Read Online Conrad's Fate by Diana Wynne Jones - Free Book Online Page A

we’ll go up to nearly a hundred. But the mourning period for Count Rudolf isn’t over for another fortnight, so we’re very quiet until then. Plenty of time for you to find your feet. Uniforms are this way.”
    He led us to the next slatted door. Beyond it was an even bigger room. It had shelves like a public library, and all the shelves were stacked with clothes. There was pile after pile of pure white shirts, a wall of velvet breeches, neat towers of folded waistcoats, stack upon stack of striped stockings, rails hung with starched white neckcloths, and more shelves devoted to yellow-striped aprons. Underneath the shelves were cardboard boxes of buckled shoes. A strong spell against moths made my eyes water. Christopher’s eyes went wide, but I only dimly saw Hugo going around, checking labels, looking at us measuringly, and then taking down garments from the shelves.
    We each got two shirts, two aprons, four pairs of underpants, four pairs of stockings, one waistcoat, and one pair of velvet breeches. Hugo followed those with neckcloths, carefully laid over the growing heaps in our arms, and then a striped nightshirt apiece. “Do you know your shoe sizes?” he asked.
    Neither of us did. Hugo whipped up a sliding measure from among the cardboard boxes and swiftly found out. Then he fetched buckled shoes from the boxes and made us try them on, efficiently checking where our toes came to and how the heels fitted. “It’s important your shoes don’t hurt,” he said. “You’re on your feet so much.” I could see he made a very good valet.
    â€œRight,” he said, dumping a gleaming pair of shoes each on top of the nightshirts. “Go and get into the uniforms and put the rest away and meet me by the lift in ten minutes.” He fetched a slender gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at the time. “Make that seven minutes,” he said. “Or I won’t have time to show you the house. I have to start for Ludwich with Count Robert at four.”
    I put my chin on the shoes to hold them steady and tried to remember the way we had come here. So did Christopher. I went one way with my pile of clothes. Christopher, with a vague but purposeful look, marched off in exactly the opposite direction.
    Hugo went racing after Christopher, shouting, “ Stop! Not there !” He sounded so horrified that Christopher swung around in alarm.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” he asked.
    Hugo pointed to a wide red-brown stripe painted on the wall beside Christopher. “You mustn’t ever go past this line,” he said. “It’s the women’s end of the attics beyond that. You’d be sacked on the spot if you were found on the wrong side of it.”
    â€œOh,” said Christopher. “Is that all ? From the way you yelled, I thought there must be a hundred-foot drop along there. Which is the right way back to our room, then?”
    Hugo pointed. It was in a direction that neither of us had thought of taking. We hurried off that way, feeling rather foolish, and after a while, more by luck than anything, arrived in the corridor where Christopher’s tie hung on the doorknob.
    â€œWhat foresight on my part!” Christopher said as we each dumped our armloads of clothing on a bed. “I don’t know about you, Grant, but I know I’m going to look and feel a perfect idiot in these clothes, though not as silly as I’m going to feel in this nightshirt tonight.”
    â€œWe’ll get used to it,” I said grumpily as I scrambled out of my own clothes. By this time Christopher’s confident way of going on was annoying me.
    â€œDo I detect,” Christopher asked, climbing out of his trousers and hanging them carefully on the rail of his bed, “a certain hostility in you, Grant? Have you, by any chance, let Mr. Amos’s ideas get to you? Are you regarding me as a rival?”
    â€œI suppose I’m