The butler, Andrew thought. There would be a butler. There was something about the man’s little plump face that struck him as familiar, but he was too angry to wonder about it. “I want to see Mr Brown,” he said. “Now.”
“Yes, sir. What name shall I say, sir?” the little man asked.
This seemed too easy. Andrew refused to be put off by it. “Tell him Professor Hope,” he snarled. Everyone here thought he was a professor. He might as well make use of it. “From Melstone House,” he added menacingly.
“Yes, sir. Please to follow me, sir.” The butler waved Andrew into the house and shut the door behind him with another impressive creak. Then he went pattering away into the gloomy interior, past carved oak panelling and across acres of red tiles.
Andrew followed. The fact that he was being let in without question made him angrier than ever. The butler didn’t even seem to notice he was angry. Trying to take the wind out of my sails! he thought. There was a strong smell of roast beef in the air. It led Andrew to hope that he was about to burst in on Mr Brown feeding, probably with a napkin under his chin and a decanter by his fat elbow.
But it seemed that lunch at the Manor must be over. The butler led him to a dark and cushy library-place, where leather-bound books glimmered on the walls and red leather chairs with buttons on stood about on a deep fawn carpet. A small fire flickered at the bottom of a vast, arched chimney-piece with a coat of arms on its leaded front.
“A Professor Hope to see you, sir,” the butler said, holding open the fat linenfold oak door. “From Melstone House, he tells me.”
“Come in, come in, Professor,” said a pleasant, silvery voice. A tall silvery gentleman in a very smooth pinstriped suit stood up from beside the fire and advanced with his hand out. “I’m very pleased to meet the tenant of Melstone House. Can I offer you a drink?”
“No, thank you,” Andrew said, glad that he was not much of a drinker. “And it’s not tenant. It’s owner.” He managed to avoid shaking hands with Mr Brown by taking his glasses off and cleaning them. To his naked eyes, the man looked even taller, and impossibly slender. There seemed to be a sort of silvery haze around him.
Mr Brown took his hand back. He seemed perplexed. “But surely, my dear sir, your name should be Brandon if you’re not a tenant?”
“Jocelyn Brandon was my grandfather,” Andrew said. “And I’m sorry to make your acquaintance on an unfriendly note, but I’ve come to complain.”
“Dear, dear,” said Mr Brown. “Well, if you won’t have a drink, at least take a seat and unburden yourself.”
He waved Andrew to the red buttoned chair opposite the one he had been sitting in himself. Andrew had always thought that this kind of chair was probably acutely uncomfortable. He sat down warily and found he was quite right. The thing was all slippery knobbles. Deep instinct caused Andrew to keep his glasses off. On the pretext of finding a smear on the left lens and then on the right one, Andrew managed to keep his eyes naked for most of what followed.
He watched Mr Brown sink his silvery length into the chair opposite and pick up the glass he had been drinking from. The drink was rose-coloured. From time to time it even looked, blurrily, as if Mr Brown was actually sipping at a real rose. The decanter Andrew had imagined earlier was there, on a table at Mr Brown’s slender elbow. In fact, there were several decanters. One contained an oddly pulsing blue liquid. Another was yellow, with a dazzle to it that made Andrew’s naked eyes water, and a third was violently green. None of them was rose-coloured. Andrew was extremely glad he had refused a drink. He gave silent thanks to Aidan for showing him this trick with your glasses.
“Mr Brown,” he said, “an hour or so ago I was walking in my wood — Melstone Wood, it is called on the deeds to my property — and I found half of the wood fenced off and patrolled by an extremely unpleasant fellow who said he was Security for you. He ordered me off with threats. Now, whoever he is—”
Mr Brown gave a graceful shrug. “I’m afraid I can give you no other name for him but Security,” he said.
“— I object very strongly,” Andrew went on, “to being ordered off my own property.”
“But look at it from my point of view,” Mr Brown said, calm and soothing. “There are creatures in that wood that I wish to protect.”
“I can perfectly well protect my own squirrels!” Andrew retorted. “The fact remains that you have absolutely no right to fence off half my w—”
“We are not talking of squirrels,” Mr Brown cut him off, placid and silvery. “We are talking of my personal privacy, which is mine to protect, not yours.”
“Nobody goes in that wood anyway,” Andrew snarled, “except me, and I own it, Mr Brown! All of it.”
“As I said,” Mr Brown continued, as if Andrew had not spoken, “you must see it from my point of view, Mr Hope. As a scholar and, I presume, a gentleman, you can surely see both sides of a question. I came back to live in this Manor last year, sorely in need of privacy. My two former wives are, both of them, moving against me. Naturally, until I can destroy the lever they have against me, I need somewhere well defended to live. Unfortunately, that lever is proving rather hard to locate and, until I can locate him, I must insist on my privacy.”
“I fail to see,” Andrew snapped, “what your love life has to do with this! We are talking about my legal rights!”
Mr Brown shook his silver head and gave a pitying smile. “Ah, Mr Hope, you must be younger than you look if you have never yet had trouble with grasping women. And I must point out to you that my position would have been a great deal more comfortable if you had made the slightest effort to keep to our covenant.”
“What covenant?” Andrew said. “I never met you till today.”
“Yes. That was why I assumed you were merely renting Melstone House,” Mr Brown said, placidly crossing his pinstriped legs and sipping at his blurred rosy glass. “If you have indeed inherited that property, then you are under an obligation to protect me and mine, by covenant signed by your ancestors. Do not think that the fact that you are not called Brandon excuses you from this, Mr Hope. I have legal rights too.”
“No, you don’t!” Andrew said, so angry now that he scrambled out of the uncomfortable chair and stood glaring threateningly down on Mr Brown. “You’re simply trying to distract my attention from what you’ve done. I repeat, Mr Brown, you have no right to fence off half my wood!”
Mr Brown did not seem to feel threatened at all. He smiled calmly up at Andrew. “I have,” he said, “naturally to put my point of view to you. It is far more important than yours. Because you had made no attempt to abide by the covenant, I had no choice but to protect myself. My enclave here is now unsafe. Your so-called grandfather was as negligent as you are. When I came back here to avoid my wives, it was clear from the number of counterparts in your field-of-care that my realm has been leaking for years. You should correct this, if you please.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andrew said. “Your enclave, as you call it, is Melstone Manor and its grounds. And nothing more. You have done the leaking.”
Mr Brown, with an indulgent smile, shook his silvery head. “Go home, Mr Hope. Go home and consult your covenant. You will find it clearly states that counterparts are not to occur.”
“What do you mean — counterparts?” Andrew demanded. His thoughts went, uneasily, to the ghostly paper with the black seal that his grandfather’s spirit had tried to give him. But that’s got nothing to do with this fellow blandly trying to steal half my wood! he thought. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean,” he said.
“I see you are very ignorant,” Mr Brown said, sighing. “Very well. I shall, just this once, excuse you on those grounds. That, and because I can see my Security has annoyed you—”
“Annoyed me!” Andrew almost screamed.
“—and I shall order him to eject you more politely in future,” Mr Brown went on. “Also I will enlighten your ignorance by explaining to you, as if to a child, what co
unterparts are. Counterparts are people within your field-of-care who strongly resemble — in appearance and in powers — people who belong to my realm. You must order all these counterpart folk to leave Melstone, Mr Hope. Or…” Here Mr Brown, still smiling, seemed to turn from silvery to steely. “Or I shall have to assume that you are trying to set yourself up with a powerbase against me. And we wouldn’t want that, would we, Mr Hope?”
For a second or so, Andrew could not think of a word to say. Order people to leave! Was Mr Brown mad? Or were he and Mr Brown simply on two different wavelengths? In which case, Mr Brown’s wavelength seemed to Andrew quite sinisterly occult. Andrew was not his grandfather. Occult magic was something he knew nothing about. He settled for giving an uneasy little laugh. “Of course I’m not setting up a powerbase,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how. And if this is all you can say, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer very shortly.”
“When I do hear, I shall of course apologise politely for the bad manners of my Security,” Mr Brown said placidly. “I am sure we can be civilised about it. I think you should leave now, Mr Hope.”
“So do I!” Andrew said through clenched teeth. He put his glasses on with a flourish. “Good afternoon!”
He slammed out of the library-place and strode to the massive front door so swiftly that the little butler had to patter madly over the red tiles after him in order to open the door and bow him out into the weak sunshine beyond.
“You know, sir,” the little butler said, “it would have been far better if you had accepted that drink. Most of your ancestors did.”
“I don’t drink!” Andrew snapped and stormed down the brick steps to his car.
He drove off with a roar and, until he got to the main road, he could do nothing but gibber with rage at how politely rude Mr Brown had been. As he turned towards Melstone House, it did occur to him, in gaps, that some of the things Mr Brown had said were pretty queer. Telling him to make people leave Melstone, for instance. That had to have been a joke. Yes, it was probably a joke, designed to take Andrew’s mind off Mr Brown’s takeover of half the wood. Mr Brown had been playing with him! Andrew’s rage enlarged. His lawyer would soon sort that out. Silvery, smooth crook!
He burst into Melstone House, wanting nothing so much as to tell someone about the extraordinary things Mr Brown had had the gall to say. Stashe would have been the perfect person to tell, but Stashe would not be here until tomorrow. Mrs Stock had left. Andrew found her note and threw it aside with an angry laugh. He had half a mind to throw aside the big sloppy bowl of potato cheese too, but then he remembered Aidan and how much Aidan ate. He left the bowl on the kitchen table and stormed round the house, looking for Aidan to tell him what Mr Brown had said. There was no Aidan either. Andrew stormed to his study and phoned his lawyer again.
This time he got someone who seemed to know a bit more than the first person. This voice told him that Mrs Barrington-Stock was away on holiday, but would be in touch the moment she was back. Andrew hurled the phone down in disgust and wondered whether to look for Aidan again. But, by this time, he had cooled down just enough to decide that he ought not to burden someone Aidan’s age with all that strange stuff. No. The urgent thing was to dig out old Jocelyn’s papers and see if he could discover this contract, or covenant, or whatever Mr Brown thought it was.
Mrs Stock, he remembered, had bundled all old Jocelyn’s papers into three large cardboard boxes. “I’ve not thrown anything away,” she had told Andrew, “not even his pipe cleaners. I don’t know what’s important.” And she had put the boxes somewhere until Andrew had time to look through them.
Andrew could not find those boxes. They were not in his study, or in the hall cupboard, or the cupboard under the stairs, and they were certainly not in the living room — where he was furious to find Mrs Stock had moved the piano again. The boxes were not in any of the bedrooms, or in the attics, or anywhere else Andrew could think of. By the time he had searched the house, Andrew had simmered down enough to notice he was hungry. He made himself a pot of tea and some bread and honey. Then he felt calm enough to move the piano. By this time, his anger had gone into the background of his mind and stuck there, hard and black and unforgivingly.
When Aidan finally came back, he found Andrew in the living room, reading a book about glass-making in early Victorian times. “Did you see Mr Brown?” Aidan asked.
“Yes,” said Andrew.
“My friends playing football said he was scary,” Aidan said.
“He’s a smooth, silver crook,” Andrew said, with what struck Aidan as truly dreadful calm.
“Do you think he’s a gangster?” Aidan asked, interested.
“Probably,” Andrew said. “Whatever he is, he claims to have had some kind of contract with my grandfather. But I’ll have to wait for Mrs Stock before I can find it.”
“Can I eat that potato cheese?” Aidan said.
Mrs Stock was slightly later than usual that Friday. Her sister Trixie came with her. The two of them were tenderly leading Shaun between them. Shaun had a new hairstyle. Aidan couldn’t take his eyes off it. The top of Shaun’s head was all flaxen tips, with touches of red, and the red-and-flaxen gathered together at the back to make a kind of starburst of hair with a parting down the middle of it. Aidan had never seen someone with a parting at the back of his head before. He stared until Shaun looked self-conscious.
Andrew stared too. Trixie was as fat as her sister was thin, smoothly and pinkly overweight, and obviously many years younger than Mrs Stock. Nevertheless, the two of them were so alike that they could have been twins. They had the same fair hair in the same elaborate hairstyle, and the same shaped face with the same slightly bulging, shrewd blue eyes. They even walked in the same way, as if their feet were on either side of a small wall. Here Andrew remembered Mr Brown’s Security again and swallowed rage. Despite this, he wondered what Trixie was here for. He knew a deputation when he saw one and he wondered what this one was about.
The truth was that Mrs Stock had remembered Andrew’s not-quite-joke the day Aidan arrived. She might have been furious with Andrew, but she was also afraid of losing her job. Her aim was to distract Andrew into some kind of reconciliation.
“You’re not really angry with Shaun, Professor,” Trixie said warmly. “He was only doing what he thought right.”
“And how was he to know Mr Stock was growing asparagus?” Mrs Stock added. “He’s kept that pretty secret, I can tell you!”
Andrew had entirely forgotten the matter of the asparagus. “No, no. Not at all angry,” he said.
“You see, you have to tell Shaun just exactly what to do,” Trixie said earnestly. “Then he’ll do it, no problem.”
“And you haven’t told him a thing what to do these last two days,” Mrs Stock put in, reproachfully and according to plan.
“They say you’re going to give me the sack, Professor,” Shaun said anxiously.
Andrew lost patience with this manoeuvring. “Of course I’m not going to give you the sack!” he said to Shaun. “I told you to clean out the old shed. You’ve been doing that, haven’t you?” Shaun nodded vigorously, so that his hairstyle glittered in the coloured light from the back door. “Then you run along and keep doing that,” Andrew said. “That’s your job.”
Shaun cried out, “Wey-hey!” and did his arm-waving thing. Both Andrew and Aidan thought, Just like Groil! And Andrew thought, Counterparts? and felt uneasy. Shaun was not a giant, but no one could deny he was well built.
Trixie grinned triumphantly at her sister. “Told you it would be all right.” She waddled over and patted Andrew’s shoulder. “You’re a good man to look after my Shaun,” she told him. “Any time you want your hair cut free, you come to me. I’ve got a lovely product that’ll tint you up those grey sides there too. It’ll take ten years off you, Professor, if you let me do that.”
Her fat hand patted gently at the side of Andrew’s head. Andrew squirmed. He could feel his face heating up and see Aidan trying not to
laugh as Aidan imagined Andrew with a hairstyle like Shaun’s.
Fortunately, the back door opened at that moment and Stashe breezed in. Andrew felt boundless relief. Joy! Now he could get on with his book. Stashe was like a gust of fresh air, driving Trixie away from his head. She was looking lovely too, in a short green dress that showed off those fine legs of hers. He found he was smiling before she was halfway into the room.
“Morning all,” said Stashe. “Hi, Trixie. I was going to phone you. Can you fit me in for a hair appointment late on Wednesday? Ronnie Stock needs me until five.”
“Can do,” Trixie said cheerfully.
Stashe turned to Andrew then. “Professor—”
“Oh, please remember to call me Andrew,” Andrew said. Aidan looked shrewdly from him to Stashe and thought, If those two get together, they won’t want me around. He sighed, thinking of the Arkwrights.
“Andrew,” Stashe corrected herself. “If you’re not needing me to take notes or do letters, I’ll make a start on old Mr Brandon’s papers for you.”
“Yes, do. But I don’t know where the papers are,” Andrew said.
Mrs Stock tut-tutted. “World of his own! I told you, Professor. They’re in the little room off your study that used to be the pantry when your study was the kitchen.” She said to Stashe, “Men!”
Stashe said, “Good. Then I’ll be nearby if you need me — er — Andrew.”
Trixie said, agreeing with her sister, “Men. I’ll be off then. Wednesday, late then, Stashe. Now, Shaun, you be good and work careful, see.” Shaun nodded humbly.
“Right.” Stashe took hold of Aidan by one shoulder. “Come on, my lad. You promised you’d help me go through those papers.”
“Oh — I …” said Aidan. “I said I’d play football—”
“With Jimmy Stock. I know,” said Stashe. “But you promised me before you even met Jimmy, and it’s wrong to break promises, you know that.”