The Magicians of Caprona (17 page)

Paolo listened without truly attending. He was thinking about Tonino and wondering if he dared depend on the word of a Petrocchi.

After a while, someone came and picked Tonino up. That was unpleasant. His legs and arms dragged and dangled in all directions, and he could not do anything about it. He was plunged somewhere much darker. Then he was left to lie amid a great deal of bumping and scraping, as if he were in a box which was being pushed across a floor. When it stopped, he found he could move. He sat up, trembling all over.

He was in the same room as before, but it seemed to be much smaller. He could tell that, if he stood up, his head would brush the little lighted chandelier in the ceiling. So he was larger now; where he had been three inches tall before, he must now be more like nine. The puppets must be too big for their scenery, and the false villa meant to look as if it was some distance away. And, with the Duchess suddenly taken ill, none of her helpers had bothered what size Tonino was. They had simply made sure he was shut up again.

“Tonino,” whispered Angelica.

Tonino whirled around. Half the room was full of a pile of lax puppet bodies. He scanned the cardboard head of the policeman, then his enemy the Hangman, and the white sausage of the baby, and came upon Angelica’s face halfway up the pile. It was her own face, though swollen and tearstained. Tonino clapped his hand to his nose. To his relief, the red beak was gone, though he still seemed to be wearing Mr. Punch’s scarlet nightgown.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His teeth seemed to be chattering. “I tried not to hurt you. Are your bones broken?”

“No—o,” said Angelica. She did not sound too sure. “Tonino, what happened?”

“I hanged the Duchess,” Tonino said, and he felt some vicious triumph as he said it. “I didn’t kill her though,” he added regretfully.

Angelica laughed. She laughed until the heap of puppets was shaking and sliding about. But Tonino could not find it funny. He burst into tears, even though he was crying in front of a Petrocchi.

“Oh dear,” said Angelica. “Tonino, stop it! Tonino—please!” She struggled out from among the puppets and hobbled looming through the room. Her head banged the chandelier and sent it tinkling and casting mad shadows over them as she knelt down beside Tonino. “Tonino, please stop. She’ll be furious as soon as she feels better.” Angelica was wearing Judy’s blue cap and Judy’s blue dress still. She took off the blue cap and held it out to Tonino. “Here. Blow on that. I used the baby’s dress. It made me feel better.” She tried to smile at him, but the smile went hopelessly crooked in her swollen face. Angelica’s large forehead must have hit the floor first. It was now enlarged by a huge red bump. Under it, the grin looked grotesque.

Tonino understood it was meant for a smile and smiled back, as well as he could for his chattering teeth.

“Here.” Angelica loomed back through the room to the pile of puppets and heaved at the Hangman. She returned with his black felt cape. “Put this on.”

Tonino wrapped himself in the cape and blew his nose on the blue cap and felt better.

Angelica heaved more puppets about. “I’m going to wear the policeman’s jacket,” she said. “Tonino—have you thought?”

“Not really,” said Tonino. “I sort of know.”

He had known from the moment he looked at the Duchess. She was the enchanter who was sapping the strength of Caprona and spoiling the spells of the Casa Montana. Tonino was not sure about the Duke—probably he was too stupid to count. But in spite of the Duchess’s enchantments, the spells of the Casa Montana—and the Casa Petrocchi—must still be strong enough to be a nuisance to her. So he and Angelica had been kidnapped to blackmail both houses into stopping making spells. And if they stopped, Caprona would be defeated. The frightening part was that Tonino and Angelica were the only two people who knew, and the Duchess did not care that they knew. It was not only that even someone as clever as Paolo would never think of looking in the Palace, inside a Punch and Judy show: it must mean that the two of them would be dead before anyone found them.

“We absolutely have to get away,” said Angelica. “Before she’s better from being hanged.”

“She’ll have thought of that,” said Tonino.

“I’m not sure,” said Angelica. “I could tell everyone was startled to death. They let me see you being put through the floor, and I think we could get out that way. It will be easier now we’re bigger.”

Tonino fastened the cape around him and struggled to his feet, though he felt almost too tired and bruised to bother. His head hit the chande-lier too. Huge flickering shadows fled around the room and made the heap of puppets look as if they were squirming about. “Where did they put me through?” he said.

“Just where you’re standing,” said Angelica.

Tonino backed against the windows and looked at the place. He would not have known there was any opening. But, now Angelica had told him, he could see, disguised by the painted swirls of the carpet and confused by the swinging light, the faintest black line. The outline made an oblong about the size of the shoddy dining table. The tray of
supper must have come through that way too.

“Sing an opening spell,” Angelica commanded him.

“I don’t know one,” Tonino was forced to confess.

He could tell by the stiff way Angelica stood that she was trying not to say a number of nasty things. “Well I don’t dare,” she said. “You saw what happened last time. If I do anything, they’ll catch us again and punish us by making us be puppets. And I couldn’t bear another time.”

Tonino was not sure he could bear it either, even though, now he thought about it, he was not sure it had been a punishment. The Duchess had probably intended to make them perform anyway. She was quite mean enough. On the other hand, he was not sure he could stand another of Angelica’s botched spells, either. “Well, it’s only a trapdoor,” he said. “It must be held up by one of those little hooks. Let’s try bashing at it with the candlesticks.”

“And if there’s a spell on it?” said Angelica. “Oh, come on. Let’s try.”

They seized a candlestick each and knelt beside the windows, knocking diligently at the scarcely-seen black line. The cardboard was tough and pulpy. The candlesticks shortly looked like metal weeping willow trees. But they succeeded in making a crumbly hollow in the middle of one edge of the hidden door. Tonino thought he could see a glimmer of metal showing. He raised his bent candlestick high to deliver a mighty blow.

“Stop!”
hissed Angelica.

There were large shuffling footsteps somewhere. Tonino lowered the candlestick by gentle fractions and scarcely dared breathe. A distant voice grumbled. … “Mice then” … “Nothing here. …” It was suddenly very much darker. Someone had switched off a light, leaving them only with the bluish glimmer of the little chandelier. The footsteps shuffled. A door bumped, and there was silence.

Angelica laid her candlestick down and began trying to tear at the cardboard with her fingers. Tonino got up and wandered away. It was no good. Someone was going to hear them, whatever they did. The Palace was full of footmen and soldiers. Tonino would have given up then and waited for the Duchess to do her worst. Only now he was standing up, the cardboard room seemed so small. Half of it was filled with the puppets. There was hardly room to move. Tonino wanted to hurl himself at the walls and scream. He did make a movement, and knocked the table. Because he was so much bigger and heavier now, the table swayed and creaked.

“I know!” he said. “Finish drawing the Angel.”

The bump on Angelica’s forehead turned up to him. “I’m not in the mood for doodling.”

“Not a doodle, a spell,” Tonino explained. “And then pull the table over us while we make a hole in the trapdoor.”

Angelica did not need telling that the Angel was the most potent spell in Caprona. She threw the candlestick aside and scrambled up. “That might just work,” she said. “You know, for a Montana, you have very good ideas.” Her head hit the chandelier again. In the confusion of swinging shadows, they could not find the tap Angelica had been drawing with. Tonino had to jam his head and arm into the tiny bathroom and pull off the other useless tap.

Even when the shadows stopped swinging, the Angel scratched on the table was hard to see. It now looked faint and small.

“He needs his scroll,” said Angelica. “And I’d better put in a halo to make sure he’s holy.”

Angelica was now so much bigger and stronger that she kept dropping the tap. The halo, when she had scratched it in, was too big, and the scroll would not go right. The table swayed this way and that, the tap ploughed and skidded, and there was a danger the Angel would
end up a complete mess.

“It’s so fiddly!” said Angelica. “Will that do?”

“No,” said Tonino. “It needs the scroll more unrolled. Some of the words show on our Angel.”

Because he was quite right, Angelica lost her temper. “All right! Do it yourself, if you’re so clever, you horrible Montana!”

She held the tap out to Tonino and he snatched it from her, quite as angry. “Here,” he said, ploughing up a long curl of varnish. “Here’s the hanging bit. And the words go sideways. You can see
Carmen pa, Venit ang, Cap
and a lot more, but there won’t be room for it.”

“Our Angel,” said Angelica, “says
cis saeculare, elus cantare
and
virtus data
near the end.” Tonino scratched away and took no notice. It was hard enough shaping tiny letters with a thing like a tap, without listening to Angelica arguing. “Well it does!” said Angelica. “I’ve often wondered why it’s not the words we sing—”

The same idea came to both of them. They stared at one another, nose to nose across the scratched varnish.

“
Finding
the words means
looking
for them,” said Tonino.

“And they were over our gates all the time! Oh how
stupid
!” exclaimed Angelica. “Come on. We
must
get out now!”

Tonino left the scroll with
Carmen
scraped on it. There was really no room for any more. They dragged the creaking, swaying table across the hole they had made in the floor and set to work underneath it, hacking lumps out of the painted floor. Shortly, they could see a bar of silvery metal stretching from the trap door to the floor underneath them. Tonino forced the end of his candlestick down between the battered cardboard edges and heaved sideways at the metal.

“There’s a spell on it,” he said.

“Angel of Caprona,” Angelica said at the same moment.

And the bar slipped sideways. A big oblong piece of the floor
dropped away from in front of their knees and swung, leaving a very deep dark hole.

“Let’s get the Hangman’s rope,” said Angelica.

They edged along to the pile of puppets and disentangled the string from the little gibbet. Tonino tied it to the table leg.

“It’s a long way down,” he said dubiously.

“It’s only a few feet
really
,” Angelica said. “And we’re not heavy enough to hurt. I went all floppy when you kicked me off the stage and—well—I didn’t break anything anyway.”

Tonino let Angelica go first, swinging down into the dark space like an energetic blue monkey.
Crunch
went the shoddy table.
Creeeak
. And it swayed towards the leg where the rope was tied.

“Angel of Caprona!” Tonino whispered.

The table plunged, one corner first, down into the space. The cardboard room rattled. And, with a rending and creaking of wood, the table stuck, mostly in the hole, but with one corner out and wedged against the sides. There was a thump from below. Tonino was fairly sure he was stuck in the room for good now.

“I’m down,” Angelica whispered up. “You can pull the rope up. It nearly reaches the floor.”

Tonino leaned over and fumbled the string up from the table leg. He was sure there had been a miracle. That leg ought to have broken off, or the table ought to have gone down the hole. He whispered “Angel of Caprona!” again as he slid down under the table into the dark.

The table creaked hideously, but it held together. The string burned Tonino’s hands as he slid, and then it was suddenly not there. His feet hit the floor almost at once. “Oof!” he went. His feet felt as if they had been knocked up through his legs.

Down there, they were standing on the shiny floor of a Palace room. The towering walls of the Punch and Judy show were on three
sides of them. Instead of a back wall, there was a curtain, intended to hide the puppet-master, and very dim light was coming in around its edges. They pulled one end of the curtain aside. It felt coarse and heavy, like a sack. Behind it was the wall of the room. The puppet show had evidently been simply pushed away to one side. There was just space for Angelica and Tonino to squeeze past the ends of the show, into a large room lit by moonlight falling in strong silver blocks across its shiny floor.

It was the same room where the court had watched the Punch and Judy show. The puppet show had not been put away. Tonino thought of the time he and Angelica had tottered on the edge of the stage, looking into nothingness. They could have been killed. That seemed another miracle. Then, they must have been in some kind of storeroom. But, when the Duchess was so mysteriously taken ill, no one had bothered to put them back there.

The moonlight glittered on the polished face of the Angel, high up on the other side of the room, leaning out over some big double doors. There were other doors, but Tonino and Angelica set out, without hesitation, towards the Angel. Both of them took it for a guide.

“Oh bother!” said Angelica, before they reached the first block of moonlight. “We’re still small. I thought we’d be the right size as soon as we got out, didn’t you?”

Tonino’s one idea was to get out, whatever his size. “It’ll be easier to hide like this,” he said. “Someone in your Casa can easily turn you back.” He pulled the Hangman’s cloak around him and shivered. It was colder out in the big room. He could see the moon through the big windows, riding high and cold in a wintry dark blue sky. It was not going to be fun running through the streets in a red nightgown.