Charmed Life

“It may not be so bad once we get used to it,” Cat said, without hope.

“It’ll be worse,” Gwendolen promised him. “There’s something about this Castle. It’s a bad influence, and a deadness. It’s squashing the life and the witchcraft out of me. I can hardly breathe.”

“You’re imagining things,” said Cat, “because you want to be back with Mrs Sharp.” And he sighed. He missed Mrs Sharp badly.

“No I’m not imagining it,” said Gwendolen. “I should have thought it was strong enough even for you to feel. Go on, try. Can’t you feel the deadness?”

Cat did not really need to try, to see what she meant. There was something strange about the Castle. He had thought it was simply that it was so quiet. But it was more than that: there was a softness to the atmosphere, a weightiness, as if everything they said or did was muffled under a great feather quilt. Normal sounds, like their two voices, seemed thin. There were no echoes to them. “Yes, it is queer,” he agreed.

“It’s more than queer – it’s terrible,” said Gwendolen. “I shall be lucky if I survive.” Then she added, to Cat’s surprise, “So I’m not sorry I came.”

“I am,” said Cat.

“Oh, you would need looking after!” said Gwendolen. “All right. There’s a pack of cards on the dressing-table. They’re for divination really, but if we take the trumps out we can use them to play Snap with, if you like.”

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_e5a164a6-e999-5b11-a705-43df898bb56e)

The same softness and silence were there when the red-haired Mary woke Cat the next morning and told him it was time to get up. Bright morning sunshine was flooding the curved walls of his room. Though Cat knew now that the Castle must be full of people, he could not hear a sound from any of them. Nor could he hear anything from outside the windows.

I know what it’s like! Cat thought. It’s like when it’s snowed in the night. The idea made him feel so pleased and so warm that he went to sleep again.

“You really must get up, Eric,” Mary said, shaking him. “I’ve run your bath, and your lessons start at nine. Make haste, or you won’t have time for breakfast.”

Cat got up. He had so strong a feeling that it had snowed in the night that he was quite surprised to find his room warm in the sun. He looked out of the windows, and there were green lawns and flowers, and rooks circling the green trees, as if there had been some mistake. Mary had gone. Cat was glad, because he was not at all sure he liked her, and he was afraid of missing breakfast. When he was dressed, he went along to the bathroom and let the hot water out of the bath. Then he dashed down the twisting stairs to find Gwendolen.

“Where do we go for breakfast?” he asked her anxiously.

Gwendolen was never at her best in the morning. She was sitting on her blue velvet stool in front of her garlanded mirror, crossly combing her golden hair. Combing her hair was another thing which always made her cross. “I don’t know and I don’t care! Shut up!” she said.

“Now that’s no way to speak,” said the maid called Euphemia, briskly following Cat into the room. She was rather a pretty girl, and she did not seem to find her name the burden it should have been. “We’re waiting to give you breakfast along here. Come on.”

Gwendolen hurled her comb down expressively, and they followed Euphemia to a room just along the corridor. It was a square, airy room, with a row of big windows, but, compared with the rest of the Castle, it was rather shabby. The leather chairs were battered. The grassy carpet had stains on it. None of the cupboards would shut properly. Things like clockwork trains and tennis rackets bulged out. Julia and Roger were sitting waiting at a table by the windows, in clothes as shabby as the room.

Mary, who was waiting there too, said, “And about time!” and began to work an interesting lift in a cupboard by the fireplace. There was a clank. Mary opened the lift and fetched out a large plate of bread and butter and a steaming brown jug of cocoa. She brought these over to the table, and Euphemia poured each child a mug of the cocoa.

Gwendolen stared from her mug to the plate of bread. “Is this all there is?”

“What else do you want?” asked Euphemia.

Gwendolen could not find words to express what she wanted. Porridge, bacon and eggs, grapefruit, toast and kippers all occurred to her at once, and she went on staring.

“Make up your mind,” Euphemia said at last. “My breakfast’s waiting for me too, you know.”

“Isn’t there any marmalade?” said Gwendolen.

Euphemia and Mary looked at one another. “Julia and Roger are not allowed marmalade,” Mary said.

“Nobody forbade me to have it,” said Gwendolen. “Get me some marmalade at once.”

Mary went to a speaking tube by the lift, and, after much rumbling and another clank, a pot of marmalade arrived. Mary brought it and put it in front of Gwendolen.

“Thank you,” Cat said fervently. He felt as strongly about it as Gwendolen – more, in fact, because he hated cocoa.

“Oh, no trouble, I’m sure!” Mary said, in what was certainly a sarcastic way, and the two maids went out.

For a while, nobody said anything.

Then Roger said to Cat, “Pass the marmalade, please.”

“You’re not supposed to have it,” said Gwendolen, whose temper had not improved.

“Nobody will know if I use one of your knives,” Roger said placidly.

Cat passed him the marmalade and his knife, too. “Why aren’t you allowed it?”

Julia and Roger looked at each other in a mild, secretive way. “We’re too fat,” Julia said, calmly taking the knife and the marmalade after Roger had done with them. Cat was not surprised, when he saw how much marmalade they had managed to pile on their bread. Marmalade stood on both slices like a sticky brown cliff.

Gwendolen looked at them with disgust, and then, rather complacently, down at her trim linen dress. The contrast was certainly striking. “Your father is such a handsome man,” she said. “It must be such a disappointment to him that you’re both pudgy and plain, like your mother.”

The two children looked at her placidly over their cliffs of marmalade. “Oh, I wouldn’t know,” said Roger.

“Pudgy is comfortable,” said Julia. “It must be a nuisance to look like a china doll, the way you do.”

Gwendolen’s blue eyes glared. She made a small sign under the edge of the table. The bread and thick marmalade whisked itself from Julia’s hands and slapped itself on Julia’s face, marmalade side inwards. Julia gasped a little. “How dare you insult me!” said Gwendolen.

Julia peeled the bread slowly off her face and then fumbled out a handkerchief. Cat supposed she was going to wipe her face. But she let the marmalade stay where it was, trundling in blobs down her plump cheeks, and simply tied a knot in her handkerchief. She pulled the knot slowly tight, looking meaningly at Gwendolen while she did so. With the final pull, the half-full jug of cocoa shot steaming into the air. It hovered for a second, and then shot sideways to hang just above Gwendolen’s head. Then it began to joggle itself into tipping position.

“Stop it!” gasped Gwendolen. She put up a hand to ward the jug off. The jug dodged her and went on tipping. Gwendolen made another sign and gasped out strange words. The jug took not the slightest notice. It went on tipping, until cocoa was brimming in the very end of its spout. Gwendolen tried to lean out sideways away from it. The jug simply joggled along in the air until it was hanging over her head again.

“Shall I make it pour?” Julia asked. There was a bit of a smile under the marmalade.

“You dare!” screamed Gwendolen. “I’ll tell Chrestomanci of you! I’ll – oh!” She sat up straight again, and the jug followed her faithfully. Gwendolen made another grab at it, and it dodged again.

“Careful. You’ll make it spill. And what a shame about your pretty dress,” Roger said, watching complacently.

“Shut up, you!” Gwendolen shouted at him, leaning out the other way, so that she was nearly in Cat’s lap. Cat looked up nervously as the jug came and hovered over him too. It seemed to be going to pour.

But, at that moment, the door opened and Chrestomanci came in, wearing a flowered silk dressing-gown. It was a red and purple dressing-gown, with gold at the neck and sleeves. It made Chrestomanci look amazingly tall, amazingly thin, and astonishingly stately. He could have been an Emperor, or a particularly severe Bishop. He was smiling as he came in, but the smile vanished when he saw the jug.

The jug tried to vanish too. It fled back to the table at the sight of him, so quickly that cocoa slopped out of it on to Gwendolen’s dress – which may or may not have been an accident. Julia and Roger both looked stricken. Julia unknotted her handkerchief as if for dear life.

“Well, I was coming in to say good morning,” Chrestomanci said. “But I see that it isn’t.” He looked from the jug to Julia’s marmalade-glistening cheeks. “If you two ever want to eat marmalade again,” he said, “you’d better do as you’re told. And the same goes for all four of you.”

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Gwendolen said, as if butter – not to speak of marmalade – would not have melted in her mouth.

“Yes, you were,” said Roger.

Chrestomanci came to the end of the table and stood looking down on them, with his hands in the pockets of his noble robe. He looked so tall like that that Cat was surprised that his head was still under the ceiling. “There’s one absolute rule in this Castle,” he said, “which it will pay you all to remember. No witchcraft of any kind is to be practised by children unless Michael Saunders is here to supervise you. Have you understood, Gwendolen?”