Diana Jones - Enchanted Glass

Tarquin O’Connor had once been a jockey, a very good one and very well known. Mr Stock had placed many a bet on horses ridden by Tark and never been out of pocket. Tarquin had been rich in those days. Mr Stock’s much younger sister had had the best of everything, including expensive private medical care, before she died. Their daughter had had a costly education. But then Tarquin had had a truly terrible fall. Tark, as Mr Stock heard it, had been lucky to live, trampled and broken in all directions as he was. He’d never ride again. Nowadays, Tarquin lived on his savings and what he got from the Injured Jockey Fund, while his daughter, the story went, gave up all the millionaire jobs she might have had and stayed in Melstone to look after her father.

“How’s my niece doing?” Mr Stock asked, halfway down his second cup of tea. “These biscuits are good. She make them?”

“No.” Tarquin pushed the biscuits nearer to Mr Stock. “I did. As for Stashe, I wish she’d have a bit more faith in how I can manage and consider working further afield. She’d surely get something at the University, just for a start, so she would.”

“Where’s she working now then?” asked Mr Stock, who knew very well.

Tarquin sighed. “Still down at the Stables. Part time. And I swear Ronnie exploits her. He has her doing pedigrees and racing statistics on the computer, until I think she’s never coming home. She’s the only one there who understands the bloody machine.”

The computer. This was what had given Mr Stock his idea. He gleamed. “Wasting herself,” he pronounced. “Now my new fellow’s at the computer game too. Stuff all over, wires, papers. I’m not at all sure he knows what he’s doing.”

Tarquin’s tufted, waif-like face lifted towards him. Worried, Mr Stock was pleased to see. “But he does know he has the field-of-care to look after?” Tarquin asked anxiously.

Mr Stock turned the corners of his mouth down. And I wish he’d get on and do it, and leave me alone! he thought. “As to that, I couldn’t say. He’s walked up and down a bit, for what that’s worth. I think he thinks he’s here to write a book. Now, to get back to my niece—”

“But if he doesn’t know, someone ought to put him straight,” Tarquin interrupted.

“That’s right. Show him he has responsibilities,” Mr Stock agreed. “It’s not my place to. You could do it though.”

“Ah. No.” Tarquin slumped down in his chair at the mere thought. “I never met the man.” He stayed bowed over, considering. “We do need someone to sound him out,” he said. “See if he even knows what his job is here, and if he doesn’t know, to tell him. I wonder—”

“Your daughter could do it,” Mr Stock said daringly. “My niece,” he added, because Tarquin seemed astonished by the idea. “If we could persuade him he needs a secretary — and he does, I don’t doubt: he’s used to several of them at that University, I’m sure — and then tell him we have the very person, wouldn’t that suit?”

“It sounds a bit dishonest,” Tarquin said dubiously.

“Not really. She’s high-class stuff, our Stashe,” said Mr Stock. “She could do the job, couldn’t she?”

Pride caused Tarquin to sit straight again. “Degrees all over,” he said. “She’s probably too good for him.”

“And too good for the Stables,” Mr Stock prompted him.

“ Wasted there,” Tarquin agreed. “All right, I’ll put it to her. Will Monday do?”

Bullseye! thought Mr Stock. “Monday it is,” he said.

At almost the same moment, Mrs Stock said to her sister, “Now don’t go putting ideas into Shaun’s head, mind, but you can tell him he’s really needed there. The place is crying out for someone to — ah — move furniture and so on. That man is really impossible as things stand.”

“Can I give him a job description?” asked Trixie.

“Jargon,” said Mrs Stock. “Anyway, someone’s got to do something and my hands are full. We’ll get on to it first thing Monday, shall we?”

In this way, plans were made for keeping Andrew under control. The trouble was, neither Mr nor Mrs Stock had thought very deeply about what Andrew was really like, or about what made Melstone such a special place, so it was not surprising that things took rather a different turn.

Mostly, this was because Aidan Cain turned up on Monday as well.

Aidan Cain got off the train at Melton and joined the queue for taxis. While the queue shuffled slowly forward, Aidan fetched out the old battered wallet that Gran had given him just before she died, and cautiously opened it. By some miracle, the wallet had contained enough money for Aidan’s half fare from London, plus a bacon sandwich and a chocolate bar. Now, the only things inside it were the two cash receipts for this food, a small one for the chocolate and a larger one for the sandwich. Gran had brought Aidan up not to cheat people, but the situation was desperate.

Still shuffling, Aidan took off his glasses and shut the wallet. Holding the glasses in his mouth by one sidepiece, he opened the wallet again and looked searchingly inside. Yes. The two flimsy receipts now looked exactly like a twenty-pound note and a ten-pound note. Aidan stared in at them for a moment with bare eyes, hoping this would fix them, and then put his glasses on again. To his relief, the two receipts still looked like money.

“I — I need to get to Melstone,” he said to the taxi driver when his turn came. “Er — Melstone House in Melstone.”

The taxi driver was not anxious to drive ten miles into the country for the sake of a kid. He looked over Aidan’s dusty brown hair, his grubby sweatshirt, his shabby jeans and his worn trainers, his pale worried face and his cheap glasses. “That’s twenty miles,” he said. “It’ll cost you.”

“How much?” Aidan asked. The thought of walking twenty miles was daunting, but he supposed he could ask the way. But how would he know the house when he got there? Ask again probably. It would take all day. Enough time for the pursuit to catch up with him.

The driver tipped his face sideways, calculating a sum it was unlikely that this kid would have. “Thirty quid?” he suggested. “You got that?”

“Yes,” Aidan said. In the greatest relief, he got into the taxi with his fingers crossed where the driver could not see them. The driver sighed irritably and set off.

It was quite a way. The taxi groaned and graunched through the town for so long that Aidan had to give up holding his breath for fear that the pursuit might stop it, but he only breathed easily when the taxi began making a smoother noise on a road between fields and woodlands. Aidan stared out at hedges laced with cow parsley and supposed he ought to be admiring the countryside. He had seldom been this far out of London. But he was too nervous to see it properly. He kept his fingers crossed and his eyes mostly on the meter. The meter had just clicked to £17.60 when they came to a village, a long winding place, where the road was lined with old houses and new houses, gardens and telegraph poles. Downhill they went, past a pub and a village green beyond it, with a duck pond and big trees, then uphill again past a squat little church surrounded by more trees. Finally, they turned down a side lane with a mossy surface and stopped with a croak outside a big pair of iron gates, overarched by a massive copper beech tree. The meter now read £18.40.

“Here we are,” the driver said, over the panting of the taxi. “Melstone House. Thirty quid, please.”

Aidan was now so nervous that his teeth were chattering. “The meter says — says eighteen pounds — pounds forty,” he managed to say.