Witch's Business by Diana Wynne Jones Page B

were considering it.”
    This made them all quiet again. Jess had a feeling that Frank had managed to pull them away from the edge of a steepling—or was it yawning?—abyss. She gave him a grateful look, but Frank just looked worried.
    â€œSo what do we do?” Vernon said at last.
    â€œJenny’s heirloom! ” said Jess.
    â€œWhat about it?” said Frank.
    Jess knelt up and tried to explain. “She said Jenny will limp until she finds it. Then she got mad with me and Vernon, and added Silas to it. So neither of them will get better till it’s found. Which means we’d better find it.”
    â€œBut she meant never,” Frank objected.
    â€œI know. She thought ‘never.’ But we mustn’t let it be never. We must do her down by finding it. I vote we go and ask Jenny more about it.”
    Vernon got up at once, saying, “Let’s go now.” Martin, however, muttered, “Oh, no !” and stayed where he was.
    â€œIt’s all right,” said Frank. “Honestly. They agreed to stop, provided we did something to Biddy. And this is something.”
    â€œBut they’re such little creeps,” said Martin, with his face bunched up.
    â€œMartin,” said Vernon, “you come along and don’t be so silly. No one told me not to hit girls.”
    Martin, to Frank’s relief, got up grudgingly and set off with them across the field to the Adams’s great bare house. They were beside the cheese-colored wall, when Jess suddenly clapped her hand to her mouth and said, “Oh, good heavens!”
    â€œWhat?” said Frank.
    â€œIt’s all right. I got your handkerchief,” said Vernon.
    â€œNo!” said Jess. “Oh, dear ! I’ve just remembered who that odd man is who rescued us from Buster. He’s their father—Mr. Adams!”
    â€œChristmas!” said Martin. Vernon stared at Jess with his eyes getting bigger and bigger.
    â€œReally,” said Jess.
    â€œI get you,” said Vernon. “Some tie-up, isn’t there? Shall we not ask?”
    â€œI think we’d better,” said Frank. “It seems the only way to cure Silas.”
    Very subdued, they went in a group over to the peeling door, and Frank knocked. After the same amount of hollow thumping about inside as before, the door was opened by the same tall, vague lady, who might have had the same cigarette in her mouth for all Jess could tell. At any rate, it looked the same, and wagged in the same way when the lady spoke.
    â€œWanting Frankie again?” she said. “I think they’re in. More of you this time, aren’t there? Seems a wider palette,” said the Aunt, looking from Vernon’s black face and blood-spotted sweater to Martin’s red hair. “Quite decorative,” she said, leaving the door open as before and walking away inside. “Red, black, and two fair ones,” they heard her say from down the passage. “And bloodstains to tie it all in.”
    Vernon and Martin hesitated. “She means go in,” Frank whispered. He saw what the Aunt meant about bloodstains. Vernon had bled on Jess’s coat, and there was more blood on Frank’s leg, which he rather thought was his own, not Vernon’s, but he did not at all mind if it were someone else’s. He hoped it was Stafford’s.
    Jess led them inside, after the Aunt. Now that it seemed that Mr. Adams might be a friend of Biddy’s, the damp smell struck her as very sinister indeed. She wondered if the Aunt was sinister, too, and when they found her waiting outside the playroom door, Jess was fairly sure that she was. The cigarette wagged as the Aunt looked them over again.
    â€œYou know,” she said, “you four make a very pretty composition indeed. D’ you think your parents would object if I tried to get you on canvas?”
    â€œOh, very much,” said Jess at once. “They’d hate