"Diana Wynne Jones - Witch Week" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

Here, Miss Cadwallader turned gracefully to them. Nan, to her utter relief, stopped in mid-sentence.
"You have all been long enough in the school by now," Miss Cadwallader said, "to know the town quite
well. Do you know that lovely old house in High Street?"
They all three stared at her. Charles gulped down a ring of potato. "Lovely old house?"
"It's called the Old Gate House," said Miss Cadwallader. "It used to be part of the gate in the old
town wall. A very lovely old brick building."
"You mean the one with a tower on top and windows like a church?" Charles asked, though he could
not think why Miss Cadwallader should talk of this and not processed peas.
"That's the one," said Miss Cadwallader. "And it's such a shame. It's going to be pulled down to make
way for a supermarket. You know it has a king-pin roof, don't you?"
"Oh," said Charles. "Has it?"
"And a queen-pin," said Miss Cadwallader.
Charles seemed to have got saddled with the conversation. Nirupam was happy enough not to talk,
and Nan dared do no more than nod intelligently, in case she started describing the food again. As Miss
Cadwallader talked, and Charles was forced to answer while trying to eat tinned tomatoes-no, they were
not skinned mice!-using just a fork, Charles began to feel he was undergoing a particularly refined form of
torture. He realized he needed a hate-word for Miss Cadwallader too. Hot-pot would do for her. Surely
nothing as awful as this could happen to him more than once a month? But that meant he had still not got a
code-word for Nan.
They took the hot-pot away. Charles had not eaten much. Miss Cadwallader continued to talk to him
about houses in the town, then about stately homes in the country, until the pudding arrived. It was set
before Charles, white and bleak and swimming, with little white grains in it like the corpses of ants-Lord, he
was getting as bad as Nan Pilgrim! Then he realized it was the ideal word for Nan.
"Rice pudding!" he exclaimed.
"It is agreeable," Miss Cadwallader said, smiling. "And so nourishing." Then, incredibly, she reached
to the top of her plate and picked up a fork. Charles stared. He waited.
Surely Miss Cadwallader was not going to eat runny rice pudding with just a fork? But she was. She
dipped the fork in and brought it up, raining weak white milk.
Slowly, Charles picked up a fork too and turned to meet Nan's and Nirupam's incredulous faces. It
was just not possible.
Nirupam looked wretchedly down at his brimming plate. "There is a story in the Arabian Nights," he
said, "about a woman who ate rice with a pin, grain by grain." Charles shot a terrified look at Miss
Cadwallader, but she was talking to the lord again. "She turned out to be a ghoul," Nirupam said. "She ate
her fill of corpses every night."
Charles's terrified look shot to Nan instead. "Shut up, you fool! You'll set her off again!"
But the possession seemed to have left Nan by then. She was able to whisper, with her head bent
over her plate so that only the boys could hear, "Mr. Wentworth's using his spoon. Look."
"Do you think we dare?" said Nirupam.
"I'm going to," said Charles. "I'm hungry."
So they all used their spoons. When the meal was at last over, they were all dismayed to find Mr.
Wentworth beckoning. But it was only Nan he was beckoning. When she came reluctantly over, he said,
"See me at four in my study." Which was, Nan felt, all she needed. And the day was still only half over.




Chapter Three
That afternoon, Nan came into the classroom to find a broom laid across her desk. It was an old tatty
broom, with only the bare minimum of twigs left in the brush end, which the groundsman sometimes used to
sweep the paths. Someone had brought it in from the groundsman's shed. Someone had tied a label to the