“Certainly,” I said, in my best flunkey manner. “This way.” I took them along towards the lift, collecting the tray on the way. They thumped along after me in their great crusty boots.
“It wasn’t only a castle,” Smedley said. “It was never the same castle anyway. It kept turning different. Then it was a huge place made of glass…”
“All cracked and dirty,” said Mr Avenloch. “Such neglect I never saw.”
“And after that there were three palaces with white marble everywhere,” Smedley chattered on. I knew how he felt. He had been having the sort of experience you just have to talk about. “And then there was this great enormous brick mansion, and when we went inside it kept changing all the time. Stairs in all directions. Old furniture, ballrooms…”
“Didn’t you see any people at all?” I asked, hoping to get news of Christopher.
“Only the one,” Mr Avenloch said repressively, “and she was in the distance all the time.” I could see he thought Smedley was talking too much.
I thought nervously of the witch. “What, like an old woman in rubber boots?” I asked.
“She seemed like a young girl to me,” Mr Avenloch replied, “and ran like a hare when we called out to her.”
“That was what brought us up here,” Smedley explained. “She ran away upstairs in the mansion – well, it was more like a cathedral by then – and we chased up after her, wanting to know what was happening and how to get out of there…”
We were at the lift by then. Its door slid aside to show Mr Prendergast pretending to be Mr Amos. I hadn’t realised that Mr Prendergast was such a good actor. He was tall and thin and Mr Amos was short and wide, but he had Mr Amos’s way of holding his head back and slowly waving one hand so exactly that I almost saw him as pear-shaped. Mr Avenloch and Smedley both gaped at him.
“Lunch is served,” Mr Prendergast said. “I require you to be furniture against the wall. Furniture with legs of flesh.” Then he did a Mr Amos stare at Mr Avenloch and Smedley. “And what are you doing with a rake and a wheelbarrow, Conrad, may I ask?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. Hugo was in the lift too, behind Mr Prendergast, grinning all over his face. “Can we come down in the lift with you?” I asked.
“Feel free,” Hugo said. “He came up looking for you anyway.”
Mr Prendergast waved the two gardeners into the lift, like Mr Amos ushering the Countess. “Enter. It is not your place to wait upon your fellow Improver, Conrad,” he said to me, and I really felt for a moment as if it was Mr Amos telling me off. “Enter, and place the rake in that corner and the wheelbarrow by the wall here. Hold your tray two inches higher. We will now descend.” He pressed the lift button with a Mr Amos flourish. “I will now,” he said, “make use of our descent to instruct you upon the correct way to place chairs for a banquet. All chair legs must be exactly in line. Having placed them at the table, you must then crawl along behind them, measuring the distance of chair from chair, with a tape measure carried in the waistcoat pocket for the purpose.”
He went on like this all the way down to the undercroft. Smedley could not help giggling – and kept getting a Mr Amos glare, followed by, “Know your place, wheelbarrow” – and even Mr Avenloch began to grin after a while. Hugo was laughing as much as I was.
When we got to the undercroft, Mr Prendergast announced, “Mr Hugo will now repair to the Upper Hall, while I march Conrad off to his fate in the Middle Hall. You two implements…”
“Please, sir,” Smedley interrupted imploringly, “have we missed our lunch, sir?”
“Take this tray,” Mr Prendergast said, removing it from me and dumping it on Smedley, “and proceed with your mentor to the kitchens, where you will find they have been anxiously awaiting your return. Off with you now.” He pretended to look at his watch. “You have exactly two minutes before they feed your lunch to the dogs.”
Smedley went racing off. Mr Avenloch paused to say, “That was as good as a play. But don’t let Mr Amos catch you at it. You’d be in for it then.”
“It’s probably the one thing he wouldn’t forgive me for,” Mr Prendergast agreed cheerfully. “Which is why I am rehearsing the part. Come, Conrad. Your lunch awaits.”
I had to have another lunch. They really did not like me running after Christopher. And I really could not explain. I was half asleep for the rest of the afternoon, until around supper time, when I was suddenly ravenous and wide awake. And, I don’t know why, I was quite convinced that Christopher was back. I sneaked off early to the kitchens and asked them to give me Christopher’s tray now. I did not want Mr Prendergast butting in again.
It was so early that the regular maids were all gathering there for their high tea. They told me that the ghost had been bouncing that red rubber ball up and down the corridors all afternoon. They weren’t frightened by then, they said, just annoyed by it. Besides, who wanted to leave, one of them added, when there was a chance of getting to know Francis? Or Manfred, said another. A third one said, “Yes, if you want gravy poured down your neck!” and they all shrieked with laughter.
The men’s end of the attics seemed very quiet after this. I went along to our room and got the door open – which is not easy when you’re carrying a tray – and Christopher seemed to be there. At least, he was in bed and asleep when I went in, but when I turned round from putting the tray on the chest of drawers there was no one there. The bed was flat and empty.
“Oh, come on!” I said. “Don’t be stupid. It’s only me. What happened? Didn’t you find Millie then?”
A girl’s voice answered, “Oh dear. What’s gone wrong? You’re not Christopher.”
I spun about, looking for where the voice came from. Christopher’s bed was still flat and unused, but there was a dip in the edge of my bed, the sort of dent a person makes sitting on the very edge. She was obviously very nervous. I said, “It’s all right. I’m Conrad. I work here at Stallery with Christopher. You’re Millie, aren’t you? He said you were an enchantress.”
She became visible rather slowly, first as a sort of wobble in the air, then as a blur that gently hardened into the shape of a girl. I think she was ready to whip herself invisible again and run away if I seemed to be hostile. She was just a girl, nothing like as glamorous as Fay or Polly, and a bit younger than Christopher. She had straight brown hair and a round face, and a very direct way of looking at a person. I thought she seemed nice. “Not that good an enchantress,” she said ruefully. “You’re that boy who was with Christopher on those stairs, aren’t you? I made a real mistake getting into all those mansions. There never seemed to be a way to get outside them.”
“It may have been the witch keeping you in,” I said.
“Oh, it was,” she said. “I didn’t realise at first. She was sort of kind and she had food cooked whatever kitchen I got to, and she kept hinting that she knew all about the way the buildings changed. She said she’d show me the way out when things were ready. Then she suddenly disappeared, and as soon as she was gone, I realised that it was that knitting of hers – she was sort of knitting me in, trying to take me over, I think. I had to spend a day undoing her knitting before I could get anywhere.”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“Christopher shouted across those double stairs to go to the top and then find the room with his tie on the doorknob,” Millie said. “I was so tired by then that I did.”
“Then he’s still out there?” I said.
Millie shrugged. “I suppose so. He’ll be back in the end. He’s good at that kind of thing – having nine lives and so on.”
She seemed a bit cool about it. I began to wonder if the witch had grabbed Christopher instead, because he was stronger, and that this was how Millie got out. “Oh well,” I said. “He’s not here and you are. He’s supposed to be ill and I’m supposed to bring his meals. Would you like this supper now I’ve brought it?”
Millie brightened up wonderfully. “Yes, please! I don’t know when I’ve ever been s
o hungry!”
So I passed her the tray. She arranged it on the bedside table, which she pulled in front of the bed, and began to eat heartily. The food changed from egg and chips to cottage pie while she ate, but she hardly seemed to notice. “I had nothing to buy food with, you see,” she explained. “And the witch only did breakfast. The last breakfast was days ago.”
“Did you run away from school without any money then?” I asked.
“Pretty well,” Millie said. “Money from Series Twelve wouldn’t work in Series Seven, so I only took what was in my pocket. I was going to be a parlourmaid and earn some money. Except when I got inside those mansions, there was nobody there to be a maid for. But…” She looked at me very earnestly. I could tell she was wanting me to believe the next bit particularly. “But I had to run away from that school. It really was an awful place – awful girls, awful teachers – and the lessons were all things like dancing and deportment and embroidery and how to make conversation with an ambassador, and so on. I told Gabriel de Witt that I was miserable and not learning a thing, but he just thought I was being silly.”
“And you told Christopher,” I said.
“In the end,” Millie said. “Only as a last resort – Gabriel never listens to him either. And Christopher was just as overbearing as I knew he would be. You know, ‘My dear Millie, set your mind at rest and I will fix it’ – and this time he was worse. He decided we were going to go and live together on an island in Series Five. And when I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to go and live all alone with Christopher – well, would you want to, Conrad?”
“No,” I said, very definitely. “He’s far too fond of his own way. And the way he makes superior jokes all the time – I want to hit him!”
“Oh, doesn’t he just!” Millie said.
After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding – which started as jam roly-poly and then became chocolate meringue – we both tore Christopher’s character to shreds. It was wonderful fun. Millie, from having known Christopher for years, found two faults in him where I only knew one. His clothes, she told me, he fussed about his clothes being perfect all the time. He’d been like that for three years now. He drove everyone in Chrestomanci Castle mad by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pyjamas. “And he could get them right anyway by magic,” Millie told me, “if he wasn’t too lazy to learn how. He is lazy, you know. He hates having to learn facts. He knows he can get by just pretending to know – bluffing, you know. But the thing that really annoys me is the way he never bothers to learn a person’s name. If a person isn’t important to him, he always forgets their name.”
When Millie said this, I realised that Christopher had never once forgotten my name – even if it was an alias. It suddenly seemed to me to be rather mean, talking about Christopher’s faults when he wasn’t here to defend himself.
“Yes,” I said. “But I’ve never known him do anything really nasty. I think he’s all right underneath. And he makes me laugh.”
“Oh, me too,” Millie agreed. “I do like him. But you can’t deny that he’s maddening a lot of the time – who’s that?”
It was Mr Prendergast again. We could hear him outside in the corridor, doing his Mr Amos act. “Grant,” he called out. “Conrad, stop lurking in sickrooms and descend to the undercroft immediately. Supper is being served!”
He was nearer than we realised. The next moment he flung the door open and stood looming in the doorway. Millie made a sort of movement, as if she was thinking of turning invisible, but then realised that it was too late, and stood up instead. Mr Prendergast hitched his face sideways at her, and his eyebrows travelled up and down his forehead like two sliding mice. He looked at me, and then at the tray.
“What is this?” he said. “Is Christopher really a girl?”
“No, no,” I said. “This is Millie.”
“She’s not another wheelbarrow,” Mr Prendergast said. “Is she?” And when Millie simply looked completely confused, he narrowed his eyes at her and said, “So where are you from, young lady?” For a moment, he looked so utterly serious that he made goosebumps come up on my arms.
Millie probably felt the same. “Er – from Series Twelve really,” she admitted.
“Then I think I don’t want to know,” Mr Prendergast said. He hitched his face the other way, and I remembered, with great relief, that he was simply a very good actor. “I think,” he said to me, “that she’d better be a feather duster.”
“What are you talking about?” Millie said, exasperated and frightened, but almost laughing too. This was the effect Mr Prendergast seemed to have on people.
“We can’t have Conrad embarrassed,” he said to her, “and he would be if you went on sharing his room like this. So I think you’d better come downstairs and get turned into another new housemaid. Luckily, there are so many just now that one more will hardly be noticed. Come along to the lift, both of you. No, let her carry the tray, Conrad. It makes her look the part more.”
Hardly able to believe it, we followed Mr Prendergast to the lift. Hugo was in it. He stared at Millie with gloomy surprise.
“New feather duster,” Mr Prendergast told him airily. “She’s the child star of Baby Bunting – you won’t know it yet, it’s on trial in the provinces, but it’ll be a hit, I assure you.”
Millie went bright red and gazed hard at her tray, biting her lip. I think she was trying not to laugh.
Mr Prendergast said nothing more until the lift was nearly at the undercroft. Then he said suddenly, “By the way, where is Christopher?”
“Around,” I said.
Millie added, “He went to the bathroom.”
“Ah,” said Mr Prendergast. “Indeed. That accounts for it then.”
Rather to my surprise, he didn’t ask any more. He just stalked with us to the Middle Hall, where he took Fay aside and murmured a few words to her. It was like magic really. Fay and Polly and two other girls instantly took charge and hurried Millie off to the maids’ cloakroom. When they came back, Millie was wearing a brown and gold striped dress just like the other girls, and a proper maid’s cap. She sat and chatted to them and the other actors while the rest of us had supper.
Fay and Polly must have found somewhere for Millie to sleep that night. When I saw her at breakfast the next morning, she had her hair up on top of her head, under her cap, and Fay or someone had done things to her face with clever make-up, so that Millie looked rather different and quite a bit older. I think she was enjoying herself. She had a surprised, happy look whenever I saw her.
I kept out of Millie’s way on the whole. I dreaded the moment when Miss Semple spotted Millie. Miss Semple’s mild, serious, distracted eyes didn’t miss much, and I was sure she would realise that Millie was not a real maid before long. Then the fat would be in the fire and Mr Prendergast would probably get the sack. I was fairly sure he had made Millie into a feather duster in order to get sacked.
But Miss Semple – nor Mrs Baldock – did not notice Millie all day. Some of the reason was the ghost. It distracted people by playing pranks, dragging the sheets off all the newly made beds on the nursery floor, smashing tooth glasses and bouncing that red rubber ball down flights of stairs. It had done something new every time Mrs Baldock took me over to train me upstairs. But some of the distraction was due to the changes Christopher had started by pressing that button in the cellar. Everything kept moving about, so that when you put something down, and then turned round to pick it up again, it wasn’t where you’d left it. Most people who noticed – and it was hard not to notice before long – thought this was the ghost’s doing too. They just sighed. Even when all the sheets and towels got shifted to quite different cupboards on different floors, they said it was the ghost again and sighed.
But no one could blame the ghost when, late in the afternoon, all our uniforms suddenly changed colour. Instead of gold and brown stripes, we were suddenly wearing bright apple green and cream.
Miss Semple was really distressed
by that change. “Oh, Conrad!” she said. “What is going on? These are the colours we had in my mother’s day. My mother changed them because they were thought to be unlucky. Green is, you know. Things had gone wrong then until Stallery had barely enough money to buy the new colours. Oh, I do hope we aren’t in for any more bad luck!” she said, and went rushing off past me in her usual way.
We were all still rushing about exclaiming, when the Countess and Lady Felice came back unexpectedly.
The Countess and Lady Felice were not expected until the next morning, just before all the guests arrived. But they had finished their shopping early, it seemed, and now there they were, in three cars drawing up outside the great front entrance.
Their arrival caused a general stampede. I had just arrived in the kitchens for my cookery lesson, but Mr Maxim sent me away again because he had to help get together a proper Dinner for the Ladies in a hurry. He told me to go and help in the hall instead. Hugo shot out of the lift as I went by, and raced to the garage to find out where Count Robert had gone with Anthea, and to get him back if he could. In the black-floored hall, there was the main stampede, for what Mr Prendergast called “the dress rehearsal for the real show tomorrow”. Footmen raced down from the attics and up from the undercroft and the marvel was that we all arrived there just as Mr Amos – with Mr Prendergast haunting his right shoulder like a skinny black scarecrow – threw open the huge front doors and Francis and Andrew pulled them wide.
The Countess sailed inside with a new fur wrap trailing from her shoulders. As she handed the wrap off to Manfred, she gazed round at us all with gracious satisfaction, but she seemed, for a second, a little puzzled to see us all in our green and cream stripes. “Amos…” she began.
Mr Amos said, “Yes, my lady?”
The Chrestomanci Series Page 112