadays always neglect the magics that go with the properties, and then they think the plants have no virtue. A great waste. Change the spell from womanly to manly, and your milkwort does wonders for men too. Pass me over those two plates there beside you. And what’s the special virtue of the small fern beside your foot?”
Cat picked up the two wooden plates and passed them over while he inspected the fern.
“Invisibility?” he said doubtfully. Now he came to look, the grassy verge was a mass of tiny plants, all different. And the wild strawberries almost underneath him were ripe. He felt as he often did with Syracuse, as if he was being given a whole new way of looking at the world.
The old man, pushing bacon, eggs and mushrooms on to the plates with a wooden spatula, said, “Not invisibility so much as a very good ‘Don’t Notice’. You can be a tree or a passing bird with some of this under your tongue, but you have to tell it what you need it to do. That’s mostly how herb magic works. Tuck in and enjoy it.”
He passed Cat a full plate, still sizzling, with a bent knife and a wooden fork lying across it. Cat balanced the plate on his knee and ate. It was delicious. While he ate, the old man went on telling him about the plants he was sitting among. Cat learnt that one plant made your breath sweet, another cured your cough, and that the small pink one, ragged robin, was very powerful indeed.
“Handled one way, it slides any ill-wishing away from you,” the old man said, “but if you pick it roughly, it brings a thunderstorm. It’s not good to be rough with any living thing. Handle it the third way, and ask for its help, it can bring strong vengeance down on your enemy. Has the egg hatched yet?”
“No, not yet,” Cat said. Somehow it did not surprise him that the old man knew about the egg.
“It will soon, once it’s warm and being loved,” the old man said. He sighed. “And its poor mother can set her mind at rest at last.”
“What – what’s it going to be?” Cat asked. He found he was quite nervous about this.
“Ah, it will bring its own name with it,” the old man answered. “Something weak and worried and soft, it will be at first, that’s certain. It’ll need all your help for a while. Finished?” He held out his big brown hand for the plate.
“Yes. It was really good. Thank you,” Cat said, passing the plate, knife and fork over.
“Then you’d be better going after your Big Man,” the old man said. Cat, in the middle of standing up, stared at him. The old man looked slightly ashamed. “My fault for distracting you,” he said. “I was very desirous of meeting you, you see. Your Big Man’s not far away.”
Cat could feel Chrestomanci quite near. He thought the old man must be pretty powerful to have distracted him from knowing until now. So he thanked him again and said goodbye, rather respectfully, before he set off along the mossy road.
As he passed the cart, the old white horse once more raised her head to look at him. Cat found himself facing a most un-horselike pair of interested blue eyes with a tumble of white mane almost across them. Sticking out from that swatch of white horsehair was quite a long pointed horn. It was pearly coloured, with a spiral groove around it.
He turned to the old man incredulously. “Your horse has got – your horse is a unicorn!” he called out.
“Yes, indeed,” the old man called back, busy with his fire.
And the horse said, “My name is Molly. I was interested to meet you too.”
“How do you do,” Cat said respectfully.
“Not so bad, considering how old I am,” the unicorn said. “I’ll see you.” She went back to grazing again, tearing up mouthfuls of grass and tiny flowers.
Cat stood for a moment, sniffing the smell of her. It was not quite like a horse. She smelt of incense, almost, together with horse-smell. Then he said, “See you,” and went on his way.
About a hundred yards down the road, he found he needed to turn off and plunge into the wood to the right. He waded through bracken and crunched across thorny undergrowth, until he came to clearer ground under some bigger trees. There he found an open space, knee deep in old leaves. As Cat waded into the leaves, Chrestomanci came wading out into the space as well from the opposite direction. They stopped and stared at one another.
“Cat!” said Chrestomanci. “What a relief!”
He was wearing clothes Cat had never seen him in before, plus-fours with thick knitted socks and big walking shoes, and a sweater on his top half. Cat had never seen Chrestomanci in a sweater before, but as he was also carrying a walking stick, Cat supposed that these were what Chrestomanci thought of as clothes for walking in. He had never seen Chrestomanci in need of a shave before, either. It all made him look quite human.
“I came to get you,” Cat said.
“Thank heavens!” Chrestomanci replied. “There seemed no reason why I should ever get out of this wood.”
“How did you get in?” Cat asked him.
“I made a mistake,” Chrestomanci admitted, wearily. “When I set off, my aim was simply to check up on what you told me about the roads, by walking to Ulverscote Wood if I could. But when I found myself repeatedly walking back to the Castle, whatever direction I took, I got irritated and pushed. I got to the wood with a bit of a fight, but then I couldn’t get out. I must have been walking in circles for twenty-four hours now.”
“This isn’t really Ulverscote Wood,” Cat told him.
“I believe you,” Chrestomanci said. “It’s a sad, lost, empty place whatever it is. How do we get home?”
“There’s a funny sort of a barrier,” Cat told him. “I think they put you behind it if you break their turn-you-back-to-the-Castle spell, but I’m not sure. It’s pretty old and rusty. Just start a slow teleport to the Castle and I’ll try to get us through.”
“I’ve tried that,” Chrestomanci said wryly.
“Try again with me,” Cat said.
> Chrestomanci shrugged and they set off. Almost at once, they were up against the barrier. It seemed much more real from this side. It looked almost exactly like chicken wire and old corrugated iron that was grown all over with brambles, goosegrass and thickly tangled honeysuckle. In among the tangle Cat thought he saw swags of bright red briony berries and the small pink flowers of ragged robin. Ahah! he thought, remembering what the old man had told him. A slide-you-off spell. He turned himself left side foremost and scratched about among the creepers to find a join. While he groped, he felt Chrestomanci being slid away backwards. Cat had to seize hold of Chrestomanci’s walking stick with his other hand and drag him forwards to the place where he thought he could feel two pieces of corrugated iron overlapping. Luckily, before they were both swept away backwards again, Chrestomanci saw the overlap too and helped Cat force the two pieces apart. It took all the strength of both of them.
Then they squeezed through. They arrived, panting and strung with creepers, halfway up the Castle driveway, where Cat found he still had hold of Chrestomanci’s walking stick.
“Thank you,” Chrestomanci said, taking his stick back. He needed it to walk with. Cat saw he was limping quite badly. “Lord knows what that barrier was really made of. I refuse to believe such strong magic can be simply chicken fencing.”
“It was the creepers, I think,” Cat said. “They were all for binding and keeping enemies in. Have you hurt your ankle?”
“Just some of the biggest blisters of my life,” Chrestomanci said, pausing to pull a long strand of clinging goosegrass off his sweater. “I’ve been walking for a day and a night, in shoes I’m beginning to hate. I shall throw the socks away.” He limped on a few steps and started to say something else, in a way that seemed quite heartfelt, but before he could begin, Millie came dashing down the driveway and flung her arms round Chrestomanci.
Millie was followed by Julia, Irene, Jason, Janet and most of the Castle wizards. Chrestomanci was engulfed in a crowd of people, welcoming, exclaiming, asking where he had been, congratulating Cat and wanting to know if Chrestomanci was all right.
“No I am not all right!” Chrestomanci said, after five minutes of this. “I have worldwide blisters. I need a shave. I’m tired out and I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast yesterday. Would you feel all right in my position?”
Saying this, he vanished from the driveway in a cloud of dust.
“Where’s he gone?” everyone said.
“To have a bath, I imagine,” Millie said. “Wouldn’t you? Someone go and find him some foot balm while I go and order him something to eat. Cat, come with me and explain how on earth you managed to find him.”
An hour later, Chrestomanci summoned Cat to his study. Cat found him sitting on a sofa with his sore feet propped on a leather tuffet, shaved and smooth again and wearing a peach satin dressing gown that put Cat in mind of a quilted sunset. “Are you all right now?” Cat said.
“Perfectly, thank you, thanks to you,” Chrestomanci replied. “To continue the conversation we were about to have when the welcoming hordes descended, I can’t stop thinking about that barrier. It’s a real mystery, Cat. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was around your age, I was dragged off on the longest, wettest walk of my life up to then. Flavian Temple marched me right across Hopton Moor almost to Hopton. I set Hopton Wood on fire. There were no turn-you-round spells then and no kind of barrier. I know. I would have welcomed either of them heartily. Temple and I walked miles in a straight line, and nothing stopped us.”
“The barrier looked quite old,” Cat said.
“Twenty years can grow a lot of creepers,” Chrestomanci said, “and a lot of rust. Let’s take it that the barrier is no older than that. The real puzzle is why is it there?”
Cat would have liked to know that too. He could only shake his head.
Chrestomanci said, “It may only apply to Ulverscote Wood, of course. But I see I shall have to investigate the whole thing. The real reason I asked you in here, Cat, is to tell you that I can’t, after the way you rescued me, keep you apart from that wretched horse any longer. The stableman tells me its feet are sounder than mine are. So off you go. There’s just time for a ride before supper.”
Cat hurtled off to the stableyard. And there would have been time for a ride, except that Syracuse saw Cat coming and hurdled the paddock gate, and hurdled Joss with it as Joss tried to open the gate. Syracuse then dashed several times round the yard and jumped back into the paddock, where he spent a joyous hour avoiding the efforts of Joss, Cat and the stableboy to catch him. After that, there was no time left before supper.
“No she is not!” Gammer shouted, so loudly that the Dell’s crowded little living room rang all over with the noise. “Pinhoes is Pinhoes and make sure you look after Nutcase for me, Marianne.”
“I don’t understand you, Gammer,” Marianne said boldly. She thought Cat had been right to say she was downtrodden, and she had decided to be brave from now on.
Gammer chomped her jaws, breathed heavily and stared stormily at nothing.
Marianne sighed. This behaviour of Gammer’s would have terrified her a week ago. Now she was being brave, Marianne felt simply impatient. She wanted to go home and get on with her story. Since her meeting with Irene, the story had suddenly turned into The Adventures of Princess Irene and her Cats, which was somehow far more interesting than her first idea of it. She could hardly wait to find out what happened in it next. But Aunt Joy had sent Cousin Ned down to Furze Cottage to say that Gammer wanted Marianne now, and Mum had said, “Better see what she wants, love.” So Marianne had had to stop writing and hurry round to the Dell. Uselessly, because Gammer was not making any sense.
“You have got Nutcase, have you?” Gammer asked anxiously.
“Yes, Gammer.” Marianne had left Nutcase sitting on the draining board watching Mum chop herby leaves and peel knobby roots. She could only hope that he stayed there.
“But I’m not having it!” Gammer said, switching from anxiety to anger. “It’s not true. You’re to contradict it whenever you hear it, understand?”
“I would, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marianne said.
At this, Gammer fell into a real rage. “Hocum pocum!” she yelled, beating the floor with her stick. “You’re all turned against me! It’s insurpery, I tell you! They wouldn’t tell me what they’d done with him. Put him down it and pull the chain, I told them, but would they do it? They lied. Everyone’s lying to me!”
Marianne tried to say that no one was lying to Gammer, but Gammer just yelled her down. “I don’t understand you!” Marianne bawled back. “Talk sense, Gammer! You know you can if you try.”
“It’s an insult to Pinhoes!” Gammer screamed.
The noise brought Aunt Dinah striding cheerfully in. “Now, now, Gammer, dear. You’ll only tire yourself out if you shout like that. She’ll fall asleep,” Aunt Dinah said to Marianne, “and when she wakes up she’ll have forgotten all about it.”
“Yes, but I don’t know what she’s so angry about,” Marianne said.
“Oh, it’s nothing really,” Aunt Dinah said, just as if Gammer was not sitting there. “It’s only that your aunt Helen was in here earlier. She likes to have all your aunts drop in, tell her things, cheer her up. You know. And Helen was telling her that the new lady that’s just bought Woods House is a Pinhoe born and bred —”
“She is not!” Gammer said sulkily. “I’m the only Pinhoe around here.”
“Are you, dear?” Aunt Dinah said cheerily. “And where does that leave the rest of us?”
This seemed to be the right way to treat Gammer. Gammer looked surprised, ashamed and amused, all at once, and took to pleating the clean, clean skirt that Aunt Dinah had dressed her in that morning. “These are not my clothes,” she said.
“Whose are they then?” Aunt Dinah said, laughing. She turned to Marianne. “She’d no call to drag you over here for that, Marianne. Next time she tries it, just ignore it. Oh, and could
you ask your mum for more of that ointment for her? She gets sore, sitting all the time.”
Marianne said she would ask, and walked away among the chickens and the ducks, taking care to latch the gate behind her. Joe was always forgetting to shut the gate properly. Last time Joe forgot, the goats had got out into everyone’s gardens. The things Aunt Joy had said about Joe —! Marianne discovered herself to be missing Joe far more than she had expected. She wondered how he was getting on.
“Mum,” Marianne asked, as she came into the herby, savoury steam of the kitchen in Furze Cottage. Nutcase, to her relief, was still there, sitting on the table now, among the jars and bottles waiting to be filled with balms and medicines. “Mum, is Mrs Yeldham a Pinhoe born and bred?”
“So your great uncle Lester says,” Mum said. Her narrow face was fiery red and dripping in the steam. Wet curls were escaping from the red and white checked cloth she had wrapped round her head. “Marianne, I could use your help here.”
Marianne knew how this one worked: help Mum, or she would get no further information. She sighed because of her unfinished story and went to find a cloth to wrap her hair in. “Yes?” she said, once she was hard at work beating chopped herbs into warm goose grease. “And?”
“She really is a Pinhoe,” Mum said, carefully straining another set of herbs through a square of muslin. “Lester went up to London and checked the records in case he did wrong to sell her the house. You remember those stories about Luke Pinhoe who went to London to seek his fortune a hundred years ago?”
“The one who turned his Gaffer into a tree first?” Marianne said.
“Only overnight,” Mum said, as if that excused it. “He did it so that he could get away, I think. There must have been quite a row there, what with Luke refusing to be the next Gaffer, and his father crippling both his legs so that he’d have to stay. Anyway, they say that Luke stole his father’s old grey mare and rode all night until he came to London, and the mare made her way back here all on her own. And Luke found an enchanter to mend his legs – and that must be true, because Lester found out that Luke set up as an apothecary first, which would have been hard to do as a cripple. He’d have been more likely to have been begging on the streets. But there he was, dealing in potions because he was herb-cunning, like me. But Luke seems to have found out quite soon that he was an enchanter himself. He made himself a mint of money out of it. And his son was an enchanter after him, and his son after that, right down to this present day, when William Pinhoe, who died this spring, had only the one daughter. They say he left his daughter all his money and two servants to look after her, and she’s the Mrs Yeldham who bought Woods House.”
The Chrestomanci Series Page 128