Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci Read Online Free PDF Page B

did, and yet when he spoke, it was in perfect, unforeign English. It was educated English, too, which was another puzzle, because Cat had always vaguely supposed that Mr. Roberts was a sort of valet hired to look after Gabriel de Witt in his retirement. But Mr. Roberts also seemed to be a strong magic user. He looked at Cat rather reproachfully as they got into the cab and said, “There are hundreds of spells against travel sickness, you know.”
    “I think I did stop him being sick,” Cat said uncomfortably. Here was his old problem again, of not being sure when he was using magic and when he was not. But what really made Cat uncomfortable was the knowledge that if he had used magic on Tonino, it was not for Tonino’s sake. Cat hated seeing people be sick. Here he was doing a good thing for a bad selfish reason again. At this rate he was, quite definitely, going to end up as an evil enchanter.
    Gabriel de Witt lived in a spacious, comfortable modern house with wide windows and a metal rail along the roof in the latest style. It was set among trees on a new road that gave the house a view of the countryside beyond.
    Miss Rosalie threw open its clean white front door and welcomed them all inside. She was a funny little woman with a lot of gray in her black hair, who always, invariably, wore gray lace mittens. She was another puzzle. There was a big gold wedding ring lurking under the gray lace of her left-hand mitten, which Cat thought might mean she was married to Mr. Roberts, but she always had to be called Miss Rosalie. For another thing, she behaved as if she were a witch. But she wasn’t. As she shut the front door, she made brisk gestures as if she were setting wards of safety on it. But it was Mr. Roberts who really set the wards.
    “You’ll have to go upstairs, boys,” Miss Rosalie said. “I kept him in bed today. He was fretting himself ill about meeting young Antonio. So excited about the new magic. Up this way.”
    They followed Miss Rosalie up the deeply carpeted stairs and into a big sunny bedroom, where white curtains were gently blowing at the big windows. Everything possible was white—the walls, the carpet, the bed with its stacked white pillows and white bedspread, the spray of lilies of the valley on the bedside table—and so neat that it looked like a room no one was using.
    “Ah, Eric Chant and Antonio Montana!” Gabriel de Witt said from the bank of pillows. His thin, dry voice sounded quite eager. “Glad to see you. Come and take a seat where I can look at you.”
    Two plain white chairs had been set one on each side of the bed and about halfway down it. Tonino slid sideways into the nearest, looking thoroughly intimidated. Cat could understand that. He thought, as he went around to the other chair, that the whiteness of the room must be to make Gabriel de Witt show up. Gabriel was so thin and pale that you would hardly have seen him among ordinary colors. His white hair melted into the white of the pillows. His face had shrunk so that it seemed like two caves, made from Gabriel’s jutting cheekbones and his tall white forehead, out of which two strong eyes glared feverishly. Cat tried not to look at the tangle of white chest hair sticking out of the white nightshirt under Gabriel’s too-pointed chin. It seemed indecent, somehow.
    But probably the most upsetting thing, Cat thought as he sat down, was the smell of illness and old man in the room and the way that, in spite of the whiteness, there was a darkness at the edges of everything. The corners of the room felt gray, and they loomed. Cat kept his eyes on Gabriel’s long, veiny enchanter’s hands, folded together on the white bedspread, because these seemed the most normal things about him, and hoped this visit would not last too long.
    “Now, young Antonio,” Gabriel said, and his pale lips moved in a dry way Cat could not look at, “I hear that your best magic is done when you use someone else’s spell.”
    Tonino nodded