Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci (4 page)

This was not to be. At breakfast Chrestomanci appeared (in a sea green dressing gown with a design of waves breaking on it) to tell Cat and Tonino that they were catching the ten-thirty train to Dulwich to visit Gabriel de Witt. Then he went away, and Millie, who looked very tired from having sat up half the night with Janet, rustled in to give them their train fare.

Tonino frowned. “I do not understand. Was not Monsignor de Witt the former Chrestomanci, Lady Chant?”

“Call me Millie, please,” said Millie. “Yes, that’s right. Gabriel stayed in the post until he felt Christopher was ready to take over, and then he retired— Oh, I
see
! You thought he was
dead
! Oh, no, far from it. Gabriel’s as lively and sharp as ever he was, you’ll see.”

There was a time when Cat had thought that the last Chrestomanci was dead, too. He had thought that the present Chrestomanci had to die before the next one took over, and he used to watch this Chrestomanci rather anxiously in case Chrestomanci showed signs of losing his last two lives and thrusting Cat into all the huge responsibility of looking after the magic in this world. He had been quite relieved to find it was more normal than that.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Millie said. “Mordecai Roberts is going to meet you at the station, and then he’ll take you back there in a cab after lunch. And Tom is going to drive you to the station here in the car and meet you off the three-nineteen when you get back. Here’s the money, Cat, and an extra five shillings in case you need a snack on the way back—because efficient as I
know
Miss Rosalie is, she doesn’t have any idea how much boys need to eat. She never did have, and she hasn’t changed. And I want to hear all about it when you get home.”

She gave them a warm hug each and rushed away, murmuring, “Lemon barley, febrifuge in half an hour, and then the eye salve.”

Tonino pushed away his cocoa. “I think I am ill on trains.”

This proved to be true. Luckily Cat managed to get them a carriage to themselves after the young man who acted as Chrestomanci’s secretary had dropped them at the station. Tonino sat at the far corner of the smoky little space, with the window pulled down as low as it would go and his handkerchief pressed to his mouth. Though he did not actually bring up his breakfast, he went whiter and whiter, until Cat could hardly credit that a person could be so pale.

“Were you like this all the way from Italy?” Cat asked him, slightly awed.

“Rather worse,” Tonino said through the handkerchief, and swallowed desperately.

Cat knew he should sympathize. He got travel-sick himself, but only in cars. But instead of feeling sorry for Tonino, he did not know whether to feel superior or annoyed that Tonino, once again, was more to be pitied than
he
was.

At least it meant that Cat did not have to talk to him.

Dulwich was a pleasant village a little south of London and, once the train had chuffed away from the platform, full of fresh air swaying the trees. Tonino breathed the air deeply and began to get his color back.

“Bad traveler, is he?” Mordecai Roberts asked sympathetically as he led them to the cab waiting for them outside the station.

This Mr. Mordecai Roberts always puzzled Cat slightly. With his light, almost white, curly hair and his dark coffee complexion, he looked a great deal more foreign than Tonino did, and yet when he spoke, it was in perfect, unforeign English. It was educated English, too, which was another puzzle, because Cat had always vaguely supposed that Mr. Roberts was a sort of valet hired to look after Gabriel de Witt in his retirement. But Mr. Roberts also seemed to be a strong magic user. He looked at Cat rather reproachfully as they got into the cab and said, “There are hundreds of spells against travel sickness, you know.”

“I think I did stop him being sick,” Cat said uncomfortably. Here was his old problem again, of not being sure when he was using magic and when he was not. But what really made Cat uncomfortable was the knowledge that if he
had
used magic on Tonino, it was not for Tonino’s sake. Cat hated seeing people be sick. Here he was doing a good thing for a bad selfish reason again. At this rate he was, quite definitely, going to end up as an evil enchanter.

Gabriel de Witt lived in a spacious, comfortable modern house with wide windows and a metal rail along the roof in the latest style. It was set among trees on a new road that gave the house a view of the countryside beyond.

Miss Rosalie threw open its clean white front door and welcomed them all inside. She was a funny little woman with a lot of gray in her black hair, who always, invariably, wore gray lace mittens. She was another puzzle. There was a big gold wedding ring lurking under the gray lace of her left-hand mitten, which Cat
thought
might mean she was married to Mr. Roberts, but she always had to be called Miss Rosalie. For another thing, she behaved as if she were a witch. But she wasn’t. As she shut the front door, she made brisk gestures as if she were setting wards of safety on it. But it was Mr. Roberts who really set the wards.

“You’ll have to go upstairs, boys,” Miss Rosalie said. “I kept him in bed today. He was fretting himself ill about meeting young Antonio. So excited about the new magic. Up this way.”

They followed Miss Rosalie up the deeply carpeted stairs and into a big sunny bedroom, where white curtains were gently blowing at the big windows. Everything possible was white—the walls, the carpet, the bed with its stacked white pillows and white bedspread, the spray of lilies of the valley on the bedside table—and so neat that it looked like a room no one was using.

“Ah, Eric Chant and Antonio Montana!” Gabriel de Witt said from the bank of pillows. His thin, dry voice sounded quite eager. “Glad to see you. Come and take a seat where I can look at you.”

Two plain white chairs had been set one on each side of the bed and about halfway down it. Tonino slid sideways into the nearest, looking thoroughly intimidated. Cat could understand that. He thought, as he went around to the other chair, that the whiteness of the room must be to make Gabriel de Witt show up. Gabriel was so thin and pale that you would hardly have seen him among ordinary colors. His white hair melted into the white of the pillows. His face had shrunk so that it seemed like two caves, made from Gabriel’s jutting cheekbones and his tall white forehead, out of which two strong eyes glared feverishly. Cat tried not to look at the tangle of white chest hair sticking out of the white nightshirt under Gabriel’s too-pointed chin. It seemed indecent, somehow.

But probably the most upsetting thing, Cat thought as he sat down, was the smell of illness and old man in the room and the way that, in spite of the whiteness, there was a darkness at the edges of everything. The corners of the room felt gray, and they loomed. Cat kept his eyes on Gabriel’s long, veiny enchanter’s hands, folded together on the white bedspread, because these seemed the most normal things about him, and hoped this visit would not last too long.

“Now, young Antonio,” Gabriel said, and his pale lips moved in a dry way Cat could not look at, “I hear that your best magic is done when you use someone else’s spell.”

Tonino nodded timidly. “I think so, sir.”

Cat kept his eyes on Gabriel’s unmoving, folded hands and braced himself for an hour or more of talk about magic theory. But to his surprise, the kind of talk Cat could not understand only went on for about five minutes. Then Gabriel was saying, “In that case I would like to try a little experiment, with your permission. A very little simple one. As you can see, I am very feeble today. I would like to do a small enchantment to enable myself to sit up, but I believe it would not come to much without your help. Would you do that for me?”

“Of course,” Tonino said. “Would—would a strength spell be correct for this? I would have to sing, if that is all right, because that is the way we do things in the Casa Montana.”

“By all means,” agreed Gabriel. “When you’re ready then.”

Tonino put back his head and sang, to Cat’s surprise, very sweetly and tunefully, in what seemed to be Latin, while Gabriel’s hands moved on the bedspread, just slightly. As the song finished, the pillows behind Gabriel’s head rebuilt themselves into a swelling stack, which pushed the old man into sitting position. After that, they pushed him away from themselves so that he was sitting up on his own, quite steadily.

“Well done!” said Gabriel. He was clearly delighted. A faint pink crept over his jutting cheeks, and his eyes glittered in their caves. “You have very strong and unusual magic, young man.” He turned eagerly to Cat. “Now I can talk to you, Eric. This is important. Are your remaining lives quite safe? I have reason to believe that someone is looking for them as well as for mine.”

Cat’s mind went to a certain cardboard book of matches, more than half of them used. “Well, Chrestomanci has them locked in the castle safe, with a lot of spells on them. They feel all right.”

Gabriel’s eyes glittered into distance while he considered Cat’s lives, too. “True,” he said. “They feel secure. But I was never totally happy while Christopher’s other life was locked in there. I put his last life into a gold ring, you know, and locked it in that same safe—this was at a time when he seemed to be losing a life once a week, and something had to be done, you understand—but it was a great relief to me when he married and we could give the life to Millie as her wedding ring. I would greatly prefer it if your lives were equally well guarded. A book of matches is such a flimsy thing.”

Cat knew this. But Chrestomanci seemed to him to be the best guardian there could be. “Who do you think is looking for them?” he asked.

“Now that is the odd thing,” Gabriel answered, still looking into distance. “The only person who seems to fit the shapes of the magics I am sensing has, I swear, been dead and gone at least two hundred years. An enchanter known as Neville Spiderman. He was one of the last of the really bad ones.”

Cat stared at Gabriel staring into distance like a bony old prophet. On the other side of the bed, Tonino was staring, too, looking as scared as Cat felt. “What,” Cat asked huskily, “makes you think it might be someone from the past?”

“For this reason—” Gabriel began.

Then the thing Cat had been dreading happened.

Gabriel de Witt’s face suddenly lost all expression. Behind him, the pillows began slowly subsiding, letting the old man down into lying position again. As they did so, Gabriel de Witt seemed to climb out of himself. A tall old man in a long white nightshirt unfolded himself from the old man who was lying down and stood for a moment looking rather sadly from Cat to Tonino, before he walked away into a distance that was somehow not part of the white bedroom.

Both their heads turned to follow him as he walked. Cat realized he could see Tonino through the shape of the departing old man, and the lilies of the valley on the bedside table, and then the corner of the white wardrobe. The old man was getting smaller all the time as he walked, until at last he was lost into white distance.

Cat was astonished not to find himself screaming—although he almost did when he looked back at Gabriel de Witt lying on his pillows and found Gabriel’s face blue-pale and more sunken than ever, and his mouth slowly dropping wider and wider open. Cat could not seem to utter a sound, or move either, until Tonino whispered, “I saw you
through
him!”

Cat gulped. “Me, too. I saw you. Why was that?”

“Was that his last life?” Tonino asked. “Is he truly dead now?”

“I don’t know,” said Cat. “I think we ought to call someone.”

But it seemed as if someone already knew. Footsteps thumped on the carpet outside and Miss Rosalie burst into the room, followed by Mr. Roberts. They both rushed to the bed and stared anxiously down at Gabriel de Witt as if they expected him to wake up any minute. Cat snatched another look at that gaping mouth and strange blue-wax complexion, and thought that he had never seen anyone more obviously dead. He had seen his parents just before their funeral, but they had looked almost asleep and not like this at all.

“Don’t worry, boys,” Miss Rosalie said. “It’s only another life gone. He’s still got two more.”

“No, you’re forgetting the life he gave to Asheth,” Mr. Roberts reminded her.

“Oh, so I am,” Miss Rosalie said. “Silly of me. But he’s still got one left. Why don’t you go downstairs, boys, until the new life takes over? It can sometimes be quite a while.”

Cat and Tonino jumped thankfully out of their chairs. But as they did so, Gabriel stirred. His mouth shut with a snap and his face became the face of a person again—a person who looked pale and unwell, but full of strong feelings despite that.

“Rosalie,” he said, weak and fretful, “warn Chrestomanci. Neville Spiderman is sniffing around this house. I felt him very clearly just now.”

“Oh, nonsense, Gabriel!” Miss Rosalie said, brisk and bossy. “How
could
he be? You
know
Neville Spiderman—whatever his real name was—lived at the time of the first Chrestomanci. That was more than a hundred years before you were born!”

“I felt him, I tell you!” Gabriel insisted. “He was there when my last life was leaving.”

“You can’t possibly know that,” Miss Rosalie insisted.

“I do know. I made a study of the man,” Gabriel insisted in return. His voice was more and more weak and quavery. “When I was first made Chrestomanci, I
studied
him, because I needed to know what a really evil enchanter was like and he was the most ingenious of the lot. And this is very ingenious, Rosalie. He’s trying to make himself stronger than any Chrestomanci ever was. Warn Christopher he’s not safe. Warn Eric particularly.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Miss Rosalie said, so obviously humoring him that Gabriel began rolling about in distress, spilling bedclothes on to the floor. “Of course I’ll warn them,” Miss Rosalie said, hauling blankets back. “Settle down, Gabriel, before you make yourself ill, and we’ll do everything you want.” She made meaningful faces at Mr. Roberts to take Cat and Tonino out of the room.

Mr. Roberts nodded. He put a hand on each boy’s shoulder and steered them out onto the landing. Behind them, as he gently shut the door, they heard Gabriel say, “Listen, Rosalie, my mind is
not
wandering! Spiderman has learned to travel in time. He’s dangerous. I mean what I say.”