The Pinhoe Egg (UK) by Diana Wynne Jones

Author:Diana Wynne Jones [Jones, Diana Wynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780007349951
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Over in Ulverscote there was suddenly a plague of frogs. Nobody had seen the like before. There were thousands of them, and there was a sort of green-redness to them if you saw them in the shade. They got in everywhere. People trod on them when they got out of bed that morning and found them in the teapot when they tried to make tea. About the only inhabitant of the village who enjoyed the plague was Nutcase. He chased frogs all over Furze Cottage. His favourite place to hunt them into was Marianne’s bedroom. Then he killed them on Marianne’s bedside rug.

Marianne picked up the strange small black remains. The frogs seemed to shrink when they were dead and die away into something dark and dry with holes in. Not real, she thought. There was a smell coming off them that she knew. Where had she smelt that particular odour before? She knew Joe had been there when she smelt it. Was it when they stole the stuffed ferret? No. It was before that. It was when Gammer had sent that blast of magic at the Farleighs.

That’s it, Marianne thought. These are Gammer’s.

She went downstairs and put the dry remains into the waste pail. “I’m going round to see Gammer,” she told Mum.

“Does she want you again?” Mum said. “Don’t be too long. I’m still finding jars with mildew in them. We’re going to have to scald the lot out.”

Though the wave of bad luck had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the effects of it were still there, in the mildew, in half healed cuts, sprained ankles and – this seemed to be the final thing the spell had done – an outbreak of whooping cough among the smaller children. Dismal coughing came from most of the houses Marianne passed on her way to the Dell. But the right kind of red bricks were just now being delivered at the Post Office as she went by.

Aunt Joy was standing on her lawn above the broken wall, watching the delivery. “I may have my bricks,” she grumbled to Marianne, “but that’s as far as it goes. Your uncle Simeon’s too busy doing the renovations at Woods House, hobbling around with a stick, if you please! All for that new woman who says she’s a Pinhoe. If he can do it on one leg for her, why not for me? As if my money wasn’t as good as hers!”

There was a lot more on these lines, but Marianne only smiled at Aunt Joy and went on. As Dad often said, if you stayed to listen to Aunt Joy, you’d be there a week and she still wouldn’t have finished grumbling.

There were frogs in the lane all the way to the Dell and the pond in front of the cottage was a seething, hopping mass of them. The ducks had given up trying to swim and were sitting grumpily on the grass.

“I don’t know what we’ve done to deserve this,” Aunt Dinah said, opening the door for Marianne.

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