Conrad's Fate

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Not here,” Christopher said in a defeated way.

  I only had time to take one photo of the harp thing before he was off again, back the way we had come, to the hall and the staircase again. “I think I saw a door,” his voice said in the distance. “Ah, yes.”

  The door was behind the stairs. Christopher had opened it and rushed through before I caught up, but when I did, he was moving slowly and cautiously down the dark stone passage beyond. There was a door on each side and a door at the end. The door on the right was open, and we could see it was a sort of big cloakroom with a row of dusty boots on the floor, several grimy coats on pegs, and a cobwebby window that looked out onto wet woodland. Christopher made angry noises and barged me aside to open the door across the passage. The room there was a dining room, as neglected and dusty as the cloakroom, and its window looked on to the weedy garden.

  Christopher expressed his feelings by slamming that door before I could take a photo. He plunged on to the door at the end of the passage.

  There were kitchens beyond that, two quite cozy-looking places with rocking chairs and big scrubbed tables and some kind of a stove in the farther one. There was a scullery beyond that which opened into a rainy yard with red tumbledown sheds all around it. By this time even Christopher was having to admit that this house we were in was much, much smaller than the place with the double staircase.

  “I don’t understand it!” he said, standing miserably beside the table in the second kitchen. “I didn’t feel any change. Did you?” He looked almost as if he might cry.

  I wished he would keep his voice down. There were definite signs that someone had been in this kitchen recently. Warmth was coming from the stove, and there was a bag of knitting on one of the rocking chairs. I could see crumbs on the table around a magazine of some kind, as if someone had been reading while they had breakfast. “Maybe the change happened while you were shouting at Millie,” I said, very quietly, to give Christopher a hint.

  He looked around at the stove, the knitting, and the table. “This must be where Millie comes to eat,” he said. “Grant, you stay here in case she turns up. I’m going back up the stairs to see if she’s there anywhere.”

  “Does Millie do much knitting?” I asked, but he had dashed off again by then, and he didn’t hear me. I sighed and sat in the chair by the table. It was clear to me, if not to Christopher, that the two staircases split apart somehow on the last spiral. Millie must have ended up somewhere as different from this house as the wooden tower was from Stallery. And I didn’t like this house. People lived here. They had left furniture, coats, and knitting about, and they might come back at any moment and accuse me of trespassing. I had no idea what I would say if they did. Ask if they’d seen Millie, perhaps?

  In order not to feel too nervous, I pulled the magazine across and looked through it while I waited for Christopher. It was quite, quite strange, so strange that it fascinated me—so very strange, in fact, that I was not surprised to find it was dated 1399, February issue. It could not have been anything like that old. It smelled new. It was printed on thick, furry paper in weird washed-out blues and reds, in the kind of round, plain letters you get in books in infant school. Gossip Weekly, it was called. There were no photographs or advertisements in it at all, and it was full of quite long articles that had titles like “From Rags to Riches” or “Singer’s Lost Honeymoon” or “Scandal in Bank of Asia.” Each article was illustrated by a drawing. Blue and red drawings. I had never seen such bad drawings in my life. They were so bad that most of them looked like caricatures, though I could see that the artist had put in lots of red and blue shadings, trying to make the drawings look like real people. And here was the really queer thing—about half of them looked like people I knew. The lady at the top of “Rags to Riches” could almost have been Daisy Bolger, and one of the drawings for the bank scandal looked exactly like Uncle Alfred. But it must have been bad drawing. When I turned to the big picture beside an article called “Royal Occasion,” the picture looked like our king, except the caption called him “Prince of Alpenholm.” One of the courtiers bowing to him might almost have been Mr. Hugo.

  Now come on, I thought. This is, actually and truly, a magazine from another world. For all I know, in this world someone just like Hugo really is a royal courtier. How amazing. And I started reading about the royal occasion. I had got most of the way down one washed-out blue column, without understanding what the occasion was, or why it happened, when I heard heavy, slow footsteps coming in through the scullery.

  They were the footsteps of a person you definitely did not want finding you sitting in their house. They stamped. There was angry puffing with them, and bad-tempered grunting. I dropped the magazine and tried to slide quietly away into the farther kitchen. Unfortunately, my foot knocked the chair as I slid out of it, and it scraped on the floor, quite loudly. The person in the scullery put on speed and arrived in the doorway while I was still in the middle of the room. This is my Evil Fate at work again, I thought.

  She was a heavily built woman with a blunt, mauve face. I could see at a glance she was the kind of woman who knows you’re up to no good, even if you aren’t, and calls the police. She had a rubber sheet over her head against the rain, and she was wearing big rubber boots and carrying a can of milk. And she was a witch. I knew this the moment she put the milk can down and said, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I could feel the witchcraft buzzing off her as she spoke.

  “A mistake,” I said. “Just going.”

  I backed away toward the door as fast as I could. She came trudging toward me in her big boots with her hands hanging, ready to grab. “They always find me,” she said. “They send spies, and they find me wherever I hide.”

  She was saying this to make me think she was mad and harmless. I knew she was because I could feel her casting a spell. It buzzed in my ears under her words until I could hardly think or see. So I did the only thing I could manage. I raised my camera and took her picture. She was nearer than I realized. The flash went off right in her face. She screamed, and her rubber sheet fell off as she put her hands up to hide her face. I heard her fall over the chair I had kicked as I pelted away through the other kitchen.

  I ran like mad, through the corridor and out into the stone hall. I raced up those stone stairs, around and up, around and up, with the other set of stairs spinning dizzily past as I climbed, until my breath was almost gone, but I still hardly slowed up when I met Christopher coming down.

  “Run!” I shrieked at him. “There’s a witch in that kitchen! Run!”

  He said, “We can do better than that, Grant,” and seized hold of my elbow.

  Before I could shake him off, we were somehow at the top at the stairs in a strong buzzing of magic. This buzzing was somehow wider and cleaner feeling than the buzzing the witch had made. As Christopher pulled me by my elbow along the gallery I remembered that he was supposed to be a nine-lifed enchanter, which made me feel a little safer, but I didn’t really feel safe until we came out through the archway into the smell of warm wood and plaster in the attics of Stallery.

  “Phew … !” I began.

  Christopher said, “In our room first, Grant,” and turned me around. The archway had gone then, and we were able to scurry along the attic passages to our room, where we both sat heavily on our beds, me panting fit to burst and Christopher all limp, white and dejected. “Tell,” he said, with his head hanging.

  So I told him about the witch.

  Christopher’s head came up, and he said, “Hmm. I wonder if she’s the reason Millie can’t get out of there. Millie’s an enchantress, you know. She ought to be able to leave. Instead, she seems to keep being shunted on to another probability. There was no sign of her on those stairs, and it could well be the witch doing it. We’d better go back and deal with the witch, then.”

  He got up. I got up, too, although my legs were weak and shaking, and followed him out beyond the stripe of paint again. Christopher groaned when we g
ot there. There was no archway—nothing but the ordinary attics we had just come through. We sat on the floorboards for quite some time, waiting, but there was no change.

  “You panicked me, Grant,” Christopher said. “We should have gone down, not up. Oh, damn it! We were so close!”

  “It was probably my bad karma,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t talk nonsense!” he said. “Let’s go and look for secret books in the library. I’m sick of sitting here. One of the maids is going to see us breaking the rules if we’re not careful.”

  He was probably right. There seemed to be a lot of female noise coming from the other end of the attics suddenly, as if all the maids had arrived there at once. The empty space by the windows echoed to shrieks and giggles, and I could feel the floorboards creaking under me, the way they always did when everyone came up to bed. When we got up and went through our side of the attics, we found there was a fair amount of noise there, too. There were doors being slammed, running feet, and men laughing. A big deep man’s voice was singing inside the nearest bathroom. It was so out of tune that I giggled.

  Christopher raised his eyebrows at me. “Gregor?” he asked.

  “Mr. Amos?” I said.

  Christopher laughed then. It seemed to do him good. He was a lot more cheerful as we went down in the lift. He nodded at my camera, still hanging around my neck. “Are you intending to photograph the books, Grant?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d need a different lens. I just forgot I’d got it. Why are we getting off at floor two? The library’s on the ground floor.”

  “Ah. Admire my forethought and cunning, Grant,” Christopher said. “That library has a sort of minstrel’s gallery, and the door to it is on this floor. We can sneak in and make sure the Countess isn’t in there consulting a cookery book or something.”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. I was glad Christopher had cheered up, but there were times when his jokes really annoyed me.

  But there was a woman in the library. When we softly opened the low wooden door and crept through onto a high balcony lined with shelves of books, we could see her through the carved wooden bars at the front of it. We both ducked down and knelt on the carpet, but she could have seen us through the bars, even so. She was sitting at the top of a long wooden stepladder, reaching for a book on a high shelf. The one good thing was that she wasn’t the Countess, because she had dark hair, but that didn’t alter the fact that she only needed to turn her head to see us there.

  I grabbed for the door, ready to crawl out through it at once. “Never fear, Grant,” Christopher said. I judged from the buzzing feeling I was getting that he had put a spell of invisibility around us on the spot. Then I gathered it was probably a spell of silence, too, because Christopher first sat down comfortably with his arms around his knees and then spoke in his normal voice. “We wait, Grant. Again. Honestly, Grant, I’ve never done so much waiting around as I have in this place.”

  “But she could be here for ages,” I whispered. The stepladder was so close to the balcony that I couldn’t help whispering. “I think she must be the penniless student who’s supposed to catalog the books.”

  Christopher looked critically through the bars of the balcony. “She doesn’t look penniless to me,” he said.

  I had to admit that she didn’t. She was wearing a dark blue dress that was both flowing around her and clinging to her in an expensive way, and her feet, hooked on a rung of the ladder, were in soft red boots, really nice ones. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders in the same sort of costly hairstyle that Lady Felice had.

  “She’s a friend of the Family come to borrow a book,” Christopher said.

  While he was saying it, the lady took down a book and opened it. She looked at the title page, nodded, and made a note on the pad on her knee. Then she leafed through the book, shut it, looked at the binding, and shook her head. She slipped some kind of card into the front and turned to put the book carefully into a box that was fastened to the back of the ladder.

  She was my sister, Anthea.

  I stood up. I couldn’t help it. I nearly called out. I would have done if Christopher had not grabbed me and pulled me down. “Someone else coming!” he said.

  Thirteen

  Christopher was right. The big main door of the library opened, and Count Robert came in. He shut the door behind him and stood smiling up at my sister. “Hallo, love,” he said. “Are you on the job already? It was only a pretext, you know.”

  And my sister Anthea cried out, “Robert!” and came galloping down the ladder. She flung herself into Count Robert’s arms, and the two of them began hugging and kissing each other frantically.

  At this point Christopher got cramp in one leg. I think it was embarrassment, really. Or it could have been running up and down those stairs. But it was real cramp. He whipped himself into a ball and rolled about, clutching his left calf, with his face in a wide grin of agony. I was forced to park my camera on the lowest bookshelf and lean over him, pounding and kneading at his striped silk leg. I could feel the muscles under the stocking in a hard ball, and you know how much that hurts. It used to happen to me after skiing sometimes. I tried to make Christopher take hold of his own foot and pull his toes upward, but he didn’t seem to understand that this was the way to cure cramp. He just rolled and clutched.

  I kept glancing through the bars in case my sister or Count Robert had noticed us, but they didn’t seem to. They were now leaning backward with their arms around each other’s waists, laughing and saying, “Darling!” rather often.

  “Ooh—ow! Ooh—ow!” Christopher went.

  “Pull your toes!” I kept whispering.

  “Ooh—ow!” he said.

  “Then use some magic, you fool!” I said.

  I heard the main door open again and looked. This time it was Hugo who came in. He stood and smiled at Anthea, too, all over his puggy face. “Good to see you, Anthea,” he said, and then something that sounded like “Join the club.” But Christopher’s knee hit my chin just then, and I went back to kneading. When I next looked, the three of them had gone to the leather chairs by the window, where Count Robert and Anthea each sat on the arm of the same chair, while Hugo leaned on the back of it. Hugo was talking quickly and urgently, and Count Robert and Anthea looked up at him and nodded anxiously at what he said.

  I wanted to know what Hugo was saying. I took hold of Christopher’s ear, put my mouth to it, and more or less shouted, “Use some magic, I said!”

  That seemed to get through. There was some frantic buzzing. Then Christopher abruptly straightened out and lay with his face in the carpet, panting. “Oh, horrible!” he gasped. “And deaf in one ear, too.”

  I looked down into the library again in time to see Count Robert kiss Anthea and get up. Hugo kissed her, too, a friendly kiss on one cheek, and they both turned to go. But the library door opened yet again. This time it was Mr. Amos who came in, looking anything but friendly. Christopher and I both froze.

  “Has this young person got everything she requires?” Mr. Amos asked, with truly dreadful politeness.

  “Well, not really,” my sister said, cool as a cucumber. “I was just explaining that I need a computer if I’m to do this job properly.”

  Hugo said, with an anxious look, “I told you, miss. Atmospheric conditions here in Stallery mean that your programming is liable to random changes.”

  Count Robert turned to Mr. Amos with his chin up, all lordly. “Have we a computer, Amos?”

  It was a splendid cover-up from all three. Mr. Amos gave Count Robert a small bow and said, “I believe so, my lord. I will see to it personally.” Then he went away, very slow and stately.

  Count Robert and Hugo grinned at each other and then at Anthea. Hugo gave her a wink over his shoulder as he followed Count Robert out of the library.

  “Phew!” said my sister. Then she swung around in a swirl of expensive skirt and came marching toward the balcony, looking really angry. “Come down out of there,” she said, “whoever you a
re!”

  I hardly needed to look at Christopher’s face, squashed against the carpet, to know that he had forgotten all about his spells of invisibility and silence from the moment he got cramp. I stood up. “Hallo, Anthea,” I said.

  She caught hold of the stepladder and stared. She was really astonished. “Conrad!” she said. “What on earth are you doing here dressed like a lackey?”

  “I am a lackey,” I said.

  “But that’s ridiculous!” she said. “You ought to be at school.”

  “Uncle Alfred said I could go to Stall High as soon as I had expiated my Evil Fate,” I explained.

  “What evil fate? What are you talking about? Come down here this instant, and tell me properly,” Anthea said. I had to smile. Anthea pointed over and over at the carpet in front of her as she gave her commands. It was so exactly what she used to do in the bookshop when she was annoyed with me that I felt almost happy as I climbed down the steep stair from the balcony. “And your friend,” Anthea commanded, jabbing her finger toward another place on the carpet.

  Christopher got up, quite meekly, and limped down the stair after me. Anthea looked from him to me.

  “This is Christopher,” I said. “He’s a nine-lifed enchanter, and he’s here on false pretenses like I am.”

  “Really?” Anthea said suspiciously. “Well, I felt someone doing magic, so I suppose that could be true. Now stand there, Conrad Tesdinic, and tell me all about this nonsense that Uncle Alfred’s been putting into your head.”

  “I knew it was nonsense,” Christopher said. “But I thought his name was Grant. Are you his sister? You look quite alike.”

  “Yes. Shut up, you!” Anthea said. “Conrad?”

  Christopher, to my surprise, did what Anthea said. He stood there attentively, looking slightly amused, while I told her what Uncle Alfred had said about my bad karma and how it was going to kill me unless I dealt with the person who was causing it. Anthea sighed and looked at the ceiling. So I told her that Mayor Seuly and the rest of the Magicians’ Circle had seen my Evil Fate clinging to me, too, and how they had given me the way to know the person responsible before Uncle Alfred sent me to Stallery. Anthea frowned heavily at this, and Christopher looked even more amused. But he seemed quite surprised when Anthea said, “Oh dear! I feel really guilty! I shouldn’t have left you. And Mother? Didn’t she even try to tell you Uncle Alfred was talking nonsense?”