Conrad's Fate Read online

  The poor kid jumped a mile. His sweaty face went white, and he scrambled to his bare feet in a hurry. “Just coming, sir—Oh, it’s you!” he said when he saw Christopher’s face sticking out from the creepers above his head. “Don’t call out at me in posh voices like that! Do you want to give me a heart attack?”

  “This is my normal voice,” Christopher said coldly. “What are you doing in that ditch anyway?”

  “Skiving off, of course,” said Smedley. “I’m supposed to be looking for that damn guard dog—the one you tamed when we was walking here. Brute disappeared this morning, and park security’s doing his nut, thinking someone may have poisoned it. All us garden staff are out looking for it.” He scowled. “I’m not risking getting bitten, thanks.”

  “Very sensible,” Christopher said. “Tell me, does this garden have a maze?”

  “No,” said Smedley. “Oriental garden, rose garden, four flower gardens, water garden, shrubbery, topiary garden, fern garden, hedged garden, vegetable garden, fruit garden, six hothouses, one orangery, big conservatory, but no maze. Or it may have got caught in a trap, see.”

  “What—the maze? Or the whole garden?” Christopher asked.

  “The dog, stupid!” Smedley said.

  “We’ll keep a look out for it for you,” Christopher told him. “What do you call this ditch and wall at the end of this garden? Apart from a good place to lurk, that is.”

  “This? This is the ha-ha,” Smedley said.

  Christopher shot me a superior look. “There you are, Grant. Come along now.” He jumped down into the ditch beside Smedley, who flinched away. “Fear me not,” Christopher said. “Grant and I are merely going for a stroll in the park. We will not give you away.”

  I jumped down and went squelch. One of my buckled shoes came off. I took the other one off, too, and my striped stockings. Smedley seemed to me to have the right idea. The grass felt deliciously cool and wet as we climbed the bank and set off into the parklands.

  “Your funeral if you tread on a bee!” Smedley shouted after me. Evidently Christopher’s superior manner annoyed him as much as it annoyed me, because he added, “Poncy footmen!” when we were almost too far away to hear.

  “Take no notice,” Christopher said—as if I would have done. “Our friend Smedley has clearly been told that house staff are nothing but mincing lackeys and that gardeners do all the real work.” We walked a little way. I curled my toes luxuriously into the grass and thought that Christopher would think this. He had no idea how irritating he could be. “Smedley may be right,” Christopher added. “I’ve never minced so much in my life before.” We walked some more, and Christopher began to frown. “The oddness is getting fainter,” he said. “Can you feel?”

  “Not really,” I confessed. “I only properly felt it in the attics.”

  “Pity. Well, let’s go as far as that clump of trees and see,” Christopher said.

  The clump of trees was more like a small bushy wood on top of a little hill. We pushed our way through, up the hill and down in a straight line. I had forgotten it had rained earlier. Willows wept on us, and bushes sprayed us. Christopher hardly seemed to notice. He pushed on, murmuring, “Fainter, fainter.” I put my shoes back on my muddy feet, wishing we’d taken the time to put on ordinary clothes. We would both need to change into dry uniforms for this evening, or Mr. Amos would have our guts for garters. Count Robert would be there for Dinner, I supposed. Maybe the reason I hadn’t known he was causing my Fate was because I hadn’t been close enough to him. I could get to stand right beside him at Dinner. Then I’d surely know.

  We were both so busy thinking of other things that we nearly missed seeing Lady Felice riding toward the wood on Oracle.

  I said, “Oh-oh! Family!” and pulled Christopher back among the wet willows.

  He said, “Thanks, Grant.” Then we had to stand there, because Lady Felice was cantering straight toward the hill where we were. Water ran down our necks, along with itchy bits of willow, while we waited for her to swerve around the hill and ride out of sight.

  Instead, she came careering straight toward the edge of the wood and pulled the horse to a stop there. Hugo came out of the bushes just below us, still in his everyday clothes, and stood there with his hair as wet as ours was, looking up at her. She stared down at Hugo. Everything went tense and still.

  Hugo said, “The car nearly broke down. I thought I was never going to get back.”

  Lady Felice said, “I wish you or Robert had warned me. It felt like a hundred years!”

  “For me, too,” Hugo said. “Robert didn’t want any questions asked, you see. At least he didn’t find Ludwich as dreary as I did. It was like being half dead.”

  Lady Felice cried out, “Oh, Hugo!” and jumped down off Oracle. Hugo sort of plunged forward to meet her, and the two of them flung their arms around each other as if it really had been a hundred years since they last met. Oracle wandered peacefully off and then stood, with the look of a horse that was used to this.

  I stared at them and then stared at Christopher, who looked quite as uncomfortable as I felt. He made a very slight gesture and said, in his normal voice, “Spell of silence, Grant. They won’t hear us. I guess we’re looking at something here that mustn’t get back to the Countess or Mr. Amos either.”

  Not altogether believing in the spell of silence, I was just nodding when there was another of those sideways jerks. It was quite strong, but nothing much seemed to change. It did not seem to affect Hugo and Lady Felice in the least, and we were still draped in trees—except that they were not willows now, but some other kind, just as drooping and just as wet. I noticed that my striped stockings were not in my hand anymore. When I looked down, I saw they were on my legs instead.

  Christopher backed away out of sight of Hugo and his Lady, looking very excited. “That definitely came from the house!” he said. “Come on, Grant. Let’s get back there quickly and find out what’s doing it.”

  Ten

  Christopher set off through the wet wood at a gallop. On the level grass beyond I had to work hard to keep up. He had such long legs. But he had to stop in the ditch in front of the ha-ha and wait for me to boost him up the wall.

  “Found the dog?” Smedley called out from farther along.

  “No,” I panted, boosting hard.

  Christopher held down his hands to help me scramble up and hauled me up as if I weighed nothing.

  “What’s the hurry, then?” Smedley said as my feet met the top of the wall and we both set off running again. “I thought the dog was after you!”

  We were too breathless to answer. Christopher dropped to a jog-trot and kept on in a straight line toward the house, past yew hedges and tiny box hedges, and then between the banks of flowers. I had a feeling that some of this was new, but it all jogged past so fast that I was not really sure anything had changed until we came to the open circle where Christopher had leaned on the sundial. The chubby boy statue was now a stately stone young lady carrying an urn, which was spouting water.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Lucky it didn’t do that while you were leaning on it!”

  “Save your breath,” Christopher panted.

  We jogged on, pounding on gravel, then clattering up stone steps, and more stone steps, until we were charging across a wide paved platform in front of the house itself. I tried to stop here. It was obviously a place where Staff were not allowed. But Christopher trotted on, into the house through an open glass door, across a parquet floor in a room that was lined with books. While Christopher was wrestling open the heavy door, I saw there was a ladder up to a balcony where there were more books, under a fancy ceiling, and I knew this was the library and we shouldn’t be there.

  The heavy door brought us out into the hall, with the main stairway ahead in the distance. Andrew was just crossing the black floor, carrying a tray. He said, “Hey!” as we dashed past him. I knew then that Christopher, in his hurry to discover what was making the changes, had clean forgotten to
make us invisible—and forgotten that he had forgotten. Andrew stared after us as Christopher skidded around the banisters and led me charging up the forbidden stairway. I was just glad it was Andrew and not Gregor. Gregor would have reported us to Mr. Amos.

  At the top, outside the ballroom, Christopher had to stop and bend over to get his breath. But as soon as he could stand up again, he stared around in a puzzled way and then pointed toward the lofty ceiling.

  “I don’t understand, Grant. I thought we’d be on top of it here. Up again.”

  So up we went again, to the floor where the Family bedrooms were. Here the next lot of stairs were not in a straight line from the lower lot. We had to tear along the palatial passage to get to them and around a corner. When we whirled around that corner, I thought for a moment we were in a riot. There were squeals and screams and girls in brown-and-gold uniforms pelting everywhere. They all froze when they saw us. Then one of them said, “It’s only the Improvers,” and there were sighs of relief all around. I could see they were all the younger maids. None of them were much older than me or Christopher.

  “It’s line-tig,” one of them explained breathlessly. “Want to play?”

  “Love to,” Christopher said, quite as breathlessly. “But we have to take a message.” And he charged on to the next stairs and up those. “I suppose … have to have … fun … somewhere,” he panted as we pounded upward.

  “If I was them, I’d go and chase about in the nurseries where it’s empty,” I said.

  “No … excuse for … being there,” Christopher suggested.

  He did not pause on the next floor with its smell of new carpets. He just shook his head, chased along to the next stairs, and clattered up them to the nursery floor. “Getting warmer,” he gasped, and we trotted along to the creaking wooden stairs to the attics.

  By this time I could feel the strangeness, too. It was buzzing actively. It did not surprise me in the least when, as soon as we panted into the attics, Christopher plunged away past the lift toward the center of the house. I knew we were going to end up in that space beyond the line painted on the wall.

  Christopher was galloping along, excitedly puffing out, “Warm, warmer, almost hot!” when we both more or less ran into Miss Semple coming away from the clothes stores.

  “Steady on!” she said. “Don’t you know the rule about not running?”

  “Sorry!” we both said. Then, without having to think, I added, “We need new clothes. Christopher got mud on his breeches.”

  Christopher looked down at himself. He was covered in brick dust and moss as well as mud. “And Conrad’s ruined his stockings,” he said.

  I looked at my striped legs and discovered that at least four of the stripes had converted into ladders, with my skin showing through. There were willow leaves stuck behind the buckles of my shoes.

  “So I see,” Miss Semple said, looking, too. “Come along, then.” She marched us into the clothes room, where she made us change practically everything. It was such a waste of time. Miss Semple said we were a disgrace to Stallery. “And those stockings will have to come out of your wages,” she told me. “Silk stockings are costly. Be more careful in future.”

  Christopher scowled and sighed and fretted. I whispered to him, “If we hadn’t met her, she’d have gone down and caught those girls playing tig. Or she might have caught us going past the painted line.”

  “True,” Christopher muttered. “But it’s still maddening. The changes have stopped now, damn it!” He was right. I couldn’t feel the strangeness buzzing at all now.

  When we were clean and neat and crisp again, Miss Semple picked up the pile of towels she had been carrying and sailed away to the lift with them.

  “Now, hurry,” Christopher said, “before anything else interferes.”

  We tiptoed speedily and cautiously toward the center of the attics. In the distance, floors creaked and someone banged a door, but no one came near. I think we both gasped with nervous relief when we passed the line painted on the wall. Then we sprinted to the wide space with the row of windows.

  “Here—it is here, the center of things!” Christopher said. He turned slowly around, looking up, looking down. “And I still don’t understand it,” he said.

  There really did seem to be nothing but flaking plaster ceiling above and wide old floorboards underfoot. In front of us, the rather dirty row of windows looked out over the distant blue mountains above Stallchester, and behind us was just wall, flaking like the ceiling. The dark passage on the other side that led to the women’s side was identical to one we had come along.

  I pointed to it. “What about Millie? Is she along there?”

  Christopher shook his head impatiently. “No. Here. Here is the only place she feels anywhere near at the moment. It looks as if these changes are somehow connected to the way she’s not here, but that’s all I know.”

  “Under the floor, then?” I suggested. “We could take one of the floorboards up.”

  Christopher said, in an unconvinced way, “I suppose we could try,” and we had, both of us, knelt down near the windows to look at the boards, when another sideways jolt happened. It was lucky we were kneeling. Up here the shift was savage. We were both thrown over by it. My head cracked against the wall under the windows. I swore.

  Christopher reached out and hauled me up. “I see the reason for these painted lines now,” he said, rather soberly. “If you’d been standing up, Grant, you’d have gone straight through the window. I shudder to think how far it is to the ground from here.”

  He was pale and upset. I was annoyed. I looked around while I was rubbing my head, and it was all exactly the same, wide floorboards, distant mountains through the windows, flaky plaster, and the feeling of something strange here as strong as ever. “What does it?” I said. “And why?”

  Christopher shrugged. “So much for my clever ideas,” he said. “If I have a fault, Grant, it’s being too clever. Let’s go down and check the nursery floor. Nothing seems to have changed at all this time.”

  Famous last words, my sister Anthea used to say. Christopher strode away down the passage, and there was a door blocking his way, a peeling red-brown door.

  “Oh!” he said. “This is new!” He rattled at it until he found the way it opened.

  It blew inward out of his hands. We both went backward.

  Wind howled around us, crashing the door into the wall and flapping our neckcloths into our faces. We both knew at once we were somewhere different and rickety and very, very high up. We could feel the floor shaking under our feet. We clutched at each other and edged cautiously forward into the stormy daylight beyond the door.

  There Christopher said, “Oooh!” and added airily, “Not afraid of heights, I hope, Grant?”

  I could hardly hear him for the wind and the creaking of wood. “No,” I said. “I like them.” The door led out onto a small wooden balcony thing with a low, flimsy-looking rail around it. Almost at our feet, a square hole led into a crazy old wooden stairway down the side of what seemed to be a tall wooden tower. Our heads both bent to look through the hole. And we could see the stairway zigzagging giddily away, down and down, getting smaller and smaller, outside what was definitely the tallest and most unsafe-looking wooden building I had ever seen. It could have been a lighthouse—except that it had slants of roof sticking out every so often, like a pagoda. It swayed and creaked and thrummed in the wind. Far, far below, something seemed to be channeling the gale into a melancholy howling.

  I tore my eyes from that tottering stairway and looked outward. Where the park should have been, the ground was all gray-green heathery moor, but beyond that—this was the creepy part to me—there were the hills around Stallery, the exact same craggy shapes that surrounded Stallchester. I could see Stall Crag over there, plain as plain.

  After that I stood by the railing and looked upward. There was a very small slanting roof above us, made of warped wooden tiles, with a sort of spire on top that ended in a broken weath
ercock. It was all so old that it was groaning and fluttering in the wind. Behind and around us, the moor just went on. There was no sign of Stallery at all.

  Christopher was white, nearly as white as the neckcloth that kept fluttering across his face. “Grant,” he said, “I’ve got to go down. Millie feels quite near now.”

  “We’ll both go,” I said. I didn’t want to be up at the top of this building when Christopher’s weight brought the whole thing down, and besides, it was a challenge.

  I don’t think Christopher saw it as a challenge. It took him an obvious effort to unclench his hand from the doorjamb, and when he had, he turned around very quickly and clenched the same hand even harder on the rail beside the stairs. The whole balcony swayed. He kept making remarks—nervous, joky remarks—as he went carefully down out of sight, but the wind roared too hard for me to hear them.

  As soon as Christopher was far enough down that I wouldn’t kick his face, I scrambled onto the stairs, too. A mistake. Everywhere groaned, and the staircase, together with the balcony, swayed outward away from the building. I had to wait until Christopher was farther down and putting weight on a different part of it. Then I had to go slowly because he was. I could tell he was scared silly.

  I was quite scared, too. I’d rather climb Stall Crag any day. It stays still. This place swayed every time one of us moved, and I kept wondering what lunatic had built the thing, and why. As far as I could tell, nobody lived in it. It was all cracked and weathered and twisted. There were windows without glass in the wooden walls. When Christopher was being particularly slow, I leaned over with the wind thundering around me and peered into the nearest window, but they were always just empty wooden rooms inside. There was a door on each balcony we came to, but when I looked down past my own legs—not a clever thing to do: I went quite giddy—I saw that Christopher was not trying to open any of the doors, so I left them alone, too. I just went on to the next flight, slanting the opposite way.