Witch Week (22 page)

“Now that is unreasonable, sir,” Chrestomanci said. “These children are in acute trouble. You are in the same trouble yourself. Your whole world is in even greater trouble. Please, try if you can, to forget that you have been scared for years, both for yourself and Brian, and listen to the questions I am going to ask you.”

But Mr. Wentworth seemed unable to be reasonable. Nan looked at him sorrowfully. She had always thought he was such a firm person up till now. She felt quite disillusioned. So did Charles. He remembered Mr. Wentworth’s hand on his shoulder, pushing him back into detention. He had thought that hand had been shaking with anger, but he realized now that it had been terror.

“It’s a trick!” Mr. Wentworth said. “You’re trying to get a confession out of me. You’re using Brian. You
are
an inquisitor!”

Just as he said that, there was a little tap at the door, and Miss Hodge came brightly in. She had just given 6B an English lesson—the last one until next Tuesday, thank goodness! Naturally, she had noticed that four other people besides Brian were now missing. At first, she had assumed that they were all being questioned by the inquisitor. They were the obvious ones. But then someone in the staff room had remarked that the inquisitor still hadn’t come. Miss Hodge saw at once that this was the excuse she needed to go to Mr. Wentworth and start sympathizing with him about Brian. She came in as soon as she had knocked, to make quite sure that Mr. Wentworth did not get away again.

The room for an instant seemed quite full of people, and poor Mr. Wentworth was looking so upset and shouting at what seemed to be the inquisitor after all. The inquisitor gave Miss Hodge a vague look and then waved his hand, just the smallest bit. After that, there did only seem to be the inquisitor and Mr. Wentworth in the room besides Miss Hodge. But Miss Hodge knew what she had seen. She thought about it while she said what she had come to say.

“Oh, Mr. Wentworth, I’m afraid there are four more people missing from 6B now.” And the four people had all been here in the room, Miss Hodge knew. Wearing such peculiar things too. And Brian had been there as well. That settled it. Mr. Wentworth might look upset, but he was not sorrowing about Brian. That meant that she either had to think of some other way to get his attention, or use the advantage she knew she had. The man who was supposed to be an inquisitor was politely putting forward a chair for her to sit in. A smooth villain. Miss Hodge ignored the chair. “I think I’m interrupting a witches’ Sabbath,” she said brightly.

The man with the chair raised his eyebrows as if he thought she was mad. A very smooth villain. Mr. Wentworth said, in a strangled sort of way, “This is the divisional inquisitor, Miss Hodge.”

Miss Hodge laughed, triumphantly. “Mr. Wentworth! You and I both know that there’s no such thing as a divisional inquisitor! Is this man annoying you? If so, I shall go straight to Miss Cadwallader. I think she has a right to know that your study is full of witches.”

Chrestomanci sighed and wandered away to Mr. Wentworth’s desk, where he idly picked up one of the schedules. Mr. Wentworth’s eyes followed him as if Chrestomanci was annoying him very much, but he said, in a resigned way, “There’s absolutely no point in going to Miss Cadwallader, Miss Hodge. Miss Cadwallader has known I’m a witch for years. She takes most of my salary in return for not telling anyone.”

“I didn’t know you—!” Miss Hodge began. She had not realized Mr. Wentworth was a witch too. That made quite a difference. She smiled more triumphantly than before. “In that case, let me offer you an alliance against Miss Cadwallader, Mr. Wentworth. You marry me, and we’ll both fight her.”

“Marry you?” Mr. Wentworth stared at Miss Hodge in obvious horror. “Oh no. You can’t. I can’t—”

Brian’s voice said out of the air, “I’m not having
her
as a mother!”

Chrestomanci looked up from the schedules. He shrugged. Brian appeared on the other side of the room, looking as horrified as Mr. Wentworth. Miss Hodge smiled again. “So I was right!” she said.

“Miss Hodge,” Mr. Wentworth said, shakily trying to sound calm and reasonable, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t marry anyone. My wife is still alive. She was arrested as a witch, but she managed to get away through someone’s backyard and get to the witches’ rescue service. So you see—”

“Well, you’d better pretend she was burned,” Miss Hodge said. She was very angry. She felt cheated. She marched up to Mr. Wentworth’s desk and took hold of the receiver of Mr. Wentworth’s telephone. “You agree to marry me, or I ring the police about you. Now.”

“No, please—!” said Mr. Wentworth.

“I mean it,” said Miss Hodge. She tried to pick the receiver up off the telephone. It seemed to be stuck. Miss Hodge jiggled it angrily. It gave out a lot of tinkling, but it would not seem to move. Miss Hodge looked around to find Chrestomanci looking at her in an interested way. “You stop that!” she said to him.

“When you tell me one thing,” Chrestomanci said. “You don’t seem at all alarmed to find yourself in a roomful of witches. Why not?”

“Of course I’m not,” Miss Hodge retorted. “I pity witches. Now will you please allow me to ring the police about Mr. Wentworth? He’s been deceiving everyone for years!”

“But my dear young lady,” said Chrestomanci, “so have you. The only sort of person who would behave as you do must be a witch herself.”

Miss Hodge stared at him haughtily. “I have never used a spell in my life,” she said.

“A slight exaggeration,” Chrestomanci said. “You used one small spell, to make sure no one knew you were a witch.”

Why didn’t I think of that? Charles wondered, watching the look of fear and dismay grow in Miss Hodge’s face. He was very shaken. He could not get used to the idea that his second witch had probably been Brian’s mother.

Miss Hodge once more jiggled the telephone. It was still stuck. “Very well,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you. You can disable all the phones in the school if you like, but you won’t stop me going and telling everyone I meet about you and Mr. Wentworth and Brian, and the other four, unless Mr. Wentworth agrees to marry me this instant. I think I shall start with Harold Crossley.” She made as if to turn away and leave the room. It was clear she meant it.

Chrestomanci sighed and put one finger down on the schedule he was holding, very carefully and precisely, in the middle of one of the rectangles marked
Miss Hodge 6B.
And Miss Hodge was not there anymore. The telephone gave out a small
ting
, and she was gone. At the same moment, Nan, Estelle, Nirupam, and Charles all found themselves visible again. It was clear to them that Miss Hodge was not just invisible in their place. The room felt empty of her, and a small gust of wind ruffling the papers on Mr. Wentworth’s desk seemed to prove she was gone.

“Fancy her being a witch!” said Nirupam. “Where is she?”

Chrestomanci examined the schedule. “Er—next Tuesday, I believe. That should give us time to sort out this wretched situation. Unless we are very unlucky, of course.” He looked at Mr. Wentworth. “Perhaps you would be ready to help us do that now, sir?”

But Mr. Wentworth sank into the chair behind his desk and covered his face with his hands.

“You never told me Mum got away,” Brian said to him accusingly. “And you never said a word about Miss Cadwallader.”

“You never told me you intended to go and camp in the forest,” Mr. Wentworth said wearily. “Oh Lord! Where shall I get an extra teacher from? I’ve got to find someone to take Miss Hodge’s lessons this afternoon somehow.”

Chrestomanci sat in the chair he had put out for Miss Hodge. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he said, “the way people always manage to worry about the wrong things. My dear sir, do you realize that you, your son, and four of your pupils are all likely to be burned unless we do something? And here you are worrying about schedules.”

Mr. Wentworth lifted his harrowed face and stared past Chrestomanci. “How did she
do
it?” he said. “How does she keep it up? How
can
Miss Hodge be a teacher and not use witchcraft at all? I use it all the time. How else can I have eyes in the back of my head?”

“One of the great mysteries of our time,” Chrestomanci agreed. “Now please listen to me. You are aware, I believe, that there is at least one other world besides this one. It seems to be your custom to send escaped witches there. I presume your wife is there. What you may not realize is that these are only two out of a multitude of worlds, all very different from one another. I come from one of the other ones myself.”

To everyone’s relief, Mr. Wentworth listened to this. “Alternative worlds, you mean?” he said. “There’s been some speculation about that. If-worlds, counterfactuals, and so on. You mean they’re real?”

“As real as you are,” Chrestomanci said.

Nirupam was very interested in this. He doubled himself up on the floor beside Chrestomanci’s beautifully creased trousers and said, “They are made from the great events in history, I believe, sir, where it is possible for things to go two ways. It is easiest to understand with battles. Both sides cannot win a battle, so each war makes two possible worlds, with a different side winning. Like the Battle of Waterloo. In our world, Napoleon lost it, but another world at once split off from ours, in which Napoleon won the battle.”

“Exactly,” said Chrestomanci. “I find that world a rather trying one. Everyone speaks French there and winces at my accent. The only place they speak English there, oddly enough, is in India, where they are very British and eat treacle pudding after their curry.”

“I should like that,” Nirupam said.

“Everyone to his taste,” Chrestomanci said with a slight shudder. “But, as you will see, exactly who won the Battle of Waterloo made a great deal of difference between those two worlds. And that is the rule. A surprisingly small change always alters the new world almost out of recognition. Except in the case of this world of yours, where we all now are.” He looked at Mr. Wentworth. “This is what I need your help about, sir. There is something badly wrong with this world. The fact that witches are extremely common, and illegal, should have made as much difference here as it does in my own world, where witches are equally common, but quite legal. But it does not. Estelle, perhaps you can tell us about the world where the witches’ rescue service sends witches.”

Estelle beamed up at him adoringly from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “The old lady said it was just like this one, only with no witchcraft,” she said.

“And that is just the trouble,” said Chrestomanci. “I know that world rather well, because I have a young ward who used to belong in it. And since I have been here, I have discovered that events in history here, cars, advertisements, goods in shops, money—everything I can check—are all exactly the same as those in my ward’s world. And this is quite wrong. No two worlds are ever this alike.”

Mr. Wentworth was attending quite keenly now. He frowned. “What do you think has gone wrong?” And Nan thought, So he
was
finding out symptoms!

Chrestomanci looked around them all, vaguely and dubiously, before he said, “If you’ll forgive me saying, your world should not exist.” They all stared. “I mean it,” Chrestomanci said, apologetically. “I have often wondered why there is so little witchcraft in my ward’s world. I see now that it is all in this one. Something—I don’t know what—has caused your world to separate from the other one, taking all the witchcraft with it. But instead of breaking off cleanly, it has somehow remained partly joined to the first world, so that it almost
is
that world. I think there has been some kind of accident. You shouldn’t get a civilized world where witches are burned. As I said, it ought not to exist. So, as I have been trying to explain to you all along, Mr. Wentworth, I urgently need a short history of witchcraft, in order to discover what kind of accident happened here. Was Elizabeth I a witch?”

Mr. Wentworth shook his head. “Nobody knows for sure. But witchcraft didn’t seem to be that much of a problem in her reign. Witches were mostly just old women in villages then. No—modern witchcraft really started soon after Elizabeth I died. There seems to have been a big increase in about 1606, when the first official bonfires started. The first Witchcraft Edict was passed in 1612. Oliver Cromwell passed more. There had been thirty-four Witchcraft Acts passed by 1760, the year Dulcinea Wilkes—”

But Chrestomanci held up one hand to stop him there. “Thank you. I know about the Archwitch. You’ve told me what I need to know. The present state of witchcraft began quite suddenly soon after 1600. That means that the accident we’re looking for must have happened around then. Have you any idea what it might be?”

Mr. Wentworth shook his head again, rather glumly. “I haven’t a notion. But—suppose you did know, what could you do about it?”

“One of two things,” said Chrestomanci. “Either we could break this world away completely from the other one, which I don’t consider a good idea, because then you would certainly all be burned—” Everybody shuddered, and Charles’s thumb found itself running back and forth over the blister on his finger. “Or,” said Chrestomanci, “and this is a much better idea, we could put your world back into the other one, where it really belongs.”

“What would happen to us if you did?” asked Charles.

“Nothing much. You would simply melt quietly into the people you really are in that world,” said Chrestomanci.

Everyone considered this in silence for a moment. “Can that really be done?” Mr. Wentworth asked hopefully.

“Well,” said Chrestomanci, “it can, as long as we can find what caused the split in the first place. It will take strong magic. But it
is
Halloween and there ought to be a great deal of magic loose in this world particularly, and we can draw on that. Yes. I’m sure it can be done, though it may not be easy.”

“Then let’s do it,” said Mr. Wentworth. The idea seemed to restore him to his usual self. He stood up, and his eyes roved grimly across the riding clothes, the sky-blue shorts and Brian’s jeans, and rested incredulously upon the tattered pink balldress. “If you lot think you can appear in class like that,” he said. He was back to being a schoolmaster again.