Conrad's Fate (2 page)

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 Formula
s?”

“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.

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,” he kept saying. “Where do I find the
money
?”

Anthea had done all the shopping and cooking, too, and this was where we all suffered most. For the week after she left we lived on cornflakes, until they ran out. Then Mum tried to solve the problem by ordering two hundred frozen quiches and cramming these into the freezer. You can't believe how quickly you get tired of eating quiche. And none of us remembered to fetch the next quiche out to thaw. Uncle Alfred was always having to unfreeze them by magic, and this made them soggy and seemed to affect the taste.

“Is there anything else we can eat that might be less squishy and more satisfying?” he asked pathetically. “Think, Fran. You used to cook once.”

“That was when I was being exploited as a female,” Mum retorted. “The quiche people do frozen pizzas, too, but you have to order them by the thousand.”

Uncle Alfred shuddered. “I'd rather eat bacon and eggs,” he said sadly.

“Then go out and buy some,” said my mother.

In the end we settled that Uncle Alfred did the shopping and I tried to cook what he bought. I fetched books called
Simple Cookery
and
Easy Eating
up out of the shop and did my best to do what they told me. I was never very good at it. The food always seemed to turn black and stick to the bottom of the pan, but I usually had enough on top to get by with. We ate a lot of bread, though only Mum got noticeably fatter. Uncle Alfred was naturally skinny, and I kept growing. Mum had to take me shopping for new clothes several times a year from then on. It always seemed to happen when she was very busy finishing a book, and this made her so unhappy that I tried to make my clothes last as long as I could. I got into trouble at school once or twice for looking like a scarecrow.

We got used to coping by next summer. I suppose that was when it finally became obvious that Anthea was not coming back. I had worked out by Christmas that she had left for good, but it took Mum and Uncle Alfred most of a year.

“She'll
have
to come home this summer,” Mum was still saying hopefully in May. “All the universities shut for months over the summer.”

“Not she,” said Uncle Alfred. “She's shaken the dust of Stallchester off her feet. And to be brutally frank with you, Fran, I'm not sure I
want
her back now. Someone that ungrateful would only be a disturbing factor.”

He sighed, dismantled his spell to keep Anthea at home, and hired a girl called Daisy Bolger to help in the shop. After that, he was always worrying about how much he had to pay Daisy in order to stop her going to work at the china shop by the cathedral instead. Daisy knew how to get money out of Uncle Alfred much better than I did. Talk about sly! And Daisy always seemed to think I was going to mess up the books when I was in the shop. Once or twice Count Rudolf up at Stallery worked another big change, and each time Daisy was sure it was me messing the books about. Luckily Uncle Alfred never believed her.

Uncle Alfred was sorry for me. He would look at me over his glasses in his most worried way and shake his head sadly. “I reckon Anthea's going has hit you hardest of all, Con,” he took to saying sadly. “To be brutally frank, I suspect it was your bad karma that caused her to leave.”

“What did I
do
in my past life?” I asked anxiously.

Uncle Alfred always shook his head at that. “I don't know
what
you did, Con. The Lords of Karma alone know that. You could have been a crooked policeman, or a judge that took bribes, or a soldier that ran away, or maybe a traitor to the country—anything! All I know is that you either
didn't
do something you
should
have done, or you did something you
shouldn't
. And because of that, a bad Fate is going to keep dogging you.” Then he would hurry away, muttering, “Unless we find a way you could expiate your misdeed, I suppose.”

I always felt horrible after these conversations. Something bad almost always happened to me just afterward. Once I slipped when I was quite high up climbing Stall Crag and scraped the whole front of me raw. Another time I fell downstairs and twisted my ankle, and one other time I cut myself quite badly in the kitchen—blood all over the onions—but the truly nasty part was that each time I thought, I
deserve
this! This is because of my crime in my past life. And I felt horribly guilty and sinful until the scrapes or the ankle or the cut had healed. Then I remembered Anthea saying she didn't believe people had more than one life, and after that I would feel better.