Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones [25]
6
G WENDOLEN GAVE VENT to her fury in her room after dinner. She jumped on her bed and threw cushions about, screaming. Cat stood prudently back against the wall waiting for her to finish. But Gwendolen did not finish until she had pledged herself to a campaign against Chrestomanci.
“I hate this place!” she bawled. “They try to cover everything up in soft, sweet niceness. I hate it, I hate it!” Her voice was muffled among the velvets of her room and swallowed up in the prevailing softness of the Castle. “Do you hear it?” Gwendolen screamed. “It’s an eiderdown of hideous niceness! I wreck their lawn, so they give me tea. I conjure up a lovely apparition, and they have the curtains drawn. Frazier, would you draw the curtains, please! Ugh! Chrestomanci makes me sick!”
“I didn’t think it was a lovely apparition,” Cat said, shivering.
“Ha, ha! You didn’t know I could do that, did you?” said Gwendolen. “It wasn’t to frighten you, you idiot. It was to give Chrestomanci a shock. I hate him! He wasn’t even interested.”
“What did he have us to live here for, if he isn’t interested in you either?” Cat wondered.
Gwendolen was rather struck by this. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “It may be serious. Go away. I want to think about it. Anyway,” she shouted, as Cat was going to the door, “he’s going to be interested, if it’s the last thing I do! I’m going to do something every day until he notices!”
Once again, Cat was mournfully on his own. Remembering what Millie had said, he went along to the playroom. But Roger and Julia were there, playing with soldiers on the stained carpet. The little tin grenadiers were marching about. Some were wheeling up cannon. Others were lying behind cushions, firing their rifles with little pinpricks of bangs. Roger and Julia turned around guiltily.
“You won’t mention this, will you?” said Julia.
“Would you like to come and play too?” Roger asked politely.
“Oh, no thanks,” Cat said hastily. He knew he could never join in this kind of game unless Gwendolen helped him. But he did not dare disturb Gwendolen in her present mood. And he had nothing to do. Then he remembered that Millie had obviously expected him to poke about the Castle more than he had done. So he set off to explore, feeling rather daring.
The Castle seemed strange at night. There were dim little electric lights at regular intervals. The green carpet glowed gently, and things were reflected in the polished floor and walls even more strongly than they were by day. Cat walked softly along, accompanied by several reflected ghosts of himself, until he hardly felt real. All the doors he saw were closed. Cat listened at one or two and heard nothing. He had not quite the courage to open any of them. He went on and on.
After a while he found he had somehow worked around to the older part of the Castle. Here the walls were whitewashed stone and all the windows went in nearly three feet before there was any glass. Then Cat came to a staircase which was the twin of the one that twisted up to his room, except that it twisted in the opposite direction. Cat went cautiously up it.
He was just on the last bend when a door at the top opened. A brighter square of light shone on the wall at the head of the stairs, and a shadow stood in it that could only belong to Chrestomanci. No one else’s shadow could be so tall, with such a smooth head and such a lot of ruffles on its shirt front. Cat stopped.
“And let’s hope the wretched girl won’t try that again,” Chrestomanci said, out of sight above. He sounded a good deal more alert than usual, and rather angry.
Mr. Saunders’ voice, from farther away, said, “I’ve had about enough of her already, frankly. I suppose she’ll come to her senses soon. What possessed her to give away the source of her power like that?”
“Ignorance,” said Chrestomanci. “If I thought she had the least idea what she was doing, it would be the last thing she ever did in that line—or any other.”
“My back was to it,” said Mr. Saunders. “Which was it? Number