“You heard about the shenanigans on the Fête Committee?” he asked. Andrew said No, he hadn’t. “Proper row,” said Wally. “That Mrs Fanshaw-Stock throwing her weight around over the bouncy castle until two of the committee walks out. No one knew what to do at first. But then they bring the vicar in, proper enough, to make up the numbers, and the vicar says to ask Mr Brown—”
“Mr Brown?” Andrew asked.
“Mr Brown down at the Manor,” Wally explained. “Proper recluse, he is, worse than you are, Professor. Surprised the hell out of everyone when Mr Brown agreed. Nobody knows what good he’ll be, but there you go. At least we’ve got a proper celebrity to open the Fete. Well known. Cooks all over the telly. He’ll draw people in all right. With any luck, we’ll make a profit this year, provided we get good weather. Weather’s been terrible this year. Fit to ruin me, what with the price of milk being so low and the supermarkets paying peanuts for lamb.”
“He always says he’s being ruined,” Andrew said to Aidan when Wally had promised to deliver the sheep next month and they were at last able to walk away.
“Oh, hey!” Wally called after them.
Andrew turned back, hoping Wally had not overheard him. Aidan sighed.
“I heard,” Wally said, “from that Stashe — working for you now, ain’t she? — that her dad’s got him a false leg after all. Went to a new specialist, I heard. Did you hear that?”
Andrew said he had heard. “Honestly!” he said, when Wally finally allowed them to walk away. “Does everyone in Melstone know everything we do?”
They walked across two fields and through a gate on to Mel Tump. It was here that Aidan truly began to enjoy the walk. Mel Tump, close to, was a fascinating mass of little green paths running this way and that among strong-scented bushes. Aidan got a feeling that people had been very busy here. Perhaps Groil was one of them. Aidan looked and looked as they climbed, in case Groil was curled up somewhere, under a bush or in one of the surprising grassy hollows, but there was no sign of him. There were rabbits and birds, but nothing out of the ordinary. From the top of the Tump, you could look out over the winding stretch of the village and over Melstone House, half hidden by its two great trees, the oak tree and the copper beech. There was even a glimpse of the distant chimneys of Melstone Manor, where the reclusive Mr Brown lived. Looking over the other way, you saw mile after mile of deep green countryside.
“There’s no way you can see the boundary,” Aidan said, putting his glasses on after experimenting with them off.
“You never can,” Andrew said. “We’ll have to do it by trial and error.”
They went down the hill and across country to the one piece of the boundary Andrew was sure of: the dip in the road where he had met old Jocelyn’s ghost. When they came to it, warmed by walking and cooled by the slight, moist wind, Aidan was thinking, This is the life! He felt rather let down to find just an ordinary road with occasional cars rushing along it.
When there were no cars coming either way, Andrew led the way down the bank, to cross the road just beside the dip where the ghost had been. Going as slowly as he dared, in case someone was speeding, he wove up and down the slight rise in the road, until he had it fixed in his mind what the boundary felt like. The side where the field-of-care was felt like what he now thought of as normal: deep and slightly exciting. The other side—
“Oh!” Aidan exclaimed. “It’s all boring and dangerous this side! Like standing on a runway in the path of an aeroplane. Flat, but you’re lucky you’re not dead.”
“Right. We look for that feeling. Then we know we’re just outside the boundary,” Andrew said.
There was a gate in the hedge opposite. Beyond it was a field of nearly ripe wheat with the remains of a cart track running beside it.
“It looks,” Andrew said, “as if there was once a path here. If there’s a path all round the boundary, that will make it all much easier.”
It was not that easy. There was, or had been, a path most of the way, but whoever owned the land there had ploughed the path up, or taken out the hedges to make larger pastures, and in these places it was truly difficult. Aidan, as he swerved from deep-and-exciting to flat-and-dangerous, hoped no one was watching them. They must look mad, the two of them carefully zigzagging across a wide green meadow. Andrew was more worried that some farmer would see them swerving about in the field of maize they came to next, madly rustling through and trying not to spoil the crop.
They came to a small river, where there had been a bridge. But it was broken, and the whole river was fiercely fenced off with barbed wire and thick bushy trees.
“It almost looks as if someone doesn’t want us to do this,” Aidan said.
“It does rather,” Andrew agreed, wondering if his grandfather had had enemies he did not know about. “Let’s eat the sandwiches.”
They ate lunch sitting on the bank of the river, further up into flat-and-dangerous, where there was a sandbank that Andrew thought might help them cross the water. While Aidan cheerfully munched his way through more than half the sandwiches, Andrew got out the map and marked in the boundary as they had found it so far. It was surprisingly regular, a steady curve that seemed to be the beginning of a large oval emanating from Melstone House near its centre. He was tempted to mark in the rest of the oval by guess and go home. But that felt like cheating. He was, now he was doing it, quite convinced that his responsibility to the field-of-care meant that he had, personally, to walk every step of its boundary. All the same, he pencilled in where he thought it went on the map. It would be interesting to see if it did as he predicted.
They crossed the river by jumping from the sandbank and got rather wet doing it. Then they walked downriver to the broken bridge and went on from there.
On this stretch, the path must once have run between two hedges and then been forgotten. They now had to struggle through the middle of a hedge, where brambles tore at their clothes, branches whipped their faces, crab apples clouted their heads and nettles tried to sting through to their legs. The pair of them forced their way on for miles, hot and out of breath, while their hair filled with seeds, until Aidan’s new fleece no longer looked new and their boots were heavy with mud.
Then it was suddenly different. They staggered out into a proper lane with a fence on the other side of it. A notice fixed to the fence said:
PRIVATE GALLOPS
KEEP OUT
“What does that mean?” Aidan gasped. He took his fleece off and shook seeds out of it.
“It’s where they exercise the racehorses,” Andrew said. He leaned on the fence and looked at the long stripes of green turf running from right to left across their way. “You know,” he said, “this boundary must be very old. I can see I’m supposed to look after half these gallops, but not the other half. They must run right across our boundary. That wouldn’t make sense unless the gallops are much newer.” He climbed the fence and swung over on to thick, thick cushiony grass. “Come on, Aidan. We’ll have to do a bit of trespassing.”
Aidan quailed. Suppose someone called the police…
“I’m sure it’s all right,” Andrew told him. “They only ride the horses out in the early morning, I know that. I’ll be surprised if we see anyone at all.”
He strode off, dropping divots of seed-filled mud from his boots as he went. Aidan followed him, cringingly. The green spaces were only divided from one another by lines of longer grass full of wild flowers. They spread out over the hillside roughly in the shape of a bunch of bananas, so open and exposed that Aidan expected the two of them to be seen and shouted at any second. And, in a way, he was right.
The boundary curved more abruptly here towards the end of the village, making the narrow end of the oval Andrew had predicted. They traced it up a steep hill and slantwise down again, to where they could see red brick buildings that were obviously the Stables and the big house that went with those, down among trees in the distance. Here someone on a horse came thundering up the turf towards them. A
idan turned round and looked desperately about the empty grass for somewhere to hide. He wondered whether to throw himself flat.
But Andrew was waving cheerfully at the rider. The rider waved back and thudded happily up to them. The horse gave a protesting sort of snort as it was pulled up. Stashe, on its back, looking surprisingly glamorous in a hard hat, smiled down at them.
“Hello, you two,” she said. “Lost? Or just doing a bit of trespassing?”
“The latter,” Andrew said in his most professor-like way. “We’re tracing the boundary of my field-of-care.” He was terribly pleased to see Stashe so unexpectedly, but not quite sure how to show it.
“Oh!” said Stashe. “Is that what it is? It sort of plucks at you, doesn’t it? All in a slant across the gallops. If you need to walk every inch of it though, I’m afraid you’ve got problems. It goes right through Ronnie Stock’s house. Dad says Melstone Grange must have been built long after the Brandons set up their field-of-care. But not to worry,” she said quickly, seeing how dismayed Andrew looked. “There’s race meetings all over today. Ronnie and Mrs Ronnie and the assistant trainer are all away at them. Meet me by the big gates and I’ll see what I can do. But I must give poor Flotsam a bit of exercise first!”
She shouted the last sentence over her shoulder as the horse galloped off. Andrew shrugged. “We might as well go on,” he said.
It became a little dreamlike for Aidan after that. They followed the boundary down the hill, then out of the gallops into a beautifully cared for garden, where it went through one corner of a rose bed. They had just reached tall iron gates that seemed to open on to the stable yard, when Stashe came galloping up on the other side of the garden wall. She hitched the horse to a ring in the wall there, gave it a lump of sugar and — Aidan winced — a kiss on its great nose, and slipped through the gate to join them.
“This way,” she said, and led them into the large, well-kept house. “Do you think you could carry those boots of yours?” she said as they went. “I don’t think Ronnie would appreciate all that mud on his carpets.”
So they traced the boundary in their socks. It was better like that, Aidan found. The boundary fizzed under his feet from beneath Ronnie Stock’s carpets. They were obviously very expensive carpets. Aidan thought they were hideous — which, he decided, proved they must be good carpets, in the way that nasty things were, like white of egg being good for you. But it felt very queer to be following the fizz through someone’s majestic living room, and then into a big hall, resplendent with chandeliers and more nasty carpets. And then to come to a dead end in a downstairs cloakroom.
“Oh dear,” Aidan said, hard up against a toilet with blue flowers all over it.
“Use it while we’re here,” Andrew said. “The boundary must run under the wall. We’ll pick it up again outside.” He looked, rather irritably, at Stashe. She was in fits of laughter.
“You — you’ve got half of a floral loo in your care!” Stashe managed to say. That made Andrew laugh too.
They went through the grand front door and sat on the imposing front steps to put their boots on again. Stashe said cheerfully, “I must see to Flotsam. See you the day after tomorrow,” and shut the front door behind them.
After this, the boundary took them down the broad curve of a gravel drive, almost to the front gates of Melstone Grange. But there it curved off again into fields and moorland on the other side of the village. Andrew looked that way, satisfied. It was almost exactly the line he had pencilled in on the map. But he could see Aidan was quite tired.
“I think we’ll leave the rest for another day,” he said, “and walk home through the village.”
Aidan was glad to agree. He felt as if he had walked for a week. And he suspected it was still a long way through the village to Melstone House.
He was right. Melstone was a long, thin village. It looked very fine in the late afternoon light, with its rows of cottages alternating with bigger houses built of old red brick, and the occasional newish bungalow squeezed in between. One of those bungalows belonged to Mr Stock, Andrew said, but he wasn’t sure which. Aidan sighed. It was becoming just a long, long road to him.
Talking of Mr Stock made Andrew think of vegetables. “My feeling is that we owe ourselves a slap-up supper tonight,” he said. “Are you any good at cooking?”
“Not bad,” Aidan said. “Gran always said she didn’t hold with helpless males who couldn’t even boil an egg. She made me learn cooking when I was quite small. I can do most ordinary things.”
“Good!” said Andrew. “Then you can do some tonight.”
Oh dear. “When my legs stop aching,” Aidan said swiftly, and looked around for something to take Andrew’s mind off cooking.
The road was winding them downhill towards the dip where Melstone House lay. And there, on the next corner, stood the perfect thatched cottage, one of those that had snuggled itself down into the land over the centuries, so that it looked as if it had grown there rather than been built. Flowering creepers grew round its diamond-paned windows and its slightly sideways front door, and its front garden was a mass of roses, roses of every possible colour.
“Hey!” Aidan said craftily, but meaning it too. “That’s a nice house! I like it better than that place of Ronnie Stock’s.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Andrew agreed. “It’s idyllic.”
Someone was bobbing about in the garden, tending the roses. As they came closer, they saw it was Tarquin O’Connor — Tarquin walking on two legs, but very carefully, as if he didn’t quite trust his new, non-existent leg not to disappear suddenly and dump him in a rose bush.
Tarquin saw them at the same time. He came limping to his front gate with a delighted smile above his little beard. “Hello there!” he called out. “I wondered if you’d be along. Come on in and have a cup of tea. I’ve just made some biscuits, so I have.”
Relief! thought Aidan.
The biscuits were some of the best shortbreads Aidan had ever tasted. Tarquin’s teacups were the kind Gran had kept in a glass-fronted cupboard and never used. Aidan hardly dared drink out of his. He stared round Tarquin’s rambling, comfortable room while he listened to Tarquin confessing to Andrew, with a rueful smile, that his non-existent leg was still there, but he just didn’t trust it.
“It’s the way my fingers go through it when I put my socks on,” he explained.
Andrew took his glasses off and examined the leg. Aidan looked at the polished furniture and the low ceiling with black beams in it, and then at Tarquin’s old, glowing, Oriental rugs.
“Oh, I like your carpets much better than Ronnie Stock’s!” he exclaimed.
“And so you should!” Tarquin said, laughing. “Ronnie never did have any taste. As long as something costs a lot, Ronnie thinks it’s good. But how come you saw inside his house?”
“Stashe took us in,” Aidan said. He and Andrew described the way the boundary of the field-of-care ran through the middle of Melstone Grange, including the downstairs cloakroom.
Tarquin laughed at that, just as Stashe had. “Ronnie will have it,” he said, “that the Grange is ever so old. He was always telling me so when I used to ride for him. So I went to the County Record Office and looked the place up. And it was built in 1832, so it was. That makes it Victorian, more or less. This cottage goes back three hundred years before that — and maybe more, but there’s no records for earlier than that. And I’ll bet that your field-of-care goes back as far as my house does at least, or it wouldn’t have the Grange built across it. By the way, did Stashe tell you of the great row there’s been on the Fête Committee?”
“No,” Andrew said, still staring at Tarquin’s leg. “Wally Stock did.”
“Him! He would!” Tarquin said. “I swear that man knows things before they happen! But it’s true, so it is, that for a while there it looked as if the whole Fête was off. I was thinking that Stockie — your Mr Stock — might be likely to cut his own throat with nowhere to show his veg at. But now it turns out that t
hey’ve brought in Mr Brown and all’s right again, so it is.”
Andrew put his glasses on again to say, “I’ve not met Mr Brown.”
“Him down at the Manor? Really not?” Tarquin said. And he added, just like Wally Stock, “Recluse and a bit of a scholar, just like you, Andrew. I’m surprised you don’t know him.”
His grandfather, Andrew remembered, had always said, “Mr Brown is not for us, Andrew, but we have to be very polite to him.” He said thoughtfully, “No. My grandfather didn’t seem to get on with him.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Tarquin said. “Nobody knows the man. That makes it all the more surprising he’s going to run the Fête, so it does. Anyway, what do you make of this leg of mine?”
“I think I can harden it up,” Andrew said. “But slowly, bit by bit. Drop in to see me as often as you can, and I’ll get it more solid gradually.”
“Thank you kindly,” Tarquin said gratefully. “It was a bit embarrassing this morning when Stockie dropped by to see me — having a rave about the Fête being cancelled, so he was — and I caught my trouser leg on a nail. I walked off in one direction and my trouser leg went in another. Stockie stared a bit.”
“You’d think he’d be used to such things,” Andrew said, “working for my grandfather all these years. Oh, well. Are your feet rested, Aidan? We’d better be going.”
Chapter Seven
Mrs Stock had gone home when Andrew and Aidan arrived back at Melstone House. There was, quite inevitably, a dish of caulifower cheese in the middle of the kitchen table. There was a reproachful note under it that said, Our Shaun dint know what to do so he went in that old shed. If he done wrong you should a been here.
Andrew simply laughed and set about cooking steak from the freezer. Andrew did most of it, to Aidan’s relief. Aidan didn’t know where saucepans were kept or how the stove worked, but he helped. And all the time, he kept looking at the huge clothes for Groil that he had brought downstairs and hung over a kitchen chair, hoping that it wouldn’t rain, so that they could put the clothes out on the woodshed roof after supper. Those clothes were Aidan’s very first big magical project and he wanted it to work.
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