By this time, the Countess was on about the way the weaknesses of Count Robert’s character had shown up when he was a toddler, and kept reminding him of bad things he had done when he was two and four and ten years old. The Count just sat there, bearing it. Lady Felice kept her head down over her plate. But the Countess noticed her too.
“I’m glad to see that your silly little eating disorder is over, dear.”
“It was nothing, Mother,” Lady Felice said.
So then the Countess decided that the fish was overcooked and told Mr Amos to send it back to the kitchen. Mr Amos snapped his fingers at me to take it. “And be sure,” he said, handing me the loaded tray, “to tell Chef exactly what her ladyship found wrong with it.”
I missed the next bit while I went away through the hall and the swing door, down the steps to the undercroft and on to the kitchens; but Christopher said it was just more of the same. In the kitchen, the chef put his hands on his hips and stared at me humorously. All the footmen called him the Great Dictator, but I thought he was quite a nice man. “And what’s supposed to be wrong with it?” he asked me.
“She says it’s overcooked,” I said. “She’s in a really bad mood.”
“One of those evenings, eh?” the chef said. “Slimming spells disagreed with her and she’s saving herself for the roast, is she? All right, get back and tell her that yours truly grovels all over the carpet and you needn’t mention that this fish was perfect.”
Back I went, all the way to the dining room, where I managed to go in almost exactly as I was supposed to, slipping in sideways with nearly no noise. Mr Amos was waiting there for me. Behind his bulky pear-shape the room felt like a thunderstorm. “And what has Chef to say for himself?” he demanded, low and urgent.
“He grovels on the carpet and I’m not to say the fish was perfect,” I said.
That was stupid of me. I think it was Christopher’s influence that made me say it. Mr Amos had the perfect opportunity to get rid of some of his bad temper on me. He gave me a glare from his stone-coloured eyes that made my knees go weak. Luckily for me, Lady Felice chose that moment to jump up from her chair and fling her big white napkin on to the table. Two wine glasses went over.
“Mother!” she said, almost in a scream. “Will you stop going on at Robert as if he’d committed a crime! All he’s done is hire the librarian you asked him to hire! So leave him alone, will you!”
The Countess turned to Lady Felice. Her eyes went wide and her lips began shaping the “Wh…” of one of her dreadful Whys.
“And if you say ‘Why, dear?’ once more,” Lady Felice screamed, “I shall pick up this candlestick and brain you with it!” She gave out a sound like a laugh and a sob mixed and rushed for the door. Mr Amos and I both had to dodge. Lady Felice stormed past us and crashed out of the room like a warm, scented hurricane and slammed the door behind her.
In the rest of the room she left a feverish, dead silence. Andrew and the other footmen sprang into action, silently and on tiptoe, mopping up spilt wine, taking away the fallen glasses and whipping away all the knives, forks and spoons still there at Lady Felice’s place. The other two at the table simply sat there, while – just as if nothing had happened – Mr Amos walked round to speak gently in the Countess’s ear.
“Chef sends his profound apologies, my lady, and says it will not occur again. Allow me to bring on the next course, my lady.”
The Countess, in a frozen way, nodded. Because the footmen were still busy wiping up wine, Mr Amos beckoned Christopher and me over to the food lift and passed us tureens and sauce boats to carry over to the table. I was not sure where to put things, but Christopher whirled everything across and dumped them any old where, and then bowed and patted the table mats with both hands, as if he knew just what he was doing. Mr Amos glowered at him over his shoulder as he picked up a massive platter piled with meat.
The Countess, still looking frozen, said to Count Robert, “Felice is so tiresome these days. I think it’s high time she was married. I shall invite that nice Mr Seuly to Dinner with our other guests. I feel sure I can induce Felice to marry him.”
Count Robert said, “Are you making some kind of a joke, Mother?”
“Not at all. I never joke, dear,” said the Countess. “Mr Seuly is Mayor of Stallchester, after all. He is wealthy, and widowed, and he has a very respectable position in life – and it’s not important who Felice marries, the way it is for you, dear. You are engaged to a title, but—”
“Give me patience!” Count Robert suddenly shouted out. He leapt to his feet, whacked his napkin on the table and – like Lady Felice – made for the door with great strides, just as Mr Amos arrived with the platter of meat.
I never could work out how Mr Amos missed Count Robert. The Count did not seem to see either Mr Amos or the meat. He just charged out through the door and banged it shut behind him. Mr Amos somehow managed to raise the vast platter above both their heads and then to twirl himself away. The Countess sat, still frozen, watching Mr Amos waltzing round with the great steaming dish.
When at last he stopped twirling, she said, “I don’t understand, Amos. What is making my children so very tiresome lately?”
‘I believe it is their extreme youth, my lady,” Mr Amos replied, laying the platter reverently down on the table. “They are mere adolescents, after all.”
Christopher’s eyes swivelled to mine in amazement. As he said to me afterwards, you called people adolescents at his age and mine. “Lady Felice has come of age,” he said, “even if they did have to cancel the party for it. And Count Robert must be in his twenties! Grant, do you think that the Countess is mad and Mr Amos humours her?”
He said that much later though. At that time we had to stand there while the Countess obstinately ploughed through three more courses, half a bottle of wine and dessert, and looked angrier with every mouthful. Mr Amos’s bottled rage grew so huge that even Christopher hardly dared move. The footmen all pretended they were invisible and so did I.
And it did not stop there. The Countess laid down her napkin and went to the Grand Saloon, telling Mr Amos that the Improvers could bring her coffee there. This meant that Christopher and I had to race upstairs after her with trays of comfits and chocolates, while Mr Amos followed us with coffee, herding us like a rather heavy sheepdog.
The Grand Saloon was vast. It stretched from the front to the back of the house and was full of things to fall over, like golden footstools and small shiny tables. The Countess sat in the middle of it, where Christopher and I had to keep dribbling coffee for her into a cup so small that it reminded me of the crucibles Uncle Alfred did his experiments in. I drizzled in coffee and Christopher dripped in cream, while Mr Amos stood by the distant door, rocking on his small shiny feet and waiting for us to make a mistake so that he could vent some of his rage on us. We knew that the very least that could happen was that Mr Amos would cancel our morning off, so we were very, very careful. We tiptoed and poured for what seemed a century, until the Countess said, “Amos, I wish to be alone now.” By that time my arms were shaking and my calves ached with tiptoeing, but we hadn’t made any mistakes so Mr Amos had to let us go.
“Whew!” I said when we were safely out of hearing. “What has Count Robert done to make them both so angry? Did you find out?”
“Well,” Christopher said, scratching at his head so that his sleek hair separated into curls, “you probably know as much as I do, Grant. But while you were away with the fish, the Countess did say something about hiring penniless students to catalogue the library here. Though why that should make anyone angry I haven’t a clue. After all, she’s supposed to have asked Count Robert to hire someone. The Librarian at Chrestomanci Castle says you have to have a proper list of the books you’ve got or you can’t find any of them. And I can’t see why that should make Mr Amos angry as well.”
I felt suddenly full of an idea. “Could it be,” I said, “that they have secret books in there? You know, books about pulling the pos
sibilities, or explaining how to work the changes at the top of the house?”
Christopher stood still in the passage outside our room. “Now that is a notion!” he said. “Grant, I think we ought to take a look at this library when we’re free tomorrow morning.”
Naturally, that next morning we went to look at the top of the mansion first. Christopher was seriously anxious about this girl Millie, and I was really excited about what we’d see there next. We went to the attics as soon as we were free.
On the way, I dodged into our room and got my camera. I wanted to have proof that we weren’t imagining the strange towers. As it was a dull sort of day, with fog down in Stallchester Valley and only Stall Crag sticking up out of it, I made sure the flash was working.
Christopher jumped at the sudden brightness. “Don’t count your chickens, Grant,” he said while we crept along to the streak of paint on the wall. “You may not have anything to photograph.”
This made me sure that my bad karma would cancel out any chance of the mansion changing. But we were in luck. Just as we passed the stripe of paint, there was the most almighty sideways wrench. Christopher and I were thrown against one another and sort of staggered round in a half circle, with me hanging on to Christopher’s neckcloth for balance. And as soon as we were facing the other way, we realised that the passage we had just come through was now a tall pointed archway made of stone. Beyond it was somewhere so shadowy and stony that I was glad I’d remembered my camera flash.
“Looks like that tower we hauled the dog up again,” Christopher said as we went through the archway.
It was nothing like the slate tower. The archway opened into a stone-floored gallery held up on one side by fancy stone pillars, each pillar a different shape. The roof was a basketwork of stone vaulting and the other wall was blank stone. The vaulting and the carvings on the pillars must have been picked out in gold paint once, but a lot of the gold had flaked off, leaving the patterns hard to see. From the space beyond the pillars there came vast, soft, shuffling echoes. It felt huge out there, but not as if people were living in it. It was more like the time my school had gone round Stallchester Cathedral, when the guide had taken us up into the passages in the dome.
Christopher said, “Millie’s here! Quite near!” and set off at a run to the other end of the gallery, where the gloomy light came from.
I raced after him with my camera bouncing on my chest. The gallery opened into a big curving stone staircase, leading down into the grey light. Christopher went plunging down the stairs and I followed. And as soon as we came round the first curve, we realised we were on an enormous spiral – a double spiral, we realised after the next curve. There was another staircase opposite ours, sort of wrapped round the one we were on. When we leaned over the high stone side, we could see the two staircases spiralling down and down. When we looked up, we saw the inside of a tower overhead. It had fancy windows in it, but they were so dirty that it was no wonder the place was in such gloom.
Footsteps rang, like an echo of ours. We looked over at the other staircase and there was a girl there, hurrying down to get to the same level as us. “Christopher!” she shouted. “What are you doing here?”
It was hard to see what the girl was like because of the gloom and because the staircases were so big and so wide apart, but her voice sounded nice. She seemed to have a rounded face and straight brownish hair, but that was all I could see. I swung up my camera and photographed her as she dashed down opposite us, which made her stop and try to cover her eyes.
“Meet us at the bottom!” Christopher shouted at her. His voice boomed around in a hundred echoes. “I’ll tell you then.”
In fact, he tried to tell her as we dashed on down and round, the two of us circling round Millie and Millie circling round us, while the space rang with our hurrying feet and the voices of the other two. They kept shouting at one another as they went, trying to explain what they were doing here, but I don’t think either of them could hear properly because of the echoes. I could tell they were truly glad to see one another. I took several more photos as we went. It was such an amazing place.
I think Millie shouted something like, “I’m so pleased you came! I’ve been having such a frustrating time! This house keeps changing and I can’t seem to get out!”
“Me too!” Christopher bellowed back. “I had to take a job as a lackey. What do you get to eat?”
“There’s always food downstairs,” Millie yelled in reply, “but I don’t know where it comes from.”
“How did you get in?” Christopher roared. The echoes got worse and worse. Neither of us could hear what Millie shouted in answer to this. Christopher roared again, “You know the main changes happen at the top of the house, do you?” I think Millie yelled back that of course she did, she wasn’t a fool, but she never seemed to get anywhere. And she seemed to try and describe her frustrations as we all hammered down several more spirals. Then Christopher began bellowing, across her description, that one of the places was bound to be the perfect place for the two of them to live in secret – but we shot down the last curve at this point and there was ceiling over the staircase. The echoes quite suddenly cut off. And we found ourselves in a plain stone hallway. Christopher stopped shouting and turned to me. “Quick, Grant. Where’s the other stairway?”
We both ran along the hall to the place we thought the other spiral ought to come out, but there was only wall there. It had little windows in it that looked out on to woodland, so it was obviously wrong.
“We got turned around,” Christopher panted, and he dashed back the other way so fast that I could barely keep up.
There was a door at the end of the hall that way. Christopher thundered through it and on into the middle of a largish room, where he stopped dead beside a pile of sofas and armchairs with a sheet draped on top of them. Beyond that, big windows showed a garden that was mostly weeds. Rain was falling on the weeds. There were more windows, showing more weeds, in the left-hand wall, a harp or something in one corner, and nothing but a big empty fireplace in the right-hand wall.
“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 on to 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 cosy-looking places with rocking chairs and big scrubbed tables and some kind of a stove in the further one. There was a scullery beyond that which opened into a rainy yard with red tumbledown sheds all round 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 round 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 smelt 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.
The Chrestomanci Series Page 107