Enchanted Glass (20 page)

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.

I
t 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:

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 here 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.”

Andrew decided that this was not the time to point out
to Aidan that doing this was bad magic. Aidan had been shaken enough to find someone in Melstone actually wanted him dead. “So it was
you
!” he said. “That’s a relief. They had me wondering which of us was mad. But the kids knew the truth. It wasn’t until the Chinese boy chased after me—”

“Henry Lee,” Aidan put in. “He’s brainy. Stashe left you a parcel. Over there, on the piano.”

Andrew realised he was glad that Aidan had interrupted him. It would do no good to tell Aidan who his father was — although it did, now Andrew thought about it, account for Aidan’s astonishing gift for magic. He went over to the piano. On the way, he paused to gesture at the fire that Mrs Stock had laid ready in the hearth. Pull out a wisp of Earth’s fiery centre, his grandfather had taught him and Andrew now remembered, and flick it among the kindling. The fire blazed up, popping and crackling. “That’s better,” Andrew said, picking up Stashe’s small parcel.

“Can you teach me to do that?” Aidan asked as Rolf trotted eagerly to the hearthrug and threw himself gratefully down in front of the fire.

“Probably,” Andrew said absently. He opened the packet and was flooded with yet more memories. A small silver pendant fell out, trickling a silver chain behind it. It looked like a very ornamental cross, but when you
examined it, it was more like a tree, or a man, or an ankh. It was, Andrew knew, very potent. His grandfather had made him wear it whenever, as old Jocelyn used to put it, there was “a spot of bother with him down at the Manor”.

And there was a spot of bother now. Andrew held the pendant out to Aidan. “Wear this,” he said. “It’ll keep you safe.”

Aidan inspected it disdainfully. “I don’t
do
bling,” he said. He had been rather scornful to find that nearly all his football friends wore gold crosses or silver charms round their necks. “Gran said charms are mostly superstition,” he explained.

“Superstition,” Andrew said, “is something you believe.
They
believe in this, so it works against them. Take it. Put it on.”

Aidan remembered his conversation with the strange voice.
Steps have been taken
, it had said,
by you and by others.
He saw that he might be being silly. “OK,” he said and grudgingly put the pendant round his neck. As soon as he had the chain over his head, he found himself sighing with a feeling of deep peace. The urgent, tense feeling he had had ever since the Puck had appeared was suddenly gone. “It works!” he said.

“Yes.” Andrew relaxed too. He treated himself to a thimbleful of whisky and sat with his feet stretched out to
the fire and Rolf stretched out by his feet. It felt very comfortable to have a snoring dog on the hearth — even if the dog was not quite a dog.

Mrs Stock had been generous that day and left them a fine, juicy pie. And the rain stopped while they were eating it. After supper, they were able to lug the box of giant beans round to the woodshed.

Groil was waiting for them, rather damp, leaning his elbows on the roof. He beamed when he saw the box and lifted it up on to the woodshed himself. “What are you wearing?” he asked Aidan uneasily as he dragged out two fistfuls of the beans. “It makes me feel sore.”

Aidan thought of himself and Tarquin’s leg. “It’s a charm to make my enemies
believe
that it hurts them,” he said. “It can’t hurt
you
because you’re a friend.”

“Ah.” Groil took a mighty bite of beans, pods and all. He munched a bit and thought. “You’re right,” he said, after one of his drainlike swallowings. “It’s all a trick. Do you still want me to keep your wallet?”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Aidan said. “It’s safe with you.”

“Fine,” Groil said. “This could be fun.”

“What did he mean by that?” Andrew asked as they went back to the house.

“No idea,” Aidan said, pushing the back door open.
This reminded him. The glass. “I forgot,” he said. “I meant to tell you there are faces in the coloured glass. I’ll show you tomorrow when it’s light.”

But Andrew fetched the big torch from his study then and there, and made Aidan stand outside and shine the light through the glass. Aidan stood there patiently, listening to Groil’s steady munching from around the corner, while indoors Andrew stared and marvelled. Here was one more thing he had forgotten his grandfather telling him. He had only remembered that this stained glass was somehow precious. “It shows you my counterparts,” old Jocelyn had said. “But we’ve only got two so far.” Indeed, in his grandfather’s day, Andrew had only been able to pick out two faces: Mrs Stock in orange, left-hand top, and Mr Stock in red, right-hand bottom, and Andrew had never been sure if he was really seeing them or not. Now he could, very definitely, see six people, all of whom must have counterparts among Mr Brown’s folk. Andrew could see Tarquin clearest of all, in the purple pane. Tarquin’s elfin face stared out at him from what seemed to be the thrashing branches of a tree, with some kind of storm raging behind it. But Rolf was almost as clear, in the yellow glass at the bottom. Rolf must count as a person then. So who did he correspond to? Security’s dog? And what about Shaun, in the blue pane — or was that Groil?