Conrad's Fate (3 page)

“Can't you find out who I was and what I did?” I asked Uncle Alfred, one time after I had been told off by the headmistress because my clothes were too small. She sent a note home with me about it, but I threw it away because Mum had just started a new book, and anyway, I knew I
deserved
to be in trouble. “If I knew, I could do something about it.”

“To be brutally frank,” said my uncle, “I fancy you have to be a grown man before you could change your Fate. But I'll try to find out. I'll try, Con.”

He did experiments in his workroom to find out, but he never seemed to make much headway.

About a year after Anthea left, I got really annoyed with Daisy Bolger when she tried to stop me looking at the newest Peter Jenkins book. I told her my uncle had said I could, but she just kept saying, “Put it
back
! You'll crease it, and then I'll be blamed.”

“Oh, why don't you go away and work in that china shop!” I said in the end.

She tossed her head angrily. “Fat lot
you
know! I wouldn't
dream
of it. It's
boring
. I only say I will to get a decent wage out of your uncle—and he doesn't pay me half what he could afford, even now.”

“He does,” I said. “He's always worrying how much you cost.”

“That,” said Daisy, “is because he's stingy, not because he hasn't got it. He must be rich as the Count up at Stallery almost. This bookshop's coining money.”

“
Is
it?” I said.

“I keep the till. I know,” Daisy said. “We're at the picturesque end of town, and we get
all
the tourists, winter
and
summer. Ask Miss Silex if you don't believe me. She does the accounts.”

I was so astonished to hear this that I forgot to be angry and forgot the Peter Jenkins book, too. That was no doubt what Daisy intended. She was a very cunning person. But I couldn't believe she was right, not when Uncle Alfred was always so worried. I began counting the people who came into the shop.

And Daisy was right. Stallchester is a famous beauty spot, full of historic buildings and surrounded in mountains. In summer, we got people to look at the town and play the casino and hikers who walked in the mountains. In winter, people came to ski. But because we are so high up, we get rain and mist in summer, and in winter there are always times when the snow is not deep enough, or too soft, or coming down in a blizzard, and those are the days when tourists come into the shop by their hundreds. They buy everything, from dictionaries to help with crosswords to deep books of philosophy, detective stories, biographies, adventure stories, and cookery books for self-catering. Some even buy Mum's books. It only took a few months for me to realize that Uncle Alfred was indeed coining money.

“What does he spend it all on?” I asked Daisy.

“Goodness knows,” she said. “That workroom of his is pretty expensive. And he always buys best vintage port for his Magicians' Circle. All his clothes are handmade, too, you know.”

I almost didn't believe that either. But when I thought about it, one of the magicians who came to Uncle Alfred's Magicians' Circle every Wednesday was Mr. Hawkins, the tailor, and he often came early with a package of clothes. And I'd helped carry dusty old bottles of port wine upstairs for the meeting, often and often. I just hadn't realized the stuff was expensive. I was annoyed with Daisy for noticing so much more than I did. But then, she was a really cunning person.

You would not believe how artfully Daisy went to work when she wanted more money. She often took as much as two weeks on it—ten days of sighing and grumbling and saying how overworked and hard up she was, followed by another day of saying how the nice woman in the china shop had told her she could come and work there anytime. Finally she would flare up with “That's
it
! I'm
leaving
!” And it worked every time.

Uncle Alfred hates people to leave, I thought. That's why he let Anthea go to Cathedral School, so she could stay at home and be useful here.

I couldn't threaten to leave, not yet. You have to stay at school until you are twelve in this country. But I could pretend I was not going to do any more cooking. It didn't take much pretending, really.

That first time I went even slower than Daisy. I spent over a fortnight sighing and saying I was sick to my back teeth of cooking. Finally, it was Mum who said, “Really, Conrad, to listen to you, anyone would think we exploited you.”

It was wonderful. I went from simmering to boiling in one breath, and I shouted with real feeling, “You
are
exploiting me! That's
it
! I'm not doing any more cooking ever again!”

Then it was even more wonderful. Uncle Alfred hurried me away to his workroom and pleaded with me. “You know—let's be brutally frank, Con—your mother's hopeless with food, and I'm worse. But we've all got to eat, haven't we? Be a good boy and reconsider now.”

I looked around at the strange-shaped glass things and shining machinery in the workroom and wondered how much it all cost. “No,” I said sulkily. “Pay someone else to do it.”

He winced. He almost shuddered at the idea. “Suppose I was to offer you a little something to take up as our chef again,” he said cajolingly. “What could I offer you?”

I let him cajole for a while. Then I sighed and asked for a bicycle. He agreed like a shot. The bicycle was not so wonderful when it came, because Uncle Alfred only produced one that was secondhand, but it made a start. I knew how to do it now.

When winter came, I went into my act again. I refused to cook twice. First I got regular pocket money out of my uncle, and then I got skis of my own. In the spring I did it again and got modeling kits. That summer I got most things I needed. The next autumn I actually made Uncle Alfred give me a good camera. I know this was calculated cunning and quite as bad as Daisy—though I couldn't help noticing that my friends at school got skis and pocket money as if they had a right to them, and that none of them had to cook for these things either—but I told myself that my Fate had made me bad and I might as well make use of it.

I stopped the year I was going to be twelve. This was not because I was reformed. It was part of a plan. You can leave school at twelve, you see, and I knew Uncle Alfred would have thought of that. The rule is that you
can
go on to an Upper School, but only if your family pays for you. Otherwise you go and find a job. All my friends were going to Upper Schools, most of them to Cathedral like Anthea, but my best friends were going to Stall High. I thought of it as like the school in the Peter Jenkins books. Stall High cost more, but it was supposed to be a terrific place, and best of all, it taught magic. I had set my heart on learning magic with my friends. Living as I did in a house where Uncle Alfred filled the stairway with peculiar smells and the strange buzz of working spells at least once a week, I couldn't wait to do it, too. Besides, Daisy Bolger told me that Uncle Alfred had been to Stall High himself as a boy. How that girl found out these things was something I never knew.

Knowing Uncle Alfred, I knew he would try to keep me at home somehow. He might even be going to sack Daisy and make me work in the shop for nothing. So my plan was to threaten to stop cooking just near the end of my last term and get him to bribe me with Stall High. If that didn't work, I thought I would threaten to go and get a job in the lowlands and then say that I'd stay if I could go to Cathedral School instead.

I worked all this out sitting in my room staring upward at Stallery, glimmering among the mountains. Stallery always made me wish for all the strange and exciting things that I didn't seem to have. It made me think that Anthea must have sat in
her
room making plans in much the same way—except that you couldn't see Stallery from Anthea's old room. Mum used it as a paper store now.

Stallery was in the news around then anyway. Count Rudolf died suddenly. People gossiping in the bookshop said he was quite young, really, but some diseases took no account of age, did they? “Driven to an early grave,” Mrs. Potts said to me. “Mark my words. And the new Count is only twenty-one, they say. His sister's even younger. They'll be having to marry soon to preserve the family name. She'll insist on it.”

Daisy was very interested in weddings. She hunted everywhere for a magazine that might have pictures of the new Count, Robert, and his sister, Lady Felice. All she found was a newspaper with the announcement of Count Robert's engagement to Lady Mary Ogworth in it. “Just plain print,” she complained. “No photos.”

“Daisy won't find pictures,” Mrs. Potts told me. “Stallery likes its privacy, it does. They know how to keep the media out of their lives up there. I've heard there's electrical fences all round those grounds, and savage dogs patrolling inside.
She
won't want people prying, not she.”

“Who's
she
?” I asked.

Mrs. Potts paused, kneeling with her back to me on the stairs. “Pass the polish,” she said. “Thanks.
She
,” she went on, rubbing in polish in a slow, enjoying sort of way, “is the old Countess. She's got rid of her husband—bothered and nagged him to death, I've heard—and now she won't want anyone to see while she works on the new Count. They say he's
well
under her thumb already and bound to be more so, poor boy.
She
likes all the power, all the money.
He'll
marry that girl
she's
chosen, and then she'll run the pair of them, you'll see.”

“She sounds horrible,” I said, fishing for more.

“Oh, she is,” said Mrs. Potts. “Used to be on the stage. Caught the old Count by kicking up her legs in a chorus line, I heard. And—”

Unfortunately, Uncle Alfred came rushing upstairs at this point and upset Mrs. Potts's cleaning bucket and Mrs. Potts's nerves along with it. I never got Mrs. Potts to gossip about Stallery again. That was my Fate at work there, I thought. But I got a few more hints from Uncle Alfred himself. With his face almost withered with worry, he said to me, “What happens up in Stallery now, eh? It could be even worse. I mention no names, but someone's very power-hungry up there. I dread the next set of changes, Con.”

He was so worried that he telephoned his Magicians' Circle and they actually met on a Tuesday, which was almost unheard of. After that, they met on Tuesdays
and
Wednesdays, and I helped carry up twice the number of dusty wine bottles every week.

And those weeks slowly passed, until the dread day arrived when the Headmistress came and gave everyone in the top class a School Leaver's Form. “Take this home to your parent or guardian,” she said. “Tell them that if they want you to leave school at the end of this term, they must sign Section A. If they want you to go on to an Upper School, then they sign Section B. Get them to sign tonight. I want all these forms back tomorrow without fail.”

I took my form home to the shop, prepared for battle and cunning. I went in through the backyard and straight upstairs to Mum. My plan was to get her to sign Section B before Uncle Alfred even knew I'd got the form.

“What's this?” Mum said vaguely as I pushed the yellow paper in front of her typewriter.

“School Leaver's Form,” I explained. “If you want me to go on at school, you have to sign Section B.”

She pushed her hair back distractedly. “I can't do that, Conrad, not when you've got a job already. And at Stallery of all places. I must say I'm really disappointed in you.”

I felt as if the whole world had been pulled out from under me like a carpet.
“Stallery!”
I said.

“If that's what you told your uncle, yes,” my mother said. And she took the form and signed Section A with her married name. F. Tesdinic. “There,” she said. “I wash my hands of you, Conrad.”

I stood there, feeling utterly let down.
I didn't know what to do or what to think. Then, when I next caught up with myself, I was racing downstairs, waving the School Leaver's Form. I rushed into the shop, where Uncle Alfred was standing behind the pay desk, and I wagged the form furiously in his face.

“What the
hell
do you mean by
this
?” I pretty well shrieked at him.

A lot of customers whirled around from the shelves and stared at me. Uncle Alfred looked at them, blinked at me, and said to Daisy, “Do you mind taking over here for a moment?” He dodged out from behind the desk and seized my elbow. “Come up to my workroom and let me explain.”

He more or less dragged me from the shop. I was still flapping the form with my free hand, and I think I was shouting, too. “What do you mean—
explain
?” I screamed as we went upstairs. “You can't
do
this to me! You've no
right
!”

When we reached the workroom, Uncle Alfred shoved me inside into a strong smell of recent magic and shut the door behind both of us with a clap. He straightened his glasses, which I had knocked crooked. He was panting, and he looked more worried than I had ever seen him, but I didn't care. I opened my mouth to shout at him again.

“No, don't, Con,” Uncle Alfred said earnestly. “Please. I'm doing the best I can for you. Honestly. It's your Fate—this wretched bad karma of yours—that's the problem, see.”