Cat was interested to see that Joss seemed to want to avoid Mr. Farleigh too. When they rode out after that, they went either along the river or out into the bare upland of Hopton Heath, both in directions well away from Home Wood. And here too, going both ways, Cat discovered the background felt as if it were missing. He found it sad, and puzzling.
Roger was hugely excited about going for a real long ride. He tried to interest Janet and Julia in the idea. They had now cycled everywhere possible in the Castle grounds and round and round the village green in Helm St. Mary too, so they were ripe for a long ride. The three of them made plans to cycle all of twelve miles, as far away as Hopton, although, as Julia pointed out, this made it twenty-four miles, there and back, which was quite a distance. Janet told her not to be feeble.
They were just setting out for this marathon, when a small blue car unexpectedly rattled up to the main door of the Castle.
Julia dropped her bike on the drive and ran toward the small blue car. “It’s Jason!” she shrieked. “Jason’s back!”
Millie and Chrestomanci arrived on the Castle steps while Julia was still yards away and shook hands delightedly with the man who climbed out of the car. He was just in time to turn around as Julia flung herself on him. He staggered a bit. “Lord love a duck!” he said. “Julia, you weigh a ton these days!”
Jason Yeldham was not very tall. He had contrived, even after years of living at the Castle, to keep a strong Cockney accent. “No surprise. I started out as boot boy here,” he explained to Janet. He had a narrow, bony face, very brown from his foreign travels, topped by sun-whitened curls. His eyes were a bright blue and surrounded by lines from laughing or from staring into bright suns, or both.
Janet was fascinated by him. “Isn’t it odd,” she said to Cat, who came to see what the excitement was. “You hear about someone and then a few days later they turn up.”
“It could be the Castle spells,” Cat said. But he liked Jason too.
Roger morosely gathered up the three bicycles and put them away. The rest crowded into the main hall of the Castle, where Jason was telling Millie and Chrestomanci which strange worlds he had been to and saying he hoped that his storage shed was still undisturbed. “Because I’ve got this big hired van following on, full of some of the weirdest plants you ever saw,” he said, with his voice echoing from the dome overhead. “Some need planting out straightaway. Can you spare me a gardener? Some I’ll need to consult about—they need special soil and feed and so on. I’ll talk to your head gardener. Is that still Mr. McDermot? But I’ve been thinking all the way down from London that I need a real herb expert. Is that old dwimmerman still around—the one with the long legs and the beard—you know? He always knew twice what I did. Had an instinct, I think.”
“Elijah Pinhoe, you mean?” Millie said. “No. It was sad. He died about eight years ago now.”
“I gather the poor fellow was found dead in a wood,” Chrestomanci said. “Hadn’t you heard?”
“No!” Jason looked truly upset. “I must have been away when they found him. Poor man! He was always telling me that there was something wrong in the woods round here. Must have had a presentiment, I suppose. Perhaps I can talk with his widow.”
“She sold the house and moved, I heard,” Millie said. “There’s some very silly stories about that.”
Jason shrugged. “Ah, well. Mr. McDermot’s got a good head for plants.”
Roger gloomed.
The van arrived, pulled by two cart horses, and everyone from the temporary boot boy to Miss Rosalie the librarian was roped in to deal with Jason’s plants. Janet, Julia, the footmen, and most of the Castle wizards and sorceresses carried bags and pots and boxes to the shed. Millie wrote labels. Jason told Roger where to put the labels. Cat was told, along with the butler and Miss Bessemer the housekeeper, to levitate little tender bundles of root and fuzzy leaves to places where Mr. McDermot thought they would do best, while Miss Rosalie followed everyone round with a list. Anyone left over unpacked and sorted queer-shaped bulbs to be planted later in the year. Roger knew there was no question of cycling anywhere that day.
He almost forgave Jason that evening at supper when Jason kept everyone fascinated by telling of the various worlds he had been on and the strange plants he had found there. There was a plant in World Nine B that had a huge flower once every hundred years, so beautiful that the people there worshipped it as a god.
“That was one of my failures,” Jason told them. “They wouldn’t let me take a cutting, whatever I said.”
But he had done better in World Seven D, where there was a remote valley full of medicinal crocuses. At first the old man who owned the valley could not think of anything he wanted in exchange for the bulbs, and he warned Jason that the crocuses were very bad for your teeth. Jason got round the old man and got a sackful of the crocuses by enchanting sets of false teeth for the old man and his family. And then he told of the mountain in World One F that was the only place in all the worlds where a dark green ferny plant grew that actually cured colds. Naturally, the man who owned the mountain was very rich from selling these plants—minus their roots, so that no one else could grow any—and quite determined that nobody else was going to get hold of one. He had guard beasts and armed men patrolling the mountain night and day. Jason had sneaked in at night, under heavy spells, and dug up several before he was spotted and forced to run for it. The guards pursued him right through World Two A before Jason skipped to World Five C and they gave up. There were now three of those plants at Chrestomanci Castle, in the care of Mr. McDermot.
“And we’ll plant some of the rest tomorrow,” Jason said gleefully.
Janet and Julia and most of the others were still helping Jason that next day. But that day was Joss Callow’s day off. Roger looked at Cat. Cat went to the stables, where he fed Syracuse peppermints and saddled him up and led him through all the people busy around Jason and his shed. “I’m just going to ride him round the paddock,” he explained. And he did that. He knew Syracuse would be unmanageable unless he had had a bit of exercise first.
Half an hour later, Cat and Roger were on the road to the distant hills.
Joss Callow meanwhile cycled down to Helm St. Mary, where he dropped in to see his mother, so that if anyone asked he could truthfully say he had been to visit his mother. But he only stayed half an hour before he pedaled on to Ulverscote.
In Ulverscote, Marianne’s dad finished his work at mid-morning by packing the donkey cart with a set of kitchen chairs and sending Dolly the donkey and Uncle Richard off to deliver them in Crowhelm. Harry Pinhoe then walked up to the Pinhoe Arms to meet Joss. The two of them settled comfortably in the Private Snug with pints of beer. Arthur Pinhoe leaned amiably in through the hatch from the main bar, and Harry Pinhoe lit the pipe that he allowed himself on these occasions.
“So what’s the news?” Harry Pinhoe asked, puffing fine blue clouds. “I hear the Family came back.”
“Yes, and bought a horse,” Joss Callow said. “Got diddled properly over it.” Harry and Arthur laughed. “Me included,” Joss admitted. “Wizard who sold it put half a hundred spells on it to make it seem manageable, see. About the only one who can ride it is the boy they’re training up to be the next Big Man, and he gets on with it a treat. Odd, though. He doesn’t seem to use any magic on it that I can see. But what I was getting round to with this was about Gaffer Farleigh. He turned up when I was out with the boy in Home Wood and gave us both a proper warning off. Seemed to think the boy was likely to interfere with our work. What do you think?”
Harry and Arthur exchanged looks. “Some of that may be about the row he had with Gammer,” Arthur suggested, “before Gammer got took strange. All us Pinhoes are dirt to the Farleighs at the moment.”
“They’ll get over it,” Harry said placidly. “But we can’t have that boy riding all over the country. We’ll have to stop that.”
“Oh, I will,” Joss assured him. “He’s not going out without me any day soon.”
Harry chuckled. “If he does, the road workings will take care of it.” They drank beer peacefully for a while, until Harry asked, “Anything else, Joss?”
“Not much. Usual stuff,” said Joss. “The Big Man got straight back to work when he wasn’t buying horses and bicycles—magical swindle in London, some coven in the Midlands giving trouble, Scottish witches fussing about funds for Halloween, row of some kind two worlds away over the new tax on dragon’s blood—business as usual. Oh, I nearly forgot! That enchanter’s back from collecting plants all over the Related Worlds. The young one that used to be so thick with Old Gaffer. Jason Yeldham. He was asking after Gaffer. How much of an eye ought I to keep on him?”
“Shouldn’t think he’d be much trouble,” Harry said, emptying vile black dottle from his pipe into the ashtray. He scraped round the pipe bowl and thought about it. He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s not likely to come bothering us here, now Gaffer’s gone all these years ago. I mean, it’s all studying and book learning with him, isn’t it? It’s not like he uses the herbs the way we do. No need to interfere with him. But stay alert, if you follow me.”
“Will do,” said Joss.
They asked Arthur for more beer and refreshed themselves with pork pies and pickled onions for a while. After a bit, Harry remembered to ask, “How’s Joe doing, then?”
Joss shrugged. “All right, I suppose. I scarcely ever see him.”
“Good. Then he’s not in trouble yet,” Harry said.
Then Joss remembered to ask, “And how’s Gammer settling in?”
“She’s fine,” Harry said. “Dinah looks after her a treat. She sits there and no one can get any sense out of her, not even our Marianne, but there you go, she’s happy. She makes Marianne go round there every day and tells Marianne she has to look after that cat of hers every time, but that’s all. It’s all peace this end, really.”
“I’d better go and pay my respects to her,” Joss said. “She’s bound to find out I was here if I don’t.” He drained off the rest of his beer and stood up. “See you later, Harry, Arthur.”
He picked up his bicycle from the yard and coasted his way downhill through the village, nodding to the occasional Pinhoe who called out a greeting, shaking his head at the piles of brick and earth where the table had run into the Post Office wall. Wondering why nobody had done anything yet about mending that wall, he turned into Dell Lane and shortly arrived at the smallholding, where geese, ducks, and hens ran noisily out of his way as he went to knock at the front door.
“Come to see Gammer,” he said to Dinah when she opened it.
“Now there’s an odd thing!” Dinah exclaimed. “She’s been on about you all this morning. She’s said to me over and over, ‘When Joss Callow comes, you’re to show him straight in,’ she said, and I’d no idea you were even coming to Ulverscote!” She dived back in and opened the door on the right of the tiny hallway. “Gammer, guess who! It’s Joss Callow come to see you!”
“Well, they all say that,” Gammer’s voice answered. “They look and they spy on me all the time.”
Joss Callow paused in the front doorway. Partly he was wondering what you said to that, and partly he was shaken by the strength of the spells Harry Pinhoe had put up to stop Gammer getting out. He pulled himself together and pushed his way through into the tiny front room, full of teapots and vases and boxes that people had thought Gammer might want. Gammer was sitting in an upright armchair with wings that almost hid her ruined face and tousled white hair, with her hands folded on the knee of her clean, clean skirt. “How are you today, then, Gammer?” he said heartily.
“Not so wide as a barn door, but enough to let chickens in,” Gammer answered. “Thank you very much, Joss Callow. But it was Edgar and Lester who did it, you know.”
“Oh?” said Joss. “Really?”
While he was wondering what else to say, whether to give her news from the Castle or talk about the weather, Gammer said sharply, “And now you’re here at last, you can go and fetch me Joe here at once.”
“Joe?” Joss said. “But I can give you news of the Castle just as well, Gammer.”
“I don’t want news, I want Joe,” Gammer insisted. “I know as well as you do where he is and I want him here. Or don’t you call me Gammer anymore?”
“Yes, of course I do,” Joss said, and tried to change the subject. “It’s a bit gray today, but—”
“Don’t you try to put me off, Joss Callow,” Gammer interrupted. “I’ve told you to fetch me Joe here and I mean it.”
“But quite warm—a bit warm for cycling, really,” Joss said.
“Who cares about the weather?” Gammer said. “I said to fetch Joe here. Go and get him at once and stop trying to humor me!”
This seemed quite definite and perfectly sane to Joss. He sighed at the thought of a lost afternoon at the Pinhoe Arms, chatting to Arthur and maybe playing darts with Charles. “You want me to cycle all the way back to Helm St. Mary and tell Joe to come here, do you?”
“Yes. You should have done it yesterday,” Gammer said. “I don’t know what you young ones are coming to, arguing with the orders I give. Go and fetch Joe. Now. Tell him I want to speak to him and he’s not to tell anyone else. Go on. Off you go.”
Such was the awe all the Pinhoe family felt for Gammer that Joss didn’t argue and didn’t dare mention the weather again. He said, “All right, then,” and went.
With Syracuse fighting to go faster, faster! Cat rode along the grass verge, while Roger pedaled beside them on the road. They were quite evenly matched going along the level, but whenever they came to a hill, Syracuse sailed up it, shaking his head and trying to gallop, and Roger stood on his pedals and worked furiously, puffing like a train. Roger’s chubby face became the color of raspberries, and he still got left far behind.
They could see the woods they were making for, tantalizingly only two hills away, a spill of dark green trees with already one or two dashes of pure, sunlit yellow that signaled autumn coming. Every time Cat looked—usually while he was at the top of a hill waiting for Roger—those trees seemed farther and farther off, and more away to the left, and still two hills away. Cat began to think they had missed a turning, or perhaps even taken the wrong road to start with.
When Roger caught up next time, with his face beyond raspberry into strawberry color, Cat said, “We ought to take the next left turn.”
Roger was too much out of breath to do anything but nod. So Cat took the lead and swung Syracuse into a nice broad road leading away left. SHALLOWHELM, the signpost said. UPHELM.
About half a mile later, when he could speak, Roger said, “This road can’t be right. It should take us back to the Castle.”
Cat could still see the wood, still in the same place, so he kept on. The road bent about, among nothing but empty countryside for what seemed miles, up and down, until Roger was more the color of a peony than anything else. Then it swung round a corner and went up a truly enormous hill.
Roger let out a wail at the sight of it. “I can’t! I’ll have to get off and push.”
“No, don’t,” Cat said. “Let me give you a tow.”
He used the same spell he had used to keep Julia from falling off Syracuse and flung it round Roger’s bicycle. They went on, fast at first, because Syracuse still regarded every hill as a challenge to gallop, then slower—even when Cat allowed Syracuse to try to gallop—and then slower still. Halfway up, when Syracuse’s front hooves were digging and digging and his back ones were scrambling, it dawned on Syracuse what was going on. He looked across at Roger and the bicycle, so uncannily keeping beside him. Then he threw Cat in the ditch and scrambled through the hedge into the stubble field beyond.
Roger only just saved himself and the bicycle from falling in the ditch too. “That horse,” he said, kneeling in the grass beside his spinning front wheel, “is too clever by half. Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Cat said, but he stayed sitting in the squashy weeds at the bottom of the ditch. It was not so much the fall. It was that Syracuse had broken the spell quite violently. This had never happened to Cat before. He discovered that it hurt. “In a moment,” he added.
Roger looked anxiously from Cat’s white face to Syracuse pounding happily about in the field above them. “I wish I was old enough to drive a car,” he said. “Or I wish that there was some way of moving this bike without having to pedal.”
“Couldn’t you invent a way?” Cat asked, to take his mind off hurting.
They were both sitting thinking about this, when a boy on a bicycle came past them up the hill. He was riding an ordinary bike, but he was humming smoothly upward at a good speed, and he was not pedaling at all. Roger and Cat stared after him with their mouths open. Cat was so amazed that it took him several seconds to recognize Joe Pinhoe. Roger was simply amazed. They both began shouting at once.
“Hey, Joe!” Cat shouted.
“Hey, you!” Roger shouted.
And they both yelled in chorus, “Can you stop a moment? Please!”
For a moment, it looked as if Joe was not going to stop. He had hummed his way about twenty yards uphill before he seemed to change his mind. He shrugged a bit. Then his hand went down to a box on his crossbar, where he appeared to move a switch of some kind, after which he turned in a smooth curve and came coasting back down the hill to them.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, propping himself on the bank with one boot. “Want me to help catch the horse?” He nodded at Syracuse, who was now watching them across the hedge with great interest.
“No, no!” Cat and Roger said at once. “It’s not the horse,” Cat added.
Roger said, “We wanted to know how you make your bike go uphill without pedaling like that. It’s brilliant!”
Joe was clearly very gratified. He grinned. But, being Joe, he also hung his head and looked sulky. “I only use it on hills,” he said guardedly.
“That’s what’s so brilliant,” Roger said. “How do you do it?”
Joe hesitated.
Roger could see Joe was very proud of his device, whatever it was, and was itching to show it off, really. He asked coaxingly, “Did you invent it yourself?”
Joe nodded, grinning his sulky grin again.
“Then you must be a brilliant inventor,” Roger said. “I like inventing things too, but I’ve never come up with anything this useful. I’m Roger, by the way. Don’t you work in the Castle? I know I’ve seen you there.”
“Boot boy,” said Joe. “I’m Joe.” He nodded at Cat. “I’ve met him.”
“Jason Yeldham used to be boot boy there too,” Roger said. “It must go with brilliance.”
“Herbs, I know,” Joe said. “It’s machines I like, really. But this box—it’s more of a dwimmer-thing, see.” His hand went out to the box on his crossbar, and stopped. “What’s in it for me, if I do show you?” he asked suspiciously.
Roger was commercially minded too. He sympathized with Joe completely. The problem was that he had no money on him and he knew Cat had none either. And Joe could be offended at being offered money anyway. “I wouldn’t tell anyone else about it,” he said while he thought. “And Cat won’t either. I tell you what—when we get back to the Castle, I’ll give you the address of the Magics Patent Office. You register your invention with them, and everyone has to pay you if they want to use it too.”
Joe’s face gleamed with cautious greed. “Don’t I have to be grown up to do that?”
“No,” said Roger. “I sent for the forms when I invented a magic mirror game last year, and they don’t ask your age at all. They ask for a fifty-pound fee, though.”
Cat wondered whether to point out that he, and not Roger, had invented the mirror game by accident. But he said nothing, because he was quite as interested in the box as Roger was.
Joe had a distant, calculating look. “I could be earning that much this summer,” he decided. “They pay quite well at the Castle. All right. I’ll show you.”
Grinning his sulky grin, Joe carefully unhooked the small latch that held the box on his crossbar shut. The hinged lid dropped downward to show—Cat craned out of the ditch and then recoiled—of all things, a stuffed ferret! The bent yellow body had bits of wire and twisted stalks of plants leading from its head and its paws to the place where the box met the crossbar.
“Metal to metal,” Joe explained, pointing to the join. “That’s machinery, see. The dwimmer part is to use the right herbs for life. You have to use something that has once been alive, see. Then you can get the life power running through the frame and turning the wheels.”
“Brilliant!” Roger said reverently, peering in at the ferret. Its glass eyes seemed to glare sharply back at him. “But how do you get the life power to flow? Is that a spell, or what?”
“It’s some old words we sometimes use in the woods,” Joe said. “But the trick is the herbs that go with the wires. Took me ages to find the right ones. You got to blend them, see.”
Roger bent even closer. “Oh, I see. Clever.”
Cat got up out of the ditch and went to catch Syracuse. He knew, now he had seen the box, that he could almost certainly make Roger one this evening, probably without needing a stuffed ferret. But he knew Roger would hate that. Cat’s kind of magic made some things too easy. Roger would be wanting to make a box by himself, however long it took. As Cat pushed his way through the hedge, he wondered exactly what Joe’s word “dwimmer” meant. Was it an old word for magic? It sounded more specialized than that. It must mean a special sort of magic, probably.
Syracuse was not very hard to catch. He was quite tired after hauling Roger uphill, and a little bored by now in the wide, empty stubble field. But when Cat finally had the reins in his hands again, he discovered that Syracuse only had three shoes. One shoe must have torn off while Syracuse was plunging through the hedge.
Finding the shoe was not a problem. Cat simply held his hand out and asked. The missing horseshoe whirled up out of a clump of grass, where no one would have found it for years in the ordinary way, and slapped itself into Cat’s hand. The real problem was that Cat knew Joss Callow would be outraged if Cat tried sticking the shoe back on by magic. It was bound to go on wrong somehow. And Joss would be truly angry if Cat tried to ride Syracuse with one uneven foot. Cat sighed. He was going to have to levitate Syracuse all the way home, or conjure him along in short bursts, or—knowing how much Syracuse hated magic—most likely just walk. Bother.
He found a gate and led Syracuse out through it and down the hill, where Joe and Roger were sitting side by side on the bank, talking eagerly. Cat could see they were now fast friends. Well, they clearly had a lot in common.
“That’s women’s work, a machine for washing dishes,” Joe was saying. “We can do better than that. If you get any good notions, you better come and tell me. I get in trouble if I wander round the Castle. You can find me in the boot room.” He looked up as he heard Syracuse’s uneven footfalls. “I have to be going,” he said. “I’ve an errand to run for our Gammer, down in Helm St. Mary.” He got up off the bank and picked up his bicycle. “And you’ll never guess what it is,” he said. “Take a look.” He pulled a large glass jar with a lid on out of the basket on the front of his bicycle and held it up. “I’m to tip this in their village pond there,” he said.
Cat and Roger leaned to look at the murky, greenish water in the jar. A few fat black things with tails were wiggling slowly around in it.
“Tadpoles?” said Roger. “A bit late in the year, isn’t it?”
“Quite big ones,” Cat said.
“I know,” Joe said. “I could only find six, and some of those have their legs already. Know what they’re for?” They shook their heads. “This is not a jar of tadpoles,” Joe said. “It’s a declaration of war, this is.” He put the jar back in his basket and got astride his bike.
“Wait a moment,” Cat said. “Do you know how far it is to Chrestomanci Castle?”
Joe shot him a slightly guilty look. “You can see it from the top of this hill,” he said. “Got turned around, didn’t you? Not my fault. But the Farleighs don’t like people wandering around in their country, so they do this to the roads. See you.”
He switched the toggle at the side of his box and went purring smoothly away up the hill.