Aidan liked the room he had been given. He liked its size and its low ceiling and its long, low window that showed that the walls were three feet thick. He wondered if that window had at one time been several arrow slits. Melstone House was certainly old enough. Above all, Aidan was charmed by the way the creaky wooden floor ran downhill to all four walls. If he put the marble he happened to have in his pocket down in the middle of the room, it rolled away to any one of the walls, depending how he dropped it.
To his dismay, Mrs Stock was in the room, tidying repressively. Being forbidden to move the living room furniture, Mrs Stock was taking out her feelings on the spare room. She glowered at Aidan and his carrier bags.
“Moving in for a long stay, are you?” she said. “You’ve got enough for a lifetime there. I hope you’re grateful to Professor Hope. He isn’t made of money, you know.”
Aidan opened his mouth to tell her he had bought the clothes himself. And shut it again. Andrew didn’t like cauliflower cheese. If he annoyed Mrs Stock, she would make cauliflower cheese for supper and that would annoy Andrew. Aidan most desperately needed not to have Andrew annoyed, in case Andrew sent him back to the Arkwrights. Aidan was not sure he could bear that.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “Very grateful.” He went over to the window and unloaded the packages of clothing on to the three-foot-wide sill.
“Those go in the chest-of-drawers,” Mrs Stock pointed out.
“I want to put some of them on now,” Aidan said meekly. “Did you know Shaun worked a miracle on the lawnmower?”
“And bring all that plastic down to the bin— Did he now?” Mrs Stock said.
“Yes. Professor Hope was really amazed,” Aidan said artfully — and just about truthfully. “Mr Stock can mow the lawn now.”
Mrs Stock’s glower phased into a malicious smile. “Ho ho, can he?” she said. “It’s about time that veggie-freak did some of the work he’s paid to do! Good for our Shaun!” She was so pleased at the thought of Mr Stock being dragged away from his Prize Vegetables, that she rushed off to find Shaun, only saying over her shoulder as she scooted off, “Lunch on the dining room table in half an hour. Plastic in the bin.”
Aidan whoofed out an enormous breath of relief.
Downstairs, Andrew put his face round his study door to tell Stashe that her father had arrived. Stashe looked round at him from a screenful of hurrying letters, signs and figures. “Tell Dad I’ll be another half hour,” she said. “I have to leave this so that I know where I am with it. What did you do to this machine? Put Dad somewhere where he won’t be in your way. He won’t mind. He’s used to waiting around for important horse people.” She backed up this command with a dazzling smile.
Andrew retreated from his study feeling as if that smile had shot him in the chest. Though Stashe didn’t strike him as quite so mad today, he was still not sure he liked her. She was, as Mrs Stock said, bossy. And Tarquin might be used to waiting around, but Andrew was not an important horse person and he was blowed if he was going to dump Tarquin in a corner somewhere.
He found Tarquin balancing on his crutches in the hallway. The missing leg was cramping again, he could see. “Stashe says she’ll be another half hour,” Andrew said. “Come into the living room and make yourself comfortable.”
“Hit a snag or three in the computer, has she?” Tarquin commented, swinging himself along after Andrew. When he had got himself into the living room and was arranging himself and his stump along a sofa, he said, with a bit of a gasp, “Leg’s always worse in wet weather. Pay no attention.”
“Is that what stops you having a false leg — prosthetic, or whatever it’s called?” Andrew asked.
“Something to do with the nerves, so it is,” Tarquin agreed, “but I never understood what. It was all doctor-talk. I’m used to it now.”
Tarquin’s small, bearded face looked to Andrew to be showing agony. But he reminded himself that the man had been a jockey and that jockeys were used to pain. To take both their minds off it, he said, “About this field-of-care. You implied it was roughly circular and maybe twenty miles across, but I don’t think it’s that big or that regular—”
“No, more like a ragged egg-shape,” Tarquin agreed. “I think you need to make sure of the boundaries.”
“I will,” Andrew said. “I’ve discovered that young Aidan can feel the boundaries almost as well as I can, so I’m going to take him with me and walk all round them. But what I really want to know is what happens inside these boundaries. What makes it different? What happens in Melstone that doesn’t happen in Melford, for instance?”
“Well, as to that,” Tarquin said eagerly, “I have my own theories. Have you noticed yet that every person living in Melstone has a knack of some kind? Stockie grows vegetables. Trixie Appleby — Mrs Stock’s sister, that is — does hair better than any London hairdresser, they say. There’s five boys and two girls up the road shaping to be football stars, and one of those boys plays the cornet like an angel. Rosie Stock up at the shop bakes cakes to die for. And so on. Probably even Trixie’s Shaun has a knack if only he could find it—”
“Oh, I think he has,” Andrew said, amused. He could hardly take his eyes off Tarquin’s missing leg, lying throbbing along the sofa. It was awful. And so unfair.
“And I myself discovered I could grow roses as soon as I came to live here,” Tarquin went on. “Not to speak of cook, and I’d never had much talent that way before. It strikes me that this area is further into the occult than most other places. Stuff comes welling up — or out — from somewhere, so it does, and it was Jocelyn Brandon’s job to cherish it and keep it clean, so that it does no harm. Mind you, it may be more complicated than that—”
Andrew took his glasses off and cleaned them. He simply could not bear the sight of that throbbing leg. “Yes, but have you any idea what my grandfather did to cherish or control this… this occult stuff?” he asked. “I never saw him do anything unusual while I stayed here as a boy.”
“Nor I. There was just a power in him,” Tarquin said. “And yet I am sure there were things he must have done. Now why am I so sure?” Thinking seriously about this, forgetting the pain and forgetting that he had only one leg, Tarquin swung himself up off the sofa and started to pace up and down the room. “Always think better on my feet,” he said. “I—”
He stopped talking and stood in the middle of the room, swaying a little. Below the folded-up right leg of his jeans, Andrew could clearly see the missing leg, transparent and sinewy, and the strong, strong muscles in its calf.
“What have you done?” Tarquin asked quietly.
Used Aidan’s method without thinking, Andrew thought guiltily. He flourished his glasses. “I’m not sure. It was so much still there that I could practically see it hurting you.”
“It’s not hurting now,” Tarquin said, looking down at where his foot should be, “but I can’t see it. Can you?” Andrew nodded. “How long will it last?” Tarquin asked.
Probably just until I put my glasses on again, Andrew thought. Very slowly and cautiously, he eased his glasses back on to his nose. The transparent leg vanished. But it was obviously still there. Tarquin did not sway or fall down. He stood steadily in the middle of the room, without his crutches, looking a little dazed. “Keep your crutches within reach,” Andrew said. “I really don’t know how permanent this is.”
“Just half an hour will do me!” Tarquin said devoutly. “You’ve no idea the relief! But I shall look very odd, walking on one invisible leg, so I will. It feels funny, so it does, with one bare foot.”
“You could let that trouser leg down,” Andrew suggested, “and wear a shoe.”
“I could,” Tarquin agreed. “And who would know? But is it likely it’ll vanish away into a stump again if I go over into normal country?”
“I really don’t know,” Andrew confessed. “But if it does, then come to me and I’ll put it back again.” He could see Tarquin was almost in tears, and that embarrassed him.
; Meanwhile, Aidan sped downstairs feeling cool, cool in some of his new clothes. Naturally he had forgotten to bring the plastic wrappings to put in the bin. He was simply thinking of that torch. Assuming that Tarquin had now taken Stashe away for lunch, he crashed merrily into Andrew’s study.
“Hi there.” Stashe turned round from the computer with a beaming smile.
Aidan stopped dead. The smile made him feel totally defeated. He would have preferred Stashe to tell him to get out.
“I’m having dreadful trouble here,” Stashe continued. “I thought at first that he’d got faulty software — and I wish it was that simple. But goodness knows what he’s done! In the end I’ve had to strip it right down and start again from scratch. Do you know anything about computers?”
Aidan felt very shy. He was not used to pretty ladies treating him like a friend. What he wanted to do was to go away and come back for the torch later. He could see it sitting on the windowsill beyond Stashe, as big as an old-fashioned lantern. “We did a bit in school,” he said. “They were always going wrong.”
“Then you know how I feel,” said Stashe. “I’m going to be all day fixing this one. Then I have to set up this database he wants. I’d hoped to make a start on sorting old Mr Brandon’s papers, but that’s just not on. Would you like to help me go through those when I get round to them?”
Her friendly manner made Aidan want to help her, even though he knew that going through papers was bound to be boring. “I might,” he said. Meanwhile, what about that torch? Stashe was not to know why he wanted it. He settled for walking boldly over to the window and simply picking up the torch.
Stashe gave him another friendly smile as he walked past her. “New clothes?” she said. “Pretty cool.”
“Thanks,” Aidan said. He gave her a flustered smile and scudded away. Safely upstairs, he hid the torch under his bed and, after a second’s thought, the big heap of plastic clothes-wrappers too. Then he galloped down again.
In the hallway, he came upon the astonishing sight of Tarquin O’Connor carrying both crutches under one arm and walking on one real leg and one invisible one. Andrew was with him. Aidan had to stop and stare. Both men were beaming all over their faces. They greeted Aidan like a long-lost friend.
“I hear I’ve you to thank for this, lad,” Tarquin said.
“Your trick with your glasses,” Andrew explained.
Aidan was astonished. He had not realised that such a simple thing could be so powerful.
Chapter Five
Aidan spent the rest of the day exploring the house and its grounds. Andrew, leaning attentively over Stashe and the computer, and trying to take in what she was telling him, watched Aidan pass and repass the study windows and was reminded of himself at Aidan’s age. Things at his grandfather’s house had seemed so magical in those days.
No. Correction. Things had been magical then. It was quite possible they still were. Watching Aidan scoot away across the tufty lawn, Andrew began, at last, to remember some of the very odd things that had happened while he stayed here as a boy. Hadn’t there been a werewolf that was nearly shot for chasing sheep? His grandfather had rescued it somehow. Andrew had told his mother about that when he came home and she had told him angrily to forget all Jocelyn’s silly nonsense.
“Are you listening, Professor?” Stashe asked. She was using a special kind voice on Andrew and his ignorance.
Andrew jumped. “Yes, yes. It’s just that my Research Assistant used to handle all this for me. Double-click on the right-hand button here, you said. And do, please, call me Andrew.”
“Or use this function key,” Stashe said, pointing to it. “Honestly, P- er… Andrew, until today I didn’t believe there were such things as absent-minded professors. I know better now.”
Aidan had been up to the attics, where there was no proper floor. He had stood on the joists and looked up at the cobwebby holes in the roof. It was queer that no rain had come in. Aidan took off his glasses and saw why. The apparent spiderwebs were really thin, old enchantments holding the roof together. Emboldened by what Andrew had done to Tarquin, Aidan tried to see the cobwebby spaces as proper roof tiles. And, as he stared at the spaces, the attics slowly became dark, dark and musty, too dark to see much in.
Pleased with himself, Aidan felt his way from joist to joist — because it wouldn’t do to mend the roof and then put a foot through a bedroom ceiling — and went down to explore the grounds. They were wonderfully bushy and wild. But the amazing thing about them was that they felt utterly and securely safe, safe the way Gran’s rented house had been until she died. Aidan knew that no Stalkers could get near him here. He went everywhere.
There were Beings living in the safety of these grounds. Things that Aidan could feel but not see seemed to lurk at the corners of his eyes, in the orchard particularly, but also among the laurels by the gate. There was a sort of grotto near one of the back walls, where water trickled and ferns grew. Something definitely lived there, but even without his glasses, Aidan had no clue what kind of entity it was.
One of the times he crossed the lawns, he encountered Shaun. Shaun had a bag of cement in each hand. He looked lost. Aidan was astonished at how strong Shaun must be. He had tried to lift one of those stone-hard bags himself and hadn’t been able to budge it.
“Professor said to bury these,” Shaun said. “Would here do?”
They were right in the middle of the main lawn. “No, I don’t think so,” Aidan said. “You’d better find somewhere with bare earth.”
“Ah.” Shaun nodded. “Easier to dig.”
He trudged off one way and Aidan went another.
After a while, Aidan worked round to Mr Stock’s particular, privileged walled vegetable garden. It was so orderly and clean and square that it was more like a room that had lost its roof than a garden. Aidan could see Mr Stock’s hatted head moving about inside the greenhouse in one corner. He veered off towards the opposite corner and tiptoed around a bed of broccoli that seemed to be trying to grow into oak trees, hoping not to be seen. He didn’t want to get Andrew punished again. But, my goodness, things grew huge in this garden! There were strawberries the size of pears and a vegetable marrow, reposing in a rich, black bed of its own, that reminded Aidan of a small dinosaur; then he thought, No, what it is, is an ecological zeppelin. Beyond it, runner beans half a metre long trailed from tall, tall peasticks.
Beyond these, Aidan came upon Shaun busily digging in another rich, black bed, with the cement bags waiting on the path to be buried.
Oo-er! Aidan thought. Crisis! “Er…” he said. “Shaun…”
Shaun just grinned at him. “Good place,” he said and went on digging.
Aidan could think of only one way of stopping Shaun. He ran to find Andrew. When he put his face round the study door, Stashe was alone in there. She gave Aidan one of her hundred-watt smiles. “What’s up?”
“I need Professor Hope,” Aidan said. “Urgently.”
“In the living room,” Stashe said. “I overloaded him and he went to play the piano.”
Aidan tore off there. But by the time he got to the living room, and Andrew had looked up from sorting music out of the piano stool, it was already too late. Mr Stock’s voice crashed like thunder in the distance.
“My sparrowgrass! That hulking, brainless looby of yours is DIGGING UP MY SPARROWGRASS BED!”
And the voice of Mrs Stock shrieked back, sharp as daggers, “And what if he is? I don’t know what you grow it for! Not one stalk of asparagus have you brought into this kitchen ever!”
“It’s for the Fête, you stupid cow! GO AND TELL HIM TO STOP!”
“You tell him. It’s your asparagus!”
“Oh dear!” Andrew said. “Is that what you were coming to tell me about?” Aidan nodded. He was thoroughly out of breath. “I think,” Andrew said, “the only thing to do is to keep our heads down. Why—?”
“You told Shaun to bury those bags of cement,” Aidan panted. “And then I told him not in the middl
e of the lawn.”
Andrew grinned. “Then it’s too late to do anything but make bets on what our punishment’s going to be.”
Aidan discovered that he really, really liked Andrew. Up to then, he had been too shy of him to know. He grinned back. “He’s got some broccoli like little oak trees.”
“No, rhubarb,” Andrew said. “I bet on rhubarb. He’s got some that’s taller than you are.”
In fact, what they got was asparagus. Only minutes after Mrs Stock had collected Shaun and stormed off in a dudgeon, the asparagus was sitting on the kitchen table in an enormous box half filled with earth.
“Double punishment,” Andrew said cheerfully. “Mrs Stock didn’t even wait to make cauliflower cheese. Do you like asparagus?”
“I’ve never had any,” Aidan said. “How do you cook it?”
“You can steam, roast or boil it,” Andrew said, picking about in the box. “My grandfather used to love it because you’re allowed to dip it in butter and eat it with your fingers. But I’m afraid that Mr Stock has let this lot get too big and woody. Let’s just wash it and put it on the woodshed roof. Someone might like it.”
Yes, and I can’t wait to see who! Aidan thought.
Andrew took the usual kitchen chair out and stood on it, while Aidan passed him dripping green bundles of asparagus they had washed in the biggest iron pan in the kitchen.
They had hardly started when Stashe came hurrying around the corner, staggering a bit in her elegant shoes. “It’s all fixed and I’m just off now,” she was saying, but she stopped and giggled when she saw what they were doing. “Oh, do you have a visitor too? Ours takes stuff off our outdoor table. But only meaty bits. Dad says it must be a fox. What do you think yours is?”