to seem cleverer than he was. “Oh, very well,” he said. He sighed. This probably meant sixty-two cabbages tomorrow, but what did that matter? “Mend the mower, Shaun. And — listen carefully — after that, your work will be to clean up this place properly. Do it very gently and carefully and make sure you don’t break anything, particularly that window up there. You can take days and days if you want. Just get it how it should be. OK?”
Shaun said, “Yes, Professor. Thank you, Professor.” Andrew wondered if he had listened, let alone understood. But there was no doubt that Shaun was pleased. When he was pleased, he waved his hands about like a baby, with his fat fingers spread out in several directions, and beamed.
“Can I help him?” Aidan asked. He wanted to know what this shed really was.
“For ten minutes,” Andrew said. “We’re going into Melton to buy you some clothes, remember.”
He left Shaun and Aidan to it. Beating dust and old spells out of his hair and slapping them out of his jeans as he walked, he went to the house to receive Tarquin’s lecture.
Tarquin was sitting in a straight-backed chair with the stump of his leg propped across the piano stool. That stump, Andrew thought, must hurt him quite a lot.
“No, it doesn’t,” Tarquin said, just as if Andrew had spoken. “At least, the half that’s still with me doesn’t hurt at all. It’s the missing half that gives me gyp. Most of the time it’s pins and needles from the lost knee down. Just now, it’s giving me cramp in the calf that isn’t there. I can’t seem to convince it that there’s nothing there to give me cramp with. Stashe keeps telling me I ought to try hypnotism, but I don’t like the idea of someone getting into my head and giving me, like, secret orders. The idea doesn’t appeal at all, so it doesn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t like that either,” Andrew agreed. He felt he could almost see the sinewy missing half of Tarquin’s leg, spread out across the piano stool with its calf muscles in a tight, aching ball. Quite a telepathist, Tarquin. “What did you want to speak to me about?”
“Ah. That.” Tarquin suddenly looked embarrassed. “Stockie and Stashe both seem to think I’m the best person to speak to you, the Lord knows why, and I thought I’d better do it before I lost my nerve for it. Forgive me for asking. Were you actually here when your grandfather died?”
Not what I expected! Andrew thought. “No,” he said. “I was driving along a road quite near, not knowing he was dead, and I saw his ghost. Then I drove straight here.”
Tarquin gave him an intent look. “And how did he seem — his ghost?”
“Rather urgent,” Andrew said. “He was trying to give me a paper of some kind, with a big seal on it, but when I tried to take it, my hand went right through it. I thought it was his will, but that was quite a different shape when the lawyer produced it.”
“Ah,” said Tarquin. “We thought as much. You don’t know. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll start looking for that document right now. It must be his field-of-care he was trying to hand on to you. It will tell you clearer than I can what you ought to do.”
“What I ought to do about what?” Andrew asked.
Tarquin looked embarrassed again and wriggled on his chair. “That’s what I don’t truly know,” he admitted. “I’m not a magician like Jocelyn Brandon was. I just have unofficial knacks, you might say — growing roses and knowing horses and such — but he was the real thing, Jocelyn, so he was, even if he had got old and a bit past it by the time I moved here. What I do know is that all round here, in a radius of ten miles or more, is strange. And special. And Jocelyn was in charge of it. And he was trying to hand the responsibility on to you.”
“But I’m not a magician, any more than you are!” Andrew protested.
“But you could be,” Tarquin said. “It seems to me that you could train yourself a little. You have the gift. And you need to find that document. I’ll tell Stashe to help you look for it when she’s sorted that computer. And you can count on me for any help you need — explaining or advising, or whatever. I’d be grateful to help, to tell the truth. I need my mind taken off my lost career sometimes, something cruel.”
Tarquin meant this, Andrew could see. Though the life of a jockey was something Andrew could barely imagine himself, he could tell it had been as thrilling and absorbing as his own work on his book. And he wondered how he would feel if he had somehow lost both hands and couldn’t write that book, or any other books, ever. “Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” said Tarquin. “Now I’d better be going.” He looked suddenly relieved. “Cramp’s gone!” he said. “Virtual cramp, I should say. Cleared off like magic. So I’ll be off now, but feel free to ask me anything about Melstone that you think I’ll know.”
Andrew drove off to Melton with his mind full of what Tarquin had told him. Beside him, Aidan, who was not used to cars, was having trouble with his seat belt.
“Push until you hear it click,” Andrew told him.
This added Aidan to his thoughts. And these Stalkers Aidan told him about. Andrew supposed he could protect Aidan from them and give him a holiday until the social workers arrived. Otherwise he was not sure what could be done. And meanwhile it seemed Andrew was supposed to be looking after his grandfather’s field-of-care. Now he came to think of it, although he had always known there was such a thing, he had very little idea what a field-of-care was. He had never understood quite what it was that his grandfather did. Probably that document his grandfather’s ghost had tried to give him would make all that clear. But where was the wretched thing? He had never set eyes on it while Jocelyn was alive. He would have to hunt for it, and it was going to interrupt the work on his book. Everything was going to interrupt him. Andrew’s heart ached with his need to write his book. This was, after all, why he was employing Stashe.
And that brought his thoughts around to money. He was now employing two extra people and buying Aidan clothes, among other things. Luckily — and not entirely thanks to Mr Stock — Melstone House produced a lot of its own food; but that was a drop in the ocean, really, at the rate Aidan ate… Andrew began to wonder how soon he was going to be bankrupt.
Brooding on these things, Andrew drove past the new houses at the end of the village and past the football field, and on into the countryside. A couple of miles further on, there came the familiar little jolt, as if the car had for a second caught on some elastic. Aidan jumped.
“What was that?”
“We’ve just passed the boundary between the strange part my grandfather looked after and the normal places,” Andrew told him.
“Funny,” Aidan said. “I didn’t notice it when I was coming.”
“You probably had other things on your mind,” Andrew said.
This was true, Aidan realised. He had been twitching all over, in case the Stalkers followed him, in case the taxi driver noticed about the money, in case old Mr Brandon couldn’t help him. His whole mind and body had been roaring with nerves. Now his curiosity was aroused. “How big is this strange part?” he wanted to know.
“I’m
