Kitabı oku: «Enchanted Glass»

Chapter One

When Jocelyn Brandon died — at a great old age, as magicians tend to do — he left his house and his field-of-care to his grandson, Andrew Brandon Hope. Andrew himself was in his thirties. The house, Melstone House, was a simple matter of making a will. But it had been old Jocelyn’s intention to pass the field-of-care on in the proper way, personally.

He left it rather too late. He knew Andrew could reach him very quickly. If you climbed to the top of Mel Tump, the hill beyond the house, you could see the University where Andrew taught as a dark blue clot on the edge of the great blue-green plain, only half an hour’s drive away. So, when he realised he was on his deathbed, Jocelyn commanded his housekeeper, Mrs Stock, to telephone for his grandson.

Mrs Stock did telephone. But the truth is, she did not try very hard. Partly, she did not take the old man’s illness seriously; but mostly, she did not approve of the old man’s daughter for marrying a Hope (and then dying of it). She therefore also disapproved of the daughter’s son, Andrew Hope. Besides, she was waiting for the doctor and didn’t want to be on the phone when she should be answering the door. So when she had worked her way through the intricate University switchboard system and arrived at the History Department, and then to a person who described herself as a Research Assistant, who told her that Dr Hope was in a committee meeting, she simply gave up.

Andrew Hope was driving in the general direction of Melstone that evening, returning from a site connected with his research. His Research Assistant, not having the least idea where he was, had simply told Mrs Stock the lie she told everyone. Andrew had reached the curious dip in the road where, as he always said to himself, things went different. It was blue gloaming and he had just switched his headlights on. Luckily, he was not going fast. A figure was suddenly there, dashing into his headlights’ glare, dark and human and seeming to wave.

Andrew trod on his brakes. His car wove about, wheels howling, in a long, snaking skid, showing him horrendous detail of grass and blackthorn on both sides of the road, violently lit by his headlights. It followed this by going up and over and down off something sickeningly squashy. Then it stopped.

Andrew tore open his door and jumped out. Into something squashy. This proved to be the ditch in which his nearside wheel was planted. Horrified, he squelshed out and around the bonnet and peered underneath the other three wheels. Nothing. The squashy lump must have been the wet bank between the road and the ditch. Only when he was sure of this did Andrew look round and see the human figure standing waiting for him in the beam of the headlights. It was tall and thin and very like himself, except that its hair was white, its back a little bent and it did not wear glasses like Andrew did. Jocelyn’s eyesight had always been magically good.

Andrew recognised his grandfather. “Well, at least I didn’t kill you,” he said. “Or did I?”

This last question was because he realised he could see the white line in the middle of the road through his grandfather’s body.

His grandfather shook his head, grinned a little and held something out towards him. Andrew could not see it clearly at first. He had to go nearer, remove his glasses and peer. The thing seemed to be a folded paper with some kind of black seal on one corner. The old man shook it impatiently and held it out again. Andrew cautiously reached for it. But his fingers went right through it and grew very cold. It was like putting his hand for an instant into a freezer.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll come to the house and get it, shall I?”

His grandfather gave the paper in his hand a look of keen exasperation, and nodded. Then he stepped back a pace, enough to take him out of the tilted beams of the headlights, and that was all. There was only dark road in the dip.

Andrew stepped outside the light himself to make sure his grandfather was gone. Finding that he was, Andrew put his glasses back on and retrieved his right shoe from the mud in the ditch. After that he stood thinking, watching the right front wheel of his car sinking slowly deeper into the grassy ooze.

He thought movements of sky and earth, time and space. He thought Einstein and skyhooks. He thought that the position of the wheel in the ditch was only a temporary and relative fact, untrue five minutes ago and untrue five minutes from now. He thought of the power and speed of that skid, and the repelling power of the ditch. He thought of gravity reversing itself. Then he knelt down with one hand on the grassy mud and the other on the wheel and pushed the two apart. Obediently, with some reluctant sucking and squelshing, the car moved out of the ditch and over the bank and bumped down in the road. Andrew sat himself in the driving seat to put his shoe back on, thinking ruefully that his grandfather would simply have stood in the road and beckoned to get the same result. He would have to work at the practical side of magic a bit more now. Pity. He sighed.

After that, he drove to his grandfather’s house. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” he said, when Mrs Stock opened the door to him.

Mrs Stock nodded and redeemed what little conscience she had by saying, “But I knew you’d know.”

Andrew walked through the front door and into his inheritance.

There was of course a great deal of business involved, not only in Melstone and in Melton, the town nearby, but also in the University, because Andrew decided almost at once to leave the University and live in Melstone House. His parents had left him money and he thought that, with what old Jocelyn had left him, he had enough to give up teaching and write the book he had always wanted to write. He wanted to give the world a completely new view of history. He was glad to leave the University, and particularly glad to leave his Research Assistant. She was such a liar. Amazing that he had wanted to marry her a year ago. But Andrew felt he had to make sure she was safely shunted to another post, and so he did.

One way or another, it was nearly a year before Andrew could move in to Melstone House. Then he had to make sure that the various small legacies in his grandfather’s will were paid, and he did that too; but he was vaguely puzzled that this will, when he saw it, was quite a different size and shape from the paper his grandfather’s ghost had tried to give him. He shrugged and gave Mrs Stock her five hundred pounds.

“And I do hope you’ll continue to work for me just as you did for my grandfather,” he said.

To which she retorted, “I don’t know what you’d do if I didn’t. You live in a world of your own, being a professor.”

Andrew took this to mean yes. “I’m not a professor,” he pointed out mildly. “Just a mere academic.”

Mrs Stock took no notice of this. To her mind this was just splitting hairs. Everybody at a university was to her a professor, unless they were students of course, and therefore even worse. So she told everyone in Melstone that old Jocelyn’s grandson was a professor. Andrew soon became accustomed to being addressed as “Professor”, even by people who wrote to him from elsewhere about details of folklore or asking questions about magic.

He went to give Mr Stock the gardener his legacy of five hundred pounds. “And I do hope you’ll continue your admirable work for me too,” he said.

Mr Stock leaned on his spade. He was no relation to Mrs Stock, not even by marriage. It was simply that a good half of the people in Melstone were called Stock. Both Mr and Mrs Stock were extremely touchy on this matter. They did not like one another. “I suppose that old bossyboots says she’s carrying on for you?” Mr Stock asked aggressively.

“I believe so,” Andrew said.

“Then I’m staying to see fair play,” Mr Stock said and went on banking up potatoes.

In this way, Andrew found himself employing two tyrants.

He did not see them this way of course. To him the two Stocks were fixtures, his grandfather’s faithful servants, who had worked at Melstone House since Andrew had first visited the house as a child. He simply could not imagine the place without them.

Meanwhile, he was extremely happy, unpacking his books, going for walks and simply being in the house where he had spent so many fine times as a boy. There was a smell here — beeswax, mildew, paraffin and a spicy scent he could never pin down — which said Holidays! to Andrew. His mother had never got on with old Jocelyn. “He’s a superstitious old stick-in-the-mud,” she said to Andrew. “Don’t let me find you believing in the stuff he tells you.” But she sent Andrew to stay there most holidays to show that she had not exactly quarrelled with her father.

So Andrew had gone to stay with old Jocelyn and the two of them had walked, over fields, through woods and up Mel Tump, and Andrew had learned many things. He did not remember old Jocelyn teaching him about anything magical particularly; but he did remember companionable nights by the fire in the musty old living room, with the curtains drawn over the big French windows, when his grandfather taught him other things. Old Jocelyn Brandon had a practical turn of mind. He taught his grandson how to make flies for fishing, how to mortice joints, and how to make runestones, origami figures and kites. They had invented riddles together and made up games. It was enough to make the whole place golden to Andrew — though he had to admit that, now he was living here, he missed the old man rather a lot.

But owning the place made up for that somewhat. He could make what changes he pleased. Mrs Stock thought he should buy a television for the living room, but Andrew disliked television so he didn’t. Instead, he bought a freezer and a microwave, ignoring the outcry from Mrs Stock, and went over the house to see what repairs were needed.

“A freezer and a microwave!” Mrs Stock told her sister Trixie. “Does he think I’m going to freeze good food solid, just for the pleasure of thawing it again with rays?”

Trixie remarked that Mrs Stock had both amenities in her own house.

“Because I’m a working woman,” Mrs Stock retorted. “That’s not the point. I tell you, that man lives in a world of his own!”

Great was her indignation when she arrived at the house next day to find that Andrew had moved all the furniture around in the living room, so that he could see to play the piano and get the best armchair beside the fire. It took Mrs Stock a whole morning of grunting, heaving and pushing to put it all back where it had been before.

Andrew came in from inspecting the roof and the outhouse in the yard after she had gone, sighed a little and moved everything to where he wanted it again.

Next morning, Mrs Stock stared, exclaimed and rushed to haul the piano back to its hallowed spot in the darkest corner. “World of his own!” she muttered, as she pushed and kicked at the carpet. “These professors!” she said, heaving the armchair, the sofa, the table and the standard lamps back to their traditional places. “Damn it!” she added, finding that the carpet had now acquired a long slantwise ruck from corner to corner. “And the dust!” she exclaimed, once she had jerked the carpet flat. It took her all morning to clean up the dust.

“So you’ll just have to have the same cauliflower cheese for lunch and supper,” she told Andrew, by way of a strong hint.

Andrew nodded and smiled. That outhouse, he was thinking, was going to fall down as soon as his grandfather’s magic drained from it. Likewise the roof of the house. In the attics, you could look up to see cobwebby patches of sky through the slanted ceilings. He wondered whether he could afford all the necessary repairs as well as the central heating he wanted to install. It was a pity he had just spent so much of his grandfather’s remaining money on a new computer.

In the evening, after Mrs Stock had gone, he fetched a pizza out of his new freezer, threw away the cauliflower cheese and, while the pizza heated, he moved the living room furniture back the way he wanted it.

Dourly, the next day, Mrs Stock moved it back to where tradition said it should be.

Andrew shrugged and moved it back again. Since he was employing the method he had used on his ditched car, while Mrs Stock was using brute force, he hoped she would shortly get tired of this. Meanwhile, he was getting some excellent magical practice. That evening, the piano actually trundled obediently into the light when he beckoned it.

Then there was Mr Stock.

Mr Stock’s mode of tyranny was to arrive at the back door, which opened straight into the kitchen, while Andrew was having breakfast. “Nothing particular you want me to do today, so I’ll just get on as usual,” he would announce. Then he would depart, leaving the door open to the winds.

Andrew would be forced to leap up and shut the door before the wind slammed it. A slam, as his grandfather had made clear to him, could easily break the delicate coloured glass in the upper half of the door. Andrew loved that coloured glass. As a boy, he had spent fascinated hours looking at the garden through each different-coloured pane. Depending, you got a rose-pink sunset garden, hushed and windless; a stormy orange garden, where it was suddenly autumn; a tropical green garden, where there seemed likely to be parrots and monkeys any second. And so on. As an adult now, Andrew valued that glass even more. Magic apart, it was old, old, old. The glass had all sorts of internal wrinkles and trapped bubbles, and its long-dead maker had somehow managed to make the colours both intense and misty at once, so that in some lights, the violet pane, for instance, was both a rich purple and a faint lilac grey at one and the same time. If a piece of that glass had broken or even cracked, Andrew’s heart would have cracked with it.

Mr Stock knew that. It was his way of ensuring, like Mrs Stock, that Andrew did not make any changes.

Unfortunately for Mr Stock, Andrew went over the grounds as carefully as he went over Melstone House itself. The walled vegetable garden was beautiful. Mr Stock’s great ambition was to win First Prize in all the vegetable classes at the Melstone Summer Fete, either from his own garden down the road or from Andrew’s. So the vegetables were phenomenal. But for the rest, Mr Stock was content merely to mow lawns. Andrew shook his head at the flower garden and winced at the orchard.

After a couple of months, while he waited for Mr Stock to mend his ways and Mr Stock went on as usual, Andrew took to leaping up as soon as Mr Stock appeared. Holding the precious door open ready to shut again after Mr Stock left, he would say things like, “I think today would be a good time to get rid of all those nettles in the main flowerbed,” and, “Give me a list of the shrubs we need to replace all the dead ones and I’ll order them for you,” and, “There’ll be no harm in pruning the apple trees today: none of them are bearing fruit.” And so on. Mr Stock found himself forced to leave his vegetables, often for days on end.

Mr Stock took his revenge in his traditional manner. The following Monday, he kicked open the back door. Andrew was only just in time to stop it crashing against the inside wall, even though he had cast aside his toast and leaped to the door handle at the sight of Mr Stock’s hat silhouetted through the coloured glass.

“You’ll need both hands,” Mr Stock said. “Here.” And he placed a vast cardboard box loaded with vegetables in Andrew’s arms. “And you’re to eat these all yourself, see. Don’t you let that old bossyboots go pinching them off you. And she will. I know her greedy ways. Puts them in her bag and scuttles off home with them if you give her the chance. So you eat them. And don’t try chucking them away. I’ll know. I empty the bins. So. Nothing particular you want me to do today. I’ll just get on, shall I?”

“Well, actually there is,” Andrew said. “The roses need tying in and mulching.”

Mr Stock glared at him incredulously. This was rebellion.

“Please,” Andrew added in his usual polite way. “I’ll be—!” said Mr Stock. And turned and trudged away.

Andrew, very gently, nudged the door closed with his foot and dumped the cardboard box beside his toast. It was that or drop it, it was so heavy. Unpacked, it proved to contain six enormous onions, a bunch of twelve-inch carrots, a cabbage larger than Andrew’s head, ten peppers the size of melons, a swede like a medium-sized boulder and a vegetable marrow like the body of a small crocodile. The spaces were carefully packed with overripe peapods and two foot runner beans. Andrew grinned. This was all the stuff that would not be up to the standard of Melstone Fete. He left a few of the most edible things out on the table and packed the rest back in the box, which he hid in the corner of the pantry.

Mrs Stock found it of course. “He’s never palmed his rejects off on us again!” she pronounced. “The size of them! All bulk and no taste. And what am I to do for potatoes? Whistle? Really, that man!” Then she took her coat off and went to put the furniture back again. They were still at that.

The next day, Mr Stock kicked the door open on behalf of a box full of fourteen lettuces. On Wednesday, for variety, he accosted Andrew as Andrew went out to check the state of the garden walls and presented a further cardboard box containing ten kilos of tomatoes and a squash like the deformed head of a baby. On Thursday, the box contained sixteen cauliflowers.

Andrew smiled nicely and accepted these things, staggering a bit under their weight. This had happened when his grandfather annoyed Mr Stock too. They had often wondered, Andrew and his grandfather, if Mr Stock collected cardboard boxes and stored them ready to be annoyed with. Andrew presented the tomatoes to Mrs Stock.

“I believe you had better make some chutney,” he said.

“And how do you expect me to find time for that, when I’m so busy—” She broke off, mildly embarrassed.

“Moving the furniture in the living room?” suggested Andrew. “Perhaps you could bring yourself to leave it for once.”

Mrs Stock found herself making chutney. “World of his own!” she muttered over her seething red, vinegary saucepan, and occasionally, as she spooned the stuff into jars, and it slid out and pooled stickily on the table, “Professors! Men!” And, as she got her coat on to leave, “Don’t blame me that the table’s covered in jars. I can’t label them until tomorrow and they’re not going anywhere until I have.”

Once he was alone, Andrew did as he had done every evening that week. He heaved the latest box out of the pantry and carried it outside to where the lean-to of the woodshed made a flattish slope level with his head. With the help of a kitchen chair, he laid the vegetables out up there. Too high for Mr Stock to see, his grandfather had remarked, or Mrs Stock either.

Tomatoes, squash and cauliflowers, were all gone in the morning, but the marrow remained. Careful looking showed a slightly trampled place in the grass beside the woodshed, but Andrew, remembering his grandfather’s advice, enquired no further. He took the marrow back and tried to cut it up to hide in the freezer. But no knife would penetrate the crocodile skin of the thing and he was forced to bury it instead.

Friday brought a gross of radishes from Mr Stock and five bloated aubergines. It also brought Andrew’s new computer. Finally. At last. Andrew forgot house, grounds, radishes, everything. He spent an absorbed and beatific day setting up the computer and beginning the database for his book, the book he really wanted to write, the new view of History.

“Would you believe, it’s a computall now!” Mrs Stock told her sister. She never could get that word right. “Sitting there all day, patter-patter, like dry bones, fair gives me the creeps. And if I ask him anything, it’s, ‘Do as you think best, Mrs Stock’. I could have given him the boiled teacloths for lunch and he wouldn’t have noticed!”

Well, he was a professor, Trixie pointed out, and professors were well known to be absent-minded. And in her opinion, men were all children at heart anyway.

“Professors! Children!” Mrs Stock exclaimed. “I tell you, it’s worse than that. The man needs a minder to keep him in order!” Then she went quiet, struck with an idea.

Mr Stock looked proprietorially in through the window of Andrew’s ground-floor study. He surveyed the new computer and the explosion of thick books and papers around it, on the desk, draping off it, on the chairs, floor, everywhere, and the chaos of wires and cables around these. He was struck with an idea too. The man needed someone to keep him in order, someone to stop him interfering with those who had real work to do. Hm.

Mr Stock, thinking deeply, dropped round at his brother-in-law’s cottage on his way home.

It was a very pretty cottage, thatched roof and all, although Mr Stock never could see why a man in Tarquin’s condition should put up with an old place just because it looked good. Mr Stock much preferred his own modern bungalow with its metal frame windows. Tarquin’s windows were all crooked and didn’t keep the draught out. But Mr Stock could not avoid glowering jealously at the garden. Tarquin O’Connor had some kind of touch, even if it was only with flowers. The roses that lined the path to the front door now. Mr Stock could not approve these romantic, old-fashioned sort of roses, but he had to admit they were perfect of their kind, healthy, big clusters of cups, rosettes, whorls, and buds and buds coming on. More prizes at the Fête for Tark, for sure. And the bushes so well controlled that not one thorny branch strayed to catch a visitor coming between them to the door. While beyond them — well — a riot. Scents in the air. Enviously, he knocked on the door.

Tarquin had seen Mr Stock coming. He opened the door almost at once, holding himself up on one crutch. “Come in, Stockie, come in!”

Mr Stock entered, saying, “Good to see you, Tark. How’s things?”

To this, Tarquin replied, “I’d just put a pot of tea on the table. Isn’t that lucky now?” He turned, swinging himself on both crutches into the main room, all the space downstairs bar the kitchen.

Two cups on the round table by the windows, Mr Stock noticed. “Expecting my niece home, were you?”

“No, no, she’s not due yet. Expecting you,” Tarquin replied, puffing a bit as he got himself and his crutches arranged in the chair behind the teapot.

Joke? Or did Tarquin really have the Sight? Mr Stock wondered, getting out of his boots. Tarquin had nice carpets. Not to his taste, these dark Oriental things, but expensive. Besides, the poor fellow had a job and a half with a vacuum cleaner. Mr Stock had seen him, balanced on one crutch, with his stump of a leg propped over a chair, scraping and pushing for dear life. It didn’t do to tread dirt in. He put his boots near the door and sat facing Tarquin in his socks, wondering as usual why Tarquin had grown a beard. Mr Stock did not approve of beards. He knew it was not because of scars; but there it was, a little tufty dark grey beard on the end of Tark’s chin. Nor was it for convenience either. You could see the man had shaved round it carefully. Might as well shave the lot, but he didn’t.

Tarquin O’Connor had once been a jockey, a very good one and very well known. Mr Stock had placed many a bet on horses ridden by Tark and never been out of pocket. Tarquin had been rich in those days. Mr Stock’s much younger sister had had the best of everything, including expensive private medical care, before she died. Their daughter had had a costly education. But then Tarquin had had a truly terrible fall. Tark, as Mr Stock heard it, had been lucky to live, trampled and broken in all directions as he was. He’d never ride again. Nowadays, Tarquin lived on his savings and what he got from the Injured Jockey Fund, while his daughter, the story went, gave up all the millionaire jobs she might have had and stayed in Melstone to look after her father.

“How’s my niece doing?” Mr Stock asked, halfway down his second cup of tea. “These biscuits are good. She make them?”

“No.” Tarquin pushed the biscuits nearer to Mr Stock. “I did. As for Stashe, I wish she’d have a bit more faith in how I can manage and consider working further afield. She’d surely get something at the University, just for a start, so she would.”

“Where’s she working now then?” asked Mr Stock, who knew very well.

Tarquin sighed. “Still down at the Stables. Part time. And I swear Ronnie exploits her. He has her doing pedigrees and racing statistics on the computer, until I think she’s never coming home. She’s the only one there who understands the bloody machine.”

The computer. This was what had given Mr Stock his idea. He gleamed. “Wasting herself,” he pronounced. “Now my new fellow’s at the computer game too. Stuff all over, wires, papers. I’m not at all sure he knows what he’s doing.”

Tarquin’s tufted, waif-like face lifted towards him. Worried, Mr Stock was pleased to see. “But he does know he has the field-of-care to look after?” Tarquin asked anxiously.

Mr Stock turned the corners of his mouth down. And I wish he’d get on and do it, and leave me alone! he thought. “As to that, I couldn’t say. He’s walked up and down a bit, for what that’s worth. I think he thinks he’s here to write a book. Now, to get back to my niece—”

“But if he doesn’t know, someone ought to put him straight,” Tarquin interrupted.

“That’s right. Show him he has responsibilities,” Mr Stock agreed. “It’s not my place to. You could do it though.”

“Ah. No.” Tarquin slumped down in his chair at the mere thought. “I never met the man.” He stayed bowed over, considering. “We do need someone to sound him out,” he said. “See if he even knows what his job is here, and if he doesn’t know, to tell him. I wonder—”

“Your daughter could do it,” Mr Stock said daringly. “My niece,” he added, because Tarquin seemed astonished by the idea. “If we could persuade him he needs a secretary — and he does, I don’t doubt: he’s used to several of them at that University, I’m sure — and then tell him we have the very person, wouldn’t that suit?”

“It sounds a bit dishonest,” Tarquin said dubiously.

“Not really. She’s high-class stuff, our Stashe,” said Mr Stock. “She could do the job, couldn’t she?”

Pride caused Tarquin to sit straight again. “Degrees all over,” he said. “She’s probably too good for him.”

“And too good for the Stables,” Mr Stock prompted him.

“Wasted there,” Tarquin agreed. “All right, I’ll put it to her. Will Monday do?”

Bullseye! thought Mr Stock. “Monday it is,” he said.

At almost the same moment, Mrs Stock said to her sister, “Now don’t go putting ideas into Shaun’s head, mind, but you can tell him he’s really needed there. The place is crying out for someone to — ah — move furniture and so on. That man is really impossible as things stand.”

“Can I give him a job description?” asked Trixie.

“Jargon,” said Mrs Stock. “Anyway, someone’s got to do something and my hands are full. We’ll get on to it first thing Monday, shall we?”

In this way, plans were made for keeping Andrew under control. The trouble was, neither Mr nor Mrs Stock had thought very deeply about what Andrew was really like, or about what made Melstone such a special place, so it was not surprising that things took rather a different turn.

Mostly, this was because Aidan Cain turned up on Monday as well.