The Chrestomanci Series: Entire Collection Books 1-7. Diana Wynne Jones

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      Tonino was not sure he could bear it either, even though, now he thought about it, he was not sure it had been a punishment. The Duchess had probably intended to make them perform anyway. She was quite mean enough. On the other hand, he was not sure he could stand another of Angelica’s botched spells, either. “Well, it’s only a trap-door,” he said. “It must be held up by one of those little hooks. Let’s try bashing at it with the candlesticks.”

      “And if there’s a spell on it?” said Angelica. “Oh, come on. Let’s try.”

      They seized a candlestick each and knelt beside the windows, knocking diligently at the scarcely-seen black line. The cardboard was tough and pulpy. The candlesticks shortly looked like metal weeping-willow trees. But they succeeded in making a crumbly hollow in the middle of one edge of the hidden door. Tonino thought he could see a glimmer of metal showing. He raised his bent candlestick high to deliver a mighty blow.

      “Stop!” hissed Angelica.

      There were large shuffling footsteps somewhere. Tonino lowered the candlestick by gentle fractions and scarcely dared breathe. A distant voice grumbled… “Mice then” … “Nothing here…” It was suddenly very much darker. Someone had switched off a light, leaving them only with the bluish glimmer of the little chandelier. The footsteps shuffled. A door bumped, and there was silence.

      Angelica laid her candlestick down and began trying to tear at the cardboard with her fingers. Tonino got up and wandered away. It was no good. Someone was going to hear them, whatever they did. The Palace was full of footmen and soldiers. Tonino would have given up then and waited for the Duchess to do her worst. Only now he was standing up, the cardboard room seemed so small. Half of it was filled with the puppets. There was hardly room to move. Tonino wanted to hurl himself at the walls and scream. He did make a movement, and knocked the table. Because he was so much bigger and heavier now, the table swayed and creaked.

      “I know!” he said. “Finish drawing the Angel.”

      The bump on Angelica’s forehead turned up to him. “I’m not in the mood for doodling.”

      “Not a doodle, a spell,” Tonino explained. “And then pull the table over us while we make a hole in the trap door.”

      Angelica did not need telling that the Angel was the most potent spell in Caprona. She threw the candlestick aside and scrambled up. “That might just work,” she said. “You know, for a Montana, you have very good ideas.” Her head hit the chandelier again. In the confusion of swinging shadows, they could not find the tap Angelica had been drawing with. Tonino had to jam his head and arm into the tiny bathroom and pull off the other useless tap.

      Even when the shadows stopped swinging, the Angel scratched on the table was hard to see. It now looked faint and small.

      “He needs his scroll,” said Angelica. “And I’d better put in a halo to make sure he’s holy.”

      Angelica was now so much bigger and stronger that she kept dropping the tap. The halo, when she had scratched it in, was too big, and the scroll would not go right. The table swayed this way and that, the tap ploughed and skidded, and there was a danger the Angel would end up a complete mess.

      “It’s so fiddly!” said Angelica. “Will that do?”

      “No,” said Tonino. “It needs the scroll more unrolled. Some of the words show on our Angel.”

      Because he was quite right, Angelica lost her temper. “All right! Do it yourself, if you’re so clever, you horrible Montana!”

      She held the tap out to Tonino and he snatched it from her, quite as angry. “Here,” he said, ploughing up a long curl of varnish. “Here’s the hanging bit. And the words go sideways. You can see Carmen pa, Venit ang, Cap and a lot more, but there won’t be room for it.”

      “Our Angel,” said Angelica, “says cis saeculare, elus cantare and virtus data near the end.” Tonino scratched away and took no notice. It was hard enough shaping tiny letters with a thing like a tap, without listening to Angelica arguing. “Well it does!” said Angelica. “I’ve often wondered why it’s not the words we sing—”

      The same idea came to both of them. They stared at one another, nose to nose across the scratched varnish.

      “Finding the words means looking for them,” said Tonino.

      “And they were over our gates all the time! Oh how stupid!” exclaimed Angelica. “Come on. We must get out now!”

      Tonino left the scroll with Carmen scraped on it. There was really no room for any more. They dragged the creaking, swaying table across the hole they had made in the floor and set to work underneath it, hacking lumps out of the painted floor.

      Shortly, they could see a bar of silvery metal stretching from the trap door to the floor underneath them. Tonino forced the end of his candlestick down between the battered cardboard edges and heaved sideways at the metal.

      “There’s a spell on it,” he said.

      “Angel of Caprona,” Angelica said at the same moment.

      And the bar slipped sideways. A big oblong piece of the floor dropped away from in front of their knees and swung, leaving a very deep dark hole.

      “Let’s get the Hangman’s rope,” said Angelica.

      They edged along to the pile of puppets and disentangled the string from the little gibbet. Tonino tied it to the table leg.

      “It’s a long way down,” he said dubiously.

      “It’s only a few feet really,” Angelica said. “And we’re not heavy enough to hurt. I went all floppy when you kicked me off the stage and – well – I didn’t break anything anyway.”

      Tonino let Angelica go first, swinging down into the dark space like an energetic blue monkey. Crunch went the shoddy table. Creeeak. And it swayed towards the leg where the rope was tied.

      “Angel of Caprona!” Tonino whispered.

      The table plunged, one corner first, down into the space. The cardboard room rattled. And, with a rending and creaking of wood, the table stuck, mostly in the hole, but with one corner out and wedged against the sides. There was a thump from below. Tonino was fairly sure he was stuck in the room for good now.

      “I’m down,” Angelica whispered up. “You can pull the rope up. It nearly reaches the floor.”

      Tonino leaned over and fumbled the string up from the table leg. He was sure there had been a miracle. That leg ought to have broken off, or the table ought to have gone down the hole. He whispered, “Angel of Caprona!” again as he slid down under the table into the dark.

      The table creaked hideously, but it held together. The string burnt Tonino’s hands as he slid, and then it was suddenly not there. His feet hit the floor almost at once.

      “Oof!” he went. His feet felt as if they had been knocked up through his legs.

      Down there, they were standing on the shiny floor of a Palace room. The towering walls of the Punch and Judy show were on three sides of them. Instead of a back wall, there was a curtain, intended СКАЧАТЬ