“Seven times round,
Seven times round,
Bind the child that I have found,
Seven times round,
The child is bound.”
Aidan tried to keep his eyes on just one of the creatures, to count how many times it circled him, but he soon realised he could be hypnotised that way. It was like trying to follow one snowflake in a blizzard. Without his glasses, he was not sure if they were exactly hornets, but he could see they had big bent, striped bodies and stings sticking out at the ends. Their wings made a snarling blur. Aidan remembered reading somewhere that you could die if enough hornets stung you. He was terrified. He looked across at poor near-naked Rolf, crouching on the grass, but the creatures did not seem to be interested in Rolf. That was one good thing at least.
“Help!” he shouted. Mrs Stock must be in the kitchen. Surely she would hear.
“Seven times round,” chanted the Puck. “Seven times round.” And he added in a more normal voice, “Then walk where my hornets take you and you will not be hurt. Walk towards the front of this house.”
“No!” Aidan screamed. “Help!” Was Mrs Stock deaf?
Help came from another direction instead. Uneven feet ran, one foot light, one heavy. “What the green festering devil is going on?” demanded a voice. It could have been the Puck’s voice, except that it had an Irish accent. Tarquin came round the corner of the house and exclaimed at the sight of Aidan half crouching in a funnel of whirling dark creatures. He swore. “Call those things off!” he said, pointing his crutch at the Puck. “Call them off now!”
The Puck looked extremely dismayed to see Tarquin, but he shook his head. “Not I. This is in my master’s service,” he said, and went on with his chant. “Seven times round, Seven times round…”
Tarquin suggested several very filthy things the Puck could do with his master and rushed at the little chanting man with his crutch pointed like a lance. “Stop it!” he yelled.
“I take no orders from a man with one leg!” the Puck screamed out, as Tarquin’s crutch hit him in his bulging grey waistcoat.
Tarquin’s missing leg promptly gave way. Tarquin landed in a crouch on his real knee. But he heaved with the crutch as he went down and the Puck went up and over backwards into the water butt. SPLASH!
Rolf cheered and seized the chance to become a dog again. And, Aidan saw out of the corner of his eye as he ran out from among the dwindling, vanishing hornet creatures, Groil also seized his chance. Aidan glimpsed him uncurling and whisking himself out of sight round the corner of the house.
Aidan knelt down beside Tarquin. “Thanks,” he said. “What can I do for your leg?”
“The Lord alone knows, except it isn’t there any more,” Tarquin said wretchedly.
Here the kitchen door opened and Mrs Stock came out with her what’s-going-on face. Shaun followed her, busily gnawing on half a French loaf filled with steak and lettuce. Aidan’s stomach rumbled at the sight. Then they all had to shield their faces as the Puck came soaring back out of the water butt in a brown surge of rainwater.
“I’ll be even with you yet!” he screamed at Tarquin, spitting out water and pond life.
“Evens is all you’ll ever be with me,” Tarquin said to him. “I’m your human counterpart, so I am. Add in Shaun here and you’re outnumbered. Go away. Stay away.”
“What in the world…?” said Mrs Stock, watching the Puck come hovering down to the ground in his dripping morning dress. “Shaun, get that creature out of here before my nerves get the better of me, for Heaven’s sake!”
“I’m going, I’m going!” the Puck said, glowering at her. “You needn’t invoke That Place. And,” he added to Aidan, “I shall find you again, soon enough. Whenever you use that wallet.” He bent and popped the soaking envelope he was holding into the pink bag. Then he was gone. There was nothing of him left but a small shower of water falling among the thistles and the grass.
“We must ask the professor for some way to keep these creatures off you,” Tarquin said to Aidan.
“Professor’s not here,” said Mrs Stock. “Gone to London. World of his own. Were you wanting him for anything particular?”
“Nothing, only hoping for a bit of physio, as you might say,” Tarquin said. He was still kneeling on his good leg, propped on his crutch. He pointed miserably to the missing one, where his trouser leg draped across the grass.
“Help him up, Shaun,” Mrs Stock commanded. She picked up the pink bag — which had got rather wet in the encounter — and looked inside it. “Wet letter for the professor,” she said. “Damp cereal. At least you got proper food for that ungrateful dog.” Rolf gave her a reproachful look and shook himself. Water sprayed across Mrs Stock’s apron. “None of that, or I shan’t open you a single tin,” Mrs Stock said. “Aidan, your filled French will be ready in ten minutes. Be here.” She marched back indoors with the bag. Rolf followed her, with his nose practically inside the bag.
Shaun, with his French bread waving in one hand, heaved Tarquin up with his other hand, and Aidan helped steady him. Tarquin’s shoe fell off his missing foot as he came upright. “See?” Tarquin said despairingly. “Gone again.”
There was a perfectly good sock on the missing foot. Aidan looked at it, glad of the distraction. He was still vibrating all over from the hornet creatures, and from knowing that someone here in Melstone wanted him dead now. He was like the strings of Andrew’s piano, he thought, if you struck one of the deep keys hard and then went away.
“Your sock’s still on,” he said to Tarquin. He bent and felt the air above the sock. His fingers met a sharp shin and a bony knee and strong muscles at the back of them. “Your leg’s still there. The Puck just made you think it wasn’t.” He put the shoe back on over the sock to prove it to Tarquin.
“Is that so?” The colour began to come back to Tarquin’s bearded, elfin face. Very cautiously, he stood on both feet. He flexed the missing leg, then stamped. “You’re right!” he said. “It hasn’t gone!”
Shaun nodded, satisfied that Tarquin was now all right, and turned to Aidan. “Groil wants you to look in the shed. He got the window clean.”
Groil came sidling back round the corner of the house, big again, with his head nearly level with the bedroom window beside him. He grinned down at Aidan. “That was a good parsnip last night,” he said. “Sweet. Big. Come and look in the shed.”
Here was another distraction. Aidan grinned back. “There’s about a thousand broad beans for tonight,” he said.
“Oh, good,” said Groil.
Tarquin tipped his head back to look up at Groil. His mouth came open. “Who—?” he said to Shaun.
Shaun had just taken a massive mouthful of bread and steak. “Glmph,” he said, with lettuce hanging down his chin.
“This is Groil,” Aidan said. “He’s one of those who don’t use iron. My gran told me there’s a lot of them all over the place if you look. Coming?”
Tarquin nodded wonderingly and limped after Shaun as Shaun followed Groil and Aidan round the house to the yard. There Groil stopped beside the lawnmower and bowed Aidan towards the shed door with one huge hand outstretched. It was so courtly that it made Aidan laugh as he slipped inside the shed.
The place was quite different already. It glowed with strangely coloured light from the glistening clean glass in the roof. Aidan could see where Shaun had been at work on two of the walls, cleaning and polishing the carved wood. The oddly shaped birds and little animals stood out all over the back wall, shiny and almost golden. The polish revealed that there were carved people in there too, mixed with trails of leaves and flowers.
Aidan breathed in the honey smell of the beeswax. “It’s lovely!” he called out. He took his glasses off and looked up at the coloured glass in the roof. You could hardly see where the panes had been cracked now, or if you could see a crack, it looked like part of the patterns in the glass. Those patterns certainly seemed to be faces, but the window was too high for Aidan to see them pr
operly with his naked eyes. All he could see was that they seemed to be moving. Or was it that his head was moving because he was craning upwards?
Something strange happened then.
The shed went away from Aidan and, with it, the footsteps of the others and Tarquin’s voice — Tarquin was chattering as usual. But Aidan could still hear birds singing somewhere in the garden or in the orchard. He could hear trees rustling too, and smell damp leaves mixing with the scent of honey from the walls. Out of this, a voice spoke to him. It did not seem to use words, but it reminded him of Gran’s voice all the same, even though it seemed to be the voice of a man.
What is it you need, young sprig of kindling?
Aidan answered the voice in his mind, not by speaking. I want to be safe. People keep coming after me.
The voice seemed to consider. Then it said, Steps have been taken, by you and by others, but to be sure of safety you need to get rid of that wallet in your pocket.
Why? Aidan asked, startled.
Because they can trace you by it, sprigling. Money from nowhere is always trouble.
This sounded so like one of Gran’s sayings that Aidan believed it instantly. He said in his mind, I’ll get rid of it then. Thanks.
But isn’t there anything more you need? Have you no ambitions?
Well, Aidan thought, he would quite like to be a football star, like Jimmy Stock was obviously going to be. But what his real ambition was he knew suddenly… I want to be wise, like Gran and Andrew, and have my own field-of-care and write books about all the amazing things I find out and, and fix things magically that can’t be fixed any other way and, and do lots of other things that need magic and, and—
The voice interrupted him. Aidan could hear the smile in it. Good. That is a very proper aim. The perfect one for you. You shall have my help in this.
The birdsong and the leaf smell receded into the background and Aidan found himself back in the shed again, with all three of the others. Shaun, with his mouth full, was waving his French loaf at a piece of the wall and Groil was bending down to inspect it. Aidan blinked and wondered however Groil had squeezed inside here. On the other side of him, Tarquin had both hands curled up around his eyes, as if his hands were binoculars, and was looking up through them at the window in the roof.
“I can’t see all the faces clearly,” Tarquin was saying, “but there’s Wally and Rosie, and I think there’s Ronnie Stock too, so I do. On a rough guess I’d say half the village was up there.”
A hatted silhouette darkened the door. “Shaun,” said Mr Stock, “what do you mean, leaving my mower out in the yard? Get it in at once. It’s going to rain.”
“Yes, Mr Stock. Sorry, Mr Stock.” Shaun fled out into the yard, still munching.
Aidan looked round for Groil. Groil had crouched down in one corner and made himself hard and heavy. He was obviously not wanting Mr Stock to see him. He looked for all the world, Aidan thought, like one of those old bags of cement that Shaun had buried in the asparagus bed. Aidan went over to Groil, wrestling the wallet out of his pocket as he went.
“Can you guard this for me for a while?” he asked him.
Groil put out a surprisingly small dense hand and took the wallet. “Where would I keep it?” he asked anxiously.
“Your pocket. Zip it into one of your pockets,” Aidan said.
Groil grinned, like a crack in a sack. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I got zips.”
Aidan remembered then how hungry he was. Mrs Stock had said ten minutes and be there. He pushed past Mr Stock and ran.
“What went down?” Mr Stock said to Tarquin as soon as Aidan had gone. “I felt something. Do you need any help?”
“Not now. I dealt with it myself,” Tarquin said. “But I warn you, Stockie, Aidan’s going to need us all on maximum alert from now on, so he is.”
As Shaun began to trundle the mower towards them, Mr Stock scratched worriedly under the back of his hat. “All right. But it’s the professor I seem to be homed in on really.”
“Revamp yourself to home on both of them then,” Tarquin said. “I think it’s urgent.”
Shaun and the mower arrived then. Beyond Shaun, rain began to pelt down. Tarquin made a face and raced away to his car, carrying his crutch like a rifle and quite forgetting he had only one leg.
Chapter Twelve
It rained all that afternoon and evening. Aidan moodily went with Rolf into the dark, chilly living room, wishing yet again that Andrew could bring himself to own a television, and wondering what to do with himself instead. He scrounged around the room, looking for something — anything! — interesting. In this way he found the two packages from Stashe that Mrs Stock had hidden quite cunningly in a pile of music on the piano.
One was for Andrew. Stashe had written on it: “Andrew. No parchment yet but I found this. And please read the letters and notes I put in your study. I think they’re important. S.”
The other, to Aidan’s pleasure, was for him, and it was big. Stashe’s note on this one said, “Aidan. These were all in the bottom of that box. You should have waited. Enjoy. S.”
When Aidan unwrapped this packet, he found a stack of old comics, each labelled in round black schoolboy writing, Property of Andrew Brandon Hope. Do not throw away.
“Hey, cool!” Aidan said. He settled himself, Rolf, all the cushions and the comics on the best sofa, turned on the reading lamp and prepared to enjoy himself.
Andrew came in hours later, tired, exasperated and damp from standing on stations waiting for trains. His first act was to go to the kitchen to make himself a proper cup of coffee. The memory of Mrs Arkwright’s coffee still lingered, and it was painful. As he was putting the kettle on, he noticed the wet letter in the middle of the kitchen table addressed to him in curly, majestic writing. Here was something to take away the taste of London, he thought.
The letter was too wet to read as it was. Andrew sat down with his coffee, thought a little while and then used a variation of the way he had fetched his car out of the ditch. Resting his fingertips on the damp envelope, he thought Einstein again, and time, and time past, back to the moment when the letter was first written, when it was dry and crisp. He suggested to the letter that it return to the way it was then.
The letter obligingly did so. In a second or so, it was a large expensive envelope, new and dry, dry enough for Andrew to slit it open with the end of his coffee spoon. Andrew drew the letter out from it. In the same curly, majestic writing, it said:
Mr Hope,
It has come to my attention that you are now bribing and coercing my folk to join your side. Desist from this. Failure to desist will lay you open to reprisals when my plans for Melstone have matured.
Yrs,
O. Brown
All Andrew’s pleasure in his successful piece of magic vanished in a surge of fury. How dare Mr Brown command him like this! The, the nerve of the man! He swigged coffee and raged. As he poured himself a second mugful, he had cooled down enough to wonder just who Mr Brown thought he had been bribing. Groil and Rolf, he supposed the man meant. He certainly couldn’t mean Security. “Absolutely absurd!” Andrew said aloud. Groil was still a child and his grandfather had been feeding Groil for years. Fat lot of care Mr Brown had taken of Groil, who had had no food and no clothes until Melstone House provided him with them. And the same went for Rolf, who was little more than a puppy anyway. “Absurd!” Andrew said again. He threw the letter aside and went to look for Aidan.
Aidan looked up with a grin from among his heap of comics. Rolf sprang up from across Aidan’s legs, tail whirling, and fawned on Andrew. Andrew rubbed Rolf’s silky ears and felt slightly better. Aidan watched a moment, then said, “Was it a bad day?”
“Yes,” said Andrew. “What’s that you’re reading?”
Aidan answered by turning the comic round to the signature and holding it up. Andrew bent over and was amazed to read his own signature. He had clean forgotten his comics collection. He had forgotten how he had stored the comics he
re in Melstone House because his parents objected to him reading such things. His grandfather hadn’t objected. Andrew remembered his grandfather reading the comics too and enjoying them as much as Andrew did.
Except when it came to the supernatural parts, Andrew recalled. There his grandfather had got all annoyed and explained to Andrew where they were wrong, and how. “Were-dogs, weres of any kind, don’t need a full moon to change,” Andrew remembered old Jocelyn saying. “That part’s just folklore, son. They naturally change at will.” After this, Andrew remembered Jocelyn instructing him in the correct, real way of this magic, then that; telling him so many things that the present-day Andrew felt as if he were receiving an information dump. He felt quite dazed by the amount he now remembered. He laughed incredulously. He had made himself forget it all, first because his mother told him it was all nonsense and then, as a hard working student, because he had decided that magic was not an adult thing to know. And old Jocelyn had, after all, instructed his grandson very carefully in everything he would need to know when he took over his grandfather’s field-of-care. What a fool I’ve been! Andrew thought.
Aidan watched attentively as the dazed, incredulous smile grew on Andrew’s face. When Andrew finally laughed, Aidan relaxed. Now he could break the bad news. “There was a bit of trouble here today,” he said, “but Tarquin’s leg really is still there. I checked.” He went on to describe his encounter with the Puck, although he did not mention the strange voice in the shed. That felt private. “So I gave the wallet to Groil to guard,” he finished.
“Good,” said Andrew. “I’d been meaning to warn you not to use that wallet. They can find you by it. So after that little scrimmage, it may not surprise you to learn that they’ve got the Arkwrights’ house staked out in London. I had an encounter there too. But the Arkwrights seem to have made themselves believe that they sent you away for frightening the other children.”
“Great!” said Aidan. “I meant them to.”