I almost did it. I almost got it. Then one of the transparent things came bumbling along and sat on my hands instead. I could see others crowding in at me from all sides of the room. I tried to shake the thing loose. “Get off!” I said, flapping my hands. “Get out of it!” Then I know my face went as red as last night’s beetroot supper. “I—I—I …” I went.
“It’s all right,” he said, calmly smiling. “The invisible folk are always attracted to magic working. Take no notice of them.”
“We don’t have them on Earth,” I said defensively.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “I can always see them there, even though I can’t see them here at all on Blest. It seems to work that way. Carry on.”
I tried to carry on, but I’d lost it by then. And I think I was too busy giving relieved looks at the floating creatures to concentrate. I couldn’t help asking, “Why do they like Dora so much?”
“She’s hung with charms. Lives in a stream of half spells, poor girl,” he said. He sighed. “Always trying to prove she’s as good as her sister, Judith, I think. I hoped she’d snap out of it, and she did for a while after Toby was born. Then she got divorced, and that made her as bad as ever.”
Twice a week Dora got dressed up in black and lots of clattering jet beads and an enormous round hat and went out for the evening. The first time I saw her dressed up, she said, “I’m off to my magic circle,” and looked past my left shoulder in her dotty way. “Would you like to come, too, Nick?”
“Not unless you fa
ncy taking all your clothes off and galloping round in a ring,” Maxwell Hyde said, quickly and warningly. Toby looked dreadfully ashamed.
“Er—perhaps not tonight,” I said. “Thanks all the same, Dora.”
“It’s the most releasing and natural experience,” Dora said reproachfully. “You’re like all Orientals: you spend far too much time watching your tummy button. Be liberated. Try it. My group is full of wonderful people.”
“Yes, yes, off you go,” Maxwell Hyde said. And after she had gone, he told me, “You may not believe me, but Dora is the sane one in that group. I’d better look in on them soon. After I’ve had a go at the Plantagenate Empire, I think. They sometimes get up to very silly, harmful stuff.”
He went to see the Plantagenate Empire two days later. He gave Toby and me some money and told Toby to show me London. Then he walked out into the street and vanished beside the bus stop. Toby and I got on a bus at the exact same spot.
TWO
Blest London was quite a bit different because they’d never had the Great Fire. There were thatched cottages in Mayfair, and the parks were all in strange places. Toby and I had great fun, in spite of the baking heat. I told Toby that I didn’t want to see historic buildings, like the Houses of Parliament and so on, and he said we couldn’t anyway because the parliament was in Winchester and not very important in the first place. So we saw the circus that was permanently in Piccadilly, and waxworks that really moved, and their London Bridge that had houses on it and tourist shops. They have the Tower, oddly enough, and a Tower Bridge that opens for shipping, though it doesn’t look anything like ours on our Earth, and lots more boats on the Thames than in our London. Their ice creams taste a lot different.
Because it was so hot, we went back by water-bus. Toby showed me the ground where the hurley team he followed played. They didn’t have football. Hurley is much more dangerous. Toby followed the Vauxhall Vampires, and two of them broke their necks at it last week. Vox Vamps, you say, or just Vamps, like we say Wolves or Hammers.
I liked Toby a lot. It was a new experience for me. I wasn’t used to liking someone so much younger than me.
We got home to find that Maxwell Hyde had just come in, too.
“That was quick!” I said.
He gave his little soldierly grin. “Ah, I’m an old hand, Nick. I went straight to the head of things and made inquiries at the Academy of Mages. Told them I was the Magid looking into the recent infiltration in Marseilles.” That made me laugh. He looked solemn. “It’s absolutely true. I am and I was. And they told me, without any beating about the bush. Those poor fellows did get into some trouble, I’m sorry to say. They were removed from any Royal Security that night. But nobody thought it was their fault. They were just blamed for not noticing you weren’t the right novice. Inefficiency and so on. And because fully trained mages are much in demand, all four of them have found new jobs already. Charles Pick and Pierre Lefevre now work in France, and Arnold Hesse and David Croft are in Canada for Inland Security there.”
You can’t imagine how relieved I was to hear that.
“Where’s Canada?” Toby asked.
“A part of North America,” said his grandfather. “In some worlds, Europeans settled quite a lot in—”
He never finished that explanation. Dora suddenly dashed in, white as a sheet. She slammed the living room door and stood with her back to it, shaking. “Don’t go into the garden!” she gasped. “I went for a lettuce.”
“What did it do? Bite you?” Maxwell Hyde asked.
She shuddered. “No. I never got that far. There’s a white devil on the lawn. With horns!”
“What?” said Maxwell Hyde. “Are you sure?”
Dora shuddered some more. “Oh, yes. It was quite real. I know I lose touch quite often, but I always know when something I see is real. It was eating the dahlias.”
At this Maxwell Hyde thundered, “WHAT?” and set off for the garden like an Olympic sprinter. Dora got whirled aside, and Toby and I pelted past her, full of curiosity.
In the baking garden the white devil looked up from a flower bed with a leaf fetchingly dangling beside its beard, saw Maxwell Hyde, and came prancing toward him, obviously delighted to see him.