A faint stale smell filled the hall, as if he was keeping an animal somewhere else in the house. He had actually tried to close the door in her face. ‘Francis, look at me. What’s the matter with you? I can’t believe you’re doing this!’
‘It isn’t the place for her,’ he repeated, ‘just now.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That I can’t take her. Is there someone you can call?’ He offered Anna the telephone, which he kept buried in a litter of church leaflets on the hall table.
‘How pathetic your life has made you,’ she said. ‘You were frightened of me. You were frightened of the lion. Now you’re frightened of looking after a baby.’
He stared away from her.
She took his hand again quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Francis, please. I have to have an hour without her. All I want is an hour. Half an hour, Francis. I promise I’ll be back in half an hour. Look, here’s a bar of chocolate. She’ll do anything for that. Or just switch the television on – do they let vicars have television? Francis, she’s asleep anyway. Give me half an hour, Francis. Please? I’m leaving Nonesuch, but I can’t go without talking to John.’
*
The rectory door slammed behind her.
She ran back to the Volvo, started it up and, rather than waste time turning it round, plunged straight into the maze of lanes north and east of the village. These she would normally have avoided. They were ill-kept and unevenly surfaced. Summer storms washed loose gravel across their adversely cambered corners, which farm machinery then larded with mud. You were always unsighted by some hedge or bank, confused by the way the sunlight flickered through the trees. Still, she drove as fast as she dared; and as she drove, she rehearsed the things she was going to say to John Dawe.
‘We could leave all this behind. Live in London. I could work again, I could get us a house. I’d love to do that. We could be an ordinary family together, with a house of our own and a garden, and you could write your book about dreams.’
Her eyes stung with sentiment and self-pity. ‘Oh, John,’ she said aloud. ‘You’re so useless.’
This made her think of Francis Baynes.
‘It wouldn’t hurt you to help,’ she had insisted. ‘And it’s important, Francis, it’s so important.’ If he had understood he didn’t show it, but only looked down at Eleanor (now fully awake and studying him with a sort of disinterested amusement) and said heavily, ‘All right. But this is a mistake.’ When he met Anna’s eye again his expression had been so at odds with itself, so difficult to interpret, that Anna wondered if he wasn’t right. But what was the alternative? Eleanor mustn’t go back to Nonesuch. If anything was true, it was that. ‘It will only be half an hour, Francis,’ she had promised. Now she told herself, I couldn’t have done anything else. And men always plead to be let off. It’s one of the least attractive things about them. Just as she was thinking that, a woman stepped out in front of the car.
‘Christ!’ said Anna and jammed her foot on the brake.
*
Francis Baynes’s room smelled strongly of sex. The sheets were half off the bed and on the floor all around it were scattered empty cups, plates of half-eaten food and discarded Kleenex tissues. Two large church candles were burning on his writing table. Francis stood at the window with the child in his arms. It seemed to be asleep again. He cupped its head gently in the palm of his hand and said, ‘I won’t do it.’
‘Oh yes, you will,’ said the woman on the bed.
When he came back upstairs he had found her sprawled out with her legs open, eating tomatoes, biting into them so carelessly that the seeds in their greenish jelly dribbled down her chin and into the bed. Now, though, she was squatting up near the pillows in her characteristic posture, looking alert but distant. The muslin dress had rucked itself up round her waist. Her breasts had fallen forward and spilled out. ‘You’ll do it,’ she stated.
Francis stared at her huge brown nipples. He swallowed. ‘I won’t.’
‘Shut up,’ She closed her eyes and concentrated. ‘Izzie’s up to something, sweetie. She doesn’t want it spoilt.’ A brief, inturned smile flickered across her lips, as if, somewhere inside herself, she were looking not at the room, or Francis, but some other part of the village. ‘There. Two places at once. If you want cleverness, leave it to Izzie. There! See? But you can’t, can you? Because you’re a religious man, Francis, you’re such a moral man. Anyway, we’ve got the kiddy now. And this will keep your skinny bitch out of the way—’
*
There was an instant of slow motion – a weightless moment in which Anna, narrowing her eyes in puzzlement, was able to see quite clearly the long brown muslin dress the woman wore, how her arms were raised in that meaningless, rehearsed-looking gesture, how she seemed to be carrying a bunch of primroses – then the Volvo gave an elephantine shudder, spun sideways and slid towards the hawthorn hedge at the side of the road. Anna steered into the skid. Nothing. ‘Oh God,’ she thought. ‘Now I’m for it.’
It seemed to take for ever. The Volvo tilted up on two wheels, pondered things for a moment, then smashed its way through the hedge and toppled over the edge of the thirty-foot bank behind it. Anna hung on to the steering wheel until a sudden change of direction banged her head into the side window. She saw badly tuned TV shapes. She had already forgotten the woman in the brown dress. She felt ashamed of the self-pity which had overcome her a few minutes before and remembered, oddly enough, some advice her father had once given her: ‘Only ever cry for someone else.’
But her last thought was, What a bloody stupid thing to do.
*
Millefleur lay in the darkness, remembering the saddest sight she had ever seen: the old manor house receding away from her through puffs of dust kicked up by the tyres of the car in which she was trapped, and Orlando, brave, sweet Orlando, pounding down the drive after her, his face, appearing and disappearing through the swirling exhaust fumes, a mask of pain and horror. If sheer willpower had been stronger than reinforced glass, she would have melted right through the back windscreen there and then, and tumbled out on to the gravel in front of him.
Instead she was here, in some lightless, sealed room in which a dozen or more cats of all ages, and both genders, slept and quarrelled and complained of the cold. She had been here for several days. They all had. No one had fed them in that time; no one had even opened the door. Every time self-pity threatened to overcome her, Millie would conjure up in her mind favourite places she had visited; friends she had known; fish she had eaten. She remembered a headland, whipped by salt-bearing winds, on which the sun beat down so hard that the patches of lichen on the speckled rocks glowed the same orange as the buoys that bobbed in the sheltered bay below; lying in a beech forest amid a haze of bluebells, watching small birds dart from branch to branch, unaware of her presence; stalking the pebbly foreshore of a sleeping fishing port at dawn, catching hard green crabs with claws that nipped and pinched. She remembered an old brindled female to whom she had poured out her heart. And most often of all she thought about a certain marmalade tomcat and wondered if she would ever see him again.
It seemed to be some kind of holding pen they were in, somewhere to be kept on the way to somewhere else, but where they were headed none of them knew. For the first couple of days there had been an excitable air to the place. Cats had exchanged greetings, talked about themselves and boasted about their comfortable homes; their regular meals; their extensive territories; their kittens; the usual stuff of chatter. The second day, hungry and with nothing to sustain them except a bowl of stale water and a dripping tap, they had talked about nothing but food. Lately, though, anxiety had bred rumours and those were the worst.
‘It’ll be for our fur,’ someone said; but this was immediately refuted by a gruff male voice.
‘If they wanted us in good condition, they’d bleeding well feed us.’
‘Perhaps it was a mistake and they’ll come and let us go.’
‘More likely
we’ll be left here to rot.’
‘They’re going to use us for dog food, that’s what I reckon.’
A chorus of wails followed this.
‘I’d heard it was for cosmetics – perfume, that sort of thing.’
There was a silence. Then, ‘That’s nice,’ came a hesitant female voice close to Millie.
Someone explained exactly what that might mean, and Millie felt the shape next to her curl itself into a ball and begin to tremble.
After that, Millie could stand it no more. She got up, stretched her legs and made yet another inspection of the room. She had done this every day, as much for exercise as in the genuine expectation of finding an escape route. The place seemed to be constructed of featureless concrete, windowless and with a single wooden door, locked with a key high up. Bolts Millie could manage. A lock was a different matter. She made it through to the back wall, after much bad-tempered shuffling and muttering from the cats she disturbed, and started to work her way along the seam between the wall and floor. Nothing. She turned the corner towards the dripping tap and walked into an immovable object.
‘Watch where you are going, clumsy daughter of a sewer rat!’ The voice was deep, accented and rather upper-class.
Millie felt her hackles rise. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘To think I should be reduced to this – left to rot in a filthy sty with the hoi polloi, as if I am a nobody, a nothing. It is a nonsense; a tragedy.’
Millie, despite herself, was amused. ‘And just who are you, then, to think yourself so far above the rest of us poor hoi polloi?’
‘My name is Circassian Gogol II, Supreme Champion Russian Blue of countless shows, winner of Finest Stud Cat, prized for my beauty and for my legendary staying power. I have serviced a thousand females, sired a million perfect kittens. Ah, the kittens, they would all have been show winners, had they…’ His voice tailed away to a mournful drone.
Something clicked in Millefleur’s head. ‘Excuse me. Circus – whatever you’re called, you don’t happen to have a father who lived out Drychester way and was the local dreamcatcher there, do you?’
In the darkness she saw his eyes flicker briefly as if she had caught his interest. ‘I might,’ he conceded. ‘But I had rather not tell more of my tragic circumstances to someone whom I have not even been introduced.’
‘My name is Millefleur; though friends call me Millie.’
‘Millefleur. French for “yarrow”: a common weed, found in hedges, I believe. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make silk from a sow’s ear.’
‘You are either naturally rude,’ Millie returned cheerfully, ‘or you are so handsome that you have always let your looks speak for you and never bothered about being polite. Which is it, I wonder?’
A frosty silence fell between them. Then, ‘I apologise. I am not much used to the company of other cats,’ the Russian Blue said stiffly.
‘I thought you said you had sired a million kittens.’
‘It does not take long to service a harnessed female.’
An unpleasant image flickered across Millie’s mind’s eye. ‘So you are the witch’s cat, then?’
‘For years I was her familiar and stud cat. But she seems to have grown tired of me. Her boys took me from one place to another, but they did not seem to have much idea of what to do with me. For some time I was kept in some awful laboratory; then they brought me here two – three? – weeks ago. They kept bringing in bundles of scrawny streetmogs and throwing them in here, but the devil knows what I’m supposed to do with them. Apart from the fact that that pair don’t even seem to be able to tell the difference between male and female cats, they can hardly expect me to show an interest in such miserable specimens, can they? But since they brought you in there’s been no sign of them. How my mistress can allow them to treat me so I can’t imagine.’
‘She’s dead, the witch.’
There was a long pause. Then the foreign cat said sorrowfully, ‘I had thought she had found another to replace me. Now I’ll be dead before she returns.’
Millie was puzzled by this. ‘What do you mean? She’s dead, I said. She’s not coming back.’
‘She always comes back.’
‘I saw her body,’ Millie said through gritted teeth. ‘It was all black and burned.’
‘Ah. They burned her, did they? I see. It’ll be another body, then, that she seeks to return to this time. Tell me, did they burn the house, too?’
‘The house?’
‘Nonesuch. Did they burn Nonesuch along with its mistress?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Millie said. ‘Though it wasn’t completely destroyed. More’s the pity.’
‘And the knot garden and the Chamber of Secrets?’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about. Various parts of the house were badly burned, but Orlando’s and Lydia’s people have been restoring it. Not that it seems to be making them very happy.’
‘Lydia, you say? Not the little golden beauty?’
Millie sighed. ‘Is she so memorable, among your thousands of conquests?’
‘Ah. Do I detect a note of jealousy?’
‘No you bloody well don’t. She had kittens, you know.’
‘They all do.’
‘No. I mean, she still has them. They escaped.’
Millie felt a frisson of reaction, then, ‘Kittens,’ Circassian Gogol II said ruminatively. ‘Well, well, well. I say. How many?’
‘Three. All girls. Letitia, Arabella and Caterina—’
‘Pretty names. Very elegant. Very… proper.’
‘—better known as Thug and Beetle and Squash,’ Millie finished spitefully.
‘How perfectly dreadful. It sounds rather as if they are missing out on the finer things in life. Yet, as I recall, their mother was a rather refined little queen.’
Millie snorted. ‘Yeah, right. She’s about as refined as a shark, that one. Same sort of appetite, too.’
‘Even so, I should like to see her again,’ the witch’s familiar mused. ‘And the kittens, too. How remarkable that they should avoid the Boiling.’
Millie felt her fur bristle. ‘They were the lucky ones,’ she said grimly. Then, ‘Just how much did you know about what the witch was doing, anyway?’
‘Not much, for a long time. She became less discreet as things progressed, however. Less discreet and… more… sleek, somehow. Terrible smell, though. No noses, these humans; no idea at all. The last time I saw her she stank of that vile concoction she made, despite all the rose tincture she added to it to disguise the scent of boiled kitten. I’ve smelled it on other women since – not the most refined version, of course; she kept that for herself. It would not do to slave so long in search of perfection and then allow others access to it, would it? There can only be one Queen of the Night, after all. And she could hardly afford for the other one to steal her man again, not after defeating her time and again down the centuries.’
‘Centuries? Even I know humans don’t live so long—’
Millefleur sensed the other cat’s smile as a ripple in the air between them. ‘She has had life after life,’ he said at last. ‘They all have, those three. Whether they want to return to Nonesuch or not, it draws them back into the pattern again and again. So my grandfather told me, and his grandfather told him. The witch and her familiars, defeating the plain little woman so that she may keep the Dark Man for herself.’
Millie felt a sudden warmth of fellow feeling for ‘the plain little woman’, by whom he seemed to mean Anna, who had gentle hands and eyes the colour of a burnished chestnut, and had never shown her anything but kindness, and tin after tin of tuna in brine. ‘She had a child, too,’ she said, a little dreamily. ‘A baby with green eyes.’
Circassian Gogol twitched. His head went up. One of his long whiskers brushed her own. ‘Does it gather… things?’ he asked obscurely.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh… unusual objects. Things you might not expect a child to play with.’
Mi
llie frowned. ‘A black tin box that made a noise. A necklace thing. An old spoon—’
‘She’s coming back,’ he said excitedly. ‘My mistress is seeking to return. We must leave now. I must go back to her!’
‘And just how,’ Millie asked with the merest touch of sarcasm, ‘do you imagine we’re going to get out of here? Melt through the walls, maybe; magic up a little door? I’ve searched this damn place from top to bottom and not found so much as a crack.’
Circassian Gogol made a strange creaking sound that Millie realised belatedly was a laugh. Then he stirred himself and stood up. He was taller than her: she could feel his warm breath on the top of her head. Where he had lain, the place felt different: cool and shimmering; somehow mutable, undependable…
Millie pushed a paw into the coolness, felt it swallowed, felt it grow. Freezing air, moving furiously, caught the lynx fur and flattened it to her skin. She drew the paw back, licked at it curiously. Tiny ice shards burst like scintillant lights on her tongue. She laughed. ‘A wild road!’ she crowed delightedly. ‘You’ve been sitting right over the entrance to a highway all this time!’
‘I felt it was my job to guard it,’ Circassian Gogol said austerely, ‘until I was certain of what was required of me. Now that I know, I must leave at once.’ And with that he leapt into the wild road.
Millie looked back over her shoulder into the darkness, where a buzz of sound was beginning to spread excitedly through the room. ‘Wild road,’ she called softly. ‘Right over here. Take your chance while you can and good luck!’ Then she followed the witch’s familiar into the highway.
*
Later that morning, not far from the rectory, two or three acres of rough pasture were turned over for winter wheat. The tractor – driven by an old boyfriend of Alice Meynell’s, christened Dave but known to the village at large as ‘Geronimo’ – groaned its way up and down, then rumbled off into the mist, trailing the sounds of country music and leaving the gulls to wheel and screech above the juicy furrows, which now had the colour of Green & Black’s chocolate and smelled a little like it too.