Mixed Magics. Diana Wynne Jones

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 together on the white bedspread, because these seemed the most normal things about him, and hoped this visit would not last too long.