‘And you’ve never tried to escape,’ I said.
‘Look around you, sonny,’ said the voice from the back. ‘How would you do it?’
I stared at the bars, the seeping concrete, and felt foolish. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I see. No one could get out of here.’
‘Except when you’re finished with,’ someone said, ‘and you go out in a plastic bag.’ Lydia made a noise of suppressed terror and began to fling herself against the bars. There was some attempt to calm her. Then the voice from the back said:
‘I only asked how you would do it. I didn’t say that no one had ever escaped.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t listen to her dear,’ I was advised. ‘She’s mad.’
Several voices hastened to agree.
‘I’m not mad,’ said the voice from the back. ‘I often wish I was. I had a life before I turned up in this hell. It was a good life. If I was mad I might be able to forget it.’ There was a pause, and in the silence I could almost feel the invisible cat shrug. ‘Still, I’m not mad yet, and there it is. Unless it’s mad to be awake while this lot sleep, and see something they all missed. If that’s mad, of course, then I am.’
‘There’s no need for sarcasm, dear,’ the fat queen reminded her gently.
‘No, no, I suppose not. We’re all in this together. Well, this is the story: it wasn’t that long ago, the end of last winter. I’d guess, though it’s hard to keep track of the changing seasons in here. It was night, deep night, and dark, that kind of dark in which you can still see but you’re never sure what you can see. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s the most exciting darkness there is.’
The voice received this with amusement. ‘You’ll grow out of that, sonny,’ it assured me. ‘You’ll grow bored, because the dark promises so much and delivers so little. Or you’ll grow to fear it precisely because of what it delivers.’ Another pause. ‘So. Silence, but for the breath of sleeping cats. Darkness, but not perfect. The concrete floor seemed to shimmer faintly. I could see the bars of the cages, the indistinct outlines of the rooftops against the sky. Suddenly, I smelt last year’s leaves, and there, in the middle of the floor, dancing round in a little eddy, dim sparks and motes of light! The air felt damp and charged, the way it feels before a storm. A silent lightning-flash blanched the faces of the sleeping queens. I turned my head away; when I looked again, a great red fox stood in the middle of the floor. His reek filled the place. He looked around him and I swear he laughed.’
‘Laughed?’ I said. I knew that fox. I knew that laugh. But what had he been doing here?
‘He laughed, that animal, and said, “Well here’s a go. Got it first time.” Then he saw where he was, and that gave him something to think about, and he was silent after that.’
‘What happened then?’ I said.
‘Do you think I know? I have no idea to this day what happened. I can tell you what I saw, though. The fox – he had a grey patch on one flank, I remember that, where it looked as if some old injury had healed – counted his way along the tiers of cages. When he reached a certain point, he looked up. There was that extraordinary flash of light again, and he was inside the third cage up, with the astonished tabby who lived there. She hardly had time to wake up. Even as I watched, he was picking her up in his cunning great mouth. There was another flash, and they were both back on the floor. That fox could open a highway wherever he wanted. I’ve never seen a talent like it.’
‘I don’t understand!’ I cried. ‘Lydia! I know this fox!’ But Lydia was shivering to herself at the back of her pen and gave no sign that she had heard. ‘Did he say why he was here?’ I asked the cages at large. ‘Some of you must have woken? Some of you must know something?’
They know nothing,’ said the voice of the unseen cat. ‘And neither do I. He walked to the centre of the floor, put the tabby down for a moment, and stared around him. Then he looked straight at me, as if he’d known all along I was awake, and said, “I can’t help now, but I’ll send someone when I can. Tell them to endure a little longer.” Then he picked up the tabby and ran full tilt at that wall over there. They were both gone long before he reached it.’
Silence.
‘I’ll never know what he meant. How can we do anything else but “endure”? We’re in hell.’ There was a dry laugh. ‘Goodness knows what he wanted that tabby for. She was a poorly little thing. And she was so pregnant she probably had her kits in his mouth.’
While I was trying to make something of all this, Lydia threw herself against her bars again. ‘Please help me!’ she called. ‘Orlando!’
I had no idea what to say. The fox had promised they would be saved. Circumstances had conspired to bring me here, but what could I do? I was as trapped as them. I ran up and down between the cages. They watched me silently. I stared helplessly at the blank wall towards which the fox had run before he disappeared. At that very moment, I heard a faint scraping noise from the other side. Then, rather louder, a thud. Dust trickled down. I felt the fur rise on the back of my neck.
*
The cat Millefleur watched Anna Prescott tread the little maze, then stand stock-still as if she had been switched off. That was the problem with human beings: you never had the slightest idea why they did the things they did. And it was so hard to get their attention. Right, she thought. That’s enough. This won’t save Orlando. She opened her mouth and produced the most penetrating noise in her vocabulary. It was impressive, and had worked for her, she recalled, even when she was a kitten.
*
A piercing yowl. Anna roused herself. Visions, dreams, inchoate images of times she didn’t remember. The little box hedges at the edge of the knot garden had been planted and trimmed, she thought, to make the words ‘Tempus Fugit’. It was difficult to get a decent perspective so close up, and some of the letters had perhaps become fused together over the years. What did it mean? If she tried, she felt, it would come back to her: but the tabby-and-white cat – now stalking about on the doorstep of a French window Anna recognised from her last visit to the house – wouldn’t let her concentrate.
‘What?’ said Anna.
The cat stared at her. It closed its mouth deliberately, then, as if performing a charade for the benefit of a half-wit, began scratching at the closed door. ‘Why don’t I help you with that?’ enquired Anna sarcastically. The handle gave beneath her hand. The cat slipped inside so easily, and vanished so completely, it was like a conjuring trick. Anna put her head round the door.
‘Stella?’ she called. ‘John?’
Silence.
With a quick intake of breath, she stepped out of the light and into Nonesuch. At once, she was overcome by a sharp chill – but whether this was merely physical or caused by the guilt of entering Stella Herringe’s house uninvited, it was hard to know. To judge by the hardwood floors and white walls, she was somewhere in Stella’s apartment. But where the rest of the flat maintained a pristine chic, here was all the evidence of life lived day-to-day.
Items of clothing had been strewn over the furniture and on the floor, including a frayed and unglamorous old candlewick dressing gown. (It was pink, Anna remarked, and rather grubby, and it had been dropped just inside the French window, as if someone had let it fall at their feet before stepping into their bathroom, rather than their garden, dropped as if shedding an old skin.) Antique mirrors hung like paintings on every wall, arranged so that you couldn’t move without catching a glimpse of yourself from some unnerving – not to say unflattering – angle: no wonder Stella found it so hard to relax. Cosmetics lay scattered on every surface – lipsticks without their tops; bronzing pearls and tinctures; eyeshadows in every imaginable shade; brushes and pencils and eyelash curlers. An open pot spilled pale, translucent powder across a black marble mantelpiece. Firming creams, wrinkle creams, creams to feed the skin. Many of them bore the Engelion label. Others, however, had been put together in a distinctly amateurish fashion, bearing cheap stationers’ sti
cky labels applied untidily over the original packaging. The labels offered no clue to the contents of the pots other than a handwritten scattering of numbers that appeared at second glance to be a collection of dates. Lids off, they spilled their thick, disturbing perfume into the morning air.
Anna stared at herself in a mirror. She raised her hand to her face, lowered it again. All around the walls, the same shadowy woman raised and lowered her hand.
On a Louis Quinze desk to the left of the door she found a collection of photographs in antique silver frames. Stella in the sixties, all Twiggy hair and false eyelashes. Stella more recently, holding an elegant Russian Blue in her arms (a caption along the bottom read ‘Ms Stella Herringe and Grand Champion Circassian Gogol III’). The classy head-and-shoulders print used on the Engelion website. Here was John Dawe, sitting cross-legged on the deck of the Magpie, glowering into the camera with a tiny golden kitten cupped in his hands. And here were both the cousins, caught by some official photographer at a fancy dress party long ago. Stella had chosen a beaded gown which showed off her shoulders. The print was sepia-tinged, distressed with some cleverly applied brown mottle designed to look like mildew.
Anna picked it up and stared. John was dressed in a high-collared suit and remarkable fake mutton-chop sideburns. Despite that, he didn’t look more than fifteen.
All over the room, on chairs and coffee tables, on the floor with the discarded underwear and empty coffee cups, books were scattered. Many of them had been put aside carelessly, open and page-down, as if by a reader who couldn’t settle to one thing at a time. Some looked brand-new, others like original editions of very old works indeed. There were recent issues of Harpers & Queen and Vogue. There was an academic paper from an American university headed ‘Teratogenicity in feline fetuses’. Anna leafed through a battered volume of poetry by Robert Mannyng, inscribed Handlyng Synne: The Cursed Daunsers; a leatherbound tome bearing the legend Cosmetick Preparations (this, she put down quickly); and a pamphlet by one William Herringe, dated 1562 and entitled ‘The Diminutive Tyger’. A copy of Webster’s The White Devil lay among the make-up on the mantelpiece, its flyleaf inscribed to Stella in John’s distinctive hand:
‘For Stella,’ Anna read, ‘Your beauty, O, ten thousand curses on’t! / How long have I beheld the devil in crystal! / Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice / With music and with fatal yokes of flowers / To my eternal ruin. Woman to man / Is either a God or a wolf...’
‘A God or a wolf,’ Anna mused softly.
She shivered. Putting down the book, she stared around. The room was like a locked diary, its pages encoded in the obsessional languages of clutter, narcissism and waste. But the lock was also its own key. It was a visible show of character, of personal history. It was the key to Nonesuch. It was the key to Stella Herringe – who and what she really was. Before Anna had time to turn it in the lock, there was a noise behind her.
Anna, expecting John or his cousin, whirled round. Her hand flew guiltily to her mouth. ‘I didn’t—’ she began to say.
But it was only the tabby-and-white cat, which had leapt up from nowhere on to the gilt and ormolu dressing table and begun knocking down every small item it could find. After each outrage, it looked up at Anna deliberately as if to say, ‘There! What are you going to do about that?’ The tubes and tubs of make-up, the little white pots with their pink and gold labels, rolled and bounced across the floor.
‘Hey!’ cried Anna.
She tried to scoop the cat into her arms, but it evaded her deftly and fled into the next room. She chased it through the rest of Stella’s apartment, and then out into Nonesuch itself, where she quickly lost her bearings. Corridors multiplied, smelling of damp plaster and ancient floor polish. The cat scampered up one staircase, down another. ‘Wait!’ appealed Anna. The cat ignored her. ‘What am I doing?’ she asked herself. ‘What am I doing?’ Through the open doors of rooms she had never seen, she caught glimpses of broken furniture, fallen mouldings, nests of broken lath and horsehair stuffing. At one point there were noises, faint and distant, somewhere ahead of her: but when she stopped to listen, all she could hear was her own breath scraping in her throat; and if they had been human cries, they were not repeated. Then, without any warning, she was in the Long Corridor. Clara de Montfort stared down at her contemptuously from the wall. The cat took one look back to make sure Anna was still there, gathered speed as if for a last effort, and disappeared into the Painted Room.
*
Stella’s dinner party might never have taken place. The table and chairs had been spirited away, leaving for furniture a couple of long Jacobean benches scarred and blackened by use which, isolated in the middle of the room, somehow made it look emptier than it was. Brassy light spilled through the casements, to fall in long diagonal bars across the age-blackened boards. It gilded the dust-motes. It picked out the details of the trompe Toeil painting on the opposite wall. It discovered the tabby-and-white cat, sitting complacently in the middle of the floor, one leg stuck in the air while it thoughtfully washed its behind. When Anna entered the room, it stopped washing and looked up at her expectantly.
‘What?’ said Anna.
She shrugged. ‘I hate that painting,’ she said. She went over to examine it nonetheless. The fake courtyard lay under its fake illumination, less like life than ever. ‘Why would anyone do this?’
Her voice echoed in the amplified silence of the empty room.
She heard a faint cry.
The cat shot to its feet, darted between her legs, and began to claw frantically at the painting.
‘Stop that!’ said Anna.
The tabby only clawed harder. Little flakes of paint and decaying plaster fluttered to the ground. Everything’s rotten in this house, Anna thought suddenly. ‘You mustn’t do this!’ she warned the tabby, thinking how angry Stella would be. When the cat ignored her, she tried to drag it away. It writhed in her hands like a single coiled muscle: bit her wrist. ‘Ow!’ Fragments of last night’s dreams turned and shifted in Anna’s head. There was another faint cry from behind the painting.
‘There’s something there!’ said Anna. ‘Isn’t there?’
The tabby ignored her, but continued to claw and bite at the wall. Plaster fell away in lumps. Faint cold airs seeped into the Painted Room, bringing with them a sharp, ammoniacal smell. All at once there was a commotion, a barrage of yowling and mewling from the other side of the painting, and rising above that a demanding wail she recognised only too well. The tabby backed away and sat down suddenly, looking exhausted.
Anna got down on her knees and – all thoughts of Stella’s anger dispelled – began to try and enlarge the hole. She found that the tabby had given up for a good reason: the rotten plaster, which had been like damp icing sugar to the touch, had given way to firmer stuff. There were battens behind it, supporting the tough old lath. Anna got up and kicked at it awkwardly. This achieved nothing, though it caused the cats behind the wall to redouble their cries.
‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Damn!’
A familiar pink nose appeared in the hole. Anna stared puzzledly.
‘Orlando?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’ Then, with a growing sense of horror and disorientation: ‘Orlando? How did you get behind there?’
She renewed her efforts with the wall. A few minutes later, she was slumped at the base of it, panting. Her fingers were bruised and cut. She had broken most of her fingernails.
‘Orlando,’ she said. ‘How could you be so silly?’
She said: ‘I don’t know what to do!’
Then her eye was taken by the Jacobean benches in the centre of the room. They looked heavy, but manageable. Picking the nearest one up, she ran at the wall with it. There was a muffled booming noise, a shock ran up her arms, the bench clattered to the floor. She studied the wall. Once more, she thought, struggling to pick the bench up again. A minute or two later, bruised and exhausted, she was looking through the painting at the secret of Nonesuch. Beyond the fake courtyard, she n
ow realised, the real one had always lain in wait for her.
*
Joshua Hering would not have recognised it. His tranquil outdoor space, not much larger than the Great Hall and designed, perhaps, to protect the ailing Elizabeth Marchmount from draughts as she took the air in the spring and early summer of her last haunted year, had been floored with concrete and roofed over with chicken wire. It was walled on three sides with cage upon cage of cats. On the fourth side – where the trompe l’œil painting had depicted the glassed-in arcade with the open door – was some kind of workroom housed in a modern lean-to construction resembling a Portakabin.
Anna stared at the rows of cages.
Stella’s rescue cats, was her first thought.
Her second was: But why hide them?
Orlando ended this speculation by pushing his face into the hole and purring loudly. He tried to rub his cheek against hers.
‘Now wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Just wait a minute!’
Too excited to move away while she kicked down the rest of the painting, Orlando got covered in plaster and stood there, blinking and sneezing and shaking himself vigorously, until she had finished. Then the tabby-and-white jumped through eagerly, and the two cats greeted one another with obvious delight.
‘Well!’ said Anna, a little jealous. ‘You are good friends!’
She gave them a moment or two, then swept Orlando up and squeezed him against her until he complained.
‘Oh, Orlando!’
*
The walk between the cages subdued her; but she never forgot the contents of the workroom.
Bright lights, even temperatures, the little hums and clicks of electricity busy about its work. Stainless-steel sinks with hospital taps. White walls racked at eye-level with what could only be surgical instruments. Shelves lined with jars of clear fluid. Once she had seen what was in the jars it was hard to look away from them. Hard not to. Beside one of the sinks was something she took to be a huge casserole dish – when she lifted the lid an inch, the smell was so thick it could have choked a cat. It was a thousand times more powerful than the smell of Engelion firming products – rawer, less dilute, less polite – but it was the same smell. It poured out all over her like the contents of a fat-rendering factory, until she shuddered and slammed down the lid.