One new distance opened into a dell. And then they were in the dell.
“What a lovely place!” Janet whispered. “But how peculiar!”
The little dip was full of spring flowers. Daffodils, scillas, snowdrops, hyacinths and tiny tulips were all growing there in September in the most improbable profusion. There was a slight chill in the dip, which may have accounted for it. Janet and Cat picked their way among these flowers, shivering a little. There were the scents of spring, chilly and heady, clean and wild, but strong with magic. Before they had taken two steps, Cat and Janet were smiling gently. Another step and they were laughing.
“Oh look!” said Janet. “There’s a cat.”
It was a large stripy tom. It stood arched suspiciously beside a clump of primroses, not sure whether to run away or not. It looked at Janet. It looked at Cat. And Cat knew it. Though it was firmly and definitely a cat, there was just a suggestion of a violin about the shape of its face.
He laughed. Everything made him happy in that place. “That’s old Fiddle,” he said. “He used to be my violin. What’s he doing here?”
Janet knelt down and held out her hand. “Here, Fiddle. Here, puss.” Fiddle’s nature must have been softened by being in that dell. He let Janet rub his chin and stroke him. Then in the most unheard-of way, he let Janet pick him up and stand up hugging him. He even purred. Janet’s face glowed. She could almost have been Gwendolen coming home from a witchcraft lesson, except that she looked kinder. She winked at Cat. “I love all kinds of Cat!”
Cat laughed. He put out his left hand and stroked Fiddle’s head. It felt strange. He could feel the wood of the violin. He took his hand away quickly.
They went on through a white spread of narcissi, smelling like paradise, Janet still carrying Fiddle. There had been no white flowers until then. Cat began to be almost sure that the garden was moving round them of its own accord. When he stepped among bluebells, and then big red tulips, he was sure. He almost – but not quite – saw the trees softly and gently sliding about at the sides of what he could see. They slid him among buttercups and cow-parsley, into a sunny, sloping stretch. And here was a wild rose, tangled with a creeper covered in great blue flowers. Cat could definitely feel the sliding movement now. They were being moved round and down somehow. If he thought about the way the garden had also been moving about in the Castle grounds, he started to feel almost as sick as he did in the car. He found it was best just to keep walking and looking.
When they slid through the trees among flowers of high summer, Janet noticed too. “Aren’t we getting a lightning tour of the year?” she said. “I feel as if I’m running down a moving staircase.”
It was more than the ordinary year. Fig trees, olives and date-palms moved them round into a small desert, where there were cacti like tormented cucumbers and spiny green armchairs. Some had bright flowers on them. The sun burnt down. But they had hardly time to get uncomfortable before the trees circled around them again and brought them into a richer, sadder light, and autumn flowers. They had barely got used to that, when the trees put out berries, turned amber and lost their leaves. They moved towards a thick holly, full of red berries. It was colder. Fiddle did not like this part. He struggled out of Janet’s arms and ran away to warmer climes.
“Which are the gates to other worlds?” Janet said, brought back to a sense of purpose.
“Soon, I think,” said Cat. He felt them coming to the centre of the garden. He had seldom felt anything magical so strongly.
The trees and bushes round them now were embalmed in frost. They could see bright berries in bright casings of ice. Yet Janet had scarcely time to rub her arms and shiver, before a tree met them that was a wintry mass of pink blossom. Straight stalks of winter jasmine hung from the next, in lines of small yellow stars. And then came a mighty black thorn tree, twisted in all directions. It was just putting out a few white blossoms.
As it took them in under its dark hood, Janet looked up into its black twistings. “The one at Glastonbury looks like this,” she said. “They say it blooms at Christmas.”
Then Cat knew they were in the heart of the garden. They were in a small bowl of meadowland. All the trees were up round the edges, except one. And here it seemed the right season of the year, because the apples were just ripening on that one tree. It stood leaning over the centre of the meadow, not quite over-shadowing the queer ruin there.
As Janet and Cat passed quietly towards this place, they found a little spring of water near the roots of the apple tree, which bubbled up from nowhere, and bubbled away again into the earth almost at once. Janet thought the clear water looked unusually golden. It reminded her of the water from the shower when it stopped Cat burning.
The ruins were two sides of a broken archway. There was a slab of stone which must have fallen from the top of the arch lying nearby at the foot of the tree. There was no other sign of a gate.
“I think this is it,” said Cat. He felt very sad to be leaving.
“I think it is, too,” Janet agreed in an awed, muffled voice. “I feel a bit miserable to be going, as a matter of fact. How do we go?”
“I’m going to try sprinkling a pinch of dragon’s blood in the archway,” said Cat.
He fumbled out the crucible wrapped in his handkerchief from his pocket. He smelt the strong smell of the dragon’s blood and knew he was doing wrong. It was wrong to bring this harmful stuff into a place that was so strongly magic in such a different way.
But, since he did not know what else to do, Cat carefully took a pinch of the smelly brown powder between the finger and thumb of his right hand, wrapped the crucible away again with his left hand, and then, carefully and guiltily, sprinkled the powder between the pillars of broken stone.
The air between the pillars quivered like air that is hot. The piece of sunny meadow they could see beyond grew misty, then milky pale, then dark. The darkness cleared slowly, away into the corners of the space, and they found they could see into a huge room. There seemed acres of it. All of it was covered in a carpet of a rather ugly playing-card sort of design in red, blue and yellow. The room was full of people. They reminded Cat of playing-cards too, because they were dressed in stiff bulky clothes in flat bright colours. They were all trailing about, this way and that, looking important and agitated. The air between them and the garden was still quivering and, somehow, Cat knew they would not be able to get into the huge room.
“This is not right,” said Janet. “Where is it?”
Cat was just about to say that he did not know either, when he saw Gwendolen. She was being carried by, quite near, on a sort of bed with handholds. The eight men carrying it wore bulky golden uniforms. The bed was gold, with gold hangings and gold cushions. Gwendolen was dressed in even bulkier clothes than the rest, that were white and gold, and her hair was done up into a high golden headdress which may have been a crown.
From the way she was behaving, she was certainly a queen. She nodded to some of the important people and they leapt eagerly to the side of her bed and listened with feverish intelligence to what she was saying. She waved to some others, and they ran to do things. She made a sign at another person and he fell on his knees, begging for mercy. He was still begging when other people dragged him away. Gwendolen smiled as if this amused her. By this time, the golden bed was right beside the archway, and the space was a turmoil of people racing to do what Gwendolen wanted.
And Gwendolen saw Cat and Janet. Cat knew she did, from the expression of surprise and faint annoyance on her face. Maybe she worked some magic of her own, or maybe the magic in the dragon’s blood was simply used up. Whatever it was, the broken archway turned dark again, then milky, then to mist; and finally, there was nothing but meadow again between the pillars, and the air had stopped shimmering.
“That was Gwendolen,” Cat said.
“I