Enchanted Glass (23 page)

Andrew stared into Tarquin’s earnestly twinkling eyes
and tried to send his mind back to Saturday night, when the sight of his own signature on the comic Aidan was reading had caused him to remember so much. It was not easy. His mind kept going to Stashe instead, lovely, bossy, clever Stashe whom he was going to marry. He took hold of her hand. Then it was easier. He could hold her and still let his mind work.

Memory came at last. You said a string of old words, Jocelyn had told him, in a language that was no longer spoken. Andrew could see his grandfather now, standing with his back to the fire in this very room, slowly repeating the strange syllables, one by one. It almost felt as if his grandfather was
there
, at that very moment, staring at him, willing Andrew to remember. Andrew had been Aidan’s age at the time and he had known he would never remember those words. So he had written those words down, sound by strange sound on —on —on… What had he been writing on? Something he had had in his hand. Of course! On one of those very comics!

Andrew let go of Stashe’s hand and dived to collect the comics that first Aidan, and then Stashe and Titania, had left scattered around the room.

A
idan was startled and depressed to learn that Andrew and Stashe were getting married soon. It did not help that he had seen it coming.

It was Mrs Stock who sourly broke the news to him, when Aidan and Rolf came galloping in for lunch. Mrs Stock didn’t exactly
say
, “They won’t want
you
around now,” but Aidan knew she meant it. He tried very hard to be as nice as Shaun was about it. Shaun beamed. He took Andrew’s hand and shook it, up and down, up and down, with his hairstyle glittering. “Good,” he said. “
Very
good, Professor.”

Aidan had very little chance to say more than “Congratulations!” before Andrew and Stashe were off to Melton, Stashe clutching a rattling vase that she told Aidan was very valuable. Aidan blinked a bit. It struck him as a
very ordinary and ugly vase, but he supposed Stashe knew what she was talking about.

Aidan mooched about with Rolf for the rest of that afternoon, anxiously wondering what would become of him now. He couldn’t go back to the Arkwrights. He had arranged for them not to want him. Thinking about it, Aidan rather wished he could have thought of some other way to stop them sending people after him, but he had done it, and that was that now. Meanwhile he tried to avoid Mrs Stock, who was in her sharpest mood, and kept out of the way of Mr Stock. Mr Stock looked like the cat that had had the cream. Stashe was his niece and he was extremely proud of her. Mr Stock knew he had started it all by visiting Tarquin that day. He even whistled as he sorted out another huge box of vegetable discards.

And there was no football to take Aidan’s mind off things. The football field was filling with tents and dusty lorries loaded with fairground machines. Where Aidan and his friends had played football, people were walking solemnly about, putting in markers for the roped off enclosures where the various competitions were going to be. At any other time, Aidan would have been highly interested and excited about Saturday’s Fete, but not now. The field was just one more place to avoid.

To add to Aidan’s gloom, Groil did not appear that
night. Andrew, helped by Stashe and Aidan, piled the woodshed roof with vegetable discards, but they were still there the next morning.

Ronnie Stock needed Stashe urgently that day. Andrew had a good mind to tell the man that he needed Stashe even more urgently, but at least he could send her off to the stables with a bright new emerald ring twinkling on her elegant ring finger. Titania’s jewels had turned out to be worth quite a lot. With Stashe not there, Andrew felt almost as gloomy as Aidan. He firmly turned his mind to other urgent things. He could get on with his book, but his computer had gone wrong again, probably when Titania arrived. Anyway, this was not urgent, not nearly as urgent as Aidan, who was seriously in need of explanations. Andrew and Stashe had had a long talk about Aidan. Stashe was insistent that Andrew told Aidan exactly what the position was. “I know how I’d feel if everyone kept me in the dark,” she said. So Andrew decided to talk to Aidan while they went on walking the boundary. This was urgent too. It proved the field-of-care was Andrew’s and not Mr Brown’s.

“Get your boots on and bring Rolf,” he told Aidan. “We’re walking the boundary again today.”

Aidan listlessly agreed. He wanted to hit Rolf for being so glad to do it.

They walked down the village and started from the Stables —where else, with Stashe so near? —from the place by the gates of the Grange where the boundary wheeled off beyond the other side of the village. It was good walking weather, not too hot, not too cold, with just a hint of rain in the air. Andrew and Rolf appreciated it. Aidan didn’t. Aidan was more unhappy still that the first bit meant they were definitely trespassing. The boundary curved through the gardens of the Grange, right across the corner of a rose bed and over a lawn, before plunging among a copse of ornamental trees. Aidan was not happy about this, not even slightly, until they came to a stile beyond the trees, where they had to lift Rolf over into the fields and heathland on the other side. There Rolf uttered an excited “Yip!” and set off with his nose down on the line of the boundary.

Then the only problem was keeping up with Rolf. Luckily, Rolf realised and kept coming back for them. As they toiled after Rolf’s distant golden figure, Andrew began a careful explanation to Aidan.

“What?” Aidan said. “You mean I am your cousin?”

“Certainly,” Andrew assured him. “Distant, but it means I have a perfect right to have you to live with us. More than the Arkwrights anyway. Stashe is going to look into what we have to do to make it official —whether we
need to adopt you or get made your legal guardians. I probably need to be married before I can adopt you. Is that all right? Do you mind?”

Did he
mind!
Aidan felt his face stretching into a smile that beamed wider than any of Shaun’s. “
Thanks!
” he managed to say. It was as if a heavy weight had been levered off his back and from inside his head. There was such a lightness to him that he began to walk faster and faster, still beaming. Perhaps, he thought, he might persuade Andrew that a telly in the box room wouldn’t really be in his way. With a beanbag to sit on maybe. And he thought he could get round Stashe to let him have a mobile phone, if he went at it carefully. Oh, joy!

They were now walking up a long hill, among gorse bushes. Aidan was going so fast that Andrew struggled to keep up. He was more than a little out of breath as he gave the next part of the explanation. And six months ago, Andrew thought, I wouldn’t have believed a word of what I’m saying now! Telling a boy that his father was Oberon and that his father wanted to kill him. Am I giving him too much of a shock?

Aidan was still too happy to feel much of a shock. The Puck had told him some of it after all. And Gran had always been very clear that Aidan’s father was a very bad thing indeed. Aidan had always believed that. Instead, he
worried about something Andrew had never expected. “Does that mean,” he asked, “that I’m half
something else?
”

“They’re not as different as everyone likes to think,” Andrew panted, thinking of Stashe battling with Titania. What was the difference between two angry women? Except one of them was Stashe of course. “Think of yourself,” he puffed, “as having the best of two worlds. A lot of people would give their eye teeth for a heredity like yours.”

“Mm,” Aidan said, taking this in. As long as it didn’t show…

Up ahead of them, Rolf stopped and sat down. Warned by this, Aidan and Andrew stopped too. Andrew stood getting his breath back, wondering what Rolf had heard or smelt.

There seemed to be a jogger out on the faint path that marked the boundary. He came looming up over the brow of the hill, taller and taller, rushing towards them in great strides and huge leaps, most unlike the usual kind of jogger. He saw them and swerved away and went bounding down into the meadows below the hill, where they saw him dodging past bushes and splashing through patches of marsh. Over the brow of the hill after him came pouring a smoky stream of
somethings.
Whatever they were, they checked at the exact spot where the mighty jogger had left
the path and then went pouring down into the meadows after him.

Andrew and Aidan both whipped off their glasses. Although the smoky stream was still hard to see, the long, galloping shapes of what might be dogs were part of it, and the upright, running figures of —maybe —men. The jogger they were after was much plainer.

“It’s Groil!” Aidan said. “They’re chasing him because he’s got my wallet.”

There was nothing either of them could do. Groil and his pursuers were going far too fast. Andrew led the way slowly upwards to where Rolf was sitting. Neither he nor Aidan could stop themselves from staring down into the meadows most of the time. Groil was jinking, turning, racing round bushes, and the smoky stream of the pursuit faithfully followed his exact path, even when he ran round in a circle. They watched Groil lead them into a figure-of-eight, leave them crossing their own path, mindlessly, and then set off uphill again in great energetic leaps. At that point the pack seemed to lose Groil. At any rate, just as Andrew and Aidan reached Rolf, Groil was nowhere to be seen, but the horde of pursuers was streaming uphill towards them.

Rolf, Andrew and Aidan all froze as the smoky pack came up against the line of the boundary just ahead. It
seemed as if they could not cross it and Groil could. For a moment, they billowed round and round aimlessly. Then something in their midst cried out. A horn sounded. And the whole cloudy crowd of them came streaming downhill towards Andrew, Aidan and Rolf.

Andrew hastily pulled Aidan, and Aidan pulled Rolf, out into the hillside beyond the boundary. There they stood and watched the chase pour soundlessly past, mean dogs, big catlike creatures, Security in his woolly hat, manlike beings with stags’ heads, staglike creatures with men’s faces, and a crowd of tall, skinny people in golden helmets, who all looked rather like Mr Stock.

“They seem to have lost him,” Andrew said. “And us,” he added thankfully, as the chasers rushed away downhill and out of sight. He had had a feeling, for a moment, that the hunt had started to home in on Aidan, until Aidan had crossed the boundary.

They walked carefully back to the line of the boundary and climbed on up the grassland. Aidan was feeling guilty, wishing he had not asked Groil to keep that wallet for him. But then they passed a large gorse bush and Groil stood up out of it, laughing.

“This is fun,” he said. “I go small and hard and they lose me.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind?” Aidan asked anxiously.

Groil shook his great shaggy head. “Not had so much fun for years,” he said. “Hi, Rolf. You being tame these days?” He put a massive hand down on Rolf’s back.

A look of extreme alarm came over Rolf’s face. All four of his legs buckled. Before his legs could quite give way, Rolf was forced to change into boy shape, lying face down on the turf. “Stupid!” he said over his shoulder.

Groil grinned. “That always happens when I lean on him,” he said. “Funny that.”

“I’ll bite your leg,” Rolf said.

Groil laughed, waved to Aidan and Andrew, and went bounding away down into the meadows again.

“Oaf!” said Rolf. It turned into a bark as he went back to dog shape.

“They must have known one another for ages,” Aidan said to Andrew. “I think they tease each other all the time.”

They went on. Beyond the top of the hill, the boundary took a wide curve. To balance the bulge where the Manor was, Andrew thought. It was so much wider than the oval shape Andrew had been predicting, that they only walked half of it that day and had to come back to the village by a cart track level with the lane that led to Melstone House.

They got back to the house to find that Mrs Stock had made cauliflower cheese again. She was not going to forgive Andrew for marrying Stashe in a hurry. Mr Stock had also
been in again, with bundles and bundles of weeded-out carrots. Andrew thought those could possibly have been a reward. But there were far too many to eat, so they put them up on the roof for Groil, on top of yesterday’s heap. Aidan anxiously hoped that Groil would manage to get back to eat them soon.

He must have done. The vegetables were gone the next morning, carrots and all. That’s a relief! Groil must have worked up quite an appetite! Aidan thought, while he waited impatiently to set off walking the boundary again. Stashe was back that day and Andrew did not seem able to leave her side.

They got going in the end. They were halfway down the drive, with Rolf charging ahead, when Stashe came racing after them. “Wait! Wait! You must come and see this. Both of you!” They turned back, to Rolf’s annoyance. He sat down in the drive and yawned disgustedly.

Stashe had begun unpacking the third box. The first layer had been more of Andrew’s comics collection, mixed in with numbers of old Jocelyn’s irritable notes to himself. Andrew picked one up at random and read,
O. Brown trying to take over my wood again. What does he make all that barbed wire out of?
Ah, he thought. So he’s done this before, has he? There had been no sign of the barbed wire when Andrew first came into his inheritance. He would
very much have liked to know what his grandfather had done to get rid of it.

The rest of the box contained nothing but fat, dusty cardboard folders. Andrew took the one that Stashe handed to him and opened it dubiously. It was full of accounts from an investment firm. Form after form announced that Jocelyn now had so many thousands of pounds invested and that these had earned him so much more money that Andrew’s mind reeled.

“They’re
all
like that,” Stashe said. “There’s a small fortune here, Andrew. Did you know about them?”

“No,” Andrew said. “I only knew about what he had in the bank.”

“Then I could
smack
Mrs Stock for bundling them all in this box!” Stashe said. “And you take a look at
this
one, Aidan.” She passed Aidan a much thinner folder.