the Angel of Caprona,” Aunt Maria said, and shuddered as she picked up her greasy cup.
“Lucia, you fool!” said Rinaldo. “That’s the strongest tune there is.”
“All right, all right. Stop going on at me. I’m sorry!” Lucia said angrily.
“So are the rest of us, unfortunately,” sighed Uncle Lorenzo.
If only I could be like Giorgio, Tonino thought, as he got up from the table. I suppose what I should have to do is to find the words to the Angel. He went to school without seeing anything on the way, wondering how he could manage to do that, when the rest of his family had failed. He was realistic enough to know that he was simply not good enough at spells to make up the words in the ordinary way. It made him sigh heavily.
“Cheer up,” said Paolo, as they went into school.
“I’m all right,” Tonino said. He was surprised Paolo should think he was miserable. He was not miserable at all. He was wrapped in delightful dreams. Maybe I can do it by accident, he thought.
He sat in class composing strings of gibberish to the tune of the Angel, in hopes that some of it might be right. But that did not seem satisfactory, somehow. Then, in a lesson that was probably History – for he did not hear a word of it – it struck him, like a blinding light, what he had to do. He had to find the words, of course. The First Duke must have had them written down somewhere and lost the paper. Tonino was the boy whose mission it was to discover that lost paper. No nonsense about making up words, just straight detective work. And Tonino was positive that the book had been a clue. He must find a peeling blue house, and the paper with the words on would be somewhere near.
“Tonino,” asked the teacher, for the fourth time, “where did Marco Polo journey to?”
Tonino did not hear the question, but he realised he was being asked something. “The Angel of Caprona,” he said.
Nobody at school got much sense out of Tonino that day. He was full of the wonder of his discovery. It did not occur to him that Uncle Umberto had looked in every piece of writing in the University Library and not found the words to the Angel. Tonino knew.
After school, he avoided Paolo and his cousins. As soon as they were safely headed for the Casa Montana, Tonino set off in the opposite direction, towards the docks and quays by the New Bridge.
An hour later, Rosa said to Paolo, “What’s the matter with Benvenuto? Look at him.”
Paolo leant over the gallery rail beside her. Benvenuto, looking surprisingly small and piteous, was running backwards and forwards just inside the gate, mewing frantically. Every so often, as if he was too distracted to know what he was doing, he sat down, shot out a hind leg, and licked it madly. Then he leapt up and ran about again.
Paolo had never seen Benvenuto behave like this. He called out, “Benvenuto, what’s the matter?”
Benvenuto swung round, crouching low on the ground, and stared urgently up at him. His eyes were like two yellow beacons of distress. He gave a string of mews, so penetrating and so demanding that Paolo felt his stomach turn uneasily.
“What is it, Benvenuto?” called Rosa.
Benvenuto’s tail flapped in exasperation. He gave a great leap and vanished somewhere out of sight. Rosa and Paolo hung by their midriffs over the rail and craned after him. Benvenuto was now standing on the water butt, with his tail slashing. As soon as he knew they could see him, he stared fixedly at them again and uttered a truly appalling noise.
Wong wong wong wong-wong-wong!
Paolo and Rosa, without more ado, swung towards the stairs and clattered down them. Benvenuto’s wails had already attracted all the other cats in the Casa. They were running across the yard and dropping from roofs before Paolo and Rosa were halfway down the stairs. They were forced to step carefully to the water butt among smooth furry bodies and staring, anxious green or yellow eyes.
“Mee-ow-ow!” Benvenuto said peremptorily, when they reached him.
He was thinner and browner than Paolo had ever seen him. There was a new rent in his left ear, and his coat was in ragged spikes. He looked truly wretched. “Mee-ow-ow!” he reiterated, from a wide pink mouth.
“Something’s wrong,” Paolo said uneasily. “He’s trying to say something.” Guiltily, he wished he had kept his resolution to learn to understand Benvenuto. But when Tonino could do it so easily, it had never been worth the bother. Now here was Benvenuto with an urgent message – perhaps word from Chrestomanci – and he could not understand it. “We’d better get Tonino,” he said.
Benvenuto’s tail slashed again. “Mee-ow-ow!” he said, with tremendous force and meaning. Around Paolo and Rosa, the pink mouths of all the other cats opened too. “MEE-OW-OW!” It was deafening. Paolo stared helplessly.
It was Rosa who tumbled to their meaning. “Tonino!” she exclaimed. “They’re saying Tonino! Paolo, where’s Tonino?”
With a jolt of worry, Paolo realised he had not seen Tonino since breakfast. And as soon as he realised that, Rosa knew it too. And, such was the nature of the Casa Montana, that the alarm was given then and there. Aunt Gina shot out of the kitchen, holding a pair of kitchen tongs in one hand and a ladle in the other. Domenico and Aunt Maria came out of the Saloon, and Elizabeth appeared in the gallery outside the Music Room with the five little cousins. The door of the Scriptorium opened, filled with anxious faces.
Benvenuto gave a whisk of his tail and leapt for the gallery steps. He bounded up them, followed by the other cats; and Paolo and Rosa hurried up too, in a sort of shoal of leaping black and white bodies. Everyone converged on Antonio’s rooms. People poured out of the Scriptorium, Elizabeth raced round the gallery, and Aunt Maria and Aunt Gina clambered up the steps by the kitchen quicker than either had ever climbed in her life. The Casa filled with the sound of hollow running feet.
The whole family jammed themselves after Rosa and Paolo into the room where Tonino was usually to be found reading. There was no Tonino, only the red book lying on the windowsill. It was no longer shiny. The pages were thick at the edges and the red cover was curling upwards, as if the book was wet.
Benvenuto, with his jagged brown coat up in a ridge along his back and his tail fluffed like a fox’s brush, landed on the sill beside the book and rashly put his nose forward to sniff at it. He leapt back again, shaking his head, crouching, and growling like a dog. Smoke poured up from the book. People coughed and cats sneezed. The book curled and writhed on the sill, amid clouds of smoke, exactly as if it were on fire. But instead of turning black, it turned pale grey-blue where it smoked, and looked slimy. The room filled with a smell of rotting.
“Ugh!” said everybody.
Old Niccolo barged members of his family right and left to get near it. He stood over it and sang, in a strong tenor voice almost as good as Marco’s, three strange words. He sang them twice before he had to break off coughing. “Sing!” he croaked, with tears pouring down his face. “All of you.”
All the Montanas obediently broke into song, three long notes in unison. And again. And again. After that, quite a number of them had to cough, though the smoke was distinctly less. Old Niccolo recovered and waved his arms, like the conductor of a choir. All who could, sang once more. It took ten repetitions to halt the decay of the book. By that time, it was a shrivelled triangle, about half the
