Chrestomanci said impatiently to Cat, “Get in. Let’s go.”
But Klartch had decided he wanted to meet Dolly. Jason had to grab him round his wriggling body and dump him in the back seat of the car, where he somehow covered Irene in green pond weed. And now Millie was climbing out of the driver’s seat to help the Reverend Pinhoe out of the pond and offer him a lift back up the hill. More pond weed arrived in the car. Chrestomanci looked exasperated. He went back to Marianne. “The car will come for you at eight-thirty on Monday,” he said to her. “I hope it will be cleaner by then. Pack for five days.”
I see how Dad feels, Marianne thought. He does expect everyone to do what he says. And she thought, I’ll miss school. Suppose they throw me out of the Castle after a week? Will school have me back? But I’ll learn all sorts of new magic. Do I want to? She gave Chrestomanci a nervous and slightly indefinite nod.
“Good.” Chrestomanci strode back to the car. Cat was now packed in beside everyone else, with Klartch across their knees. Nothing would possess Klartch to get down on the floor. He wanted to look out of the window. “Thank goodness!” Chrestomanci said, throwing himself in beside Millie. “I really must have a word with Gaffer Farleigh before all the other Farleighs get back!”
The Pinhoes stood aside and watched unlovingly while Millie turned the car and drove out of the Dell. She drove along the lane, where a few enchanted frogs still croaked in the hedges, and then on up the hill, past groups of mournful people sweeping up broken glass, past Great Uncle Lester’s stranded car, and stopped by the vicarage to let the Reverend Pinhoe squelch away, along with Irene and Jason, all of them covered in green weed. After that Cat and Klartch expanded in the back seat and Millie put on speed.
It was not long before they began passing Farleighs. Gammer Norah and Dorothea first, since they had been the last to leave, shot the car poisonous looks as it purred past them. After that came a whole line of Farleighs, trudging along the side of the road pushing bent bicycles or carrying useless broomsticks. Some of them made rude gestures, but most of them dejectedly ignored the car as it whispered by. When they had passed the last Farleigh, still only about halfway home, Chrestomanci seemed to relax. “How come you turned up so providentially?” he asked Millie.
“Oh, I only went down to the village to post a letter,” Millie said, “and the first thing I saw was a really peculiar statue of a tree, standing in the middle of the green. Norah Farleigh was stamping about beside it, haranguing people. As I walked past, I heard her say something like ’and we’ll do for those Pinhoes!’ and I saw there was going to be trouble. Then while I was posting the letter and wondering what to do, I recognised one of our horses outside the smithy. So I hurried over there and found Joss Callow. I said, ’Leave the horse and come with me at once. We may be in time to stop a witches’ war in Ulverscote.’ I knew I had to have a Pinhoe with me, you see, or their spells would stop me getting there. And Joss was only too glad to come with me. He was afraid someone was going to get killed – he kept saying so. But we hadn’t reckoned on the Farleighs being so quick. By the time we’d gone back to the Castle and I’d got the car out, they were already on the way. The road was blocked by bicycles and the air was thick with broomsticks. We had to crawl behind them the whole way. So I went to Woods House and picked up the Yeldhams, in case they got hurt – I knew I could keep them safe in the car – but when we came out into the village they were fighting there like mad things and none of us could think of how to stop them. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come along in that flying machine.”
“I was not happy to be there,” Chrestomanci said. “I’d only persuaded Roger to take me in order to get an overview of the misdirection spells.”
“I’m glad the boys survived it,” Millie said. “I must remind Roger that he has only one life.”
They purred on for another couple of miles. They were almost in Helm St Mary when they saw a man in the distance wrestling with a horse. The man was being bounced and dangled and dragged all over the road.
Cat said, “It looks as if Joss has run out of peppermints.”
“I’ll handle it,” said Chrestomanci.
Millie crept up behind Joss and whispered to a stop far enough away not to outrage Syracuse any further. Chrestomanci rolled down his window and held out a paper bag of peppermints. More of Julia’s probably, Cat thought.
“Thank you, sir!” Joss said gratefully.
Cat said sternly, “Syracuse, behave!”
Chrestomanci said, “By the way Mr – er – Carroway —”
“Callow,” Joss managed to say. He was hanging on to the reins with both hands, with the paper bag between his teeth.
“Callow,” Chrestomanci agreed. “I do hope you are not considering giving in your notice at all, Mr Carlow. You are by far and away the best stableman we have ever had.”
Joss flushed all over his wide brown face. “Thank you, sir. I – well—” He spat the bag into his hand and waved it enticingly under Syracuse’s nose. “It’s a job I’d be glad to keep,” he said. “My mother lives in Helm St Mary, see.”
“She was born a Pinhoe, I take it,” Chrestomanci said.
Joss flushed redder still and nodded. Chrestomanci did not need to say he knew that Joss had been planted in the Castle as a spy. He gave Joss a gracious wave as Millie drove on.
Very soon after this, the car was scudding round the village green of Helm St Mary, just below the Castle. There, slap in the middle of the green, stood the stone oak tree, looking like a twisty granite, three-armed memorial of some kind. Hard for Gammer Norah to miss it there, Cat thought guiltily. He’d had no idea he had sent it here.
“Dear me,” Chrestomanci murmured as the car crunched to a halt beside the green. “What a very ugly object.” He climbed out. “Come on, Cat.”
Cat scrambled out and persuaded Klartch to stay inside the car. He was not looking forward to this, he thought, as he followed Chrestomanci over to the stone tree.
“Uglier than ever, close to,” Chrestomanci said, looking up at the thing. “Now, Cat, if you could turn at least his head back, I’d be glad of a word with him. You can leave the gun as granite, I think.”
Cat was somehow very much aware of Klartch watching anxiously through the car window as he put his hands on the cold rough granite. And because Klartch was watching, Cat knew there was also a ring of half-seen beings watching quite as anxiously from behind every tuft of grass on the green. In fact, Klartch made him see that they were everywhere, swinging on the inn sign, sitting on the roofs, peering out of hedges and perched on chimneys. Cat saw that he had let them all out, all over the country. They would always be everywhere now.
“Turn back into Mr Farleigh,” he said to the stone oak.
Nothing happened.
Cat tried again with his left hand alone and still nothing happened. He tried putting both hands on the rough, knobby place that must have been Mr Farleigh’s face, and then pushing both hands apart to clear the stone away. Still nothing happened. Chrestomanci moved Cat aside and tried himself. Cat knew that this was unlikely to work. Chrestomanci almost never could turn anything back once Cat had changed it: their magic seemed to be entirely different. And he was right. Chrestomanci gave up, looking exasperated.
“Let’s try together,” he said.
So they both tried and still nothing happened. Mr Farleigh remained a grey, faintly glistening, obdurate oak made of stone.
“It comes to something,” Chrestomanci said, “when two nine-lifed enchanters together can make no difference whatsoever to this thing. What did you do, Cat?”
“I told you,” Cat said. “I made him like he really was.”
“Hm,” said Chrestomanci. “I really must learn more about dwimmer. It seems to be your great strength, Cat. But it’s very frustrating. I wanted to tell him what I thought of him – not to speak of asking him how he managed to be a gamekeeper we didn’t need for all those years.” He turned discontentedly away to the c
ar.
A flitting half-seen being drew Cat’s attention to Joss’s bored horse, still hitched up outside the smithy. “I’d better bring Joss his horse back,” Cat said. “You go on.”
Chrestomanci shrugged and got into the car.
Cat ran over to the horse. It had all four shoes again. “All right if I take him?” he called to the blacksmith, deep inside his coaly cave of a shed.
The blacksmith looked up from hammering and called back, “About time. I’ll send the bill up to the Castle.”
Cat mounted the horse from the block of stone beside the smithy. It was much taller than Syracuse. Otherwise it had no character at all. He got no feelings from it, not even a wish to go home. This felt very strange after Syracuse. But at least its dull mind left Cat free with his own thoughts. As he clopped round the green in the early evening light, Cat wondered if he had left Mr Farleigh as a stone tree because he wanted him that way. Mr Farleigh had scared him. He had scared the half-seen beings even more. As Cat turned up through the Castle gates, the beings skipped and skittered among the trees lining the driveway, laughing in their delight that Mr Farleigh was no longer a threat. Cat wondered if they had helped him leave Mr Farleigh as he now was.
He had had no lunch and he was starving. Klartch would be hungry too. Cat made the lumpish horse go faster and – because it was now thinking dimly of home and food – he took it the short way he was not supposed to go, along the gravel in front of the newer part of the Castle. The flying machine was spread out on the lawn there, in front of four deep brown skidmarks in the grass. It looked as if Roger and Joe had had a rough landing.
Janet and Julia were cautiously inspecting the machine. Janet called out, “Cat, I can’t find Klartch anywhere!”
Julia called out, “What have you been up to without us? It isn’t fair!”
“You wouldn’t have enjoyed it,” Cat called back. “Millie’s got Klartch.”
“I don’t care,” Julia shouted. “It still isn’t fair!”
Marianne arrived very apprehensively the next Monday. She found she was in for ordinary lessons at first with Joe, Roger, Cat, Janet and Julia, taught by a tall, keen man called Michael Saunders. She was impressed by Mr Saunders. No one else had ever made Joe do any schoolwork at all. But Joe had been promised a big new workshed where he and Roger could experiment with all their new ideas, provided he pleased Mr Saunders. So Joe sat at a desk and worked, and very soon proved to be quite extraordinarily good with figures.
Marianne began to enjoy herself. She made friends instantly with both the other girls and she liked Cat anyway, although she was shy of Roger. Roger would talk about machinery or money.
Most afternoons, Marianne and Cat had a lesson with Chrestomanci. At first, Marianne could hardly speak for nerves. Enchanter’s magic was all so strange and Cat knew so much more than she did. But she discovered on the second afternoon that Cat was slow with Magic Theory, whereas Marianne found it so easy that she almost felt she knew most of it already. Anyway, the next half of the lesson was always more like a conversation, with Cat and Chrestomanci asking her interested questions about the craft and dwimmer and herb lore. After the first terrifying afternoon, Marianne felt entirely at ease and talked and talked.
She had brought her story with her, of Princess Irene and her Cats, but she never got very far with it, because she was always being roped in for games with the girls or with Klartch and half the people in the Castle, and these were all so much fun that she never seemed to have time for anything else.
By the end of the week, she was enjoying herself so much that it was a real wrench when she and Joe had to go home to Ulverscote. They found they had missed Gammer’s funeral. But at least they arrived in time to welcome Nicola home from hospital, pale and skinny but no longer seriously ill. As they walked back from the welcome party, Joe and Marianne talked all the time about Chrestomanci Castle. In fact, they talked of nothing else all weekend. Dad was morose about it, but Mum listened, doubtfully but intently. When the car came and fetched Joe and Marianne away again the next Monday, their mother went thoughtfully along to Woods House to talk to Irene.
Irene had never been officially named as the next Gammer, but people were always going to talk to her as if she was. Irene would lay her pencil down across her latest delicate design-work and listen seriously with Nutcase on her knee. Nutcase was now able to get into any cupboard or at any food he fancied and only Jane James could control him. Mum told Marianne it was a blessing that Irene liked that cat so much.
Irene’s advice was always considered to be excellent – though Irene told Marianne that all she did was to tell people what they were really trying to say to her. One of the first people to consult her was Uncle Charles. He put on his badly crumpled wedding-suit and went up to Woods House as an official visitor, where he told Irene many things. Shortly after that, he enrolled as an advanced student at the Bowbridge College of Art. Mum told Marianne that Uncle Charles was intending to go to London to seek his fortune in a year or so.
“There’s another who’s above his own family now,” Dad said.
Mum’s own visit to Irene resulted in her sharing the car that came for Joe and Marianne on the third Monday and arriving at Chrestomanci Castle too. Millie welcomed her with delight. Mum spent a most enjoyable morning talking to Millie over coffee and biscuits – good, but not as good as Jane James’s, Mum said, but then whose were? – talking about everything under the sun, including the deep mysteries of herbs. After a bit, she agreed to let Chrestomanci’s secretary Tom come in and take notes, because, as Millie said, she was saying things that even Jason had never heard of. Marianne’s mum enjoyed this visit so much – including the chance to have lunch with both her children – that she went back to the Castle many times. It annoyed Dad but, Mum said, there you go, that’s Dad.
After this, the car going to the Castle on a Monday was often quite crowded with Pinhoe ladies – and their broomsticks for the return journey – visiting various people in the Castle. Mr Stubbs and Miss Bessemer were busy learning from the craft too. Amazing new chutneys and tangy pickles made their way into the Castle, along with certain magical embroideries for sheets, clothes and cushions. The Castle gave them spells in return, but most Pinhoe ladies were agreed that Castle spells were not a patch on the spells of the craft. It made them feel pleasantly useful and superior.
The men mostly went over by bicycle. They were even more superior, particularly Uncle Richard and Uncle Isaac, when they found themselves giving lessons in woodworking and the craft of growing things to a ring of earnest gardeners and footmen.
“Bah!” said Dad. “Letting them pick your brains!”
By this time it was all round the country, beyond Bowbridge in one direction and Hopton the other way, that Edgar and Lester Pinhoe had done away with Gaffer Pinhoe. Both of them lost clients. In the end, neither of them could stand the gossip any more. They moved away to Brighton, where they lived together in a bachelor flat. Great Aunt Clarice moved in with Great Aunt Sue, where they lived in the house just outside Ulverscote among more fat lazy dogs than anyone could count. Dad called the house “The Fleapit” from then on.
Gammer Norah and her daughter Dorothea naturally bore a grudge. They were the ones who spread the gossip about Edgar and Lester. When Marianne’s two great uncles left, Gammer Norah and Dorothea took to standing on the green of Helm St Mary, where they scowled so at any Pinhoes visiting the Castle that, as Mum said, it made you nervous in case they still had the evil eye. But that stopped when Gammer Norah won a lottery ticket for two to go to Timbuktu, and both Norah and Dorothea went. “We can’t have them festering away on our doorstep,” Millie said, with a wink at Mum. “They had to go before their magic grew back.”
“Typical interference,” Dad said.
Klartch continued to grow. By Christmas he was developed enough to join the others in the now crowded schoolroom and learn to read and write. Even Janet began to realise that Klartch was a friend and not a pet. Games
of Klartchball still got played on the lawn, but the rules changed with Klartch’s size. Klartch was a team on his own by the New Year.
Often, usually around dusk, the Castle staff got used to seeing a huge female griffin come ghosting down to the lawn. This was sometimes confusing, because Joe’s latest flying machine was also liable to arrive home at dusk, whereupon it usually crashed. The way to tell the difference, Mr Frazier explained, was that if it was the griffin, you got knocked down in the corridor by Klartch rushing out to see his mother. If Klartch did not appear, then you rushed out with healing spells and mending crafts the Pinhoes had taught you.
And sometimes, sometimes, when Cat rode out on Syracuse into the more distant woods, they would see a tall old man striding along in the distance with his hand on the back of a glimmering white unicorn.
Copyright
Charmed Life. Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1977
Illustrations copyright © Tim Stevens 2000
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007393930
Version 1
The Magicians of Caprona. Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1980
Illustrations copyright © Tim Stevens 2000
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007369096
Version 1
Witch Week. Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1982
Illustrations copyright © Tim Stevens 2000
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007369102
Version 1
The Lives of Christopher Chant. Text copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1988
Illustrations copyright © Tim Stevens 2000
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007389018
Version 1
Mixed Magics. collection © Diana Wynne Jones 2000
Warlock at the Wheel © Diana Wynne Jones 1984
Carol Oneir’s Hundreth Dream © Diana Wynne Jones 1986
The Sage of Theare © Diana Wynne Jones 1982
The Chrestomanci Series Page 143