City of Secrets by Mary Hoffman Page B

thoughts to the back of his mind. It always unsettled him when a new Stravagante arrived from his old world. ‘I feel a lot safer with him here, I can tell you.’
    â€˜What sort of person is he?’ asked Matt.
    â€˜Well, he’s older than my real dad,’ said Luciano. ‘He’s in his late fifties but his hair is white. People age quicker here in Talia because life expectancy is shorter.’
    â€˜But he is not from Talia,’ said Cesare quietly.
    â€˜He’s still from more than four hundred years before Matt’s time,’ said Luciano. ‘I don’t know how long Elizabethans lived but I’m betting Doctor Dethridge would be considered old in his own time and place.’
    â€˜I don’t think Shakespeare lived much longer than that,’ said Matt, surprising both the others. Cesare had no idea who Shakespeare was.
    â€˜I didn’t take you for a literary type,’ said Luciano cautiously.
    Matt laughed. ‘I’m not. But my mum’s an English teacher and she’s always coming out with things like that.’
    But what he thought was that Luciano had made a bad deal in swapping twenty-first century life expectancy for a curtailed existence in Talia. Then he remembered that the older boy hadn’t had any choice and was glad he had kept his mouth shut.
    â€˜Anyway,’ Luciano was saying. ‘He’s an alchemist – a natural philosopher, he calls it – but he’s also a mathematician, an astronomer and a calendarist.’
    â€˜And a fine horseman,’ added Cesare, before Matt could ask what a calendarist was. ‘He helped me teach Luciano to ride in Remora.’
    â€˜One thing will strike you as odd about him, though,’ said Luciano. ‘Cesare and the others don’t hear it but to all Stravaganti from the other world he sounds as if he’s talking in old-fashioned English, Elizabethan English, in fact.’
    â€˜What, all forsooth and gadzooks?’ asked Matt disbelievingly.
    â€˜It’s not as bad as that,’ said Luciano. ‘You’ll understand him fine.’
    â€˜I’d better get back to the Scriptorium,’ sighed Matt, heaving himself off the bench. ‘Mustn’t let the real pressmen think I’m not one of them.’
    Luciano and Cesare watched him go.
    â€˜He doesn’t have any idea, does he?’ said Cesare.
    â€˜None at all,’ said Luciano. ‘He’s like a babe in arms.’

Chapter 8
    A Date with Doctor Death
    For the next week Matt needed all the stamina his rugby-playing and training gave him. By day he was working hard at school and by night he was a printer’s ‘devil’. Biagio told him apprentices were called that because of the black smudges that their faces got covered in while they were making ink. He was very relieved that the smuts never travelled back with him to his own world; it would have been really hard to explain to his mother why his bedclothes were full of soot.
    So far he hadn’t been back into the Secret Scriptorium. Constantin had told him that most of his work there happened at night and that was the one time Matt couldn’t be there. He wondered if the Professor had forgotten about that when he brought him to Talia. But he had plenty to do during the time he was there and met Luciano and Cesare only at lunch or just before he had to stravagate home.
    He was bursting with questions about what he was supposed to be doing in Padavia, more than he had time to ask when he was there and he hadn’t met the famous Doctor Dethridge yet. So he sought out the others at Barnsbury more often. And that was problematic too, since Ayesha would only believe he needed to talk to them about university up to a certain point.
    â€˜I don’t see how Nick can help,’ she said. ‘He’s not even applying till the year after next.’
    â€˜No, but he’s pretty bright,’ said Matt.
    â€˜So