The Pinhoe Egg

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Does she want you again?” Mum said. “Don’t be too long. I’m still finding jars with mildew in them. We’re going to have to scald the lot out.”

  Though the wave of bad luck had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the effects of it were still there, in the mildew, in half-healed cuts, sprained ankles, and—this seemed to be the final thing the spell had done—an outbreak of whooping cough among the smaller children. Dismal coughing came from most of the houses Marianne passed on her way to the Dell. But the right kind of red bricks were just now being delivered at the Post Office as she went by.

  Aunt Joy was standing on her lawn above the broken wall, watching the delivery. “I may have my bricks,” she grumbled to Marianne, “but that’s as far as it goes. Your uncle Simeon’s too busy doing the renovations at Woods House, hobbling around with a stick, if you please! All for that new woman who says she’s a Pinhoe. If he can do it on one leg for her, why not for me? As if my money wasn’t as good as hers!”

  There was a lot more on these lines, but Marianne only smiled at Aunt Joy and went on. As Dad often said, if you stayed to listen to Aunt Joy, you’d be there a week and she still wouldn’t have finished grumbling.

  There were frogs in the lane all the way to the Dell, and the pond in front of the cottage was a seething, hopping mass of them. The ducks had given up trying to swim and were sitting grumpily on the grass.

  “I don’t know what we’ve done to deserve this,” Aunt Dinah said, opening the door for Marianne. “Anyone would think we’d offended Moses or something! Go on in. She’s been asking for you.”

  Marianne marched into Gammer’s crowded living room. “Gammer,” she said.

  Gammer’s ruined face turned up to her. “I’m not in my right mind,” Gammer said quickly.

  “Then you shouldn’t do magic,” Marianne retorted. “There’s frogs all over the village.”

  Gammer shook her head as if she were saddened by the way people behaved. “What’s this world becoming into? Those shouldn’t be there.”

  “Where should they be, then?” Marianne challenged her.

  Gammer shook her head again. “No need to take on. Little girls shouldn’t worry their heads over such things.”

  “Where?” Marianne said.

  Gammer bent her face down and pleated her freshly starched skirt.

  “Where?” Marianne insisted. “You sent those frogs somewhere, didn’t you?”

  Very reluctantly, Gammer muttered, “Jed Farleigh should have left me alone.”

  “Helm St. Mary?” Marianne said.

  Gammer nodded. “And all over. There’s Farleighs in all the villages over there. I forget the names of those places. I don’t remember so well these days, Marianne. You have to understand.”

  “I do,” said Marianne. “You sent frogs to Helm St. Mary, right outside Chrestomanci Castle, so that they were almost bound to notice, and you made the Farleighs so angry that they ill-wished us and sent the frogs right back. Aren’t you ashamed, Gammer?”

  “That’s Jed Farleigh all over,” Gammer said. “Hides out over there, thinks he’s safe from me. And they’re spying on me all the time, spying and lurking. It wasn’t me, Marianne. It was Edgar and Lester. I didn’t tell them to do it.”

  “You know perfectly well that Edgar and Lester would never send anyone frogs!” Marianne said. “I’m disgusted with you, Gammer!”

  “I have to defend myself!” Gammer protested.

  “No, you don’t, not like this!” Marianne said, and stormed out among the frogs, down the lane and past the stack of new bricks. Feeling angrier and braver than she had ever been in her life, she stormed on down Furze Lane and into the shed behind Furze Cottage. There, Dad and Uncle Richard were trying to saw wood without cutting frogs in half. “Gammer did these frogs,” she told them.

  “Oh, come now, Marianne,” Dad said. “Gammer wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

  “Yes, she would. She did!” Marianne said. “She sent them to Helm St. Mary, but the Farleighs sent them back here and did an ill-wishing on us because Gammer made them so angry. Dad, I think we’re in the middle of a war with the Farleighs without knowing we are.”

  Dad laughed. “The Farleighs are not that uncivilized, Marianne. These frogs are just someone’s idea of a joke—you can see they’re creatures bewitched from the way they glow. Run along and don’t worry your head about them.”

  Whatever Marianne said after that, Dad simply laughed and refused to believe her. She went indoors and tried to tell Mum.

  “Oh, really, Marianne!” Mum said, holding a kettle with a cloth round the handle, amid clouds of steam. “I grant you Gammer’s mad as a coot these days, but the Farleighs are sane people. We cooperate with them around the countryside. Just get your hair tied up and give me a hand here and forget about the beastly frogs!”

  Marianne spent the rest of the day boiling kettles in a sort of angry loneliness. She did not trust Gammer simply to stop at frogs. She knew she had to get someone to believe her before the Farleighs got so angry that they did something terrible, but Dad and Mum seemed to have closed their minds. Some of the time, she was tempted just to keep quiet about Gammer and let bad things happen. But she had started being brave now, and she felt she had to go on. She wondered who else might believe her. Someone who might stop Gammer and explain to the Farleighs. Apart from Uncle Charles, she could think of no one, and Uncle Charles was working up at Woods House with Uncle Simeon. I’ll talk to him when he gets off work, she decided. Because I think it really is urgent.

  By that afternoon, the frogs had become such a nuisance that Uncle Richard took action. He harnessed Dolly the donkey to the cart and filled the cart with bins and sacks. Then he called in all Marianne’s cousins, all ten of them, and the troop of them went round the houses collecting frogs. They were handed frogs by squirming fistfuls everywhere. For those people who were too old or too busy with the whooping cough to collect frogs for themselves, the boys went in and tipped frogs out of tea caddies and scooped frogs out of cupboards, shoes, and toilets, while the rest hunted frogs in the gardens. They came joyfully out again with squirming, croaking sacks and dumped them in the cart. Then they went on to the next house. They caught two hundred frogs in the vicarage and twice that number in the church. The only place with more frogs was the Dell.

  “Stands to reason,” Uncle Richard said, refusing to believe a word against Gammer. “There’s a pond at the Dell.”

  When, finally, the cart was piled high with bulging sacks and croaking bins and there was hardly a loose frog to be seen, they took Dolly down Furze Lane to the river and tipped all the frogs in. Uncle Richard scratched his head over what happened then. Every frog, as it hit the running water, seemed to dissolve away to nothing. The cousins could not get over it.

  “Well, they say running water kills the craft,” Uncle Richard told Mum and Marianne, when he came to Furze Cottage for a cup of tea after his labors, “but I’d never believed it until now. Melted away into black like foam, they did. Astonishing.”

  Here, Marianne looked round and noticed that Nutcase was missing again. “Oh, bother him!” she wailed, and hurried to the table to set the knife spinning. It was still whirling round and round when there was a knock at the front door.

  “See who that is, Marianne!” Mum called out, busy pouring hot water on the tea.

  Marianne opened the door. And stared. A very tall, thin woman stood there, carrying a basket. She had straight hair and a flat chest and she wore the drabbest and most dust-colored dress Marianne had ever seen. Her face was long and severe. She gazed at Marianne, and Marianne was reminded of a teacher about to find fault.

  Before Marianne could ask what this stranger wanted, the woman said, “Jane James. From Woods House. Wrong way to make your acquaintance, I know, but did you know your cat walks through walls? He was in my kitchen eating the fish for Mr. Adams’s supper. Doors all shut. Only explanation. Don’t know how you’ll keep him in.”

  “I don’t eith
er,” Marianne said. She looked up at the grim face and found it was full of hidden humor. Jane James evidently found the situation highly amusing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll come and fetch him back at once.”

  “No need,” said Jane James. She opened the basket she was carrying and turned Nutcase out of it like a pudding onto the doormat. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, and went away.

  “Well I’ll be—!” Uncle Richard said, as Marianne shut the front door. “Quite a touch of the craft in that woman, if you ask me!”

  “And no wonder we can’t keep that cat in!” Mum said, putting the teapot on the table.

  Nutcase sat on the doormat and glowered at Marianne. Marianne glowered back. They can believe Jane James that Nutcase walks through walls, but they can’t believe me about Gammer, she thought. “You,” she said to Nutcase, “you’re as bad as Gammer! And I can’t say worse than that!”

  Meanwhile, back at the Castle, Cat was trying to get used to the way he had to feed a baby griffin every four hours—at least, it was usually only about three and half hours before the griffin woke, with its stomach all flat and thin again, and went “Weep, weep, weep!” for more food. He was carrying it to the kitchen yet again—and it felt a good deal heavier than it was when it first hatched—when Julia stopped him on the stairs.

  “Can I help you feed him?” she asked. “He’s just so sweet! Janet wants to help too.”

  Cat realized that this was exactly what he needed. He said quickly, “We can have a feeding rota, then. You can feed him in the day, but I’ll have to look after him at night.”

  In fact, as he soon discovered, a surprising number of people wanted to help feed the griffin. Miss Bessemer wanted to, and so did Mr. Stubbs and Euphemia. Millie wanted to, having, as she said, a personal interest in this griffin. And Irene, when she was not over in Ulverscote seeing to the alterations to her new house, begged to have a turn as well.

  At first Cat found himself sitting over the person feeding the griffin as possessively as Mopsa did. He knew it was happier when he was beside it. But when the griffin seemed perfectly used to somebody else putting lumps of meat into its beak, Cat—rather guiltily—sighed with relief and went off to ride Syracuse. Before long, he only had to feed the griffin during the nights.

  He went up to his room every night carrying two large covered bowls of meat, each with a stasis spell on it to keep it fresh. By the third night he was—well, almost—used to being woken at midnight and again at four in the morning by the griffin’s “Weep, weep, weep!” If this did not wake Cat, then Mopsa did, pushing her cold nose urgently into Cat’s face and treading heavily on his stomach.

  What he never seemed to get used to was how sleepy he was during the day.

  On the third night, Mopsa as usual woke him at midnight. “All right. I know, I know!” Cat said, rolling out from under Mopsa’s nose and feet. “I’m coming.” He sat up and switched on the light.

  To his surprise, the griffin was still heavily asleep, curled in its basket with its yellow beak propped on the edge, making small whistling snores. But there was something tapping on his big window. It was exactly like that strange dream he had had. I think I know what that is! Cat thought. He got out of bed and opened the window.

  An upside-down face stared at him, but it was human.

  Cat stared back, finding this hard to believe.

  “Can you give us a bit of help?” the face asked, rather desperately. “It’s raining.”

  Because it was upside down, it took Cat a moment or so to recognize that the face belonged to Joe the boot boy. “How did you get there?” he said.

  “We made this flying machine,” Joe explained, “but we didn’t get it right. It crashed on your roof. Roger’s up here too, wedged like.”

  Oh, my lord! Cat thought. That’s what they’ve been up to in that shed! “All right,” he said. “I’d better bring you in here. Let yourself go loose.”

  By using a spur-of-the-minute mixture of conjuring and levitation, Cat managed to pull Joe off the roof and bend him around through the window and into his room. Unfortunately, this seemed to dislodge the crashed flying machine. As Joe flopped heavily onto Cat’s carpet, there was a set of long sliding sounds from above, followed by a cry of horror from Roger. Cat was only just in time to catch Roger as he fell past the window and to levitate him inside too.

  “Thanks!” Roger gasped.

  Both of them stood by the window, panting, pale, and speckled with rain. Instead of doing as Cat would have expected and crawling away to bed, the two of them went into an anxious conference. Joe said, “Where do you reckon we went wrong, then? Think it was the rain?”

  Roger answered, “No. I think we got the wiring wrong on the stuffed eagle.”

  Joe said, “May have to start again from scratch, then.”

  “No, no,” Roger said. “I’m sure we’ve got the basics. We just need to refine it some more.”

  They’re mad! Cat thought. He looked past them at the wreckage. It was now hanging down across the window, growing wetter by the second. As far as Cat could see, it was a number of interlocked pieces of tables and chairs, with a three-legged stool in there somewhere, and dangling upside down in the midst of it a forlorn and draggled stuffed golden eagle. The eagle had wires coming out of it, together with a few damp tufts of herbs.

  “I belong to Chrestomanci Castle,” the eagle remarked sadly. Everything in the Castle was bespelled to say this if it was taken more than a few feet from the castle walls.

  “Where did you get the eagle?” Cat asked.

  “It was in one of the attics,” Roger said. “We have to insulate the dandelion seeds, for a start.”

  “We might try using willow herb instead,” Joe replied.

  The griffin woke up. Instead of screaming for food, it sat up and stared at the two wet boys and the dangling wreckage with interest. Mopsa sat on Cat’s bed and stared, too, disapprovingly.

  “You can’t leave all that stuff hanging there,” Cat said.

  “We know,” said Roger. “Or we could use both kinds of seeds.”

  “And gear up the bikes a bit,” Joe replied.

  “It’s a real nuisance,” Roger said, “having to do things at night in order not to be found out. Cat, we’ll go down into the garden. When we whistle, can you levitate the flying machine down to us? Gently, mind, in order not to break it any more.”

  “I suppose so,” Cat said.

  Joe went down on one knee to pet the griffin as if it were a dog. “Aren’t you soft!” he said to it. “All that fluff. Where have I seen one of you before? It’ll come down in bits, you know. Part of it got hooked on your turret.”

  Cat giggled. If he had been Chrestomanci, he knew he would have said, The griffin got hooked on the turret? “All right,” he said. “I’ll send it up first, to unhook it, before I send it down. You two get down to the garden before someone notices it.”

  The two aviators hurried off, both limping slightly. The griffin opened its beak.

  “All right,” Cat said. “Don’t say it!”

  He had time to feed the griffin a square meal before a soft whistle came from the garden below. Cat put the bowl away and leaned out of the window to levitate the wreckage.

  “I belong to Chrestomanci Castle,” the stuffed eagle said piteously.

  “I know,” said Cat. “But this is difficult.”

  The remains of the flying machine were wedged onto the turret. Cat had to spread the various bits of it apart and send them downward piece by piece. He had no idea what most of the bits were. He simply floated them away from his roof and down to the ground. Another soft whistle and a faint chorus of voices singing “I belong to Chrestomanci Castle!” told him when all the parts had landed safely under the cedar trees. Wooden clatterings and the occasional soft clang showed that the two aviators were now hauling the stuff away, protesting that it belonged to the Castle.

  “They’re mad!” Cat told Mopsa and the griffin. “Quite mad.” He went b
ack to bed.

  The griffin did not wake him again that night. In the morning, it climbed out of its basket and woke Cat by nudging him with its beak. Cat opened his eyes to find two yellow griffin eyes staring into his, interested and friendly. “Oh, I do like you!” Cat said, before he had had time to think. Then he felt guilty, because Syracuse was bound to be jealous.

  Still, there was nothing to be done about Syracuse just then. Cat got dressed, while the griffin staggered around the room investigating everything Cat owned. There was no doubt that it had grown again in the night. The dark beginnings of feathers were showing on its neck and on its absurd, stubby wings.

  “Isn’t it growing too quickly?” Cat asked Millie anxiously, when he had gotten it down to the kitchen. The griffin was now far too heavy for Cat to carry. The two of them came downstairs in a mixture of staggering and levitating—and some flopping—and the griffin looked very pleased with himself for getting there.

  Millie pursed up her mouth and studied the griffin. “You have to remember,” she said, “that griffins are strongly magical creatures, and this one must have spent years inside that stasis spell in the egg. I think it’s making up for lost time. I wonder how big it’s going to be.”

  Only about the size of Syracuse, Cat hoped. Any bigger would be really awkward. He was about to say so, when Millie added, “Cat, I’m worried about Roger. He seems so tired today.”

  “Um,” Cat said. “He could have been up all night reading.”

  “He must have been,” Millie agreed. “He had six books by his bed when I went in, all from other worlds. They were all about flying. I do hope he’s not going to do anything silly.”

  “He won’t,” Cat said, because he knew Roger already had.

  He left Millie shoving mince into the griffin and went to muck out Syracuse, soon done by enchanter’s methods. While Cat was grooming Syracuse, wishing that there was some magical method to do this too, Joss Callow came in.

  “It’s my day off today,” Joss said. “If you want a ride, you’d better make it now before breakfast.”