Aidan was not enjoying himself at all by then. The almost-blister from yesterday had developed into a full-grown one, large, squashy and painful. He could feel another growing on his other foot. But at last, long last, the walk was almost over. They were walking on the road by then, because Mr Brown’s defences had filled the space between that and the marshy place, and it was a great relief to Aidan when they arrived at the dip in the road and he knew they had finished.
It was even more of a relief to see Wally Stock driving his cows out into the field beside the road. Wally waved to Andrew and came over. He wanted to talk, as usual. Aidan sat thankfully in the grass beside the scratching Rolf, while Wally told Andrew what a terrible price the Fête Committee was having to pay for the hire of the bouncy castle and how unreliable some of the Fair people were.
“And what’s Mr Brown up to in that wood?” Wally asked eventually. This seemed to be what he had really come over to say. “I thought it was your wood.”
“It is,” Andrew said.
“Well, you better look into it,” Wally said. “It’s all barbed wire in there now. Man with a dog turned me out of it when I went in to get a sheep that had got herself caught on the wire.”
“What?!” Andrew was, for a moment, almost too angry to speak. What was the point, he thought, of trudging right round the boundary, when Mr Brown quietly expanded to take over from inside? “Come on, Aidan,” he said curtly. He waved to Wally and set off in long, angry strides towards the wood, with Rolf bounding ahead and Aidan limping behind.
They came to the sheep field. Rolf had almost reached the wood by the time Aidan had clattered the gate shut behind him. Andrew, halfway across the field, could see that the wood was full of pale coils of wire between the trees. He swore.
A grey, snarling dog shot out from among the trees and raced towards Andrew. It was coming straight for him and he knew it meant to attack. He stood still, wishing he had a stick. But his walking boots were quite stout. He supposed he could kick it.
Chapter Fifteen
Before Andrew could think what to do, or even move, Rolf came hurtling round the edge of the wood and threw himself on the grey dog. The air filled with snarls, growls and hoarse yelping —all the clamour of a serious dog fight. The golden body and the grey one rolled in a tangle on the grass.
Aidan forgot his blister and ran. “No, Rolf!” he shouted. He remembered only too well what thick muscles that grey dog had and the drool on its yellow fangs. It didn’t seem fair that Rolf should die defending Andrew. But he had only run about ten yards when the fighting yellow body beside the wood dissolved into a blur and then into a small boy, clinging to the back of the grey dog, holding it by one ear and punching its head mightily.
The grey dog howled with pain and heaved the boy away with a twist of its huge shoulders. Then it too became misty. It rolled over and it was Security, in his ragged coat with his knitted cap on crooked, diving to to strangle Rolf with his big knotty hands. But by this time Rolf was a dog again, snapping at Security’s hands. Security snatched his hands away and scrambled to kick Rolf in the head. Rolf dodged the flailing boot and became a boy again. And Security was a dog then, snarling and going for Rolf’s bare legs.
Aidan pelted onwards, frankly fascinated by the way were-dogs fought. They were man, boy, yellow dog, grey dog, boy, man again, almost quicker than Aidan could think. Andrew was circling warily in on them, watching for a chance to kick the grey dog in the head. But the changes were too fast for him to find his target. The snarling, hoarse shouting and screams were horrible.
“Go it, Rolf!” Aidan panted. “Get him!”
The fight was over as he said it. Security rose up into a man again, with one big boot drawn back to kick Rolf as soon as Rolf’s yellow blur became a dog. But the yellow blur dissolved into a boy instead. As a boy, Rolf ran at Security head down and butted him violently in the stomach. Security went “Bwah!” as all the breath left his body, then toppled over on to his back. Andrew saw his chance and, quite unscrupulously, raced in and kicked Security in his knitted hat. Several times. It helped that he did not think of Security as human any more.
“Get out!” he roared. “Get out at once!”
Security rolled over into a cowed, dazed dog. Andrew threatened to kick him again, but Security did not wait. He put his whiplike tail between his bulging back legs and bolted away into the wood. Rolf sank down on to his stomach, panting out a pink triumphant tongue. His plumed tail flapped on the grass. Didn’t I do well?! every inch of him said.
Aidan dashed up and hugged him. “You were brilliant!” he said. “You used your brain.” Rolf licked Aidan’s face contentedly.
“I’m afraid it’s not over yet,” Andrew said.
Aidan looked up and saw twenty more grey-hatted figures standing at regular intervals along the edge of the wood. They were all identical and they all reminded Aidan —just faintly —of Shaun. As he looked, they began to advance out into the field.
Andrew was furious. This was his wood, his property, his field-of-care. How dare they set a pack of were-dogs on him in his own place! He had just walked round every inch of it, making it his own, hadn’t he?
His own. It dawned on Andrew that he was now able to draw on all the power in his field-of-care, even Mr Brown’s, since he had just walked round the Manor too. He drew in a deep breath and, with it, the whole strength of Melstone. It made him feel huger than Groil. He spread out both arms and then flung them forward in a great scooping push. The power of it roared in his ears.
“Get out of here!” he shouted over the noise of the power. “Get out of here NOW!”
And he rolled the lot away backwards through the wood, all the grey-hatted figures and the coils of barbed wire, tumbling over and over. Beyond, he could feel most of the barbed wire melting away around the Manor walls. But not all of it. It stopped at one sparse coil and the Securities stopped when they were behind the ruined wall. He did not seem to be able to send them any further than that, although the trees thrashed about in the storm of magic. Leaves flew off them as if it were autumn and birds came up in a screaming cloud. But that was all. Mr Brown had clearly done something that fixed his boundaries at the walls. Andrew made sure that they could not come any further again by stamping three times, like Stashe when she threw Titania out.
“And stay there!” he said as the storm died down a little.
Aidan said, “Wow!”
There were shouts in the distance. To Andrew’s surprise, Mr Stock was rushing across the sheep field, carrying a spade.
“Need any help?” he asked as he approached.
“No thanks. I think I’ve fixed it for the moment,” Andrew said. He was feeling strange. Nothing he had done in his life had been like this.
Mr Stock surveyed the heaving trees. He nodded. “Trying to take over again, wasn’t he?” he said. “Old Mr Brandon warned me he might. They need a lesson, to my mind. I’ll think of something after the Fête. Let’s make what you did stick for now.” He went to the edge of the wood and drove the spade into the earth, so that it stood upright. “Iron,” he said. “That should hold them for a day or so.”
They went back to Melstone House. There, Andrew sat rather limply in a chair in the kitchen, while Stashe attended to Aidan’s blisters.
“Honestly, Aidan,” she said, “you should have mentioned these before. They deserve to be in the Guinness Book of Records. I’ve never seen any so big.”
Aidan agreed with her. He was feeling very smug and cared for, with Stashe’s shining fair head bent over him, smelling of clean hair mixed with wafts of disinfectant, and Stashe’s face turning up to him and smiling every so often. Rolf groaned enviously. He was lying where he was most in the way, stiff all over from the fight, waiting for Aidan to notice him.
Mrs Stock sniffed as she got ready to go home. She still had not forgiven Andrew. “You’ll be lucky to get to the Fete, any of you,” she said as she opened the back door. “Cauliflower cheese in the oven, Professor.
If there is a Fête to go to,” she added, looking up at the sky. “It feels like thunder out here. At least if they do have to cancel the Fête we’ll be spared Trixie’s dreadful sideshow. Look on the bright side.” She shut the back door behind her with a snap.
“I can’t wait to see what Trixie’s doing,” Aidan said. “I hope it doesn’t rain.”
“It does feel like thunder,” Stashe agreed.
It did feel that way, although the sky was clear. Andrew knew it was the storm of magic he had raised. It had sunk to a sort of uneasiness at the back of things by then, and there it stayed all evening. It was still there late that night, after Tarquin had fetched Stashe home and Aidan had gone to bed, when Andrew let Rolf out for Rolf to hobble about on the lawn squirting half-heartedly at thistles. I wish my grandfather had told me how you stopped such a thing, Andrew thought, watching Rolf limp upstairs to share Aidan’s bed. But I don’t think he ever did. Andrew locked the front door and went into the kitchen to make sure the back door was locked too.
Moonlight was blazing in slantwise through the coloured glass, casting misty squares of colour on the floor, faint purple, pale, pale green and red that was hardly more than a smear. Andrew looked at the glass itself and found himself jumping, with surprise that was almost fear. The faces there were so clear and so easy to recognise. Pulled by the strength of the magic coming in with the moonlight, Andrew went up to the glass and stared through the panes.
The magic blasted in at him, icy but not cold.
He could feel it now, coming in from vast distances, and he knew it was age-old, as old as gravity, older than earth. As a boy, he had always wondered why his grandfather called magic “the fifth power” and then grumbled at the stupidity of scientists for not recognising it. He could almost feel his grandfather, here in the kitchen behind him, urging and imploring him to understand. And Andrew did understand. In a shuddering leap, rather like the strange moment when he had understood all about History, he knew that magic was one of the great forces of the universe, that had come into being right at the beginning, along with gravity and the force that held atoms together, as strong, or stronger, than any force there. Stronger, definitely. At need, magic could dissolve atoms and reassemble them, as it did when Rolf changed from dog to child. It was a great power, to be used with great care.
Now that he understood, Andrew could feel magic pouring in, homing in on Melstone from light years away. It was being collected here. Someone, long ago, had set up the two sets of enchanted glass, the one here in the kitchen and the one in the roof of the shed, to act like the two poles of an enormous horseshoe magnet, pulling magic into the field-of-care. The Brandons’ main task was to protect this glass. They were supposed to use it for the good of the earth. But as soon as he knew this, Andrew could feel that at least half the magic was being drawn off into the Manor, where Mr Brown lived, feeding on the field-of-care like a slug on a lettuce.
Andrew smiled then and thought of Mr Stock. Mr Stock was paranoid about slugs.
He went on staring at the glass for a long time, drenched in moonlit magic, wondering what to do about Mr Brown, wondering about the various uses of the colours that the glass split the magic into. He had inklings about that, but he knew it would take months or maybe years of study to use the colours accurately. No, to get rid of Mr Brown he would have to use the purple pane, the powerful glass that brought in all the others. How to do it without harming Aidan was the problem…
“Fête today,” Aidan said to Rolf as he looked into the fridge that Saturday morning. Rolf groaned with his chin on his paws. “All that shape-changing was bad for him,” Aidan explained to Andrew. “He’s bruised all over. Can I give this cauliflower cheese to Groil?”
“If you like,” Andrew said, yawning. The magic-filled night had left him feeling bloated and slow.
Aidan whistled as he took the cauliflower cheese to the larder and put the bowl of it into the box he had carefully labelled “GROILFOOD”. He was coming to dislike cauliflower cheese almost as much as Andrew did. “And I know what,” he said, coming out of the larder, “I can go down to the shop and get you a paper.”
“Only if you’re wearing the silver charm,” Andrew said, sleepily making coffee. “Tell Rosie to put the paper on my account.”
“Wearing it,” Aidan said, jingling the charm on its chain. He had become fond of the way it lay warm against his collarbone. He swallowed a bowl of cereal and said, “Coming, Rolf?” Rolf groaned again, mightily. No. Aidan set off cheerfully on his own to see what was going on in the village.
Aidan was not disappointed. Much was going on. Mr Stock rumbled across Aidan’s path trundling a wheelbarrow in which reposed the mighty zeppelin marrow, a green and yellow monster of a marrow carefully packed around with turf to prevent it from bruising. At the end of the lane, Aidan met Mrs Stock pushing an old pram piled high with old clothes for her traditional stall.
“Doing this early,” she explained to Aidan. “I have to get back and make my cake for the Best Sponge competition. Tell the professor that Shaun’s on his way. He’s just finishing his Best Robot.”
And so it went on, all the way to the shop. Aidan passed person after person with barrows or old pushchairs, or carrying mysterious tins or packages, each of them making for the competition tent in the football field. In the shop, Rosie Stock was cursing. Her Best Sponge had gone flat as a pancake, she said, and she was having to make do with Best Rock Cakes instead.
Aidan bought the paper and slipped off back to Melstone House. Shaun was just arriving. “My robot’s the greatest!” he told Aidan, waving his arms and starfishing his fingers. “Does things you’d never believe. Make sure you see it.” And he put a copy of the same paper on the kitchen table.
“Curses!” Aidan said. “Shall I take my paper back?”
“You don’t need an excuse to snoop round the village surely?” Andrew said, opening Shaun’s paper and looking for the racing results. “We can always use newspaper.”
Aidan laughed and darted off again, to spend a happy morning watching the roundabout being powered up and coloured rolls of plastic being delivered and pumped into a bouncy castle. Shaun took himself off to the shed, saying wistfully over his shoulder that they always said he was too big for the bouncy castle. “But I bounce real careful, Professor. It’s not fair!”
“Shame,” Andrew agreed without listening. He was puzzling at the result from yesterday’s first race at Goodwood. Rich Ronnie had won it, followed by Takeover Brown and Freeforall. “Now what is that supposed to mean?” he was saying to himself when Stashe breezed in, carrying a third copy of the same paper. Andrew laughed. So did Stashe.
“Three times is the charm,” she said, giving Andrew a swift kiss. “Sorry. The paper was just my excuse to get out of the house. Dad’s got ten Best Roses and six rose holders and he can’t make up his mind which to enter. He’s cooking rock cakes and sponges and trying to ice his Best Iced Cake while he dithers, and he’s still got Best Bunch of Roses and Best Vase of Flowers to do. I tell you, it’s bedlam in there!”
“I can see it is,” Andrew said, still laughing. It was wonderful how Stashe and laughter seemed to go together. “But what do you make of this result?”
Stashe took up one of the extra papers and examined the racing page. “What this means,” she said, “is that you’re not as good at this as I am. What were you trying to find out?”
“Whether it’s safe for Aidan to go to the Fête,” Andrew said. “After all, Brown’s going to be there and Takeover Brown came second—”
“To Rich Ronnie and Ronnie Stock’s going to open it,” Stashe said. “That looks like the main event and it’s got nothing to do with Aidan. Let’s see what it says won the last race at Lingfield then.” She read out, “Thunderstorm came first and Gigantic and Rain of Fire tied for second. Honestly, Andrew, all I can see there is bad weather. And seeing that this was the last race, we can hope that it holds off until later. Oh, let him go, Andrew. He’ll go mad if you tel
l him he can’t, and he’d probably sneak off there anyway.”
Andrew sighed. He had hoped to be spared the boredom of the Fête.
He spent most of the morning watching the weather. In this he was not alone. Everyone in Melstone watched the sky and muttered that it felt like thunder. There were clouds, true, but high up, with hazy silver edges. The air felt hot and thick. But no rain came. By two o’clock, when the procession started, Andrew was resigned to the fact that the Fete would go ahead. He and Stashe went with Aidan to the end of the lane to watch the procession go by.
People carrying banners came first. Naturally there was a Best Banner competition. Aidan was a little pitying here. He had seen much better ones a couple of years back, when Gran took him to Notting Hill to watch the Carnival there. But he did concede that the billowing red dragon with MELSTONE on its side, which took four men to carry it, was probably quite good. Andrew preferred the stark black and white one that unfolded to show FETE in white letters on the black parts. “Huh!” Stashe said and laughed with delight at the motorbike disguised as an elephant, on which rode no-good boy Arnie Stock dressed as an Indian rajah. He was encased in a sort of cage with MELSTONE RULES on it in curly letters. The rest of Melstone agreed with Stashe. There were cheers and yells of, “Nice one, Arnie!” up and down the hedges from people walking in the road to watch.
The yells and whistles were almost drowned out by the band, who came next, marching quite smartly and playing the traditional Melstone Dance tune. It was a strange tune, jolly and sad at once. Stashe told Aidan that folklorists were always on about it. Aidan would have asked more, but he was distracted by seeing his football friend, Jimmy Stock, in a big and baggy uniform, playing the cornet in the band. Jimmy shot him a look as he marched past that said, “Don’t you dare laugh!” and Aidan had to turn away or he would have started to giggle. He was quite glad when the band thumped onwards and was followed by the morris men, striding jingling after. They were to give a display of dancing once Ronnie Stock had opened the Fête.