them loose,” Hayley explained.
Before Harmony could answer, Lucy came dashing up, pink and proud and pleased. “I got it! I picked it up when it fell off her foot,” she panted, and held out a little glass shoe. “This truly is Cinderella’s slipper! Have I won?”
James raced in from one side, equally out of breath, and held out something clenched in his fist. “Prester John’s beard is seventy-seven centimetres long and he says we’re to stop coming and asking him for hairs all the time.” He looked at Lucy, Troy and Hayley. “Damn! Didn’t I win? Who did?”
By this time, the clock’s little tune was slowing down. Tighs and Laxtons began arriving from all directions. Harmony was soon surrounded by people waving strange objects at her and saying things like “This is Blind Pugh’s stick!” or “I got the firebird feather! Look!” or “One Aladdin’s lamp, as ordered!”
Harmony picked each object up as it was pushed at her and looked at it very closely. She nodded at the curly grey hair James was holding and at Troy’s dragon scale and Lucy’s shoe. “Those are genuine,” she agreed. “They can go in the trophy cabinet. So can this lamp. Put it down on the table, Charlie, and be careful not to rub it. But you got this feather from the vase in the lounge, didn’t you, Sarah? Go and put it back. Yes, this says DRINK ME – it’s from Alice all right. But this isn’t a walking stick, Oliver. It looks like a broom handle to me.”
“But I was in the inn when Blind Pugh arrived!” Oliver protested.
“Then he must have fooled you,” Harmony replied. “He may be blind, but he is a pirate, you know. Yes, the drinking horn truly was used by Beowulf. That can go in the cabinet and so can this One Ring. No, don’t put it on, you fool! It’s dangerous!”
All this time, the tune from the clock was going slower and slower. Just as the last three notes were dragging out, Tollie came staggering up, looking exhausted but pleased with himself. “Here you are,” he said. “Bowl of porridge from the Three Bears!” and he dumped it on the table.
Harmony looked at it and sighed. “That’s from the kitchen here,” she said. “Why must you always cheat, Tollie?”
“Because he wastes his time rushing about the strands trying to put the rest of us off!” James said. “I don’t think he should be allowed to play.”
“Hear, hear!” said almost everybody else. “He’s a pest!”
“We’ll see,” Harmony said soothingly. “Everyone come indoors to the cabinet for the presentation.”
As they all trooped towards the house, where Sarah joined them, looking decidedly ashamed of herself, Hayley whispered to Troy, “Why did she let Tollie get away with it?”
Troy made a face. “Because he’s quite capable of telling his dad – Mercer, you know – and Mercer would tell Uncle Jolyon at once. It’s blackmail really.”
The trophy cabinet was in a small room off the lounge. Although the lounge was now dry and polished, nobody had yet got round to the small room. On its wet and muddy floor stood a tall glass-fronted cupboard which Harmony unlocked with a special key from the plastic bag. Inside, on the rather dirty shelves, were little heaps of tiny objects: quite a pile of inch long glass shoes, almost a nest of grey curly hairs, six miniature Aladdin’s lamps, a bunch of tiny bright feathers and a cluster of little bottles, among other things. Harmony ceremoniously put the new objects beside the old, small ones, where they sat dwarfing them. Last of all, she put Troy’s big gleaming dragon scale beside the three tiny ones already there. Then she locked the cupboard and turned to give the plastic apple into Hayley’s hands.
“There,” she said. “I’m giving the prize to Hayley because she was pretty brave to go. Is that OK, Troy?”
“Fine,” Troy said, in his calm way. “I’ve won a hundred times anyway.”
For the next few days, Hayley enjoyed herself more than she had ever done in her entire life. Once the aunts had finished drying and cleaning the house and Mercer was able to set up ladders and start the repainting, Troy explained the rules of hide-and-seek and the other indoor games. Hayley rushed shrieking through the rooms and corridors with her cousins as if she had been doing it all her life. She ate huge meals. She went with the rest of them in a convoy of cars to the seaside, where the sea took her breath away, first by its size and strength, and again when Troy and Harmony tried to teach her to swim and an enormous wave rolled in and swamped all three of them.
“Getting quite rosy and plump, isn’t she?” beautiful Aunt Alice said to Aunt May as the two of them lay stretched on towels, watching. And Aunt May agreed, rather proudly, feeling personally responsible for the change in Hayley.
Apart from that one day by the sea, the young ones played the game most mornings and Hayley soon began to feel a veteran of the mythosphere. Harmony always insisted that Hayley went with Troy for safety, but Hayley did not mind, even when Tollie chanted, “Baby, baby! Has to have her hand held!”
“Take no notice,” Harmony said. “He’s a brat.”
“I know,” said Hayley. “Harmony, why do you always manage the game? Don’t you ever want to play too?”
A thoughtful, amused look came over Harmony’s face. “Well,” she said, “for one thing, I’m the only one who can manage it. And for another, when I was small, I used to ramble all over the mythosphere, until my mother caught me at it and threatened to tell Uncle Jolyon.”
“Daren’t you go now?” Hayley asked anxiously, thinking of how angry Grandma had been.
Harmony laughed. “Don’t worry. I still go out there a lot – but mostly when I’m away at Music College, so that I won’t get Mother into trouble.” She took up the bundle of markers and looked around the paddock, where everyone was waiting to start that morning’s game. “Where’s Troy got to?”
Troy came into the paddock as Harmony asked this. He said to Harmony, “Mercer’s going to finish the painting today.”
Hayley was surprised. She had grown so used to seeing Cousin Mercer up a ladder painting water-stained ceilings that it almost seemed like his permanent occupation – and from the number of ceilings needing painting, anyone would have thought Cousin Mercer would be up a ladder at least for the next year.
Harmony looked musingly down at the card table, with the clock and the bundle of cards on it. “I think we’d better make this the last game then,” she said.
Everybody groaned.
Harmony simply fixed Tollie with a meaning stare. “Isn’t that so, Tollie?”
Tollie shuffled his trainers in the trampled grass. “I told him all about the game. He’s going to phone Uncle Jolyon as soon as he’s finished,” he admitted.
“You little sneak,” Harmony said to him, in a dangerously kind, cheerful voice. “I hope you realise you’ve spoilt your own fun too.”
Tollie pointed at Hayley. “It’s her
