The Pinhoe Egg. Diana Wynne Jones

could be the Castle spells,” Cat said. But he liked Jason too.

      Roger morosely gathered up the three bicycles and put them away. The rest crowded into the main hall of the Castle, where Jason was telling Millie and Chrestomanci which strange worlds he had been to and saying he hoped that his storage shed was still undisturbed. “Because I’ve got this big hired van following on full of some of the weirdest plants you ever saw,” he said, with his voice echoing from the dome overhead. “Some need planting out straight away. Can you spare me a gardener? Some I’ll need to consult about – they need special soil and feed and so on. I’ll talk to your head gardener. Is that still Mr McDermot? But I’ve been thinking all the way down from London that I need a real herb expert. Is that old dwimmerman still around – the one with the long legs and the beard – you know? He always knew twice what I did. Had an instinct, I think.”

      “Elijah Pinhoe, you mean?” Millie said. “No. It was sad. He died about eight years ago now.”

      “I gather the poor fellow was found dead in a wood,” Chrestomanci said. “Hadn’t you heard?”

      “No!” Jason looked truly upset. “I must have been away when they found him. Poor man! He was always telling me that there was something wrong in the woods round here. Must have had a presentiment, I suppose. Perhaps I can talk with his widow.”

      “She sold the house and moved, I heard,” Millie said.

      “There’s some very silly stories about that.”

      Jason shrugged. “Ah well. Mr McDermot’s got a good head for plants.”

      The van arrived, pulled by two carthorses, and everyone from the temporary boot boy to Miss Rosalie the librarian was roped in to deal with Jason’s plants. Janet, Julia, the footmen and most of the Castle wizards and sorceresses carried bags and pots and boxes to the shed. Millie wrote labels. Jason told Roger where to put the labels. Cat was told off, along with the butler and Miss Bessemer the housekeeper, to levitate little tender bundles of root and fuzzy leaves to places where Mr McDermot thought they would do best, while Miss Rosalie followed everyone round with a list. Anyone left over unpacked and sorted queer shaped bulbs to be planted later in the year.

      Roger gloomed. He knew there was no question of cycling anywhere that day.

      He almost forgave Jason that evening at supper when Jason kept everyone fascinated by telling of the various worlds he had been on and the strange plants he had found there. There was a plant in World Nine B that had a huge flower once every hundred years, so beautiful that the people there worshipped it as a god.

      “That was one of my failures,” Jason told them. “They wouldn’t let me take a cutting, whatever I said.”