Stealer of Souls

“No, I am Italian,” Tonino said firmly. He added, with great pride, “I belong to the foremost spell-house in Italy.”

There did not seem to be any reply to this. Cat did think of saying, “And I’m going to be the next Chrestomanci – I’ve got nine lives, you know,” but he knew this would be silly and boastful. Tonino had not been boasting really. He had been trying to say why he did not belong in the castle. So Cat simply took Tonino back to the playroom, where Julia was only too ready to teach him card games, and mooched away, feeling he had done his duty. He tried to avoid Tonino after that. He did not like being made to feel the way Tonino made him feel.

Unfortunately, Julia went down with measles the next day, and Roger the day after that. Cat had had measles long before he came to the castle, and so had Tonino. Janet could not remember whether she had had them or not, although she assured them that there was measles in the world she came from, because you could be injected against it. “Maybe I’ve been injected,” she suggested hopefully.

Chrestomanci’s wife Millie gave Janet a worried look. “I think you’d better stay away from Roger and Julia all the same,” she said.

“But you’re an enchantress,” Janet said. “You could stop me getting them.”

“Magic has almost no effect on measles,” Millie told her. “I wish it did, but it doesn’t. Cat can see Roger and Julia if he wants, but you keep away.”

Cat went to Roger’s bedroom and then Julia’s and was shocked at how ill they both were. He could see it was going to be weeks before they were well enough to look after Tonino. He found himself, quite urgently and cold-bloodedly (and in spite of what Millie had said) putting a spell on Janet to make sure she did not go down with measles too. He knew as he did it that it was probably the most selfish thing he had ever done, but he simply could not bear to be the only one left to look after Tonino. By the time he got back to the schoolroom, he was in a very bad mood.

“How are they?” Janet asked him anxiously.

“Awful,” Cat said out of his bad mood. “Roger’s sort of purple and Julia’s uglier than ever.”

“Do you think Julia’s ugly then?” Janet said. “I mean, in the normal way.”

“Yes,” said Cat. “Plump and pudgy, like you said.”

“I was angry when I told you that and being unfair,” said Janet. “You shouldn’t believe me when I’m angry, Cat. I’ll take a bet with you, if you like, that Julia grows up a raving beauty, as good-looking as her father. She’s got his bones to her face. And, you must admit, Chrestomanci is taller and darker and handsomer than any man has any right to be!”

She kept giving little dry coughs as she spoke. Cat examined her with concern. Janet’s extremely pretty face showed no sign of any spots, but her golden hair was hanging in lifeless hanks and her big blue eyes were slightly red about the rims. He suspected that he had been too late with his spell. “And Roger?” he asked. “Is he going to grow up ravingly beautiful too?”

Janet looked dubious. “He takes after Millie. But,” she added, coughing again, “he’ll be very nice.”

“Not like me then,” Cat said sadly. “I’m nastier than everyone. I think I’m growing into an evil enchanter. And I think you’ve got measles too.”

“I have not!” Janet exclaimed indignantly.

But she had. By that evening she was in bed too, freckled purple all over and looking uglier than Julia. The maids once again ran up and down stairs with possets to bring down fever, while Millie used the new telephone at the top of the marble stairs to ask the doctor to call again.

“I shall go mad,” she told Cat. “Janet’s really ill, worse than the other two. Go and make sure Tonino’s not feeling too neglected, there’s a good boy.”

I knew it! Cat thought and went very slowly back to the playroom.

Behind him, the telephone rang again. He heard Millie answer it. He had gone three slow steps when he heard the telephone go back on its rest. Millie uttered a great groan and Chrestomanci at once came out of the office to see what was wrong. Cat prudently made himself invisible.

“Oh lord!” Millie said. “That was Mordecai Roberts. Why does everything happen at once? Gabriel de Witt wants to see Tonino tomorrow.”

“That’s awkward,” Chrestomanci said. “Tomorrow I’ve got to be in Series One for the Conclave of Mages.”

“But I really must stay here with the other children,” Millie said. “Janet’s going to need all magic can do for her, particularly for her eyes. Can we put Gabriel off?”

“I don’t think so,” Chrestomanci replied, unusually seriously. “Tomorrow could be Gabriel’s last chance to see anyone. His lives are leaving him steadily now. And he was thrilled when I told him about Tonino. He’s always hoped we’d find someone with back-up magic one day. I know what, though. We can send Cat with Tonino. Gabriel’s almost equally interested in Cat, and the responsibility will do Cat good.”

No it won’t! Cat thought. I hate responsibility! As he fled invisibly back to the playroom, he thought Why me? Why can’t they send one of the wizards on the staff, or Miss Bessemer, or someone? But of course everyone was going to be busy, with Chrestomanci away and Millie looking after Janet.

In the playroom, Tonino was curled up on one of the shabby sofas deep in one of Julia’s favourite books. He barely looked up as the door seemed to open by itself and Cat shook himself visible again.

Tonino, Cat realised, was an avid reader. He knew the signs from Janet and Julia. That was a relief. Cat went quietly away to his own room and collected all the books there that Janet had been trying to make him read and that Cat had somehow not got round to – how could Janet expect him to read books called Millie Goes to School anyway? – and brought the whole armful back to the playroom.

“Here,” he said, dumping them on the floor beside Tonino. “Janet says these are good.”

And he thought, as he curled up on the other battered sofa, that this was exactly how a person got to be an evil enchanter, by doing a whole lot of good things for bad reasons. He tried to think of ways to get out of looking after Tonino tomorrow.

Cat always dreaded going to visit Gabriel de Witt anyway. He was so old-fashioned and sharp and so obviously an enchanter, and you had to remember to behave in an old-fashioned polite way all the time you were there. But these days it was worse than that. As Chrestomanci had said, old Gabriel’s nine lives were leaving him one by one. Every time Cat was taken to see him, Gabriel de Witt looked iller and older and more gaunt, and Cat’s secret dread was that one day he would be there, making polite conversation, and actually see one of Gabriel’s lives as it went away. If he did, he knew he would scream.

The dread of this happening so haunted Cat that he could scarcely speak to Gabriel for watching and waiting for a life to leave. Gabriel de Witt told Chrestomanci that Cat was a strange, reserved boy. To which Chrestomanci answered “Really?” in his most sarcastic way.

People, Cat thought, should be looking after him, and not breaking his spirit by forcing him to take Italian boys to see elderly enchanters. But he could think of no way to get out of it that Millie or Chrestomanci would not see through at once. Chrestomanci seemed to know when Cat was being dishonest even before Cat knew it himself. Cat sighed and went to bed hoping that Chrestomanci would have changed his mind in the morning and decided to send someone else with Tonino.

This was not to be. At breakfast, Chrestomanci appeared (in a sea-green dressing gown with a design of waves breaking on it) to tell Cat and Tonino that they were catching the ten thirty train to Dulwich to visit Gabriel de Witt. Then he went away and Millie – who looked very tired from having sat up half the night with Janet – rustled in to give them their train fare.

Tonino frowned. “I do not understand. Was not Monsignor de Witt the former Chrestomanci, Lady Chant?”

“Call me Millie, please,” said Millie. “Yes, that’s right. Gabriel stayed in the post until he felt Christopher was ready to take over and then he retired – Oh, I see! You thought he was dead! Oh no, far from it. Gabriel’s as lively and sharp as ever he was, you’ll see.”

There was a time when Cat had thought that the last Chrestomanci was dead too. He had thought that the present Chrestomanci had to die before the next one took over, and he used to watch this Chrestomanci rather anxiously in case Chrestomanci showed signs of losing his last two lives and thrusting Cat into all the huge responsibility of looking after the magic in this world. He had been quite relieved to find it was more normal than that.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Millie said. “Mordecai Roberts is going to meet you at the station and then he’ll take you back there in a cab after lunch. And Tom is going to drive you to the station here in the car and meet you off the three nineteen when you get back. Here’s the money, Cat, and an extra five shillings in case you need a snack on the way back – because efficient as I know Miss Rosalie is, she doesn’t have any idea how much boys need to eat. She never did have and she hasn’t changed. And I want to hear all about it when you get home.”

She gave them a warm hug each and rushed away, murmuring, “Lemon barley, febrifuge in half an hour, and then the eye-salve.”

Tonino pushed away his cocoa. “I think I am ill on trains.”

This proved to be true. Luckily Cat managed to get them a carriage to themselves after the young man who acted as Chrestomanci’s secretary had dropped them at the station. Tonino sat at the far corner of the smoky little space, with the window pulled down as low as it would go and his handkerchief pressed to his mouth. Though he did not actually bring up his breakfast, he went whiter and whiter, until Cat could hardly credit that a person could be so pale.

“Were you like this all the way from Italy?” Cat asked him, slightly awed.

“Rather worse,” Tonino said through the handkerchief, and swallowed desperately.

Cat knew he should sympathise. He got travel-sick himself, but only in cars. But instead of feeling sorry for Tonino, he did not know whether to feel superior or annoyed that Tonino, once again, was more to be pitied than he was.

At least it meant that Cat did not have to talk to him.

Dulwich was a pleasant village a little south of London and, once the train had chuffed away from the platform, full of fresh air swaying the trees. Tonino breathed the air deeply and began to get his colour back.

“Bad traveller, is he?” Mordecai Roberts asked sympathetically as he led them to the cab waiting for them outside the station.

This Mr Mordecai Roberts always puzzled Cat slightly. With his light, almost white, curly hair and his dark coffee complexion, he looked a great deal more foreign than Tonino did, and yet when he spoke it was in perfect, unforeign English. It was educated English, too, which was another puzzle, because Cat had always vaguely supposed that Mr Roberts was a sort of valet hired to look after Gabriel de Witt in his retirement. But Mr Roberts also seemed to be a strong magic user. He looked at Cat rather reproachfully as they got into the cab and said, “There are hundreds of spells against travel sickness, you know.”

“I think I did stop him being sick,” Cat said uncomfortably. Here was his old problem again, of not being sure when he was using magic and when he was not. But what really made Cat uncomfortable was the knowledge that if he had used magic on Tonino, it was not for Tonino’s sake. Cat hated seeing people be sick. Here he was doing a good thing for a bad selfish reason again. At this rate he was, quite definitely, going to end up as an evil enchanter.

Gabriel de Witt lived in a spacious, comfortable modern house with wide windows and a metal rail along the roof in the latest style. It was set among trees in a new road that gave the house a view of the countryside beyond.

Miss Rosalie threw open its clean white front door and welcomed them all inside. She was a funny little woman with a lot of grey in her black hair, who always, invariably, wore grey lace mittens. She was another puzzle. There was a big gold wedding-ring lurking under the grey lace of her left-hand mitten, which Cat thought might mean she was married to Mr Roberts, but she always had to be called Miss Rosalie. For another thing, she behaved as if she was a witch. But she wasn’t. As she shut the front door, she made brisk gestures as if she were setting wards of safety on it. But it was Mr Roberts who really set the wards.