“No she is not!” Gammer shouted, so loudly that the Dell’s crowded little living room rang all over with the noise. “Pinhoes is Pinhoes and make sure you look after Nutcase for me, Marianne.”

“I don’t understand you, Gammer,” Marianne said boldly. She thought Cat had been right to say she was downtrodden, and she had decided to be brave from now on.

Gammer chomped her jaws, breathed heavily, and stared stormily at nothing.

Marianne sighed. This behavior of Gammer’s would have terrified her a week ago. Now she was being brave, Marianne felt simply impatient. She wanted to go home and get on with her story. Since her meeting with Irene, the story had suddenly turned into “The Adventures of Princess Irene and Her Cats,” which was somehow far more interesting than her first idea of it. She could hardly wait to find out what happened in it next. But Aunt Joy had sent Cousin Ned down to Furze Cottage to say that Gammer wanted Marianne now, and Mum had said, “Better see what she wants, love.” So Marianne had had to stop writing and hurry round to the Dell. Uselessly, because Gammer was not making any sense.

“You have got Nutcase, have you?” Gammer asked anxiously.

“Yes, Gammer.” Marianne had left Nutcase sitting on the drainboard, watching Mum chop herby leaves and peel knobby roots. She could only hope that he stayed there.

“But I’m not having it!” Gammer said, switching from anxiety to anger. “It’s not true. You’re to contradict it whenever you hear it, understand?”

“I would, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marianne said.

At this, Gammer fell into a real rage. “Hocum pocum!” she yelled, beating the floor with her stick. “You’re all turned against me! It’s insurpery, I tell you! They wouldn’t tell me what they’d done with him. Put him down it and pull the chain, I told them, but would they do it? They lied. Everyone’s lying to me!”

Marianne tried to say that no one was lying to Gammer, but Gammer just yelled her down. “I don’t understand you!” Marianne bawled back. “Talk sense, Gammer! You know you can if you try.”

“It’s an insult to Pinhoes!” Gammer screamed.

The noise brought Aunt Dinah striding cheerfully in. “Now, now, Gammer, dear. You’ll only tire yourself out if you shout like that. She’ll fall asleep,” Aunt Dinah said to Marianne, “and when she wakes up she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what she’s so angry about,” Marianne said.

“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” Aunt Dinah said, just as if Gammer was not sitting there. “It’s only that your aunt Helen was in here earlier. She likes to have all your aunts drop in, tell her things, cheer her up. You know. And Helen was telling her that the new lady that’s just bought Woods House is a Pinhoe born and bred—”

“She is not!” Gammer said sulkily. “I’m the only Pinhoe around here.”

“Are you, dear?” Aunt Dinah said cheerily. “And where does that leave the rest of us?”

This seemed to be the right way to treat Gammer. Gammer looked surprised, ashamed, and amused, all at once, and took to pleating the clean, clean skirt that Aunt Dinah had dressed her in that morning. “These are not my clothes,” she said.

“Whose are they, then?” Aunt Dinah said, laughing. She turned to Marianne. “She’d no call to drag you over here for that, Marianne. Next time she tries it, just ignore it. Oh, and could you ask your mum for more of that ointment for her? She gets sore, sitting all the time.”

Marianne said she would ask, and walked away among the chickens and the ducks, taking care to latch the gate behind her. Joe was always forgetting to shut the gate properly. Last time Joe forgot, the goats had gotten out into everyone’s gardens. The things Aunt Joy had said about Joe! Marianne discovered herself to be missing Joe far more than she had expected. She wondered how he was getting on.

“Mum,” Marianne asked, as she came into the herby, savory steam of the kitchen in Furze Cottage. Nutcase, to her relief, was still there, sitting on the table now, among the jars and bottles waiting to be filled with balms and medicines. “Mum, is Mrs. Yeldham a Pinhoe born and bred?”

“So your great-uncle Lester says,” Mum said. Her narrow face was fiery red and dripping in the steam. Wet curls were escaping from the red-and-white checked cloth she had wrapped round her head. “Marianne, I could use your help here.”

Marianne knew how this one worked: help Mum, or she would get no further information. She sighed because of her unfinished story and went to find a cloth to wrap her hair in. “Yes?” she said, once she was hard at work beating chopped herbs into warm goose grease. “And?”

“She really is a Pinhoe,” Mum said, carefully straining another set of herbs through a square of muslin. “Lester went up to London and checked the records in case he did wrong to sell her the house. You remember those stories about Luke Pinhoe, who went to London to seek his fortune a hundred years ago?”

“The one who turned his Gaffer into a tree first?” Marianne said.

“Only overnight,” Mum said, as if that excused it. “He did it so that he could get away, I think. There must have been quite a row there, what with Luke refusing to be the next Gaffer, and his father crippling both his legs so that he’d have to stay. Anyway, they say that Luke stole his father’s old gray mare and rode all night until he came to London, and the mare made her way back here all on her own. And Luke found an enchanter to mend his legs—and that must be true, because Lester found out that Luke set up as an apothecary first, which would have been hard to do as a cripple. He’d have been more likely to have been begging on the streets. But there he was, dealing in potions because he was herb-cunning, like me. But Luke seems to have found out quite soon that he was an enchanter himself. He made himself a mint of money out of it. And his son was an enchanter after him, and his son after that, right down to this present day, when William Pinhoe, who died this spring, had only the one daughter. They say he left his daughter all his money and two servants to look after her, and she’s the Mrs. Yeldham who bought Woods House.”

While Mum paused to spoon careful measures of fresh chopped herbs into the strained water, Marianne remembered that Irene had talked about someone called Jane James, who must have been her cook. It did seem to fit. “But why is Gammer so angry about it?”

“Well,” Mum said, rather drily, “I could say it’s because she’s lost her wits, but between you and me and the gatepost, Marianne, I’d say it’s because Mrs. Yeldham’s more of a Pinhoe than Gammer is. Luke was his Gaffer’s eldest son. Gammer’s family comes down from the second cousins who went to live in Hopton. See?” She covered her bowl with fresh muslin and went to put it in the cold store to steep.

Marianne started to lick goose grease from her fingers, remembered in time that it was full of herbs you shouldn’t eat, and felt rather proud of being a Pinhoe by direct descent—or no! Her family descended from that Gaffer’s second son, George, who had been by all accounts a meek and rather feeble man, and did just what his father told him. So Irene was more Pinhoe than Marianne—“Oh, what does it matter?” she said aloud. “It was all a hundred years ago!” She looked round for Nutcase and was just in time to catch him sneaking through the window Mum had opened to try to get rid of the steam. Marianne grabbed him and shut the window. “No, you mustn’t,” she told Nutcase as she put him on the floor. “Some of them move into Woods House today. They won’t want you.”

As everyone in Ulverscote somehow knew—without anyone’s precisely being told—Irene’s two servants arrived that morning. They came in a heavy London van that took two cart horses to pull it, bringing some basic furniture to put into the house. The good furniture was supposed to arrive later, when the Yeldhams moved in. Uncle Simeon and Uncle Charles went up there in the afternoon to see what alterations were going to be required.

They came away chastened.

“Massive job,” Uncle Simeon said, in his untalkative way, when the two of them arrived in Furze Cottage to report to Dad and drink restorative tea. “And the new stove and water tank to come from Hopton before we can even start.”

“That Jane James!” Uncle Charles said feelingly. “You can’t put a foot wrong there. Proper old-time servant. All I did was think the two of them was married and—ooh! And there was he, little trodden-on-looking fellow, but you have to call him Mister Adams, she says, and show proper respect. So then I call her Miss James, showing proper respect like she told me, and she shoots herself up and gathers herself in like an umbrella and ‘I’m Jane James, and I’ll thank you to remember it!’ she says. After that we just crawled away.”

“Got to go back, though,” Uncle Simeon said. “The Yeldhams come to see what’s needed tomorrow, and she wants you to start on the whitewash, Charles.”

Irene and Jason were indeed due to set off to confer with Pinhoe Construction Limited in Woods House that next day. Irene took a deep breath and invited Janet and Julia to go with them. “Do come,” she said. “Whatever Jane James has done to it, I know it’s going to look a depressing mess still. I need someone to tell me how to make it livable in.”

Janet looked at Julia and Julia looked at Janet. It was more a sliding round of eyes than a proper look. Irene seemed to hold her breath. Cat could see Irene knew the girls did not like her for some reason, and it obviously worried her. At length, Julia said, not altogether politely, “Yes. Please. Thank you, Mrs. Yeldham,” and Janet nodded.

It was not friendly, but Irene smiled with relief and turned to Cat.

“Would you like to come too, Cat?”

Cat knew she was hoping he would help make the girls more friendly, but Syracuse was waiting. Cat smiled and shook his head and explained that Joss was taking him for a ride beside the river in half an hour. And Roger was not to be found. Irene looked a little dashed, and only Janet and Julia went with Jason and Irene to Ulverscote.

In the normal way, all Ulverscote would have come out to stare at them. But that day only a few people—who had all had the presence of mind to call on the Reverend Pinhoe in order to stare over the vicarage wall—caught sight of the four of them getting out of Jason’s car. They all told one another that the fair-haired girl looked as sour as Aunt Joy, and what a pity, it just showed you what they were like at That Castle, but Mrs. Yeldham did credit to the Pinhoe family. A real lady. She was born a Pinhoe, you know.

The rest of the village was in the grip of a mysterious wave of bad luck. A fox got into the chick pen at the Dell and ate most of the baby chicks that Nutcase had not accounted for. Mice got into the grocer’s and into the pantry at the Pinhoe Arms. The wrong bricks were delivered to mend the Post Office wall.

“Bright yellow bricks I am not having!” Aunt Joy screamed at the van men. “This is a Post Office, not a sandcastle on a beach!” And she made the men take the bricks away again.

“Before I could even take a look at them too!” Uncle Simeon complained. He was in Dr. Callow’s surgery when the bricks were delivered, with a sprained ankle. He had been forced to send his foreman, Podge Callow, to consult with the Yeldhams in his place. Besides Uncle Simeon, the surgery was crowded with sprains, dislocations, and severe bruises, all to Pinhoes and all of them acquired that morning. Uncle Cedric was there, after falling from his hayloft, and so was Great-Uncle Lester, who had shut his thumb in his car door. Almost all of Marianne’s cousins had had similar accidents, and Great-Aunt Sue had tipped boiling water down her leg. Dr. Callow had to agree with her that this spate of injuries was not natural.

Down at Furze Cottage, Mum was trying to deal with further cuts and scrapes and bruises, working under great difficulty, as she said to Marianne. Half of her new infusions had got mildew overnight. Marianne had to sort the bad jars out for her before they infected the rest. Meanwhile, Uncle Richard, carefully carving a rose on the front of a new cabinet, let his gouge slip somehow and plowed a deep bloody furrow in the palm of his other hand. Mum had to leave her storeroom yet again and sort him out with a wad of cobwebs and some lotion charmed to heal.

“I don’t think this is natural, Cecily,” Uncle Richard said while Mum was bandaging his hand. “Joy shouldn’t have cursed Gammer like that.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Dad, who had come in to make sure his brother was all right. “I stopped Joy before she started. This is something else.”

Dad was about the only person who believed this. As the bad luck spread to people who were only distantly related to Pinhoes, and then to people who had no witchcraft at all, most of Ulverscote began to blame Aunt Joy. Aunt Joy’s face, as Mum said, would have soured milk from a hundred yards away.

The bad luck extended to Woods House too. There, to Jane James’s annoyance, the man installing the new stove dropped it on his foot and then mystified her by limping away into the village saying, “Mother Cecily will fix me up. Don’t touch the boiler till I get back.”

While Mum was dealing with what she suspected was a broken bone in this man’s foot, Marianne discovered—mostly by the severely bad smell—that the whole top shelf of jars in the storeroom had grown fuzzy red mold. And Nutcase disappeared again.

Nutcase reappeared some time later in the hall of Woods House, just in time to trip Uncle Charles up, as Uncle Charles crossed the hall carrying a ladder and a bucket of whitewash. Uncle Charles, in trying to save himself, hit himself on the back of the head with the ladder and dropped the bucket of whitewash over Nutcase.

The clang and the crash fetched Jane James and Irene from the kitchen and Janet, Julia, and Jason from what was going to be the dining room. Everyone exclaimed in sympathy at the sight of the house painter lying under a ladder in a lake of whitewash, while beside him the desperate white head of a cat stuck out from under the upturned whitewash pail.

Uncle Charles stopped swearing at the sight of Jane James’s face, but continued telling the world at large just what he would like to do to Nutcase. As he told Marianne later, a bang on the head does that to you. And those two girls laughed.

“But are you all right?” Jason asked him.

“I’d be better off if that cat was dead,” Uncle Charles replied. “I didn’t chance to kill him, did I?”

Janet and Julia, trying—and failing—not to laugh too much, tipped the pail up and rescued Nutcase. Nutcase was scrawny, clawing, and mostly white. Whitewash sprayed over everyone as Nutcase struggled. Janet held him at arm’s length, with her face turned sideways, while Irene and Jason dived to help Uncle Charles. “Oh, it’s a black cat!” Julia exclaimed as the underside of Nutcase became visible. Jason’s foot skidded in the whitewash. He tried to save himself by grabbing Irene’s arm. The result was that Jason fell flat on his face in the whitewash and Irene sat in it. Janet’s opinion of Irene changed completely when Irene simply sat on the floor and laughed.

“All their good clothes ruined,” Uncle Charles told Marianne. He arrived, a trifle dizzily, at Furze Cottage with Nutcase clamped under one arm. “It just goes to show that even an enchanter can’t avoid a bad-luck spell. That fellow’s a full enchanter, or I’m a paid-up Chinaman. Don’t tell Gammer he is. She’d take a fit. He had me standing up while his face was still in the matting. Take your cat. Wash him. Drown him if you like.”

Marianne took Nutcase to the sink and ran both taps on him. Nutcase protested mightily. “It’s your own fault. Shut up,” Marianne told him. Dad was sitting at the table assembling the flowers and frondy leaves of ragged robin in the careful overlapping pattern of a counter-charm, and Marianne was trying to listen to what he was saying to Uncle Charles about the bad-luck spell.

“It’s an ill-chancing. Positive,” Uncle Charles was saying. “I knew that as soon as that damn ladder hit my head. But I don’t know whose, or—”

Mum interrupted by bawling from the front room, where she was treating a small boy for a sudden severe cough. She wanted to know if Uncle Charles was concussed.

“Just a bit dizzy like,” Dad bawled back. “He’s fine. Yes,” he said to Uncle Charles. “It feels like a nudge job to me. One of those that lies in wait for all the things you nearly get wrong, like you nearly trip and you nearly drop a pail of whitewash, and it gives those a nudge so that you do it really. It doesn’t have to be strong to have a big effect.”

“That doesn’t account for the fox,” Uncle Charles objected. “Or they’re saying a lot of little ones have got the whooping cough. It can’t account for that.”

“Those could be separate,” Dad said. “If they were a part of it, then I’d have to say, to be fair, that it’s stronger than a nudge—and nobody’s dead yet.”

Meanwhile, Jason’s whitewash-spattered party was leaving Woods House in order to get some clean clothes. Jason looked particularly spectacular, as not only the front of him, but the tip of his nose and the fringe of his hair were white. He was annoyed enough to shout with rage when his car refused to start. He called the car more names than Uncle Charles had called the cat. Janet’s theory was that the car eventually started out of pure shame. Julia told her that Jason had used magic, a lot of magic.

When the car was finally chugging, they drove out into the road and out beyond the last small houses of the village. There Jason stopped, with a screech and a violent jerk. He jumped out of the car and stood in the middle of the road, glaring around at the hedges.

“What’s he doing?” Janet said.

They all looked anxiously at Jason’s clownlike figure.

“Magic,” Julia said, and got out too.

Janet and Irene followed Julia just as Jason made a dive for a clump of plants growing on the verge. “And right in the middle of the artemisia to lend it power!” they heard him say. He hacked into the clump with the heel of his boot. “Come out, you!”

A little black lump with trailing strings came out of the plants. It looked like a dirty lavender bag that someone had not tied up properly. Jason hacked it out of the grass and down the bank to the road. “Got you!” he said. Irene took one look at the thing and went back to the car, looking white and ill. Julia felt queasy. Janet wondered what was the matter with them both. It was only a greasy gray bag of herbs. “Keep back,” Jason said to her. He kicked the bag into the center of the road and bent over it warily. “Someone’s been very nasty here. This is a brute of an ill-wishing—it’s probably infecting the whole village by now. Get in the car while I get rid of the thing.”

By this time even Janet was feeling something wrong about the bag. She stumbled and nearly fell over as Julia pulled her back to the car. “I think I’m going to be sick,” Julia said.

They watched from inside the car while Jason levitated the bag fifteen feet into the air and made it burst into flames. It burned and it burned, with improbably long crimson flames, and gave off a whirl of thick black smoke. Jason kept collecting the smoke and sending it back to the flames to burn again. They all, even Janet, had the feeling that the bag was trying to fall on Jason and burn him too. But Jason made it stay in the air with batting motions of his left hand, the way you make a balloon stay in the air, batting and batting, while his other hand collected smoke and fed it back to the flames, over and over, until at last there was nothing left of it, not even the smallest flake of ash. He was sweating through the whitewash when he came back to the car.

“Phew!” he said. “Someone around here is not nice at all. That thing was designed to get worse by the hour.”

All this while, Cat was trotting blissfully on Syracuse along the bank of the river, following Joss on his big brown horse. Syracuse was drawing Cat’s attention to the smells of the river valley—the mildly churning river on one side with its rich watery smells, and the damp grassiness from the plants on its banks, and the way the scents from the rest of the valley were those of late summer. Cat sniffed the dry incense smells from the fields and thought he would know it was the end of August even if he suddenly went blind. Syracuse, who was feeling quite as blissful as Cat, helped him sense the myriad squishy things in the river going about their muddy lives, all the hundreds of creatures rustling about on its banks, and the truly teeming life of birds and animals in the meadows above.

Cat set a spell to keep off the midges and horseflies. They were teeming too. They came pouring out of the bushes in clouds. While he set the spell, he had the feeling that he always had now when he rode out, the same feeling he had first had in Home Wood, that despite the thronging of living things, there ought to have been more. Behind the bustle of creatures, and behind the flitting and soaring of birds, there was surely an emptiness that should have been filled.

Cat was once again trying to track down the emptiness, when everything stopped.

Birds stopped singing. Creatures stopped rustling among the rushes. Even the river lost its voice and seemed to flow milklike and silent. Joss stopped too, so suddenly that Syracuse nearly shot Cat off into the water, going sideways to avoid the rear end of Joss’s horse.

Mr. Farleigh stepped into sight beyond a clump of willows, with his long gun under his arm.

“Morning, Mr. Farleigh,” Joss said respectfully.

Mr. Farleigh ignored the politeness, just as he ignored Cat too, sitting slantwise across the path behind Joss. His grim eyes fixed accusingly on Joss. “Tell the Pinhoes to stop,” he said.

Joss clearly had no more idea than Cat did what this meant. He said, “Sorry?”

“You heard me. Tell them to stop,” Mr. Farleigh said, “or they’ll be having more than a bit of ill-chancing coming down on them. Tell them I told you.”

“Of course,” Joss said. “If you say so.”

“I do say,” Mr. Farleigh said. He shifted a little, so that he was now ignoring Cat more than ever. Pointedly and deliberately ignoring him. “And you’ve no business letting Castle people out all over the place,” he said. “Keep the Big Man’s nose out of things, do you hear me? I had to take steps over that myself the other day. Do your job, man.”

In front of Cat, Joss was making helpless movements. Cat could feel Syracuse, underneath him, making movements that suggested it would be a good plan to barge past Mr. Farleigh and tumble him into the river. Cat entirely agreed, but he knew this was not wise. He made movements back at Syracuse to tell him not to.

“My job’s not to stop things, Mr. Farleigh,” Joss said apologetically. “I only report.”

“Then report,” Mr. Farleigh said, “or I don’t know where it will all end. Take some steps, before I have to get rid of the lot of them.” He swung round on the heel of his big boot and plodded away down the river path.

When Mr. Farleigh had vanished ahead of them behind the willows, Joss turned to Cat. “Got to go up through the meadows now,” he said. “It won’t do to shove Mr. Farleigh off the path.”

Cat longed to ask Joss what was going on here, but he could tell Joss was hoping that Cat had not understood a word of what had been said. So he said nothing and let Syracuse follow Joss up through the fields at the side of the valley. Around them, birds flew and creatures rustled, and the river behind them went back to churning again.