By the time we reached the Besom’s cottage I had felt as shaky as a new-born foal, but Millie had no patience where others’ infirmities were concerned. ‘Don’t lag, Orlando,’ she’d chided. ‘I haven’t got all day, even if you have.’ She’d become quite abrupt with me since the night and day of those traumatic events, as if she had deliberately grown a hard and brittle skin over her heart to ward off any trace of the affection she had felt for me; but sometimes I could catch her out of the corner of my eye watching me, her face all soft and yearning. If I could only have loved Millefleur life would have been good to us both. But, for all the stupidity of it, I was still in Liddy’s thrall.
We had wormed our way through the prickly holly hedge and there, crouched in a pool of shadow, watching lines of ants crossing the broken flagstones, had been the old cat. I had been disappointed by her at first, with her bony head and dusty coat. I’d been expecting someone more impressive: a big cat, perhaps, or one gifted with great charisma. But the Besom was small and neat-looking, a little sunken at the haunches and cheeks, and her eyes were glazed with age.
‘Orlando, this is Ma Tregenna,’ purred Millie. The two of them had exchanged brief cheek rubs, then Millie promptly left, casting a sharp glance over her shoulder at me. I knew that look. It said as plainly as speech: ‘Put away your disbelief and behave politely.’ It was a look as chiding as any you’d give a kitten.
The old cat had greeted me politely, explaining that I should follow her round to the back garden, which was quieter. She had warned me not to tread on the ants. ‘There’s rain coming,’ she’d said cryptically. When she spoke, a soft, rasping cough punctuated her words, as if she had fur caught in her throat.
The little garden behind the cottage was a haven for cats, overgrown as it was with briars and ferns. I loved it at first sight. It was all I wanted from a garden, it defined the very idea for me. Bees rumbled lazily from rose to rose and hoverflies hung almost silent in the air above us, before whizzing away at high speed to suspend themselves a few feet away, as if eavesdropping on our conversation. Suddenly I found I could talk, and talk I did, all that afternoon.
She had hardly uttered a word until I finished, other than to encourage me to continue, or to clarify a point in the story; and at last all she said was, ‘Have a sleep now, Orlando. Feel your eyes closing, and have a proper old snooze.’ And I had suddenly found myself exhausted, as if all the time I had been with her I had been fighting back a weariness that went even beyond my bones, and had fallen into a long, deep sleep.
As I slept, I had dreamed. I know this, for she told me so. She had sat there beside me, amid the brambles and briars, as the sun dipped over the distant downs, and watched my dreams forming. And when I woke, she told me what she had observed.
For the Besom was a dreamcatcher, too.
*
I had not until then realised that a female cat could be a dreamcatcher. It had shocked me to think of a young queen out on the highways, chasing down and ripping apart the evil dreams of humankind, putting herself in the way of danger and discomfort – for such had always seemed to me a measure of masculine prowess and pride, the thing that set me apart from my fellows and gave me a private pleasure when they boasted of their own tame experiences of the wild roads. It was yet another failing of my own imagination, I suppose, but I was learning all the time.
Old Ma Tregenna (a title she preferred to Millie’s rather less respectful name for her) was to prove a fine, if eccentric, teacher. She had not, like my grandfather, ranged far and wide via the vast network of wild roads, chasing dreams, fornicating and fighting across the country. No, she had lived and worked on the edge of Ashmore all her life – or should I say, all her lives? – accumulating wisdom and observing the world in her quiet, thorough, unsensational way. She had never settled with a mate in this life, at least, though when she spoke of my grandfather it was with a wistful nostalgia and a certain gleam in the eye; nor had she had kittens of her own, as a result of some cruel trick of nature, though she admitted to having fostered a dozen or more of those abandoned by their mothers in harder times, and I suppose I sought her out in place of my own lost mother. In the months in which I had sloped off from Nonesuch to talk to her, my own dreams had become less troubled and I had found in me the strength of purpose to return to the wild roads of Ashmore as its dreamcatcher. I had thought of my world returning to its natural shape, my life resuming a rhythm of peace and domesticity, punctuated only by my night-time duties.
But the image of the witch’s green eyes and her strong white hands flickered before my vision even as I lay dozing on the lawn, as I ate from my bowl, as I watched the girls play, and I knew that if I could not dispel it I would go quite mad.
*
I found the Besom curled up at the foot of a quickthorn, one ear to the ground, apparently fast asleep. However, even before I could address her she said, ‘Get on over here, Orlando. En’t no need to tiptoe.’ And her pouchy old eyes were suddenly fixed on me with the acuity of a hunting cat.
She was always doing this sort of thing. It no longer phased me, though at the beginning I had found it most disconcerting.
‘I need your advice.’
‘A dream?’ she asked, head cocked, interested now.
I did not bother to ask her how she knew. So I told her what I had witnessed – the cages, the poor, desperate cats awaiting their turn in that cold white room; the straps and the table. I finished simply with, ‘What I don’t know is whether it came from the girls, or if it was always in my own head; whether it’s something or nothing; a memory or something I made up.’ I took a breath. ‘What I don’t know, and have got to find out, is whether it’s just an echo of old horrors, or an omen of some kind.’
The Besom said nothing for some moments. Then she gathered herself into a sitting position, her spine as straight as a foxglove’s, her paws ranged together as neatly as the disposition of her thoughts.
‘Cats, as a species, are a mite superstitious,’ she stated calmly.
I stared at her, disappointed, again. Clearly, she thought me a fool to disparage my fears so casually. ‘Oh,’ I said dully. ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’
She laughed: a rusty hinge of a sound. ‘For good reason. For cats, things en’t simply what they seem. Just think – all them lives, time after time after time, and whenever we come back, back come shades of all them old lives – shadows of old events, old fears all formless and detached from what caused them in the first place. It can make us nervy about the littlest things, things them with no imagination – dogs, say, or sheep – wouldn’t hardly even notice. To those who look only as far as their nose a toad is just a toad; the shriek of an owl is only a mating cry and the sight of a magpie mantling over a maggoty old rabbit en’t no more than a bird with its meal. But when you’ve lived a few lives and carried them images with you time out of time, you got a bit of a tendency to make connections quicker than others; you’re going to sense danger where others just keep drifting thoughtlessly into its path.
‘Something has started this dream off: something from now, however innocent it might seem. What you seen was not your own dream. And it wuzn’t just an old echo. You say you thought it might be one of the kittens?’
I nodded.
A silence fell between us, during which the white membrane over the Besom’s old eyes shuttled back and forth at an alarming rate. At last she said, ‘I knew a blue cat, once.’
I frowned. ‘Oh, yes?’
‘Oh, yes. He wuz right handsome, he wuz, a really gracious old chap, even if he was a foreigner of some sort; had a fine set to his head, he did, and these amazing eyes – colour of a bee’s belly, as I recall – all soft and hazy gold.’ A little pink tongue flicked out over her black lips. ‘He had an odd way of talking, but he wuz very refined; had a son taken on as the dreamcatcher in Drychester after old Figgis passed over and his grandson fell dead of the flu. Can’t quite remember the lad’s name now: must be gone fifty seasons or more…’ Her br
ow furrowed; then she shook her head. ‘Ah well, it’ll come back to me, most likely at an inconvenient time. He’d made his escape from some posh pedigree breeding place, determined to catch all those dreams he kept seeing, and the others thinking him off his head; but it wuz his grandson was the curiosity. There was some scandal attached to that one: they kept it hushed up, they did, never spoke much of him, said he’d “gone away” somewhere. But I knew better.’
She leaned forward. The sun beat down on us. In the distance I could hear a blackbird shouting threatening insults at an intruder. I stifled a yawn. Was it always the province of old folk to reminisce like this?
‘Witch’s familiar, it wuz whispered, he became.’
My head shot up. ‘What?’
She gave me her gap-toothed grin. ‘He wuz blue, too; ran in the family; finest of bloodlines, for those who care about such stuff and nonsense. You said the mother wuz golden-furred, did you not?’
I nodded.
‘And the girls—?’
‘Blue-grey; definitely blue.’
‘Ah. Does Lydia ever speak of her trials?’
‘No.’
‘And you’ve never seen her dream of such things?’
‘Never. All she seems to dream about is her own comfort.’
The old cat gave a twitch of the shoulders; more a tic than a shrug. ‘Can you blame her, Orlando? Do you blame her for that?’
I supposed I did: for she never dreamed of me. To deflect this line of questioning I said, ‘But why should one of the girls dream Liddy’s dream?’
Ma Tregenna patted my paw. ‘The bond between mother and daughter always lies deep, lad; deeper than love, some say deeper than thought.’
‘But why now?’ I persisted. ‘What has caused this dream? They all seem so contented…’
‘Something must’ve changed,’ the Besom mused. She considered this statement for a moment, then added, ‘I don’t suppose any of them has eaten the weed, have they?’
It was a little yellow plant she meant by ‘the weed’: simple mouse-ear hawkweed that grew in the wild places of the world and carried the Great Cat’s own message to those chosen as her dream-catchers. But I hadn’t seen any of the scruffy hawkweed plant growing in the lush and artificial grounds of Nonesuch. I shook my head slowly. ‘No, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Then think, Orlando; something must have happened to draw this dream out into your sight. Think what changes there may have been.’
I thought. I racked my memory. The builders were in at Nonesuch – robust-looking men in dusty overalls who carried heavy things around between them and talked a lot. They had clumped about the house in their big boots, while John followed them with his notepad and pen, but they had done very little in the way of work yet. The only real impact they’d had, as far as I was concerned, was the welcome change in diet they brought with them: I particularly enjoyed the foreman’s tuna sandwiches. But their comings and goings had caused no great anxiety and I could not believe that their cheerful presence could have triggered a dream of old horror.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said at last. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
The Besom looked deflated. ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘Keep your eyes open. Come and see me again if one of the girlies has another dream.’
‘I will.’
‘And bring me some more of that feverfew next time.’
I’d had a bit of this herb caught in my fur a couple of weeks ago, and Ma Tregenna had plucked it off and chewed it up with remarkable alacrity for such an aged cat, claiming that it was good for ‘her ticker’.
I turned to leave. It had been little Ellie who had stuck the feverfew on me; that and a bit of goose-grass for good measure; and since that hadn’t seemed to affect me too greatly, she’d lately taken to belabouring me with a horrible old doll’s head she’d found somewhere in the house. It smelled old and mildewed, though there was no sign of actual mould on it, and I had taken an entirely disproportionate hatred to it. (Though if you have a small child hitting you with its favourite toy, you, too, would most likely find it abhorrent.) She must have sensed this, for she kept the thing with her all the time and whenever I was near, would grin from ear to ear and start to chatter at me, eyes open so wide it was almost as if she thought she could communicate with me by the sheer force of her tiny will, before bashing it at me with all the strength she could muster.
‘Tell me,’ the Besom said suddenly, breaking into my reverie. ‘Are the inhabitants of your house sleeping well?’
I considered this for perhaps a second. ‘No,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘No, they’re not. Just recently they haven’t been sleeping well at all.’
3
The work continued. They took up the floor of the Great Chamber. Part of the east wall was ripped out and rolled steel joists inserted temporarily to support its sagging Dutch gables. Everywhere you went you bumped into builders drinking cups of tea, or experts arguing over how to replace the sixteenth-century glace bombée in the Long Gallery. The cats, growing used to this, became involved. They poked their noses into buckets of plaster – which the builders called ‘gobbo’ – and, venturing halfway up ladders, got stuck and had to be encouraged down with promises of tuna mayonnaise. John’s preoccupation with the works reached new heights. Eleanor, out of sorts, shrieked all day and refused to be bathed except by her father. Feeding her had become a grim war of nerves, fought out three or four times a day from entrenched positions in the kitchen. Anna tried everything. Eleanor rejected it.
‘John,’ said Anna one morning, struggling with baby rice and mashed banana, ‘we have to find a better way to do this.’
No answer. Barely seven o’clock and he was deep in a cellphone conversation about some recently restored formal garden in Hampshire. ‘That’s right,’ he kept saying. ‘Completely overgrown.’ He would listen for a minute, then say ‘Yes’, or repeat, ‘Completely overgrown’. It drove Anna mad.
‘That’s it,’ she told him, the next time Eleanor spat out the baby rice. ‘I’ve had enough. She’s your daughter, you feed her.’
He took the child absently, tucking her under his arm like a bundle of old magazines. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said to the phone.
‘John, you’re dropping her!’
He looked down, hitched Eleanor up on to his hip, then wedged the phone against his ear with one shoulder so that he could spoon up some banana and rice, and offer it to her. Eleanor, reduced to swollen-faced fury only a moment ago by exactly the same item, beamed up at him and ate it with relish. He didn’t seem to notice. ‘The yews’, he said, ‘had grown out to such a point that they had to cut them down. It was more like woodland than a garden. But this is the thing. Hang on—’ More rice. Eleanor opened her mouth for the spoon, looking sideways at Anna from under his elbow. ‘This is the thing: when they did cut them down and clean out the scrub, the exact lines of the garden were still underneath. Every line, marked out in the stumps of yew. Yes, isn’t it? I mean the purity of form that argues! Every line still distinct and perfect after three hundred years.’
Eleanor looked up at him and laughed.
‘Oh, I’ve got no patience with either of you,’ Anna muttered. In fact, she loved to see them like that father and daughter, and to feel ‘This is my family Mine.’ She got out the Dettox and wiped the kitchen surfaces. She threw things energetically into the washing-up bowl. They had a perfectly good dishwasher, but sometimes she just liked to stand with her hands in the warm soapy water and stare out of the kitchen window. She watched Orlando lead the kittens across the kitchen garden in perfect line astern. When they walked with their mother, she thought, they prowled along like fashion models but when they walked with Orlando, they walked with a quiet dignity. Anna dozed on her feet for a minute or two, musing on this, aware of John still talking on the phone while his daughter pulled at his sleeve and made approving noises on the edge of speech.
‘The knot garden? No, not yet. I’ve got to do something about it soon. What? No, it’s n
ot that good an example. If you ask me, Joshua Herringe had all the ego of the time and none of the cleverness. And Stella’s death left it very gloomy Very gloomy indeed. It’s rather overgrown now. There was an interruption at the other end. Then John said, ‘To be honest, I think I’m going to have it ripped out.’
Anna would always remember this statement because of what happened next. ‘Oh damn,’ she heard him say. There was a fractional pause, a brief slithering noise, and then an astonished shriek.
He had dropped Eleanor.
The baby lay staring upwards for a moment, then opened her mouth in outrage. Somehow she had fallen under the kitchen table and by the time Anna reached her she was rolling about down there, bright red in the face with surprise and anger. Whatever else, her lungs still worked. Huge tears were squeezing themselves out of the corners of her eyes. Anna, fearing a depressed fracture of the skull, hauled her out, gave her the kind of unceremonious examination mothers learn early in their careers, then rocked her to and fro until shock turned to self-pity and she began to calm down.
John could only look on, mortified and shaken, while from the kitchen table his cellphone, still connected, made tentative noises of enquiry. ‘She just seemed to wriggle out of my hands,’ he said.
At this, Anna’s temper deserted her. Picking up the cellphone, she threw it as hard as she could at the nearest kitchen wall, where it burst. ‘What a bloody useless thing to say!’
‘Anna—’
‘That’s the problem,’ she shouted. ‘Your bloody cousin was the same. She always had one of those things clamped to her ear.’ And then, by a logic even Anna couldn’t quite follow, ‘You care more about the house than you do about your own daughter.’ The moment this was out of her mouth she regretted it, for fear she had made it true.