Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones [62]
“That’s funny!” said Cat. “I nearly died being born too.”
“Then you must be him,” said Janet, swinging around at the end of her march. “They’d be delighted—I hope. And the best of it would have been that Gwendolen would have been dragged back here to face the music—and serve her right! This is all her fault.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Cat.
“Yes, it is!” said Janet. “She did magic when she was forbidden to, and gave Mr. Blastoff dud earrings for something she wasn’t supposed to have anyway, and dragged me here, and turned Euphemia into a frog, and got you into an even worse mess than I’m in. Will you stop being so loyal for a moment and notice!”
“It’s no good getting angry,” said Cat, and he sighed. He missed Gwendolen even more than he had missed Mrs. Sharp.
Janet sighed too, but with exasperation. She sat down at the dressing table with a thump and stared into her own cross face. She pushed its nose up and crossed her eyes. She had been doing this every spare minute. It relieved her feelings about Gwendolen a little.
Cat had been thinking. “I think it’s a good idea,” he said dolefully. “We’d better go to the garden. But I think you need some kind of magic to go to another world.”
“Thus we find ourselves stumped,” said Janet. “It’s dangerous, and we can’t anyway. But they’d taken Gwendolen’s witchcraft away, and she did it. How? That’s been puzzling me a lot.”
“I expect she used dragons’ blood,” said Cat. “She still had that. Mr. Saunders has a whole jar of dragons’ blood up in his workshop.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Janet yelled, jumping around on her stool.
She really might have been Gwendolen. At the sight of her fierce face Cat missed Gwendolen more than ever. He resented Janet. She had been ordering him about all day. Then she tried to make out it was all Gwendolen’s fault. He shrugged mulishly and went very unhelpful. “You didn’t ask.”
“But can you get some?”
“Maybe. But,” Cat added, “I don’t want to go to another world, really.”
Janet drew a long, quiet breath and managed not to tell him to stay and be turned into a frog then. She made a very ingenious face at the mirror and counted up to ten. “Cat,” she said carefully, “we really are in such a mess here that I can’t see any other way out. Can you?”
“No,” Cat admitted grudgingly. “I said I’d go.”
“And thank you, dear Janet, for your kind invitation, I notice,” Janet said. To her relief, Cat grinned. “But we’ll have to be hideously careful about going,” she said, “because I suspect that if Chrestomanci doesn’t know what we’re doing, Millie will.”
“Millie?” said Cat.
“Millie,” said Janet. “I think she’s a witch.” She ducked her head down and fiddled with the gold-backed hairbrush. “I know you think I go around seeing sorcery everywhere with my nasty, suspicious mind, like you did about Chrestomanci, but I really am sure, Cat. A sweet, kind honey of a witch, if you like. But she is one. How else did she know we were running away this afternoon?”
“Because Mrs. Sharp came and they wanted us,” Cat said, puzzled.
“But we’d only been gone for an hour or so, and we could have been just going blackberrying. We hadn’t even taken our nightclothes,” Janet explained. “Now do you see?”
Though Cat was indeed sure that Janet had an obsession about witchcraft, and he was still feeling sulky and unhelpful, he could not help seeing that Janet had a point. “A very nice witch, then,” he conceded. “I don’t mind.”
“But, Cat, you do see how difficult she’s going to make it,” Janet said. “Do you? You know, you should be called Mule, not Cat. If you don’t want to know a thing, you don’t. How did you get to be called Cat anyway?”
“That was just a joke Gwendolen made,” said Cat. “She always said I’d got nine lives.”
“Gwendolen made jokes?” Janet asked unbelievingly. She stopped, with an arrested look, and turned stiffly away from the mirror.
“Not usually,” said Cat.
“Great