At once that heady scent filled the air. Even the girls – who had given up on the paper game and were now wandering desultorily around the desk, knocking things off it – seemed to notice it. Their heads went up. Their noses twitched.
One by one, they slipped light-footed from the table and gathered about me. ‘Play with us, Uncle Orlando,’ they wheedled.
Belly rubbed herself against me. Letitia hurled herself at my feet and began cleverly to juggle one of the paper balls beneath my nose. Cat leapt up on to my back and bore me down to the ground, whereupon they all joined in so that I could hardly breathe for the riot of scent pressing down on me (and because they were crushing my ribcage).
I knew the scent of calling females only too well. Of all scents, it was the one that made me saddest. It brought back memories. I remembered how Millie had smelled, that night under the moon, when she had offered herself to me, as wicked and as sweet as you could wish, her white belly fur almost luminous in the starlight, her eyes glinting with promise. But I – stupid young simpleton that I was – had run away, as if afraid of such a gift. And I also remembered Liddy’s scent on that fateful night on the houseboat – how should I forget? – when the dream had interrupted our one and only attempt to mate. Even the memory made me dizzy. She had never forgiven me for choosing the dream over her; I knew that now. She probably never would.
Lydia—
The scent in the air was a powerful reminder to me that I was not playing my role in propagating my species.
‘Off with you!’ I cried and disentangled myself with some difficulty from the heap of pretty limbs. ‘I’m only a poor old fellow: no match for you three hoydens.’
And while the two humans lay down on the floor together and began their mating dance, and the girls trod about them, I fled down the stairs, determined to confront my love once and for all.
*
I found her at the food bowls. She had finished a dish of chicken in gravy and had just started crunching her way through a bowl of dried pellets. She stood there, her head angled to roll the food between her molars, her jaw working furiously. It was some seconds before she noticed me: the smell of that dried stuff is so strong it can make you oblivious to any other scent.
‘Liddy—’ I started.
She leapt backwards. The bowl went over and pellets shot everywhere.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ she seethed. She started to bat the food into a heap with her front paws. ‘What a waste,’ she muttered. ‘Can’t let it go to waste.’ She buried her face in the little pile she had made and tried to eat it down, but without any support to hold them in place, the pellets skittered away across the tiles.
‘Liddy – Lydia – stop, please.’
I put myself between her and the remainder of the food. She sat down abruptly, looking beset.
‘Lydia, I need to talk to you. I really must.’
‘About what?’ she said rudely. ‘What’s so important it has to interrupt my meal?’
‘I want you to tell me what happened to you here, when the witch had you captive,’ I said all in a rush, determined to get the words out before I lost my nerve.
An unreadable expression passed across her face. ‘I don’t even want to think about that time. It’s past and gone, and I have my girls.’
‘I feel,’ I said, bracing myself, ‘I feel as if you blame me somehow. For not being there. For not finding you in time—’
She laughed. ‘You? You think you could have stopped… what happened to me? You think you stood a chance against her? You’re mad, Orlando! Being a dreamcatcher has addled the few wits you were born with.’
My heart was hammering in my head. I could feel more words boiling up. ‘You see, Liddy, the thing is…’ Could I say it? Her face did not invite me to continue. But I knew that if I did not say what I had to say, I would never manage it at all and would regret my failure to do so. I took a deep breath and blundered on. ‘I still love you, Lydia, after all this time and even though you’ve been so… cold to me and have shown me no encouragement at all, I still care for you and I want to be with you properly. We could have kittens of our own—’
She looked aghast. ‘Kittens?’
I nodded dumbly. ‘I would love kittens of my own, kittens with you, Lydia. I love your girls – they are wonderful. Letty is a minx and Belly is a bit of a pawful but—’
‘Don’t call them that!’ Her eyes flashed at me. ‘They have proper names: Letitia, Arabella and Caterina. They are not common cats, for you to call them such ridiculous things.’
‘But the girls like their nicknames, Liddy,’ I said carefully, not sure what point she was trying to make. ‘They never use the long forms if they can help it.’
‘Stop it!’
I watched the muscles in her ears contracting, the flanges furling in on themselves as if she would shut out my words.
‘They have proper pedigree ancestry, my girls,’ she went on loudly, to prevent me saying more. ‘The blood of show champions runs in their veins – they have generations of fine breeding behind them. Unlike you, Orlando, a son who never even knew his own father. How could you even think I would mate with you?’ The venom in her voice was shocking.
I was nonplussed, then angry. ‘But Liddy, you cared for me once, enough to invite me aboard your boat. Enough to lift your tail for me!’
She flew at me then, claws out, meaning to hurt. Her eyes were blank with menace. One of her paws caught me a raking clout across the nose, drawing blood. Another sailed over my head, but her elbow caught me a painful, glancing blow on the ear. She bit me on the shoulder; she bit me on the leg. With the strength of a seasoned tomcat battling for its life, she pushed me down. In a frenzy of loathing, she got underneath me, grasped me around the neck in a horrible semblance of affection and then battered at me with her hind feet, her talons harrowing my belly as if she would disembowel me. She hissed. She spat and bubbled. When she could make words – or I could distinguish them from the venomous sounds with which she attacked me – she cursed me: for my stupidity, my gall and my love. And all the while I lay there, foolishly, and let her buffet me, unwilling to fight back for fear I would forget myself and, reverting to my primal self, hurt her in return.
At last she fell back exhausted. I pushed myself painfully to a crouch. I was bleeding from a dozen wounds, could feel where her teeth had met in my hock. My muzzle smarted where her first blow had fallen. Water was seeping from one of my eyes. It stung so badly I wondered for a moment whether she had caught a claw in the delicate skin surrounding it. Then I realised the other eye was doing the same thing. Mortified, I turned away from her.
I sat there, blinking furiously, little afterwaves of shock making the muscles tremble in my flanks. What could we say to one another now? How would we even share the same house from this point, let alone the same food bowl? I groomed my torn neck and tried to think of calming phrases that would make light of the situation, but the vehemence of her attack withered the words before they bubbled out into the air. At last, I decided on my approach. ‘Liddy,’ I started. ‘You’re upset. I can see that. It’s understandable—’
My face composed into mild forgiveness, I turned round, but Lydia, stealthily, silently, had gone.
Her absence hurt more than the blows.
*
She did not return that night, nor the next. She had never left Nonesuch before, never gone anywhere on her own, to the best of my knowledge. She had been cared for and cosseted all her life – except for that one brief spell she would not speak about; that sore wound in her life that I had so thoughtlessly pressed upon, out of shame of which she had fled. The house became a tense burrow of anxiety. I heard John walking the gardens when the moon came up, calling her name, but she did not reply. Anna went outside and banged a spoon against a tin, an action which always caught Lydia’s rapt attention; but she did not come. The girls and I scouted the gardens, quartering the area carefully, noses to the ground. I found a lingering trace of her scent nea
r the orchard wall, but there it disappeared.
I walked the human roads of the village of Ashmore, in the day and by the light of the moon, but no cat whom I questioned had seen a beautiful golden queen close to, or from afar. And when I went to see the Besom, to ask her opinion and her advice, she was gone, too. It was as if all my friends were deserting me, one by one, leaving me with a hard task to perform, a task that would either prove me or break me. I half expected old Hawkweed to manifest before me, a gleam in his single eye, to explain the rules of this new test. It would have been a blessing if he had.
I took to the wild roads. I hunted up and down them, though I could not imagine Lydia entering the highways. I stopped each cat I came upon there and sniffed at them carefully: for in her primal form on the animal highways, who knew what Liddy might look like? I went further afield, out of Ashmore and towards Drychester and the towns that crept out over the plain, and into the chalk hills that bore strange patterns carved into their skin, like tattoos upon the earth. I met travelling cats there: jaunty gypsy cats without a care in the world, strutting lads in the skins of tigers and pumas; feisty queens sashaying along with the proud, swinging gait of lynxes and caracals, rag-eared toms and their retinues; a pride of lions; gaggles of girls – in a fabulous assortment of guises – out for a lark and feeling themselves very daring and grown-up to be swept up in the cold compass winds, not knowing quite where they might emerge.
Not one of them had seen a cat who answered my description, on the highways or off, though a few of the lads looked at me askance and said they’d have a good idea of what to do with such a one if they came upon her. Then they would cackle and cast knowing looks at each other so that I did not know whether they had indeed encountered Liddy, or were having me on.
I ran my feet raw during the days following Lydia’s disappearance. I ran till my pads were bleeding and my neck ached with the tension of staring rigidly into howling winds and bright lights. I ran till I could run no more. Then, one night when the moon hung huge and full and bloody-orange in the sky, as swollen as a dream sac that bears the worst of nightmares – a hunter’s moon, they call it, though I brought no bounty home with me – I limped back into Nonesuch and found that just when I thought I was feeling as guilty and as sorry for myself as I possibly could, things had taken a turn for the worse.
Belly and Letty were sitting on the front doorstep, peering out into the darkness, so still and intent that at first I did not realise they were there.
‘Oh, Uncle Orlando!’ Letty’s eyes lit up at the sight of me so that they blazed like two lamps in the shadows.
‘We’re so glad to see you. Something dreadful’s happened,’ cut in Arabella.
‘Squash’s gone,’ finished Letitia.
‘Caterina,’ corrected Belly, ‘not Squash, she’s not a baby, you know.’
The relief on their faces at being able to pass this information on to someone who might pass for a responsible adult was clearly visible. But instead of responding with the calm reassurance – that all would be well – they so longed for, all I could do was let an ear-splitting wail roll out into the night air.
They quailed. ‘She said she had to follow a dream,’ Letty said hurriedly, disturbed by my reaction.
‘But we thought that was stupid,’ Belly added. ‘It’s the sort of thing you hear in stories.’
My heart sank even further.
Letty looked askance at her sister. ‘She told me more than that. But I didn’t understand what she meant.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ I said wearily. ‘Tell me exactly what happened while I eat.’
*
I had been away from Ashmore for three nights. On the second of these Caterina had woken her sisters with the declaration and had disappeared through the cat door. Letty, who had come into the world some seven minutes before the other two and therefore regarded herself as the eldest – the one in charge when things suited her; the one to chastise when they didn’t – went after Cat and found her outside in the garden, staring fixedly at a point in space about five feet above and in front of her. When she had enquired as to what exactly Caterina was playing at, making such a drama and waking them all up for no good reason. Cat had replied enigmatically that the baby was having a bad dream and since Uncle Orlando was not around to deal with it, the onus fell on her to sort it out. None of which, of course, made any sense to Letty, who had complained bitterly at the interruption and had tramped back into the house in a bad temper. And when she and Belly had woken the next morning. Cat had not returned. Nor had she come back the previous night; and they had been waiting outside ever since supper in the hopes of spying her.
I could see little point in explaining matters further to the girls, so all I said was that they should on no account leave the house; that if Cat came back they should keep her with them and that I would be back before dawn. I gulped down whatever drying food was left in the bowls. It had gained an unappetising crust and gone as dry as sawdust, and it might as well have been the latter for all I cared.
Out I went again into the night. I leapt into the first highway I came to and let the compass winds have their way with me.
*
I fetched up, as I had known I would, on Ashmore Common. There, with that grim moon hanging overhead, in the shadow of the isolated oak that stood in the centre, where once I had buried a human tooth, I sat and considered my options. I could trudge the highways till dawn and miss Cat by sheer bad luck. I could follow the flow of tonight’s dreams and see where they led me, in the hope that the currents were working much the same tonight as they had the previous night. Or I could locate myself in the middle of the knot of highways that converged on the common and pray that she would drift past.
The trouble was she could be anywhere by now. The wild roads can cover immense distances in a disconcertingly short space of time, for the planes of the inner world and the outer visible world do not always mesh; and the highways have a tendency, also, to convolute and disorientate. Some of them can become so contorted – doubling back on themselves where disturbing events lie heavy on the land and dreams have thinned the walls so that the integrity of the highway is lost – that they can deliver an unwary cat into other time periods entirely.
I stared desolately into the nothingness and felt only despair. First my poor sister Vita; then Liddy and now Caterina. It seemed that every female cat who came close to me was doomed to be lost.
I had just made up my mind to insert myself into the knot of highways where a dozen of Ashmore’s wild roads converge and hope for a miracle, when I was granted such, without even the formality of a prayer to the Great Cat. From the far corner of the common, where the goat willow and hawthorn abut the hidden pool where the yellow flag-irises bloom, something was moving at a smart trot.
The bloody cast of the moon was deceptive this night; for it seemed to me that the thing approaching me was a large dog with a coat of the most impossible russet-red. I could not see its face, for something was swinging around in front of it. As it came closer, I realised it was a fox, carrying a large, plump rabbit; no doubt heading for the bramble thicket on the other side of the common in order to eat its kill in peace.
I stood up and fluffed out my fur to give myself a bigger profile. Foxes are unpredictable animals: neither quite Canidae nor yet Felidae, it seemed to me, but an uncomfortable mixture of both. Though I had only known friendship and bravery from the one fox I had ever encountered, I had heard stories about other cats who had being attacked by foxes – some, even, who had been killed – and I had no intention of being traded for the rabbit.
I was so intent on scaring it off that I failed to be at all observant of the newcomer. Then, suddenly, there it was right in front of me: a large, handsome, long-backed, reeking beast with sharply pricked ears and powerful haunches. A patch of grey fur lay about one flank and ran down into the hock joint on that side. It had intelligent eyes. It winked at me and laid the rabbit at my feet.
Impossibly, t
he rabbit leapt up and started calling me by name.
‘Orlando, Uncle Orlando!’
My eyes had deceived me, for it was not a rabbit at all: it was Cat.
Her muzzle was more bloodied than my own, and unspeakable fluids had gushed and dried upon her face, down her neck and on to her shoulders. She reeked of something pungent and vile. She was grinning from ear to ear, but when she tried to stand, her front foot folded under her and she whimpered in pain.
‘I found her,’ the dogfox pronounced, ‘chasing one of your dreams.’ He grimaced, his big red tongue lolling out of his mouth in his most humorous expression, and the vigorous, gamey smell of him rose up and enveloped me.
‘I caught a dream,’ Caterina said, sitting upright, her injured paw held drooping in front of her. ‘It was a big fiery one, but I caught it all the same and I fought it and fought it for ages. But it knocked me down and got away, and even though I hurt my foot, I still chased it. It went for miles, in and out of all these little highways, as if it was trying to confuse me, and then we were somewhere else. Though it looked like the village, it wasn’t right – the cars were all gone and all the big houses – there were fields all over the place, and women in funny long dresses, and the men all wore dull clothes and strange hats, and I didn’t recognise any of the people I saw, and they didn’t know me. Isn’t that odd?’
Before I could say anything, she burbled on, her eyes alight with the hunter’s moon. ‘Except for one thing and that was weird. There were a man and a lady sitting on a bench in the churchyard and he had his arm round her, and he looked like John, but he wasn’t. And the woman wasn’t anything like Anna at all: she had all this black hair and these green, green eyes—’