ANDREW DROVE OFF TO MELTON WITH HIS MIND FULL OF what Tarquin had told him. Beside him, Aidan, who was not used to cars, was having trouble with his seat belt.
“Push until you hear it click,” Andrew told him.
This added Aidan to his thoughts. And these Stalkers Aidan told him about. Andrew supposed he could protect Aidan from them and give him a holiday until the Social Workers arrived. Otherwise he was not sure what could be done. And meanwhile, it seemed Andrew was supposed to be looking after his grandfather’s field-of-care. Now he came to think of it, although he had always known there was such a thing, he had very little idea what a field-of-care was. He had never understood quite what it was that his grandfather did. Probably that document his grandfather’s ghost had tried to give him would make all that clear. But where was the wretched thing? He had never set eyes on it while Jocelyn was alive. He would have to hunt for it, and it was going to interrupt the work on his book. Everything was going to interrupt him. Andrew’s heart ached with his need to write his book. This was, after all, why he was employing Stashe.
And that brought his thoughts around to money. He was now employing two extra people and buying Aidan clothes, among other things. Luckily—and not entirely thanks to Mr. Stock—Melstone House produced a lot of its own food, but that was a drop in the ocean, really, at the rate Aidan ate…. Andrew began to wonder how soon he was going to be bankrupt.
Brooding on these things, Andrew drove past the new houses at the end of the village and past the football field and on into the countryside. A couple of miles farther on, there came the familiar little jolt, as if the car had for a second caught on some elastic. Aidan jumped.
“What was that?”
“We’ve just passed the boundary between the strange part my grandfather looked after and the normal places,” Andrew told him.
“Funny,” Aidan said. “I didn’t notice it when I was coming.”
“You probably had other things on your mind,” Andrew said.
This was true, Aidan realized. He had been twitching all over, in case the Stalkers followed him, in case the taxi driver noticed about the money, in case old Mr. Brandon couldn’t help him. His whole mind and body had been roaring with nerves. Now his curiosity was aroused. “How big is this strange part?” he wanted to know.
“I’m not sure,” Andrew said. “Tarquin O’Connor has just been telling me it has a ten-mile radius, but I’m not sure it’s that big, or not regularly. The boundary this side of the village is only two miles out. The boundary on the road to the University is probably five miles away, but that’s all I know, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you know where the rest of it is that’s not on the roads?” Aidan asked.
“Not really,” Andrew admitted. He remembered long hikes with his grandfather, but he rather thought they had all been inside the boundary. The area of strangeness—if this was Jocelyn’s field-of-care—must actually be pretty big.
“You need a map,” Aidan said. “It would be really interesting to walk all round it, not on the roads, and see where it goes.”
Andrew thought. Tarquin had seemed to be saying that it was Andrew’s job to look after this area of strangeness in some way. “Not just interesting,” he said. “I think it’s necessary. Walking the bounds is something I’ll need to do.”
“I could help,” Aidan said. “I could take a map and do it like a project for you, if you like.”
He sounded as eager as Shaun. Andrew smiled. “We could make a start this weekend,” he said. “You’ll definitely need a raincoat.” He turned the windscreen wipers on as the rain came down again.
Aidan sat quietly, thinking. Andrew was being amazingly kind. Clothes cost a lot. Gran was always complaining about how much clothes cost and how quickly Aidan grew out of them. Another of Gran’s constant sayings was that one should never let oneself get into debt to anyone. “Debts get called in,” she said. Yet here was Aidan relying on Andrew to buy him a raincoat and other things. He felt very guilty. Andrew owned a big house and a car—where Gran had never been able to afford either—and he had at least four people working for him, but Aidan looked across at Andrew’s old zip-up jacket and his elderly jeans and could not help wondering if Andrew really was rich at all. And the only thing Aidan could do to pay Andrew back was to make a map of his field-of-care. That seemed pretty feeble.
It was still raining when they reached Melton, and Andrew drove into the car park of the biggest supermarket. Aidan had another attack of guilt. Andrew was buying food for him too. Gran always worried about how much food cost. He felt so guilty that, in a weird mixture of hope and despair, he fetched out his old, flat, empty wallet and looked inside it.
He gasped. He went gray and dizzy with sheer surprise.
Andrew, in the act of getting out of the car, stopped and asked, “What’s the matter?”
Aidan had whipped off his glasses to make sure this was real. He was holding the glasses in his mouth while he slid the big wad of twenty-pound notes out of the wallet. There was masses. And the money was still there to his naked eyes. “Money!” he mumbled round his glasses. “This wallet was empty just now, I swear!”
Andrew sat down again and shut the car door. “May I look?” he said, holding out his hand.
Aidan passed the wallet over. “Somebody must have filled it somehow,” he said as he put his glasses on again.
Andrew felt the soft old leather fizz faintly against his fingers. He remembered his grandfather explaining what this fizzing meant. “A fairly strong enchantment,” he said, “worked in while the wallet was being made. How did you come by this?”
“Gran gave it me,” Aidan said. “Last week, a couple of days before she—she died. She said I might as well have it, because it was the only thing my dad had ever given my mum—apart from me, of course.”
“And when did your mother die?” Andrew asked, slowly passing the miraculous wallet back.
“When I was two—ten years ago,” said Aidan. “Gran said that my dad had vanished off the face of the earth before I was even born.” He took the wallet back and removed his glasses again to count the money.
“So would you say,” Andrew asked, thinking about it, “that the wallet fills with money when you need it?”
“Um.” Aidan looked up, surprised. “Yes. I suppose. I know it was empty when Gran gave it me. But it had my train fare in it the night before I came here. And then the taxi money. Bother. I lost count.” He went back to counting twenty-pound notes.
“Then it looks as if you’re required to buy your own clothes,” Andrew said, in some relief. “Tell me, do you always take your glasses off to count money?”
Aidan lost count again. “No,” he said irritably. Must Andrew keep interrupting? “Only to see if something’s real—or magical—or real and magical. Or to keep it there if it’s only magical. You must know how it works. I’ve seen you do it too.”
“I don’t think I—How do you mean?” Andrew asked, startled.
“When you’re working with magic,” Aidan explained. “You take your glasses off and clean them when you want people to do what you say.”
“Oh.” Andrew sat back and let Aidan get on with counting. The boy was right. Times out of mind, he remembered himself cleaning his glasses while he forced that research assistant to do what she was told for once. He had got treats out of his parents the same way. And—he could not help grinning—he had once passed a French Oral exam by cleaning his glasses at a peculiarly terrifying examiner. He supposed that was cheating, really. But the man had frightened him into forgetting English as well as French. The real question was, How did it work?
Thinking about how, Andrew took a trolley and went into the supermarket with Mrs. Stock’s list, in that state of mind that caused Mrs. Stock to say, “Professors! World of his own!” Aidan also took a trolley and went to the other end of the store where the clothes were.
Aidan was expecting to have the time of his life. He had never bought clothes on his own before. He had never had this much money before. He was all prepared to lash out. But to his surprise, he found himself almost passionately spending the money as economically as he could. He hunted bargains and things that said “Two for the price of one.” He did sums frantically in his head as he went round the racks and shelves (it did not help that most things were so-many-pounds, ninety-nine pence). He saw the perfect pair of trainers, and he painfully did not buy them because they cost too much of his money. He took ages. He put things in his trolley and then took them out again when he found something cheaper. He almost forgot pajamas. He had to go back for some, because he knew he would need them when he sneaked outside tonight to see what it was that ate the vegetables. He bought a fleece to go over the pajamas and a zip-up waterproof for warmth. He nearly forgot socks. He ended up with a high-piled trolley and just two pence left in the wallet. Relief! He had got his sums right. Pity about those perfect trainers, though.
It was just as well he took so long. Andrew took longer. He spent much of the time standing in front of shelves of bacon or sugar, either staring into space or taking his glasses off and putting them on again to see if the bacon or sugar looked any different. They looked blurred, but that was all. But whoever heard of enchanted bacon anyway? So how did it work? Was it, Andrew mused, that bacon to the naked eye had the possibility of being enchanted? Would this make it the real world? Then, when you put your glasses back on, maybe you could see more clearly, but the glasses blocked out the reality. Was that it? Or was it something else entirely?
By the time Andrew had finally managed to put all the things Mrs. Stock needed into his trolley and then to pay for them, Aidan was waiting outside in the drizzle, wondering if he had found the right car.
The drizzle stopped while they drove back to Melstone, but Andrew was still more than usually absent-minded. He really was a professor, Aidan thought, looking across at Andrew’s creased forehead and intent stare. He hoped they didn’t hit anything.
They turned into the driveway of Melstone House and nearly hit Shaun.
Shaun was standing just beyond the bushes, doing his baby arm-waving thing, with his fingers out like two starfish. Shaun probably never realized how near he came to death. Andrew slammed on his brakes so hard and so quickly that Aidan looked at him with respect.
“What is it, Shaun?” Andrew asked, calmly leaning out of his window.
“I did it, Professor! I did it!” Shaun said. “She sings. She sings sweet. Come and see!” He was red in the face with pride and excitement.
Realizing that Shaun must be talking about the motor mower, Andrew said, “Move out of the way, then, and I’ll park the car.”
Shaun obediently backed into the bushes and then ran after the car. As soon as Andrew and Aidan had climbed out, he led them at a trot to the strange shed. Inside it, the motor mower was standing under the colored window in a ring of rust. Shaun seemed to have polished it.
“Pull the starter. Hear her sing,” Shaun pleaded.
Dubiously, Andrew bent and took hold of the handle on the end of the starter wire. Normally, this felt as if you were trying to pull a handle embedded in primordial granite. On a good day, you could pull the handle out about an inch, with a strong graunching noise. On a bad day, the handle would not move, however hard you pulled. On both good and bad days, nothing else happened at all. But now Andrew felt the wire humming out sweetly in his hand. When it reached the critical length, the engine coughed, caught, and broke out into a chugging roar. The mower shook all over, filling the shed with blue smoke. Shaun had worked a miracle. Andrew felt total dismay. He knew Mr. Stock would be furious.
“Well done, Shaun,” he said heartily, and tried to calculate how long it would be until Mr. Stock felt moved to mow the lawns. “Er—” he bellowed above the noise of the mower, “how long is it until the Melstone Summer Fête? How do I turn this thing off?”
Shaun reached forward and deftly twitched the right lever. “Two weeks,” he said in the resounding silence. “Not for two weeks. I thought everyone knew that.”
“Then we should be safe from the Wrath of Stock until then,” Andrew murmured. “Good work, Shaun. Now you can get on and clean this shed up.”
“Can’t I mow the grass?” Shaun pleaded.
“No,” Andrew said. “That would be most unwise.”
Shaun and Aidan were both disappointed. Aidan had thought that taking turns with Shaun at chugging about with the mower would have been fun. Shaun looked sadly around the rubbish in the shed. “What do I do with the cement bags?” he said.
The cement bags had been there so long that they had set like a row of hard paper-covered boulders. “Better bury them,” Andrew said over his shoulder as he pushed Aidan out of the shed. “Come on, Aidan. We have to unload the car.”
As they crossed the front lawn to the car, Aidan looked meaningly at the grass. It was all tufts and clumps. It had a fine crop of daisies, buttercups, and dandelions, and several mighty upstanding thistles. If ever a lawn needed mowing….
“Don’t ask,” Andrew said. “Mr. Stock will be busy full-time until the Fête, stretching beans and pumping up potatoes. He collects First Prizes. He also prides himself on being the only one who can start that mower. I hope, by the time the Fête’s over, that the mower will have reverted to its old form. Otherwise I shall get mountains of dead lettuce.”
“I understand,” said Aidan. “I think.”
“And yard-long carrots,” Andrew said bitterly.
They unloaded the groceries and took them to the kitchen. Then Aidan went back for his own bulging bags. While he was hauling them up to his room, he heard a noise that sounded like the mower. Shaun must have disobeyed Andrew, he thought, looking out of the landing window. But the noise turned out to be Tarquin O’Connor’s adapted car arriving to take Stashe home for lunch. Good! Aidan thought. There was a huge electric torch on the windowsill of Andrew’s study. Once Stashe was out of the way, Aidan intended to go in and borrow it. He was going to need it for tonight.
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 a 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 packets of clothing onto 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 lawn mower?”
“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 onto 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 were 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 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 realized that such a simple thing could be so powerful.