The Lives of Christopher Chant (10 page)

“STOP THAT!” Dr. Pawson roared. Christopher guiltily took his arms down.

Instantly everything began raining back to the ground again. The tables plunged, the carpets sank, vases, pictures and clocks crashed to the floor all around. Dr. Pawson’s armchair plummeted with the rest, followed by pieces of the chandelier, but Dr. Pawson himself floated down smoothly, hav-ing clearly done some prudent magic of his own. Up above, the roof came down thunderously. Christopher could hear tiles falling and chimneys crashing, as well as smashings and howls from upstairs. The upper floors seemed now to be trying to get through to the ground. The walls of the room buckled and oozed plaster, while the windows bent and fell to pieces. It was about five minutes before the slidings and smashings died away, and the dust settled even more slowly. Dr. Pawson sat among the wreckage and the blowing dust and stared at Christopher. Christopher stared back, very much wanting to laugh.

A little old lady suddenly materialized in the armchair opposite Dr. Pawson’s. She was wearing a white nightgown and a lacy cap over her white hair. She smiled at Christopher in a steely way. “So it was you, child,” she said to Christopher. “Mary-Ellen is in hysterics. Don’t
ever
do that again, or I’ll put a Visitation on you. I’m still famed for my Visitations, you know.” Having said this, she was gone as suddenly as she had come.

“My old mother,” said Dr. Pawson. “She’s normally bedridden, but as you can see, she’s very strongly moved. As is almost everything else.” He sat and stared at Christopher awhile longer, and Christopher went on struggling not to laugh. “Silver,” Dr. Pawson said at last.

“Silver?” asked Christopher.

“Silver,” said Dr. Pawson. “Silver’s the thing that’s stopping you, Chant. Don’t ask me why at the moment. Maybe we’ll never get to the bottom of it, but there’s no question about the facts. If you want to work magic, you’ll have to give up money except for coppers and sovereigns, throw away that tiepin, and get rid of that stupid brace.”

Christopher thought about Papa, about school, about cricket, in a flood of anger and frustration which gave him courage to say, “But I don’t think I do want to work magic, sir.”

“Yes you do, Chant,” said Dr. Pawson. “For at least the next month.” And while Christopher was wondering how to contradict him without being too rude, Dr. Pawson gave out another vast bellow. “YOU HAVE TO PUT EVERYTHING BACK, CHANT!”

And this is just what Christopher had to do. For the rest of the morning he went around the house, up to every floor and then outside into the garden, while Dr. Pawson trundled beside him in his armchair and showed him how to cast holding-spells to stop the house falling down. Dr. Pawson never seemed to leave that armchair. In all the time Christopher spent with him, he never saw Dr. Pawson walk. Around midday, Dr. Pawson sent his chair gliding into the kitchen, where a cook-maid was sitting dolefully in the midst of smashed butter crocks, spilled milk, bits of basin and dented saucepans, and dabbing at her eyes with her apron.

“Not hurt in here are you?” Dr. Pawson barked. “I put a holder on first thing to make sure the range didn’t burst and set the house on fire—that sort of thing. That held, didn’t it? Water pipes secure?”

“Yes, sir,” gulped the cook-maid. “But lunch is ruined, sir.”

“We’ll have to have a scratch lunch for once,” said Dr. Pawson. His chair swung around to face Christopher. “By this evening,” he said, “this kitchen is going to be mended. Not holding-spells. Everything as new. I’ll show you how. Can’t have the kitchen out of action. It’s the most important place in the house.”

“I’m sure it is, sir,” Christopher said, eyeing Dr. Pawson’s mountain of a stomach.

Dr. Pawson glared at him. “I can dine in college,” he said, “but my mother needs her nourishment.”

For the rest of that day Christopher mended the kitchen, putting crockery back together, recapturing spilled milk and cooking sherry, taking dents out of pans, and sealing a dangerous split at the back of the range. While he did, Dr. Pawson sat in his armchair warming himself by the range fire and barking things like, “Now put the eggs together, Chant. You’ll need the spell to raise them first, then the dirt-dispeller you used on the milk.
Then
you can start the mending-spell.” While Christopher labored, the cook-maid, who was obviously even more frightened of Dr. Pawson than Christopher was, edged around him trying to bake a cake and prepare the roast for supper.

One way and another, Christopher probably learned more practical magic that day than he had in two and a half terms at school. By the evening he was exhausted. Dr. Pawson barked, “You can go back to your father for now. Be here at nine tomorrow prompt. There’s still the rest of the house to see to.”

“Oh Lord!” Christopher groaned, too weary to be polite. “Can’t someone help me at all? I’ve learned my lesson.”

“What gave you the idea there was only one lesson to learn?” bawled Dr. Pawson.

Christopher tottered back to the lodging house carrying the tooth-brace, the money, and the tiepin wrapped in the gray handkerchief. Papa looked up from a table spread with horoscope sheets. “Well?” he asked with gloomy eagerness.

Christopher fell into a lumpy chair. “Silver,” he said. “Silver stops me working magic. And I hope I
have
got more than one life because Dr. Pawson’s going to kill me at this rate.”

“Silver?” said Papa. “Oh dear! Oh dear, dear!” He was very sad and silent all through the cabbage soup and sausages the lodging house provided for supper. After supper, he said, “My son, I have a confession to make. It is my fault that silver stops you working magic. Not only did I cast your horoscope when you were born, but I also cast every other spell I knew to divine your future. And you can imagine my horror when each kind of forecast foretold that silver would mean danger or death to you.” Papa paused, drumming his fingers on the horoscope sheets and staring absently at the wall. “Argent,” he said musingly. “Argent means silver. Could I have got it wrong?” He pulled himself sadly back together. “Well it is too late to do anything about that, except to warn you again to have nothing to do with your Uncle Ralph.”

“But why is it your fault?” Christopher asked, very uncomfortable at the way Papa’s thoughts were going.

“There is no getting around Fate,” Papa said, “as I should have known. I cast my strongest spells and put forth all my power to make silver neutral to you. Silver—any contact with silver—seems to transform you at once into an ordinary person without a magic gift at all—and I see now that this could have its dangers. I take it you
can
work magic when you are not touching silver?”

Christopher gave a weary laugh. “Oh yes. Like anything.”

Papa brightened a little. “That’s a relief. Then my sacrifice here was not in vain. As you know, Christopher, I very foolishly lost your mama’s money and my own by investing it where I thought my horoscopes told me to.” He shook his head sadly. “Horoscopes are tricky, particularly with money. Be that as it may, I am finished. I regard myself as a failure. You are all I have left to live for, my son. Any success I am to know, I shall know through you.”

If Christopher had not been so tired, he would have found this decidedly embarrassing. Even through his weariness, he found he was annoyed that he was expected to live for Papa and not on his own account. Would it be fair, he wondered, to use magic to make yourself a famous cricketer? You could make the ball go anywhere you wanted. Would Papa regard this as success? He knew perfectly well that Papa would not. By this time, his eyes were closing themselves and his head was nodding. When Papa sent him off to bed, Christopher fell onto the twanging mattress and slept like a log. He had meant, honestly meant, to go to The Place Between and tell Tacroy all that had happened, but either he was just too tired or too scared that Papa would guess. Whatever the reason was, he did not have any dreams of any kind that night.

F
OR THE NEXT
three weeks, Dr. Pawson kept Christopher so hard at work mending the house that he fell into bed each night too weary to dream. Each morning when Christopher arrived, Dr. Pawson was sitting in his armchair in the hall, waiting for him.

“To work, Chant!” he would bark.

Christopher took to replying, “Really, sir? I thought we were going to have a lazy day like yesterday.” The strange thing about Dr. Pawson was that he did not mind this kind of remark in the least. Once Christopher got used to him, he discovered that Dr. Pawson rather liked people to stand up to him, and once he had discovered that, Christopher found that he did not really hate Dr. Pawson—or only in the way you hate a violent thunderstorm you happen to be caught in. He found he quite liked rebuilding the house, though perhaps the thing which he really liked was working magic that actually did something. Every spell he did had a real use. That made it far more interesting than the silly things he had tried to learn at school. And the hard work was much easier to bear when he was able to say things to Dr. Pawson that would have caused masters at school to twist his ears and threaten to cane him for insolence.

“Chant!” Dr. Pawson howled from his armchair in the middle of the lawn. “Chant! The chimney pots on the right are crooked.”

Christopher was balanced on the tiles of the roof, shivering in the wind. It was raining that day, so he was having to maintain a shelter-spell for the roof and for the lawn while he worked. And he had put the chimneys straight four times already. “Yes, sir, of course, sir!” he screamed back. “Would you like them turned to gold too, sir?”

“None of that or I’ll make you
do
it!” Dr. Pawson yelled.

When Christopher came to mend Dr. Pawson’s mother’s room, he made the mistake of trying to treat old Mrs. Pawson the same way. She was sitting up in a bed heaped with plaster from the ceiling, looking quite comfortable and composed, knitting something striped and long. “I saved the looking-glass, child,” she remarked with a pleasant smile, “but that is as far as my powers stretch. Be good enough to mend the chamber pot first, and count yourself fortunate, child, that it had not been used. You will find it under the bed.”

Christopher fished it out in three broken white pieces and got to work.

“Mend it quite straight,” old Mrs. Pawson said, her knitting needles clattering away. “Make sure the handle is not crooked and the gold rim around the top is quite regular. Please do not leave any uncomfortable lumps or unsightly bulges, child.”

Her voice was gentle and pleasant and it kept interrupting the spell. At length Christopher asked in exasperation, “Would you like it studded with diamonds too? Or shall I just give it a posy of roses in the bottom?”

“Thank you, child,” said Mrs. Pawson. “The posy of roses, please. I think that’s a charming idea.”

Dr. Pawson, sitting by in his armchair, was full of glee at Christopher’s discomfiture. “Sarcasm never pays, Chant,” he bawled. “Roses require a creation-spell. Listen carefully.”

After that, Christopher had to tackle the maids’ rooms. Then he had to mend all the plumbing. Dr. Pawson gave him a day off on Sundays so that Papa could take him to church. Christopher, now he knew what he could do, toyed with the idea of making the church spire melt like a candle, but he never quite dared to do it, with Papa pacing soberly beside him. Instead, he experimented in other ways. Every morning, while he was walking up the Trumpington Road, he tried to coax the trees that lined it into a different pattern. He got so good at it that before long he could shunt them up the road in a long line and crowd them into a wood at the end. In the evenings, tired though he was, he could not resist trying to make the lodging house supper taste better. But food magic was not easy. “What
do
they put in sausages these days?” Papa remarked. “These taste of strawberry.”

Then came a morning when Dr. Pawson shouted from his chair in the hall, “Right, Chant, from now on you finish the mending in the afternoons. In the mornings we teach you some control.”

“Control?” Christopher said blankly. By this time the house was nearly finished and he was hoping that Dr. Pawson would soon have finished with him too.

“That’s right,” Dr. Pawson bawled. “You didn’t think I’d let you loose on the world without teaching you to control your power, did you? As you are now, you’re a menace to everyone. And don’t tell me you haven’t been trying to see what you can do, because I won’t believe you.”

Christopher looked at his feet and thought of what he had just been doing with the trees in the Trumpington Road. “I’ve hardly done anything, sir.”

“Hardly anything! What do boys know of restraint?” said Dr. Pawson. “Into the garden. We’re going to raise a wind, and you’re going to learn to do it without moving so much as a blade of grass.”

They went into the garden, where Christopher raised a whirlwind. He thought it rather expressed his feelings. Luckily it was quite small and only destroyed one rose bed. Dr. Pawson canceled it with one flap of his purple banana hand. “Do it again, Chant.”

Learning control was boring, but it was a good deal more restful. Dr. Pawson obviously knew this. He began setting Christopher homework to do in the evenings. All the same, even after disentangling the interlacing spells in the problems he had been set, Christopher began to feel for the first time that he had some brain left over to think with. He thought about silver first. Keeping Uncle Ralph’s silver sixpence in his pocket had stopped him doing such a lot. And that beastly tooth-brace had stopped him doing even more. What a waste! No wonder he had not been able to take the books to the Goddess until Matron made him take the brace out.

He must have been using magic to get to the Anywheres all these years without knowing it—except that he
had
known it, in an underneath sort of way. Tacroy had known, and he had been impressed. And the Goddess must have realized, too, when her silver bracelet turned Christopher into a ghost. Here Christopher tried to go on thinking about the Goddess, but he found he kept thinking of Tacroy instead. Tacroy would now have gone into a trance uselessly for three weeks running. Tacroy made light of it, but Christopher suspected that going into a trance took a lot out of a person. He really would have to let Uncle Ralph know what had happened.

Glancing over at Papa, who was hard at work with a special pen marking special symbols on horoscopes under the big oil lamp, Christopher started writing a letter to Uncle Ralph, pretending it was part of his homework. The oil lamp cast shadows on Papa’s face, removing the threadbare look and making him look unusually kind and stern. Christopher told himself uneasily that Papa and Uncle Ralph just did not like one another. Besides, Papa had not actually forbidden him to write to Uncle Ralph.

All the same, it took several nights to write the letter. Christopher did not want to seem disloyal to Papa. In the end, he simply wrote that Papa had taken him away from school to be taught by Dr. Pawson. It was a lot of effort for such a short letter. He posted it next day on his way up the Trumpington Road with a sense of relief and virtue.

Three days later, Papa had a letter from Mama. Christopher could tell at once from Papa’s face that Uncle Ralph had told Mama where they were. Papa threw the letter on the fire and fetched his hat. “Christopher,” he said, “I shall be coming with you to Dr. Pawson’s today.”

This made Christopher certain that Mama was in Cambridge too. As he walked up the Trumpington Road beside Papa, he tried to work out what his feelings were about that. But he did not have much time to think. A strong wind, scented with roses, swept around the pair of them, hurling Christopher sideways and snatching Papa’s hat from his head. Papa made a movement to chase his hat—which was just rolling under a brewer’s dray—and then dived around and seized Christopher’s arm instead.

“Hats are expendable,” he said. “Keep walking, son.”

They kept walking, with the wind hurling and buffeting around them. Christopher could actually feel it trying to curl around him in order to pull him away. But for Papa’s grip on his arm, he would have been carried across the road. He was impressed. He had not known Mama’s magic was this strong.

“I can control it if you want,” he called to Papa above the noise. “Dr. Pawson taught me wind control.”

“No, Christopher,” Papa panted sternly, looking strange and most undignified, with his coat flapping and his hair blowing in all directions. “A gentleman
never
works magic against a woman, particularly his own mama.”

Gentlemen, it seemed to Christopher, made things unreasonably difficult for themselves in that case. The wind grew stronger and stronger, the nearer they got to the gate of Dr. Pawson’s house. Christopher thought they would never cover the last yard or so. Papa was forced to seize the gatepost to hold them both in place while he tried to undo the latch. Whereupon the wind made a last, savage snatch. Christopher felt his feet leave the ground, and knew he was about to soar away. He made himself very heavy just in time. He did it because it was a contest, really, because he did not like being on the losing side. He would not at all have minded seeing Mama. But he very much hoped Papa would not notice the rather large dents his feet had made in the ground just outside the gate.

Inside the gate there was no more wind. Papa smoothed his hair and rang the doorbell.

“Aha!” shouted Dr. Pawson from his armchair while Mary-Ellen was opening the door. “The expected trouble has come to pass, I see. Chant, oblige me by going upstairs and reading aloud to my mother while I talk to your father.”

Christopher went up the stairs as slowly as he dared, hoping to hear what was being said. All he caught was Dr. Pawson’s voice, hardly shouting at all. “I’ve been in touch almost daily for a week, but they still can’t—” After that the door shut. Christopher went on up the stairs and knocked at the door of old Mrs. Pawson’s room.

She was sitting up in bed, still knitting. “Come and sit on that chair so that I can hear you,” she said in her gentle voice, and gave him a gentle but piercing smile. “The Bible is here on the bedside table. You may start from the beginning of Genesis, child, and see how far you can get. I expect the negotiations will take time. Such things always do.”

Christopher sat down and began to read. He was stumbling among the people who begat other people when Mary-Ellen came in with coffee and biscuits and gave him a welcome break. Ten minutes later, old Mrs. Pawson took up her knitting and said, “Continue, child.” Christopher had got well into Sodom and Gomorrah and was beginning to run out of voice, when old Mrs. Pawson cocked her white head on one side and said, “Stop now, child. They want you downstairs in the study.”

Much relieved and very curious, Christopher put the Bible down and shot to the ground floor. Papa and Dr. Pawson were sitting facing one another in Dr. Pawson’s crowded room. It had become more cluttered than ever over the last weeks, since it was stacked with pieces of clocks and ornaments from all over the house, waiting for Christopher to mend. Now it looked more disorganized still. Tables and carpets had been pushed to the walls to leave a large stretch of bare floorboards, and a design had been chalked on the boards. Christopher looked at it with interest, wondering what it had to do with Mama. It was a five-pointed star inside a circle. He looked at Papa, who was obviously delighted about something, and then at Dr. Pawson, who was just as usual.

“News for you, Chant,” said Dr. Pawson. “I’ve run a lot of tests on you these last weeks—don’t stare, boy, you didn’t know I was doing it—and every one of those tests gives you nine lives. Nine lives and some of the strongest magic I’ve met. Naturally I got in touch with Gabriel de Witt. I happen to know he’s been looking for a successor for years. Naturally all I got was a lot of guff about the way they’d already tested you and drawn a blank. That’s Civil Servants for you. They need a bomb under them before they’ll change their minds. So today, after the bother with your mama had given me the excuse we needed, I had a good old shout at them. They caved in, Chant. They’re sending a man to fetch you to Chrestomanci Castle now.”

Here Papa broke in as if he could not stop himself. “It’s just what I’ve been hoping for, my son! Gabriel de Witt is to become your legal guardian, and in due course you will be the next Chrestomanci.”

“Next Chrestomanci?” Christopher echoed. He stared at Papa, knowing there was no chance of deciding on a career for himself now. It was all settled. His visions of himself as a famous cricketer faded and fell and turned to ashes. “But I don’t want—”

Papa thought Christopher did not under-stand. “You will become a very important man,” he said. “You will watch over all the magic in this world and prevent any harm being done with it.”

“But—” Christopher began angrily.

It was too late. The misty shape of a person was forming inside the five-pointed star. It solidified into a pale plump young man with a long face, very soberly dressed in a gray suit and a wide starched collar that looked much too tight for him. He was carrying a thing like a telescope. Christopher remembered him. The young man was one of the people who had been in the hospital room after everyone had thought Christopher was dead.

“Good morning,” the young man said, step-ping out of the star. “My name is Flavian Temple. Monsignor de Witt has sent me to examine your candidate.”

“EXAMINE HIM!” shouted Dr. Pawson. “I’ve already DONE that! What do you people take me for?” He rolled his angry eyes at Papa. “Civil Servants!”

Flavian Temple obviously found Dr. Pawson quite as alarming as Christopher did. He flinched a bit. “Yes, doctor, we know you have. But my instructions are to verify your findings before proceeding. If this lad could just step into the pentagram.”

“Go on, son,” said Papa. “Stand inside the star.”

With a furious, helpless feeling, Christopher stepped into the chalked pattern and stood there while Flavian Temple sighted down the telescope-thing at him. There must be a way of making yourself look as if you only had one life, he thought. There
had
to be! But he had no idea what it was you did.