else clamoured, “Yes! The game, the game! You promised!”
“OK, OK!” Harmony said, laughing. “Wellies on, everyone. The paddock’s bound to be soaking wet.”
There was a rush for the hall and the big cupboard under the stairs, which seemed to contain every possible size of rubber boots – though not many actual pairs. Troy ended up with one red and one blue boot. Someone found Hayley a pink boot with a white flower on it and someone else came up with another that was plain black. Then everyone galloped, in a stampede of different coloured feet, out through the front door and round the house, to a sort of sloping meadow at one side, where they milled around in the wet grass, impatiently waiting for Harmony.
When Harmony appeared – in knee-length green boots that must have been her own – she was carrying a folding card table and a large plastic shopping bag with an eye-splitting swirly design on it. Everyone cheered and crowded up to her while she opened the table and set it up firmly by digging its legs into the slope. Then she put the bag on it and fetched out of it a big bundle of those kind of pointed plastic tags gardeners use to label plants. As she put those down on the table, she said, “OK, let’s recap the vow first, since you haven’t played for a year. Everyone say after me: I swear not to say a word about what we do in the game to anyone outside this paddock. You say it too, Tollie, and you, Hayley.”
Wondering very much about this, Hayley obediently chorused with the rest, “I swear not to say a word about what we do in this game to anyone outside this paddock.” Everyone was saying it, quite devoutly, even Tollie.
“Good,” Harmony said. “We don’t want Uncle Jolyon to know, do we?” Everyone nodded, equally devoutly. “Now I’ll go over the rules. First, I put one of these tags into the ground for each of you and that is where you have to start from. It makes a lot of difference where you start, remember? Then I give you each one of these cards.” She brought out of the bag a big bundle of cardboard squares held together with a rubber band. There must have been nearly a hundred of them. Some of them were old and tattered and grey, some were quite new. Harmony put the bundle on the table and said, “You stand there and read your card and—” She dug into the bag again and brought out a large clock with Mickey Mouse on the front and put that on the table too. “When the clock starts, you get going and do exactly what it says on your card. And you have to get back before it stops or you’ll be stuck out there. And—” She fished in the bag again. “The first one back successfully, without cheating, Tollie, gets this prize.” She brought out what was clearly a Christmas tree ornament, made of plastic, in the shape of a golden apple, and put it down with a flourish in the middle of the table. “There.”
“Harmony,” said the youngest Laxton girl, “I can go on my own this year, can’t I? I’m quite old now.”
“Well, Lucy—” Harmony looked from Lucy to Hayley. “Yes, I suppose you are. You’d make two of Hayley. All right then.” While Lucy was dancing about delightedly, making heavy rubbery flurps with her boots, Harmony said, “Hayley, I was going to suggest you went with Troy, as this is the first time you’ve played. Is that all right, Troy?”
Troy nodded in his good-humoured way.
Tollie said, “And me – I go alone too.”
“You know you always do,” Harmony said. “Now—”
“Let’s start!” Tollie whined. “I’m getting bored.”
“Yes,” Harmony said. She picked up the bundle of gardener’s tags. Hayley saw that each of them had someone’s name written on them. There was even one with “HAYLEY” on it. Harmony hurried up and down the paddock with the bundle, digging each one into the ground in a different place and calling out, “Lucy, you’re down here. James, up here beside this bush, right? Tollie, off to left here,” and so on. Finally, she stuck two tags into the ground together, out to one side. “Troy and Hayley, over here, see?” Then she came back to the table, a bit breathless, and solemnly took the rubber band off the cards. She shuffled the pack, the way you shuffle playing cards. Everyone’s eyes fixed on her hands as if this was the most exciting moment of the game. When she started passing the cards out, they were snatched from her and everyone except Troy and Hayley raced away to the markers.
“Harmony,” Troy said, lingering. “This is a bit fierce for someone’s first go. Look. Can’t you change it?”
Harmony glanced at the card Troy was holding out. It was obvious that she saw what Troy meant, but she shook her head. “Sorry. No. I can’t make it work with a change. The only thing you can do is not to play.”
“If we do play,” Troy said, “what sign of the zodiac are we under now?”
Harmony looked up at the sky with its scudding clouds. “Virgo,” she said. “Just passed the cusp with Leo. Make up your mind, Troy. Everyone’s waiting.”
“I suppose Virgo’s not so bad,” Troy said. “You decide,” he said, passing the card to Hayley.
The card was old and worn and floppy, and fawn coloured with age. When Hayley took it, she found it had once been a plain postcard on which someone had written – a long time ago, to judge by the way the ink had faded – in large, firm capitals: FETCH A SCALE FROM THE DRAGON THAT CIRCLES THE ZODIAC.
“What do you think?” Troy said to her.
Hayley had no idea what they were supposed to do in the game anyway and the card made her very curious to find out. Besides, everyone else was standing by the markers jigging with impatience. James, who was nearest, said, “Hurry it up, can’t you!” and Tollie, in the distance, was jumping up and down shouting, “Cowards, cowards, cowards!”
“I think we’d better try,” she said.
“Great!” said Troy. He seized her by one arm and towed her over to the double marker. “Leave the card on the grass for Harmony to collect.”
Back by the table, Harmony wound up the clock. It seemed to be a musical box as well as a clock. When Harmony set it down on the table, ticking loudly, it began to play a small tinkly tune. Grandpa had played the same tune to Hayley once and told her it was by Mozart.
“A Little Night Music?” she said to Troy.
He nodded. “We all hear different tunes,” he said. “Harmony’s good at that. Start walking.”
All over the paddock the others were setting off. James charged downhill towards the orchard. Tollie came rushing back up the hill. Lucy was walking rather carefully in a straight line, looking nervous. Most of the rest were running towards the house.
“Some of them are cheating,” Troy said, pulling Hayley forwards. “Tollie always does.”
Hayley hastily dropped the card by the markers and let herself be pulled towards the garden shed at the side of the paddock.
It was a simple brick-built shed with a pointed roof, but when they came to it, Hayley was highly delighted to find that the top half of the door was of panes of stained glass, in nine different colours. As Troy pulled the door shut behind them, Hayley saw Lucy pass slowly across outside, from thundery yellow, to stormy red and then to twilight purple as she walked out of sight. Inside, the old lawnmowers and the stack of deckchairs were in a sort of rainbow dusk. Troy, keeping hold of Hayley’s wrist, edged them past the lawnmowers – and through some thick, dusty cobwebs that caught unpleasantly on Hayley’s hair – and on into
