Diana Jones - The Pinhoe Egg

Cat shrugged. Although it seemed to him to be a stupid fuss, he was glad Janet had new things to think about. It made a slight change from horses. Cat was feeling rather flat himself, after the south of France. Flat and dull. Even the sunlight on the green velvet stretch of the lawns seemed dimmer than it had been. The usual things to do did not feel interesting. He suspected that he had grown out of most of them.

Next morning, the Bowbridge carter arrived with Roger’s gleaming new bicycle. Cat went down to the front steps with everyone else to admire it.

“This is something like!” Roger said, holding the bike up by its shiny handlebars. “Who wants a horse when they can have this ?” Janet and Julia naturally glared at him. Roger grinned joyfully at them and turned back to the bicycle. The grin faded slowly to doubt. “There’s a bar across,” he said, “from the saddle to the handles. How do I—?”

Chrestomanci was standing with his hands in the pockets of a sky blue dressing gown with dazzling golden panels. “I believe,” he said, “that you put your left foot on the near pedal and swing your right leg over the saddle.”

“I do?” Roger said. Dubiously, he did as his father suggested.

After a moment of standing, wobbling and upright, Roger and the bicycle slowly keeled over together and landed on the drive with a crash. Cat winced.

“Not quite right,” Roger said, standing up in a spatter of pebbles.

“I fancy you forgot to pedal,” Chrestomanci said.

“But how does he pedal and balance?” Julia wanted to know.

“One of life’s mysteries,” Chrestomanci said. “But I have frequently seen it done.”

“Shut up, all of you,” Roger said. “I will do this!”

It took him three tries, but he got both feet on the pedals and pushed off, down the drive in a curvacious swoop. The swoop ended in one of the big laurel bushes. Here Roger kept going and the bicycle mysteriously did not. Cat winced again. He was quite surprised when Roger emerged from the bush like a walrus out of deep water, picked up the bike and grimly got on it again. This time his swoop ended on the other side of the drive in a prickly bush.

“It’ll take him a while,” Janet said. “I was three days learning.”

“You mean you can do it?” Julia said. Janet nodded. “Then you’d better not tell Roger,” Julia said. “It might hurt his pride.”

The rest of the morning was filled with the sound of sliding gravel, followed by a crash, with every so often, the hefty threshing sound of a plump body hitting another bush. Cat got bored and wandered away.

Syracuse arrived in the early afternoon. Cat was up in his room at the time, at the top of the Castle. But he clearly felt the exact moment when Joss Callow led Syracuse towards the stableyard gates and the spells around Chrestomanci Castle cancelled out whatever spells Wizard Prendergast had put on Syracuse. There was a kind of electric jolt. Cat was so interested that he started running downstairs at once. He did not hear the mighty hollow bang as Syracuse’s front hooves hit the gates. Nor the slam as the gates flew open. He did not see how Syracuse then got away from Joss Callow. By the time Cat arrived on the famous velvety lawn, Syracuse was out there too, being chased by Joss Callow, the stableboy, two footmen and most of the gardeners. Syracuse was having the time of his life dodging them all, skipping this way and that with his lead rein wildly swinging, and, when any of them got near enough to catch him, throwing up his heels and galloping out of reach.

Syracuse was beautiful. This was what Cat mainly noticed. Syracuse was a dark brown that was nearly black, with a swatch of midnight for his mane and a flying silky black tail. His head was shapely and proud. He was a perfect slender, muscly build of a horse, and his legs were elegant, long and deft. He was not very large and he moved like a dancer as he jinked and dodged away from the running, shouting, clutching humans. Cat could see Syracuse was having enormous fun. Cat trotted nearer to the chase, quite fascinated. He could not help chuckling at the clever way Syracuse kept getting away.

Joss Callow, very red in the face, called instructions to the rest. Before long, instead of running every which way, they were organised into a softly walking circle that was moving slowly in on Syracuse. Cat saw they were going to catch him any second now.

Then into the circle came Roger on his bicycle, waving both arms and pedalling hard to stay upright. “Look, no hands!” he shouted. “I can do it! I can do it!” At this point, he saw Syracuse and the bicycle wagged about underneath him. “I can’t steer!” he said.

He shot among the frantically scattering gardeners and fell off in front of Syracuse.

Syracuse reared up in surprise, came down, hurdled Roger and the bicycle, and raced off in quite a new direction.

“Keep him out of the rose garden!” the head gardener shouted desperately, and too late.

Cat was now the person nearest to the rose garden. As he sprinted towards the arched entry to it, he had a glimpse of Syracuse’s gleaming brown rear turning left on the gravel path. Cat put on more speed, dived through the archway and turned right. It stood to reason that Syracuse would circle the place on the widest path. And Cat was correct. He and Syracuse met about two-thirds of the way down the right hand path.

Syracuse was gently trotting by then, with his head and ears turned slightly backwards to listen to the pursuit rushing up the other side of the rose garden. He stopped dead when he saw Cat and nodded his head violently upwards. Cat could almost hear Syracuse thinking, Damn!

“Yes, I know I’m a spoilsport,” Cat said to him. “You were having real fun, weren’t you? But they don’t let people make holes in the lawn. That’s what’s annoyed them. They’ll probably kill Roger. You made hoofprints. He’s practically ploughed it up.”

Syracuse brought his head halfway down and considered Cat. Then, rather wonderingly, he stretched his neck out and nosed Cat’s face. His nose felt very soft and whiskery, with just a hint of dribble. Cat, equally wonderingly, put one hand on Syracuse’s firm, warm, gleaming neck. A definite thought came to him from Syracuse: Peppermint?

“Yes,” Cat said. “I can get that.” He conjured a peppermint from where he knew Julia had one of her stashes and held it out on the palm of his left hand. Syracuse, very gently, lipped it up.

While he did so, the pursuit skidded round the corner and piled to a halt, seeing Syracuse standing quietly with Cat. Joss Callow, who had been cunning too, and limping because Syracuse had trodden on him, came up behind Cat and said, “You got him then?”

Cat quickly took hold of the dangling lead rein. “Yes,” he said. “No trouble.”

Joss Callow sniffed the air. “Ah,” he said. “Peppermint’s the secret, is it? Wish I’d known. I’ll take the horse now. You better go and help your cousin. Got himself woven into that cycle somehow.”

It took Cat some quite serious magic to separate Roger from the bicycle, and then it took both of them working together to unplough the lawn where Roger had hit it, so Cat never saw how Joss got Syracuse back to the stables. He gathered it took a long time and a lot of peppermints. After that, Joss went to the Castle and asked to speak to Chrestomanci.

As a result, next morning when Janet and Julia came into the stableyard self-consciously wearing their new riding clothes, Chrestomanci was there too, in a dressing-gown of tightly belted black silk with sprays of scarlet chrysanthemums down the back. Cat was with him because Chrestomanci had asked him to be there.

“It seems that Wizard Prendergast has sold us a very unreliable horse,” Chrestomanci said to the girls. “My feeling is that we should sell Syracuse for dog meat and try again.”