Diana Wynne Jones - Chrestomanci 05 - Conrad's Fate

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Conrad’s Fate
Diana Wynne Jones
the 5th chrestomanci book
A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
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Greenwillow Books
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people,
events, establishments, organizations, or locales are
intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are
used to advance the fictional narrative. All other
characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn
from the author’s imagination and are not to be
construed as real.
Conrad’s Fate
Copyright © 2005 by Diana Wynne Jones All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of
America. For information address HarperCollins
Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers,
1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.
www.harperchildrens.com
The right of Diana Wynne Jones to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her.
The text of this book is set in Granjon. Book design by
Chad W. Beckerman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Diana Wynne. Conrad’s fate/ by Diana Wynne
Jones.
p. cm.
“Greenwillow Books.”
Summary: When his uncle sends him to work at the
mysterious Stallery Mansion, twelve-year-old Conrad
Tesdinic must overcome his bad karma and discover the
source of the magic that threatens to pull his world into
one of the eleven other parallel universes.
ISBN 0-06-074743-9 (trade).
ISBN 0-06-074744-7 (lib. bdg.)
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Witchcraft—Fiction.
3. Fantasy.] I. Title. PZ7.J684Co 2005 |Fic]—dc22
2004042462
First Edition Greenwillow Books
For Stella
One
When I was small, I always thought Stallery Mansion was some
kind of fairy-tale castle. I could see it from my bedroom window,
high in the mountains above Stallchester, flashing with glass and
gold when the sun struck it. When I got to the place at last, it
wasn’t exactly like a fairy tale.
Stallchester, where we had our shop, is quite high in the
mountains, too. There are a lot of mountains here in Series Seven,
and Stallchester is in the English Alps. Most people thought this
was the reason why you could only receive television at one end of
the town, but my uncle told me it was Stallery doing it.
“It’s the protections they put round the place to stop anyone
investigating them,” he said. “The magic blanks out the signal.”
My Uncle Alfred was a magician in his spare time, so he knew
this sort of thing. Most of the time he made a living for us all by
keeping the bookshop at the cathedral end of town. He was a
skinny, worrity little man with a bald patch under his curls, and he
was my mother’s half brother. It always seemed a great burden to
him, having to look after me and my mother and my sister, Anthea.
He rushed about muttering, “And how do I find the money, Conrad,
with the book trade so slow!”
The bookshop was in our name, too—it said grant and tesdinic in
faded gold letters over the bow windows and the dark green
door—but Uncle Alfred explained that it belonged to him now. He
and my father had started the shop together. Then, just after I was
born and a little before he died, my father had needed a lot of
money suddenly, Uncle Alfred told me, and he sold his half of the
bookshop to Uncle Alfred. Then my father died, and Uncle Alfred
had to support us.
“And so he should do,” my mother said in her vague way. “We’re
the only family he’s got.”
My sister, Anthea, said she wanted to know what my father had
needed the money for, but she never could find out. Uncle Alfred
said he didn’t know.
“And you never get any sense out of Mother,” Anthea said to me.
“She just says things like ‘Life is always a lottery’ and ‘Your father
was usually hard up’—so all I can think is that it must have been
gambling debts. The casino’s only just up the road, after all.”
I rather liked the idea of my father gambling half a bookshop
away. I used to like taking risks myself. When I was eight, I
borrowed some skis and went down all the steepest and iciest ski
runs, and in the summer I went rock climbing. I felt I was really
following in my father’s footsteps. Unfortunately, someone saw me
halfway up Stall Crag and told my uncle.
“Ah, no, Conrad,” he said, wagging a worried, wrinkled finger at
me. “I can’t have you taking these risks.”
“My dad did,” I said, “betting all that money.”
“He lost it,” said my uncle, “and that’s a different matter. I never
knew much about his affairs, but I have an idea—a very shrewd
idea—that he was robbed by those crooked aristocrats up at
Stallery.”
“What?” I said. “You mean Count Rudolf came with a gun and
held him up?”
My uncle laughed and rubbed my head. “Nothing so dramatic,
Con. They do things quietly and mannerly up at Stallery. They pull
the possibilities like gentlemen.”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“I’ll explain when you’re old enough to understand the magic of
high finance,” my uncle replied. “Meanwhile…” His face went all
withered and serious. “Meanwhile, you can’t afford to go risking
your neck on Stall Crag, you really can’t, Con, not with the bad
karma you carry.”
“What’s karma?” I asked.
“That’s another thing I’ll explain when you’re older,” my uncle
said. “Just don’t let me catch you going rock climbing again, that’s
all.”
I sighed. Karma was obviously something very heavy, I thought,
if it stopped you climbing rocks. I went to ask my sister, Anthea,
about it. Anthea is nearly ten years older than me, and she was
very learned even then. She was sitting over a line of open books on
the kitchen table, with her long black hair trailing over the page
she was writing notes on. “Don’t bother me now, Con,” she said
without looking up.
She’s growing up just like Mum! I thought. “But I need to know
what karma is.”
“Karma?” Anthea looked up. She has huge dark eyes. She opened
them wide to stare at me, wonderingly. “Karma’s sort of like Fate,
except it’s to do with what you did in a former life. Suppose that in
a life you had before this one you did something bad, or didn’t do
something good, then Fate is supposed to catch up with you in this
life, unless you put it right by being extra good, of course.
Understand?”
“Yes,” I said, though I didn’t really. “Do people live more than
once, then?”
“The magicians say you do,” Anthea answered. “I’m not sure I
believe it myself. I mean, how can you check that you had a life
before this one? Where did you hear about karma?”
Not wanting to tell her about Stall Crag, I said vaguely, “Oh, I
read it somewhere. And what’s pulling the possibilities? That’s
another thing I read.”
“It’s something that would take ages to explain, and I haven’t
time,” Anthea said, bending over her notes again. “You don’t seem
to understand that I’m working for an exam that could change my
entire life!”
“When are you going to get lunch, then?” I asked.
“Isn’t that just my life in a nutshell!” Anthea burst out. “I do all
the work round here and help in the shop twice a week, and nobody
even considers that I might want to do something different! Go
away!”
You didn’t mess with Anthea when she got this fierce. I went
away and tried to ask Mum instead. I might have known that
would be no good.
Mum has this little bare room with creaking floorboards half a
floor down from my bedroom, with nothing in it much except dust
and stacks of paper. She sits there at a wobbly table, hammering
away at her old typewriter, writing books and magazine articles
about women’s rights. Uncle Alfred had all sorts of smooth new
computers down in the back room where Miss Silex works, and he
was always on at Mum to change to one as well. But nothing will
persuade Mum to change. She says her old machine is much more
reliable. This is true. The shop computers went down at least once a
week—this, Uncle Alfred said, was because of the activities up at
Stallery—but the sound of Mum’s typewriter is a constant
hammering, through all four floors of the house.
She looked up as I came in and pushed back a swatch of dark
gray hair. Old photos show her looking rather like Anthea, except
that her eyes are a light yellow-brown, like mine, but you would
never think her anything like Anthea now. She is sort of faded, and
she always wears what Anthea calls “that horrible mustard-colored
suit” and forgets to do her hair. I like that. She’s always the same,
like the cathedral, and she always looks over her glasses at me the
same way. “Is lunch ready?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “Anthea’s not even started it.”
“Then come back when it’s ready,” she said, bending to look at
the paper sticking up from her typewriter.
“I’ll go when you tell me what pulling the possibilities means,” I
said.
“Don’t bother me with things like that,” she said, winding the
paper up so that she could read her latest line. “Ask your uncle. It’s
only some sort of magicians’ stuff. What do you think of
‘disempowered broodmares’ as a description? Good, eh?”
“Great,” I said. Mum’s books are full of things like that. I’m never
sure what they mean. That time I thought a disempowered
broodmare was some sort of weak nightmare, and I went away
thinking of all her other books, called things like Exploited for
Dreams and Disabled Eunuchs. Uncle Alfred had a whole table of
them down in the shop. One of my jobs was to dust them, but he
almost never sold any, no matter how enticingly I piled them up.
I did lots of jobs in the shop, unpacking books, arranging them,
dusting them, and cleaning the floor on the days Mrs. Potts’s nerves
wouldn’t let her come. Mrs. Potts’s nerves were always bad on the
days after she had tried to tidy Uncle Alfred’s workroom. The shop,
and the whole house, used to echo then with shouts of “I told you
just the floor, woman! You’ve ruined that experiment! And you’re
lucky not to be a goldfish! Touch it again and you’ll be a goldfish!”
But Mrs. Potts, at least once a month, just could not resist
stacking everything in neat piles and dusting the chalk marks off
the workbench. Then Uncle Alfred would rush up the stairs
shouting and the next day Mrs. Potts’s nerves kept her at home and
I would have to clean the shop floor. As a reward for this, I was
allowed to read any books I wanted from the children’s shelves.
To be brutally frank with you—which is Uncle Alfred’s favorite
phrase—this reward meant nothing to me until about the time I
heard about karma and Fate and started wondering what pulling
the possibilities meant. Up to then I preferred doing risky things.
Or I mostly wanted to go and see friends in the part of town where
televisions worked. Reading was even harder work than cleaning
the floor. But suddenly one day I discovered the Peter Jenkins
books. You must know them: Peter Jenkins and the Thin Teacher,
Peter Jenkins and the Headmaster’s Secret, and all the others.
They’re great. Our shop had a whole row of them, at least twenty,
and I set out to read them all.
Well, I had already read about six, and those all kept harking
back to another one called Peter Jenkins and the Football Formula
that sounded really exciting. So that was the one I wanted to read
next.
I finished the floor as quickly as I could. Then, on my way to dust
Mum’s books, I stopped by the children’s shelves and looked
urgently along the row of shiny red and brown Peter Jenkins books
for Peter Jenkins and the Football Formula. The trouble is, all those
books look the same. I ran my finger along the row, thinking I’d
find the book about seventh along. I knew I’d seen it there. But it
wasn’t. The one in about the right place was called Peter Jenkins
and the Magic Golfer. I ran my finger right along to the end, and it
still wasn’t there, and The Headmaster’s Secret didn’t seem to be
there either. Instead, there were three copies of one called Peter
Jenkins and the Hidden Horror, which I’d never seen before. I took
one of those out and flipped through it, and it was almost the same
as The Headmaster’s Secret, but not quite—vampire bats instead of
a zombie in the cupboard, things like that—and I put it back feeling
puzzled and really frustrated.
In the end I took one at random before I went on to dust Mum’s
books. And Mum’s books were different—just slightly—too. They
looked the same, with Franconia Grant in big yellow letters on
them, but some of the titles were different. The fat one that used to
be called Women in Crisis was still fat, but it was now called The
Case for Females, and the thin, floppy one was called Mother Wit,
instead of Do We Use Intuition? like I remembered.
Just then I heard Uncle Alfred galloping downstairs, whistling,
on his way to open the shop. “Hey, Uncle Alfred!” I called out.
“Have you sold all the Peter Jenkins and the Football Formulas?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, rushing into the shop with his worried
look. He hurried along to the children’s shelves, muttering about
having to reorder as he changed his glasses over. He peered
through them at the row of Peter Jenkins books. He bent to look at
the books below and stood on tiptoe to look at the shelves above.
Then he backed away looking so angry that I thought Mrs. Potts
must have tidied the books, too. “Would you look at that!” he said
disgustedly. “That’s a third of them different! It’s criminal. They
went for a big working without even considering the side effects!
Go outside and see if the street’s still the same, Conrad.”
I went to the shop door, but as far as I could see, nothing… Oh!
The postbox down the road was now bright blue.
“You see!” said my uncle when I told him. “You see what they’re
like! All sorts of details will be different now—valuable details—but
what do they care? All they think of is money!”
“Who?” I asked. I couldn’t see how anyone could make money by
changing books.
He pointed up and sideways with his thumb. “Them. Those bent
aristocrats up at Stallery, to be brutally frank with you, Con. They
make their money by pulling the possibilities about. They look, and
if they see they could get a bigger profit from one of their
companies if just one or two things were a little different, then they
twist and twitch and pull those one or two things. It doesn’t matter
to them that other things change as well. Oh no. And this time
they’ve overdone it. Greedy. Wicked. People are going to notice and
object if they go on doing this.” He took his glasses off and cleaned
them. Beads of angry sweat stood on his forehead. “There’ll be
trouble,” he said. “Or so I hope.”
So this was what pulling the possibilities meant. “How do they
change things?” I asked.
“By very powerful magic,” said my uncle. “More powerful than
you or I can imagine, Conrad. Make no mistake, Count Rudolf and
his family are very dangerous people.”
When I finally went up to my room to read my Peter Jenkins
book, I looked out of my window first. Because I was at the very top
of our house, I could see Stallery as just a glint and a flashing in
the place where green hills folded into rocky mountain. I found it
hard to believe that anyone in that high, twinkling place could have
the power to change a lot of books and the color of the postboxes
down here in Stallchester. I still didn’t understand why anyone
should want to.
“It’s because if you change to a new set of things that might be
going to happen,” Anthea explained, looking up from her books,
“you change everything just a little. This time,” she added, ruefully
turning the pages of her notes, “they seem to have done a big jump
and made a big difference. I’ve got notes here on two books that
don’t seem to exist anymore. No wonder Uncle Alfred’s annoyed.”
We got used to the changes by next day. Sometimes it was hard
to remember that postboxes used to be red. Uncle Alfred said that
we only remembered anyway because we lived in that part of
Stallchester. “To be brutally frank with you,” he said, “half
Stallchester thinks postboxes were always blue. So does the rest of
the country. The King probably calls them royal blue. Mind games,
that’s what it is. Diabolical greed.”
This happened in the glad old days when Anthea was at home. I
think Mum and Uncle Alfred thought Anthea would always be at
home. That summer Mum said as usual, “Anthea, don’t forget that
Conrad needs new school clothes for next term,” and Uncle Alfred
was full of plans for expanding the shop once Anthea had left school
and could work there full time.
“If I clear out the boxroom opposite my workroom,” he would say,
“we can put the office in there. Then we can put books where the
office is— maybe build out into the yard.”
Anthea never said much in reply to these plans. She was very
quiet and tense for the next month or so. Then she seemed to cheer
up. She worked in the shop quite happily all the rest of the
summer, and in the early autumn she took me to buy new clothes
just as she had done last year, except that she bought things for
herself at the same time. Then, after I had been back at school a
month, she left.
She came down to breakfast carrying a small suitcase. “I’m off,”
she said. “I start at university tomorrow. I’m catching the
nine-twenty to Ludwich, so I’ll say good-bye now and get something
to eat on the train.”
“University! ” Mum exclaimed. “But you’re not clever enough!”
“You can’t,” said Uncle Alfred. “There’s the shop—and you don’t
have any money.”
“I took an exam,” Anthea said, “and I won a scholarship. That
gives me enough money if I’m careful.”
“But you can’t!” they both said together. Mum added, “Who’s
going to look after Conrad?” and Uncle Alfred said, “Look here, my
girl, I was relying on you for the shop.”
“Working for nothing. I know,” Anthea said.
“Well, I’m sorry to spoil your plans for me, but I do have a life of
my own, you know, and I’ve made arrangements for myself because
I knew you’d both stop me if I told you. I’ve looked after all three of
you for years. But now Conrad’s old enough to look after himself,
I’m going to go and get a life.”
And she went, leaving us all staring. She didn’t come back. She
knew Uncle Alfred, you see. Uncle Alfred spent a lot of time in his
workroom setting up spells to make sure that when Anthea came
home at the end of the university semester she would find herself
having to stay with us for good. Anthea guessed he would. She
simply sent a postcard to say she was staying with friends and
never came near us. She sent me cards and presents for my
birthdays, but she never came back to Stallchester for years.
Two
Anthea’s going made a dreadful difference, far worse than any
change made by Count Rudolf up at Stallery. Mum was in a bad
mood for weeks. I’m not sure she ever forgave Anthea.
“So sly!” she kept saying. “So mean and secretive. Don’t you ever
be like that, Conrad, and it’s no use expecting me to run after you. I
have my work to do.”
Uncle Alfred was tetchy and grumpy for a long time, too, but he
cheered up after he had set the spells that were supposed to fix
Anthea at home once she came back. He took to patting me on the
shoulder and saying, “You’re not going to let me down like that, are
you, Con?”
Sometimes I answered, “No fear!” but mostly I wriggled a bit and
didn’t answer. I missed Anthea horribly for ages. She had been the
person I could go to when I had a question to ask or to get cheered
up. If I fell down or cut myself, she had been the one with sticking
plaster and soothing words. She used to suggest things for me to do
if I was bored. I felt quite lost now she was gone.
I hadn’t realized how many things Anthea did in the house.
Luckily I knew how to work the washing machine, but I was
always forgetting to run it and finding I’d no clothes to go to school
in. I got into trouble for wearing dirty clothes until I got used to
remembering. Mum just went on piling her clothes into the laundry
basket as she always had, but Uncle Alfred was particular about his
shirts. He had to pay Mrs. Potts to iron them for him, and he
grumbled a lot about how much she charged.
“The ingredients for my experiments cost the earth these days,”
摘要：

Conrad’sFateDianaWynneJonesthe5thchrestomancibookA3Sdigitalback-upedition1.0clickforscannotesandproofinghistoryContents|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|GreenwillowBooksAnImprintofHarperCollinsPublishersThisbookisaworkoffiction.Referencestorealpeople,events,establishments,organizat...

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