myself. So would you mind telling me where I am? It’s a Stately Home of some kind, isn’t it?”
Cat stared at her. He began to suspect that her memory was perfectly good. It was not only the way she spoke and what she said. She was thinner than she should be. Her face was the right pretty face, with the right blue eyes, but the downright look on it was not right. The golden hair hanging over her shoulders was an inch longer than it had been last night.
“You’re not Gwendolen!” he said.
“What a dreadful name!” said the girl in the bed. “I should hope not! I’m Janet Chant.”
By this time, Cat was as bewildered as the strange girl seemed to be. Chant? he thought. Chant? Has Gwendolen a twin sister she hasn’t told me about? “But my name’s Chant, too,” he said.
“Is it now?” said Janet. She knelt up in bed and scrubbed her hands thoughtfully about in her hair, in a way Gwendolen never would have done. “Truly Chant? It’s not that much of a common name. And you thought I was your sister? Well, I’ve put two and two together about a hundred times since I woke up in the bath, and I keep getting five. Where are we?”
“In Chrestomanci Castle,” said Cat. “Chrestomanci had us to live here about a year after our parents died.”
“There you are!” said Janet. “My Mum and Dad are alive and kicking – or they were when I said goodnight to them last night. Who’s Chrestomanci? Could you just sketch your life history for me?”
Puzzled and uneasy, Cat described how and why he and Gwendolen had come to live in the Castle, and what Gwendolen had done then.
“You mean Gwendolen really was a witch!” Janet exclaimed.
Cat wished she had not said was. He had a growing suspicion that he would never see the real Gwendolen again.
“Of course she is,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“Great heavens no!” said Janet. “Though I’m beginning to wonder if I mightn’t have been, if I’d lived here all my life. Witches are quite common, are they?”
“And warlocks and necromancers,” said Cat. “But wizards and magicians don’t happen so often. I think Mr Saunders is a magician.”
“Medicine-men, witch-doctors, shamans, devils, enchanters?” Janet asked rapidly. “Hags, fakirs, sorcerers? Are they thick on the ground too?”
“Most of those are for savages,” Cat explained. “Hag is rude. But we have sorcerers and enchanters. Enchanters are very strong and important. I’ve never met one.”
“I see,” said Janet. She thought for a moment and then swung herself out of bed, in a sort of scramble that was more like a boy’s than a girl’s, and again quite unlike the way Gwendolen would have done it. “We’d better have a hunt round,” she said, “in case dear Gwendolen has been kind enough to leave a message.”
“Don’t call her that,” Cat said desolately. “Where do you think she is?”
Janet looked at him and saw he was miserable. “Sorry,” she said. “I won’t again. But you do see I might be a bit cross with her, don’t you? She seems to have dumped me here and gone off somewhere. Let’s hope she has a good explanation.”
“They spanked her with a boot and took away her magic,” Cat said.
“Yes, you said,” Janet replied, pulling open drawers in the golden dressing-table. “I’m terrified of Chrestomanci already. But did they really take away her magic? How did she manage to do this, if they did?”
“I don’t understand that either,” Cat said, joining in the search. By now, he would have given his little finger for a word from Gwendolen – any kind of word. He felt horribly lonely. “Why were you in the bath?” he said, wondering whether to search the bathroom.
“I don’t know. I just woke up there,” said Janet, shaking out a tangle of hair ribbons in the bottom drawer. “I felt as if I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, and I’d no clothes on, so I was freezing.”
“Why had you no clothes on?” Cat said, stirring Gwendolen’s underclothes about, without success.
“I was hot in bed last night,” said Janet. “So naked I came into this world. And I wandered about pinching myself – ’specially after I found this fabulous room. I thought I must have been turned into a princess. But there was this nightdress lying on the bed, so I put it on—”
“You’ve got it on back to front,” said Cat.
Janet stopped scanning the things on the mantelpiece to look down at the trailing ribbons. “Have I? It won’t be the only thing I’m going to get back to front, by the sound of it. Try looking in that artistic wardrobe. Then I explored outside here, and all I found was miles of long green corridor, which gave me the creeps, and stately grounds out of the windows, so I came back in here and went to bed. I hoped that when I woke up it would all have gone away. And instead there was you. Found anything?”
“No,” said Cat. “But there’s her box—”
“It must be in there,” said Janet.
They squatted down and unpacked the box. There was not much in it. Cat knew that Gwendolen must have taken a lot of things with her to wherever she had gone. There were two books, Elementary Spells and Magic for Beginners and some pages of notes on them. Janet looked at Gwendolen’s large round writing.
“She writes just like I do. Why did she leave these books? Because they’re First Form standard and she’s up to O Levels, I suppose.” She put the books and notes to one side and, as she did so, the little red book of matches fell out from among them. Janet picked it up and opened it, and saw that half the matches were burnt without having been torn out. “That looks suspiciously like a spell to me,” she said. “What are these bundles of letters?”
“My parents’ love-letters, I think,” said Cat.
The letters were in their envelopes still, stamped and addressed. Janet squatted with a bundle in each hand. “These stamps are penny blacks! No, it’s a man’s head on them. What’s your King called?”
“Charles the Seventh,” said Cat.
“No Georges?” Janet asked. But she saw Cat was mystified and looked back at the letters again. “Your mother and father were both called Chant, I see. Were they first cousins? Mine are. Granny didn’t want them to marry, because it’s supposed to be a bad thing.”
“I don’t know. They may have been. They looked rather alike,” Cat said, and felt lonelier than ever.
Janet looked rather lonely too. She tucked the little book of matches carefully inside the pink tape that tied together the letters addressed to Miss Caroline Chant – like Gwendolen, she evidently had a tidy mind – and said, “Both tall and fair, with blue eyes? My mum’s name is Caroline too. I’m beginning to see. Come on, Gwendolen, give!” And saying this, Janet tossed aside the letters and, in a most untidy way, scrabbled up the remaining folders, papers, writing-sets, pen-wipers and the bag with Souvenir from Blackpool on it. At the very bottom of the box was a large pink sheet of paper, covered all over with Gwendolen’s best and roundest writing.
“Ah!” said Janet, pouncing on it. “I thought so! She’s got the same secretive mind as I have.” And she spread the letter on the carpet so that Cat could read it too. Gwendolen had written:
Dear Replacement,
I have to leave this terible place. Nobody understands me. Nobody notices my talents.