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.
“You’ll have to go upstairs, boys,” Miss Rosalie said. “I kept him in bed today. He was fretting himself ill about meeting young Antonio. So excited about the new magic. Up this way.”
They followed Miss Rosalie up the deeply carpeted stairs and into a big sunny bedroom, where white curtains were gently blowing at the big windows. Everything possible was white: the walls, the carpet, the bed with its stacked white pillows and white bedspread, the spray of lilies-of-the-valley on the bedside table – and so neat that it looked like a room no one was using.
“Ah, Eric Chant and Antonio Montana!” Gabriel de Witt said from the bank of pillows. His thin dry voice sounded quite eager. “Glad to see you. Come and take a seat where I can look at you.”
Two plain white chairs had been set one on each side of the bed and about halfway down it. Tonino slid sideways into the nearest, looking thoroughly intimidated. Cat could understand that. He thought, as he went round to the other chair, that the whiteness of the room must be to make Gabriel de Witt show up. Gabriel was so thin and pale that you would hardly have seen him among ordinary colours. His white hair melted into the white of the pillows. His face had shrunk so that it seemed like two caves, made from Gabriel’s jutting cheekbones and his tall white forehead, out of which two strong eyes glared feverishly. Cat tried not to look at the tangle of white chest hair sticking out of the white nightshirt under Gabriel’s too-pointed chin. It seemed indecent, somehow.
But probably the most upsetting thing, Cat thought as he sat down, was the smell of illness and old man in the room, and the way that, in spite of the whiteness, there was a darkness at the edges of everything. The corners of the room felt grey, and they loomed. Cat kept his eyes on Gabriel’s long, veiny, enchanter’s hands, folded