Charmed Life. Diana Wynne Jones

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?”

      “Yes,” said Gwendolen. She gripped her lips together and clenched her hands, but she was still shaking with rage. “I refuse to keep such a silly rule!”

      Chrestomanci did not seem to hear, or to notice how angry she was. He turned to Cat. “Have you understood too, Eric?”

      “Me?” Cat said in surprise. “Yes, of course.”

      “Good,” said Chrestomanci. “Now I will say good morning.”

      “Good morning, Daddy,” said Julia and Roger. “Er – good morning,” Cat said. Gwendolen pretended not to hear. Two could play at that game. Chrestomanci smiled and swept out of the room like a very long procession of one person.

      “Tell-tale!” Gwendolen said to Roger, as soon as the door had shut. “And that was a dirty trick with that jug! You were both doing it, weren’t you?”

      Roger smiled sleepily, not in the least disturbed. “Witchcraft runs in our family,” he said.

      “And we’ve both inherited it,” said Julia. “I must go and wash.” She picked up three slices of bread to keep her going while she did so, and left the room, calling over her shoulder, “Tell Michael I won’t be long, Roger.”

      “More cocoa?” Roger said politely, picking up the jug.

      “Yes, please,” said Cat. It never bothered him to eat or drink things that had been bewitched, and he was thirsty. He thought that if he filled his mouth with marmalade and strained the cocoa through it, he might not taste the cocoa. Gwendolen, however, was sure Roger was trying to insult her. She flounced round in her chair and stayed haughtily looking at the wall, until Mr Saunders suddenly threw open a door Cat had not noticed before and said cheerfully:

      “Right, all of you. Lesson time. Come on through and see how you stand up to some grilling.”

      Cat hastily swallowed his cocoa-flavoured marmalade. Beyond the door was a schoolroom. It was a real, genuine schoolroom, although there were only four desks in it. There was a blackboard, a globe, the pitted school floor and the schoolroom smell. There was that kind of glass-fronted bookcase without which no schoolroom is complete, and the battered grey-green and dark blue books without which no schoolroom bookcase is complete. On the walls were big pictures of the statues Mr Saunders had found so interesting.

      Two of the desks were brown and old. Two were new and yellow with varnish. Gwendolen and Cat sat silently in the new desks. Julia hurried in, with her face shining from soap, and sat in the old desk beside Roger’s, and the grilling began. Mr Saunders strode gawkily up and down in front of the blackboard, asking keen questions. His tweed jacket billowed out from his back, just as his coat had done in the wind. Perhaps that was why the sleeves of the jacket were so much too short for Mr Saunders’s long arms. The long arm shot out, and a foot of bony wrist with a keen finger on the end of it pointed at Cat. “What part did witchcraft play in the Wars of the Roses?”

      “Er,” said Cat. “Ung. I’m afraid I haven’t done them yet, sir.”

      “Gwendolen,” said Mr Saunders.

      “Oh – a very big part,” Gwendolen guessed airily.

      “Wrong,”