Conrad’s Fate. Diana Wynne Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ think anyone’s thought of doing it before.”

      “Then you must all have the most wonderful sense of direction,” Christopher said. “Is this the bathroom?”

      Hugo nodded. We both stuck our heads round the door and Christopher nodded approvingly. “All the essentials,” he said. “Far better than a tin tub or a hedge. Towels?”

      “In the linen store next to the uniforms,” Hugo told him. “This way.”

      He led us in zigzags through the narrow corridors to a place with a bigger skylight than usual. Here the doors were slatted, although they were the same red-brown as all the others. He opened the first slatted door. “Better take a towel each,” he said.

      We gazed at a room twice the size of the one we had been given, filled with shelves piled with folded towels, sheets and blankets. Enough for an army, it seemed to me.

      “How many Staff are there?” Christopher asked as we each took a big red-brown towel.

      “We’re down to just fifty indoors at the moment,” Hugo said. “When we start entertaining again, we’ll go up to nearly a hundred. But the mourning period for Count Rudolf isn’t over for another fortnight, so we’re very quiet until then. Plenty of time for you to find your feet. Uniforms are this way.”

      He led us to the next slatted door. Beyond it was an even bigger room. It had shelves like a public library and all the shelves were stacked with clothes. There was pile after pile of pure white shirts, a wall of velvet breeches, neat towers of folded waistcoats, stack upon stack of striped stockings, rails hung with starched white neckcloths and more shelves devoted to yellow striped aprons. Underneath the shelves were cardboard boxes of buckled shoes. A strong spell against moths made my eyes water. Christopher’s eyes went wide, but I only dimly saw Hugo going round checking labels, looking at us measuringly, and then taking down garments from the shelves.

      We each got two shirts, two aprons, four pairs of underpants, four pairs of stockings, one waistcoat and one pair of velvet breeches. Hugo followed those with neckcloths, carefully laid over the growing heaps in our arms, and then a striped nightshirt apiece. “Do you know your shoe sizes?” he asked.

      Neither of us did. Hugo whipped up a sliding measure from among the cardboard boxes and swiftly found out. Then he fetched buckled shoes from the boxes and made us try them on, efficiently checking where our toes came to and how the heels fitted. “It’s important your shoes don’t hurt,” he said. “You’re on your feet so much.” I could see he made a very good valet.

      “Right,” he said, dumping a gleaming pair of shoes on top of each of the nightshirts. “Go and get into the uniforms and put the rest away and meet me by the lift in ten minutes.” He fetched a slender gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at the time. “Make that seven minutes,” he said. “Or I won’t have time to show you the house. I have to start for Ludwich with Count Robert at four.”

      I put my chin on the shoes to hold them steady and tried to remember the way we had come here. So did Christopher. I went one way with my pile of clothes. Christopher, with a vague but purposeful look, marched off in exactly the opposite direction.

      Hugo went racing after Christopher, shouting, “Stop! Not there!” He sounded so horrified that Christopher swung round in alarm.

      “What’s wrong?” he asked.

      Hugo pointed to a wide red-brown stripe painted on the wall beside Christopher. “You mustn’t ever go past this line,” he said. “It’s the women’s end of the attics beyond that. You’d be sacked on the spot if you were found on the wrong side of it.”

      “Oh,” said Christopher. “Is that all? From the way you yelled, I thought there must be a hundred-foot drop along there. Which is the right way back to our room then?”

      Hugo pointed. It was in a direction that neither of us had thought of taking. We hurried off that way, feeling rather foolish, and after a while, more by luck than anything, arrived in the corridor where Christopher’s tie hung on the doorknob.

      “What foresight on my part!” Christopher said as we each dumped our armloads of clothing on a bed. “I don’t know about you, Grant, but I know I’m going to look and feel a perfect idiot in these clothes – though not as silly as I’m going to feel in this nightshirt tonight.”

      “We’ll get used to it,” I said grumpily as I scrambled out of my own clothes. By this time, Christopher’s confident way of going on was annoying me.

      “Do I detect,” Christopher asked, climbing out of his trousers and hanging them carefully on the rail of his bed, “a certain hostility in you, Grant? Have you, by any chance, let Mr Amos’s ideas get to you? Are you regarding me as a rival?”

      “I suppose I’m bound to,” I said. I turned the black knee-length trousers round to see which was front and which was back. It wasn’t easy to tell.

      “Then let me set your mind at rest, Grant,” Christopher said, puzzling over the breeches too. “And hang on. I think we need to put the stockings on first. These things buckle over the stripy socks and – I hope – help to keep the wretched things up. I sincerely hope so. I hate wrinkles round my ankles. Anyway, forget Mr Amos. I shall only be here for a short time.”

      “Why?” I said. “Are you sure?”

      “Positive,” Christopher said, wriggling a bare foot dubiously into a striped stocking. “I’m only doing this while I’m on my way to something quite different. When I find what I want, I shall leave at once.”

      I was at that moment standing on one foot while I tried to put a stocking on too. It was floppy and it twisted and the top kept closing up. I was so astonished to hear that Christopher was in exactly the same position as me, that I overbalanced. After a moment or so of frantic hopping about, I sat on the floor with a crash.

      “I see your feelings overwhelm you,” Christopher remarked. “You really needn’t worry, Grant. Regard me as a complete amateur. I shall never be a serious footman, let alone a valet or a butler.”

       Chapter Six

      After what Christopher had said, I expected him to look all wrong in his new clothes. Not a bit of it. As soon as he had tightened the straps of his striped waistcoat, so that it sat trimly around his waist, and tied the white neckcloth under his chin, he looked a perfect, jaunty young footman. I was the one who looked wrong. I could see myself in the long stripe of mirror on the back of the door looking, ever so slightly, a mess. This was odd and unfair, because my hair was as black as Christopher’s and I was not fat and there was nothing wrong with my face. But I looked as if I had stuffed my head through a hole on the top of a suit of clothes meant for someone else, the way you do for trick photographs.

      “Seven minutes up,” Christopher said, folding back the frill at the wrist of his shirt to look at his watch. “No time to admire yourself, Grant.”

      As we left the room, I remembered that I had left the port-wine cork in the pocket of my own trousers. Mayor Seuly had said to СКАЧАТЬ