The Pinhoe Egg

“Keep your horse straight,” Joss said. He had obviously not noticed anything beyond Syracuse moving sideways on for a second or so. “Keep your mind on the road.”

“Sorry,” said Cat. As they rode on, he realised that he had really been saying sorry to the hidden voices. Even using all his strength, he had not been able to help them. He could have cried.

Or perhaps he had done something. Around them, the wood was slowly and gently filling up with blue distance, as if it were leaking round the edge where Cat had pushed the framework of dead things aside. A few birds were, very cautiously, beginning to sing. But it was not enough. Cat knew it was not nearly enough.

He rode home, hugging the queer experience to him, the way you hug a disturbing dream. He thought about it a lot. But he was bad at telling people things, and particularly bad at telling something so peculiar. He did not mention it properly to anyone. The nearest he came to telling about it was when he said to Roger, “What’s that wood like over on that hill? The one that’s furthest away.”

“No idea,” Roger said. “Why?”

“I want to go there and see,” Cat said.

“What’s wrong with Home Wood?” Roger asked.

“There’s a horrible gamekeeper,” Cat said.

“Mr Farleigh. Julia used to think he was an ogre,” Roger said. “He’s vile. I tell you what, why don’t we both go to that wood on the hill? Ulverscote Wood, I think it’s called. You ride and I’ll go on my bike. It’ll be fun.”

“Yes!” said Cat.

Cat knew better than to mention this idea to Joss Callow. He knew Joss would say it was far to soon for Cat to take Syracuse out on his own. He and Roger agreed that they would wait until it was Joss’s day off.

Chapter Six (#ulink_7782cebd-661f-5bb6-97b5-8223d472f1b0)

Cat was interested to see that Joss seemed to want to avoid Mr Farleigh too. When they rode out after that, they went either along the river or out into the bare upland of Hopton Heath, both in directions well away from Home Wood. And here too, going both ways, Cat discovered the background felt as if it were missing. He found it sad and puzzling.

Roger was hugely excited about going for a real long ride. He tried to interest Janet and Julia in the idea. They had now cycled everywhere possible in the Castle grounds, and round and round the village green in Helm St Mary too, so they were ripe for a long ride. The three of them made plans to cycle all of twelve miles, as far away as Hopton, although, as Julia pointed out, this made it twenty-four miles, there and back, which was quite a distance. Janet told her not to be feeble.

They were just setting out for this marathon, when a small blue car unexpectedly rattled up to the main door of the Castle.

Julia dropped her bike on the drive and ran towards the small blue car. “It’s Jason!” she shrieked. “Jason’s back!”

Millie and Chrestomanci arrived on the Castle steps while Julia was still yards away and shook hands delightedly with the man who climbed out of the car. He was just in time to turn round as Julia flung herself on him. He staggered a bit. “Lord love a duck!” he said. “Julia, you weigh a ton these days!”

Jason Yeldham was not very tall. He had contrived, even after years of living at the Castle, to keep a strong cockney accent. “No surprise. I started out as boot boy here,” he explained to Janet. He had a narrow bony face, very brown from his foreign travels, topped by sun-whitened curls. His eyes were a bright blue and surrounded by lines from laughing or from staring into bright suns, or both.

Janet was fascinated by him. “Isn’t it odd,” she said to Cat, who came to see what the excitement was. “You hear about someone and then a few days later they turn up.”

“It could be the Castle spells,” Cat said. But he liked Jason too.

Roger morosely gathered up the three bicycles and put them away. The rest crowded into the main hall of the Castle, where Jason was telling Millie and Chrestomanci which strange worlds he had been to and saying he hoped that his storage shed was still undisturbed. “Because I’ve got this big hired van following on full of some of the weirdest plants you ever saw,” he said, with his voice echoing from the dome overhead. “Some need planting out straight away. Can you spare me a gardener? Some I’ll need to consult about – they need special soil and feed and so on. I’ll talk to your head gardener. Is that still Mr McDermot? But I’ve been thinking all the way down from London that I need a real herb expert. Is that old dwimmerman still around – the one with the long legs and the beard – you know? He always knew twice what I did. Had an instinct, I think.”

“Elijah Pinhoe, you mean?” Millie said. “No. It was sad. He died about eight years ago now.”

“I gather the poor fellow was found dead in a wood,” Chrestomanci said. “Hadn’t you heard?”

“No!” Jason looked truly upset. “I must have been away when they found him. Poor man! He was always telling me that there was something wrong in the woods round here. Must have had a presentiment, I suppose. Perhaps I can talk with his widow.”

“She sold the house and moved, I heard,” Millie said.

“There’s some very silly stories about that.”

Jason shrugged. “Ah well. Mr McDermot’s got a good head for plants.”

The van arrived, pulled by two carthorses, and everyone from the temporary boot boy to Miss Rosalie the librarian was roped in to deal with Jason’s plants. Janet, Julia, the footmen and most of the Castle wizards and sorceresses carried bags and pots and boxes to the shed. Millie wrote labels. Jason told Roger where to put the labels. Cat was told off, along with the butler and Miss Bessemer the housekeeper, to levitate little tender bundles of root and fuzzy leaves to places where Mr McDermot thought they would do best, while Miss Rosalie followed everyone round with a list. Anyone left over unpacked and sorted queer shaped bulbs to be planted later in the year.

Roger gloomed. He knew there was no question of cycling anywhere that day.

He almost forgave Jason that evening at supper when Jason kept everyone fascinated by telling of the various worlds he had been on and the strange plants he had found there. There was a plant in World Nine B that had a huge flower once every hundred years, so beautiful that the people there worshipped it as a god.

“That was one of my failures,” Jason told them. “They wouldn’t let me take a cutting, whatever I said.”