In the back window, a cat scrabbled desperately against the glass.
It was Millie.
*
‘We have to leave. It’s not safe here any more.’
‘This is my home and the girls’ home. We’re not going anywhere.’
‘The witch is on her way back,’ I said, knowing I’d never be able to explain what I meant by this to Lydia, who, refused to see anything beyond the plainly visible. ‘Those were her helpers. Why do you think they were here, if not to prepare for her return?’
Liddy looked at me. ‘By taking Millie? What good will that do them?’
I had no answer for that, of course.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, extending an elegant foreleg and examining a spot of mud that had dared to dry below the dew claw, ‘what do you think we’re going to do – sleep in a ditch?’
‘You didn’t manage so badly the last time you left here,’ I said waspishly and immediately regretted it.
Lydia’s face became closed and hard. Then she got up and stalked into the next room. There, the three girls lay curled together for comfort. They looked up as I followed their mother in, their faces identically inimical. I knew without a word being said that they blamed me, somehow, for Millie’s abduction.
I blamed myself, too. Over and over I thought how different things might have turned out had I been able to croak out that single word of warning; if I had got in the men’s way, tripped them up; if they had taken me instead. As it was, I had chased the silver vehicle down the drive, out of the gates and on to the lane outside. At the junction with Village Road I had almost caught it, though I thought my lungs might burst with the effort, but then it had leapt away from me with a tremendous surge of power and I had lost it as it sped away, fishtailing round the corner, and headed towards the main road for Drychester and the towns beyond. Millie’s face as the car accelerated away was the face of a cat that has lost all hope.
*
I wandered far and wide on the highways, searching for any sign of her, but to no avail. I popped out into unfamiliar streets in towns I had never before visited. I asked every cat, dog, bird and rat I encountered if they had seen her; but many of them ran from me, and I realised too late that I had stepped into their path straight from a wild road and still wore my lion’s mane. I tried and failed to find the fox. Loves A Dustbin, to enlist him in my quest. I quartered the gardens of country houses as old as Nonesuch, or so new they had no scent at all. Of Millefleur, or the Two Who Looked Like One, I found no trace.
The days that followed Millie’s disappearance were terrible indeed. The girls squabbled with each other constantly. Bickering turned to hisses and howls; hisses and howls to sudden outbreaks of violence. Little tufts of blue fur drifted in the air; there were spots of blood on the mat in the kitchen. Lydia ignored me entirely and for once I did not care.
The things Millie had said before she was taken kept coming back to me. I lay in empty rooms and contemplated them. In the quiet moments between times – before I slept, when I awoke; exiting the wild roads after a night’s work; while grooming the burrs and thorns of winter from my coat – her words echoed in my skull. I walked in the garden in the rain and thought about how she had described me. How she had described herself: Who loves him more than all the world…
The phrase went round and round in my head until I found I had to get up and do something, anything, to displace it. I explored the house from cellar to roof. I found rooms I had never discovered before, rooms that had been shut as if for centuries, for the dust lay as thick as fur on every surface. I disturbed spiders and mice, moths and woodlice. I watched John standing vacantly in the knot garden as though someone had switched him off. I came upon Anna, asleep, with tears drying on her face; I watched the baby crawling and toddling around the corridors when no one was paying attention to her.
The baby puzzled me. It was as much the way she smelled as her random behaviour, her odd outbursts, her avid interest in us cats; even the bizarre and resonant objects she adopted. Some days her scent was the scent of a young creature: warm and softy and milky; but I began to realise that on the days following a particularly hard night of dreams, especially those times when I had been forced on to the labyrinthine highways of Nonesuch to tackle a witch dream, she had started to smell very odd indeed. It was not merely that she smelled adult, or that very occasionally, and for a fraction of a second, she gave off the heady aroma of a fully grown and willing female – all salt and tang – but that she had many scents all intermingled, so that if you approached from one side she smelled sweet and musky; from another like a thing dead in the earth for months, a thing that worms and centipedes have found, a thing with eggs laid in its belly; while underneath it all was the innocent baby smell that suited her appearance. She conformed to nothing in the scent map of the world my grandfather had so painstakingly taught me; yet all things were present within her, as if she represented the entire world, the old and new, the fresh and the rotten, both love and hate; gentleness and a black, tearing violence.
She scared me, if truth be told. The other cats kept out of her way without the slightest understanding of why they did so beyond a cat’s natural avoidance of the unpredictable feet and grasping hands of an unsteady but curious child; but they had not seen the dreams she generated as I had.
Even so, I was nagged by the sense that she was the mystery to which all the other recent events – the discovery and dream life of the significant objects, the recent preponderance of nightmares in the village, the convolution of the highways through the house, my sightings of Vita, even the disappearance of Millie – were somehow connected and so I kept a close watch on her.
One afternoon, when Anna was working in the kitchen and Eleanor was playing beneath the table, I found myself drawn by the presence of another of the magical objects. From my vantage point, carefully out of hand’s reach under one of the kitchen chairs, I saw that although the baby appeared to be engaged in a game that involved the throwing around of a number of pieces of brightly coloured plastic, amid much clapping of hands and shouting, the object of her true attention lay all the while in her lap. I could not see it as such, but I could feel it, as though it were a pebble dropped into a pond, generating ripples that spread out and out towards the shore. Without moving closer it was hard to spy it out and I spent many frustrating minutes waiting for a clear sight of this new toy. At last, apparently aware of my interest, the baby picked the thing up and cradled it in her hands. She looked me squarely in the eye, a look at once blank and yet challenging. Then she held the object out towards me.
I felt the hairs rise on my neck and spine.
It was a bone doll. I had never seen one before in Ashmore, could not even explain how I knew this for a fact. They say that cats twine through time like the skeins that hold the world in place; they say we have been closely associated with witches, that cats and the craft have been intimately joined. They say that dreamcatchers in particular have lived many lives. Maybe once, in one of mine, I had encountered an object such as this, for how else to explain the repulsion I felt for it? I found myself backing away across the room, until my rump hit the skirting board and there was nowhere left to go. The size of a small kitten, it squatted in Eleanor’s hand, a grotesque replica of a human woman, its fat, thick legs set wide apart and its mouth carved open in an obscene utterance. The baby turned the figurine back towards her and gazed lovingly at its crude, demonic face; then she turned it back to me again. Her own expression had taken on an identical form to the bone doll’s: eyes slitted as if in some intense pain or pleasure, mouth yearning out a soundless cry.
I felt the room spin. A moment later, without the slightest idea of how I had got there, I found myself deep in the knot of Nonesuch’s highways. Lights flickered and faded, chill draughts blew my fur in all directions, cobwebs brushed my face. Behind me, as if through a mist, I could still see the kitchen as a distant glow. If I squinted hard, I could make out the shape of Anna standing at the
stove, her red jumper vibrant in the surrounding gloom of the highway. Of the child there was no sign at all. Slowly I turned round. There was nothing to see on either side except nondescript walls, as if the house were hiding its locations from me, making sure I had no starting point in the maze it had constructed. Ahead of me, however, there was a light, albeit faint and greyish, but a light all the same. Knowing that I was being herded into it like a sheep into a pen, still I went towards it. Cats are curious animals; sometimes we cannot help our natures.
The highway began to tilt downwards as I made my way forward so that when I looked back, the glow of the kitchen had disappeared and all there was behind me was darkness. I shivered then. This was the first time the highways had swallowed me without my permission, the first time I had entered them without a goal in mind: a dream to catch or a journey to make. I could not decide whether, like other wild roads, the highways of the house were a natural phenomenon, part of the Great Cat’s creation, or if they had somehow sprung into existence as a result of the witch’s magic; or whether their true nature lay somewhere between these two points. Whatever the truth of the matter, I gave myself up to their logics. It appeared that they had something to show me and I braced myself for whatever that might be.
I did not have to wait long for the puzzle to present itself. There came a peal of laughter from the lightening tunnel ahead of me. I picked up my pace. A moment later I was in what I could only describe as a cave.
Someone, or something, had hollowed a circular chamber out of the rock here, of a size to accommodate the height of a standing human and of a length to afford sufficient space for three or more to lie at full length. The floor was of soft earth, barely compacted by the passage of feet. The chamber gave back nothing more than an aroma of mulch and leaf mould, water upon stone; and the acrid scent of melted tallow. If I opened my mouth to flehm, to taste the smell, as it were, I caught the faintest echo of burned feather and cold ash. The walls of the chamber were lit by candles: tall yellow pillars, their surfaces roughly moulded as if by hand, the length of them matted with drip marks. Shadows leapt and jumped across the small space. I stepped boldly into the circle of light and there, in the centre of the floor, lay a burned-out fire. Criss-crossing it in a complex pattern were a number of long white bones, laid in a collapsed pyramid. A small heap of black ash sat in the midst of these, the centre of the pile disrupted, as if by a hand. The laughter came again, disembodied; above me, very close. I jumped back, just in time to avoid being hit by something. The object – heavy and pale – fell with a thud into the middle of the ashes, sending up a plume of dust. I looked up and saw above me a small hand, stark white against the ceiling of the chamber. For a moment it seemed to hang there, then it disappeared, as if it had been swallowed by the darkness.
The laughter echoed away into silence.
I moved forward into the light again. In the centre of the extinct fire lay the bone doll, but even as I bent my head to nose at it, the lights flickered as if blown by a great wind and all the candles went out.
13
Anna sat with two of the cats in the drawing room. She had come upon them curled up there asleep in a heap, their paws tucked into a neat pile near their faces, but even so, Letty’s pale star was just visible above the white sock on Belle’s paw.
‘What do you make of these goings-on?’ she asked them, running a hand over that bizarre blue fur. ‘Not much, I bet.’
The drawing room had a deep window recess, a ceiling decorated with lions and roses in chequer-board squares, all the tranquillity of a place worn by use and then abandoned. Life had left its mark as a patina of use, on the oak floor, the silverware, the blackened seats of the Jacobean chairs. Along with that soft dull shine came the gentle, predictable curve of wear – the curve, John had always said, of human occupation. He said you saw it wherever people had lived, but never at Heal’s, where every curve was designed. Not that he was saying anything like that now.
They hadn’t talked much after Eleanor got hold of the Engelion cream and hardly at all since John sold the Magpie.
Her new owner, a cheerful man from the Midlands, arrived to take possession the day after his cheque had cleared. John and Anna watched from the towpath as he swung the boat away from its mooring for the last time. It seemed to take for ever. The Magpie was slow to manoeuvre, her engine chugged heavily in the wet air. John shouted advice, while Anna stared numbly at the willows on the far side of the canal. The first time she met John he had been on the water, she had been on the land and that opposition had set itself into the relationship. They had fought immediately, though over what she had forgotten. She remembered saying contemptuously, ‘No one owns a cat.’ Or had that been him? You were rude then, she thought, and self-absorbed, and you had no idea how to live. We argued over the slightest thing, but at least you cared about something other than a house.
After the Magpie had vanished into the Drychester reach, Anna said forlornly, ‘He was a nice enough man. Don’t you think? But I didn’t like to see him take her away.’
She had felt the best part of their life go with him. What John felt she could only guess, because all he did was shrug. He had made more out of the sale than he expected, but it wasn’t enough. If he kept the builders on, he couldn’t buy materials. If he bought materials he couldn’t pay the men. The less he could afford to do, the harder he worked. It was beyond escapism now. It was beyond denial. He was in a kind of despair. He had to mend the house, because he hoped that would mend the rest of his life. It didn’t matter how often Anna warned him; the more he invested in this activity, the more he had to invest. Sometimes even this wasn’t sufficient to explain his obsessive determination and he seemed to Anna to be working less for any reason of his own than to prepare the place for someone else. Did he still expect the Herringes to ride up the drive in their expensive foreign cars and, at the last moment, save him?
‘I don’t know what he expects,’ Anna told the kittens, ‘because we don’t talk about anything like that.’
Letty purred, half woke, slept again. Belle stirred and opened her eyes just enough for the barest sliver of light to show, then screwed up her face like a disgruntled pensioner and threw both paws over her head. Anna knelt up next to them and ran her fingers over them. She could smell their dusty blue-grey fur in the warmth of the sun that poured between the stone mullions and into the window recess. She had no idea any more what was going on in the quiet feline world they inhabited. She had no idea where Orlando was; she hadn’t seen him for a day or more.
‘I wonder where you’ve gone this time, Orlando,’ she whispered. ‘I wonder where you are. Do you still remember the cottage? And how we all lived in it together, you and your sister and Dellifer and me? And that bad-tempered old tomcat! Do you remember him? Sometimes I wish we were back there again.’
A moment later there came the soft, distinct pat of paws on the oak floor and she looked up hopefully, thinking he might have been summoned magically by the draw of her voice. But it was only Lydia standing on the threshold of the room, surveying the attention being lavished on her children with a rather belligerent expression on her neat golden face.
*
There was a problem with the courtyard. The builders complained that the ground they had uncovered beneath it was ‘dangerous’, that it was unstable in some way they couldn’t quite describe. They thought there might be some much earlier structure down there – a passage, a cellar, the remains of some earlier building, perhaps even an old excavation, which had partly collapsed in on itself – into which the courtyard earth was subsiding. They didn’t, they told John, want to get involved with anything like that: the complications, structural and legal, would be too much. Listed buildings, they complained, were difficult enough to deal with as it was; for him it might mean a postponement of the work while archaeological teams were brought in. It might mean further preservation orders. Whatever else, they advised him, it would mean pay, pay, pay. This he understood. It was less e
asy to understand their other complaint, which was that the ground was being tampered with before they arrived in the mornings, perhaps by an animal. Something had been scuffling about there, they insisted, trying to dig it up. John went down to look. He couldn’t see what they meant, though he had to admit that the earth appeared looser and dryer than it had before. He took some up and rubbed it between his finger and thumb, quickly let it drop. He hadn’t liked the feel of it. ‘This stuff hasn’t seen the light of day in four hundred years,’ he said. ‘It might be that.’ And the shrubbery cats were in and out all night, making a nuisance of themselves. Might one of them be scuffing it up?
There was some laughter.
‘It would have to be a big cat,’ they said.
*
He reported this exchange to Anna in his office. She had gone up to show him a postcard from Alice Meynell, now in Morningside Heights, New York. (Alice was happy: into America, into physics, heavily smitten. Though she would be home soon.) After the most dutiful of glances he had said, ‘Mm’ and left them both casting around wretchedly for something more to say. It was his turn to mind the baby. Eleanor, always happy to have her father to herself, hadn’t even looked up when Anna came in. She was sitting on the floor by his desk, whispering secretively to herself, surrounded by soft toys, rag books, crumpled paper, none of which could compete with the object she was turning over in her hands. It looked like a coloured brooch.
Anna bent down quickly and took it from her. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
For a moment Eleanor was too startled to respond. Then she caught her father’s eye and began to whimper, holding her arms up to him.
‘Be quiet,’ Anna warned. ‘Or you won’t have it back.’
It was an oval of some soft faux-silver alloy pressed into a shallow concave shape perhaps two inches by two and a half, on the upper surface of which someone had made an incredibly detailed and lifelike portrait of a young woman. She was seated, dressed in brocade and a ruff, staring boldly out at the portraitist. Her hands were in her lap, holding a pair of grey kid gloves. Her unbound black hair framed a face used to having its own way, and her green eyes were blank with greed. Anna stared. Her heart was pounding hard. She felt something approaching her purposefully from a long, long way off. It was a feeling of absolute disaster. ‘John,’ she said. ‘This is a portrait of Stella.’