‘I can’t see you!’ John called.
‘I’m still here.’
‘Anna, I can’t see you. Get out while you can!’
‘I won’t go without you,’ she said. She tried to get up, but her legs wouldn’t obey her. It got harder and harder to concentrate. The heat had shrivelled her tear ducts, and she thought the back of her coat might be on fire. This is how it happens, she told herself. You’re bemused and you can’t do anything and you die. She located the edge of the bed and used it to drag herself upright. Come on, she encouraged herself fiercely: Come on! John was calling out all the time, his voice frightened and alone, ‘I can’t see you! I can’t see you!’ She couldn’t bear it. Then the blade of the knife made a grating noise beneath her foot. She bent down dizzily and there it was, gleaming silver through the smoke. She had it in her fingers when the windows blew in. Glass sprayed about. The fire rumbled and sucked air. There was a kind of blink, a shift in the light, as if the laws of physics were suspended for a moment, subsumed under a more flexible description of things. Long splinters of glass seemed to turn over and over in the air in slow motion. Then the flashover roared across the room two or three feet below the ceiling, vaporising everything in its path. The associated blast picked Anna up like a doll and threw her across the bed. She lay there for a moment with her mouth open.
‘Are you there?’ said John Dawe. He made a choking noise.
She sawed and sawed at the binding hair. It was hopeless. His legs came free, then his arms. But his eyes were closed and he didn’t seem to be breathing any more. She shook him. ‘I was here,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go away.’ She said: ‘Don’t you dare give up. Don’t you dare!’ His eyes flickered open for a moment, then closed again. She was pummelling helplessly at his chest when she heard a fresh commotion in the room behind her. Voices. Hands grasped her firmly by the shoulders and tried to pull her away. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not without him! Don’t you dare!’ She held on to him for dear life. Her tear ducts burned but she couldn’t cry. ‘Not without him.’
*
Outside on the lawn, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she lay wrapped in a damp blanket looking up at the sky. It was the most extraordinary fragile blue – one of those winter skies that shades away to a green so tentative you aren’t entirely sure it’s there at all – and across it moved a single pure white vapour trail the shape of a cat’s whisker. Anna didn’t think she would ever see anything so perfect. She wasn’t aware of pain, in fact she felt rather drowsy much of the time. Seconds stretched out to minutes as her thoughts drifted by. Occasionally she got cold. Occasionally, she became aware of Alice and Max as they swam in and out of her field of view. Max would lean over her and smile and say, ‘How do you feel?’ and she would answer, ‘Not as good as you,’ or just: ‘Safe.’ Then Alice would say:
‘The ambulance won’t be long now.’
Alice held her hand. Sometimes they talked together, too quietly for Anna to hear. She wondered what she looked like. She was too dazed to be frightened.
‘Are you discussing me?’ she said.
‘Only your awful taste in country houses,’ said Max.
She smiled up at him. ‘Are the fire brigade here?’ she asked. And: ‘Have you told me that before? I keep forgetting.’
‘We called them first,’ Max said.
‘From the bike, it didn’t look too bad,’ said Alice. ‘Of course, we were going quite fast,’ she admitted. ‘We didn’t think of an ambulance. Then, when we got here, there were all these cats milling about on the front steps. I remembered what you’d said about Stella running a refuge, so we went charging inside in case some of them hadn’t managed to get out, and that’s when I saw Orlando. He was in one of those bloody awful old passageways, miaowing his head off in the smoke. When I tried to pick him up he ran off. I thought the fire had panicked him.’ She spread her hands. ‘That’s how we found you, by trying to catch Orlando.’
‘Orlando,’ Anna said.
She drifted off.
*
Time echoed around her like a huge and complex old house. ‘Cross a threshold here,’ she remembered Stella Herringe saying, ‘and you’ve moved two hundred years before you know it.’ That was true, Anna now saw, as much for life as it was for Nonesuch. If you were lucky – or perhaps unlucky – you would cross the threshold of all your other lives, remember who you had been. Perhaps in dreams like these, you would approach the edge, look out over the mists of time, fall into...
*
She shook herself awake, full of panic, with oddly familiar names – Anna Clifford, Olivia Herley, John Mountjoy – tumbling through her mind. ‘Lift me up!’ she said. ‘Lift me up. Max. I want to see him again. I want to make sure he’s all right.’
‘Steady on now.’
‘Lift me. Max.’
Max helped her to sit up. The scene that met her eyes was a curious mixture. Two bright red fire engines were parked on the drive. Firemen ran purposefully about, shouting orders, lugging hoses. Smoke was still pouring up out of the roof of the house; there was even some seeping out from between the great front doors. But only a little way away from all this activity, the lawns of Nonesuch spread themselves tranquilly in the winter sun. And there, beneath the grandest of the cedars, only a little way away from where Anna sat, a large marmalade cat sprawled on his side, licking the smell of fire out of his coat. One of his ears was a little charred, and every so often he twitched it and looked thoughtful; but he shone in the sun like a bowl of oranges. A short way away from him, John Dawe’s cat Lydia was sitting up as elegant as a drawing in gold ink, to have her neck groomed by the tabby-and-white, which seemed to have lost to the fire its odd little crest of fur. Suddenly Anna thought: I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that.
‘I’m so glad they’re all right,’ she said firmly. ‘But that’s not what I want to see. Help me. Max.’
‘He’s OK, Anna,’ said Alice. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘John? John?’
‘He should rest, Anna.’
‘I want to know he’s all right. John?’
John Dawe coughed. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You look beautiful, even with no hair.’
He chuckled.
‘Just look over there,’ she said after a moment, ‘at that cat. Atum-Ra, to the life.’ She thought about this. ‘Lord of Life,’ she amended. ‘They’re so much more resilient than people. Do you think they have any idea of the things that go on around them?’
John Dawe, her beautiful, beautiful man, looked up at her, his eyes bright in the smoke-blackened mask of his face, and took her hand. His fingers closed tightly on hers for a moment, then he started to cough again. After a moment, the cough turned into a laugh.
‘I doubt Lydia does,’ he said. ‘She sleeps too well.’
*
Later that day, the bodies of two of Ashmore’s oldest inhabitants came to light. The first was discovered by Mrs Anscombe when she came, as she did every afternoon, to feed the ducks. The surface ice had receded on the edge of the pond, where it was melting into a kind of slurry at the base of the reeds. Something dark had come to rest there, half-submerged in the slush. When Mrs Anscombe bent to examine it, her hands flew up to her face. ‘Oh my word, you poor old chap,’ she said. ‘You poor old beggar.’
Unwrapping the strands of weed from the old cat’s legs, she lifted the body of Ashmore’s dream-catcher free of the ice.
*
The firemen found Stella Herringe.
She had, by some miracle or force of will, made it through the house and out of the French windows. There her luck and her life had run out, and she had finished up near the centre of the knot garden, bent into a foetal curve like something dug out of volcanic ash. With the exception of a single patch of pink skin – curiously, it was on her right check, which had been as exposed to the fire as any other part of her – she was charred from head to toe. Her knees had curled rigi
dly up to her chin as if she were protecting something precious, but this position is found all too often in victims of fire; and all the pathologist could say later was that he had found an unrecognisable twist of plastic fused into her fingers.
Epilogue
Anna poured the last cup of tea from the big pot and handed it to Ruth Canning. Ruth accepted it and settled back into her deckchair with a sigh. ‘Now this, I could get used to,’ she said, shading her eyes against the late September sunshine the better to watch Sam and the children playing French cricket on the lawn with Max and Alice. Max, pretending to a greater competitiveness than was actually called for, had started to bowl overarm, much to the delight of Fin and Dylan. They squealed and ducked and squealed again. They thought it exceptionally funny that Alice had to run all the way to the great cedar to retrieve the ball.
‘Look at them,’ said Ruth. ‘What a shower. Stop laughing like that. Fin, and pull your trousers up. Pull his trousers up, Sam.’
‘What’s that tea like?’ asked Anna. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer Pimm’s?’
Ruth gave her a look. ‘Oh, very Country Life,’ she said. ‘Very lady of the manor.’
Anna smiled. She was the lady of the manor, she supposed; but it was still hard to think of herself like that. Especially since she still found the house rather sinister, even without its former occupant, and preferred to spend her time out here, in the garden. Quite a lot of Nonesuch had burned down in the end – though the structure was sound there had been great damage to the interior. But Stella, controlling to the last, had left a fire-proof safe in her apartment, and inside it a copy of a will which deeded the house, along with her personal bank accounts, to her only living relative, John Dawe. That sum, by itself, had made it possible to begin the repairs; that and the sale of Anna’s cottage, snapped up after a day on the market by a couple called Tony and Fiona (who had made some money designing restaurants in London and were looking, as Fiona put it, for ‘somewhere quiet to think about things further’). The insurance was only now starting to come through, and restoration would be a long haul, but Anna was trying very hard to look upon Nonesuch as her home. John had seemed so determined to reclaim it, to save it from its ghosts, and was now pursuing the restoration with an energy and commitment that almost frightened her.
She shook the Pimm’s around in its jug. ‘I’m not sure I fancy it either,’ she said. ‘It was Max’s idea.’
‘Given Alice’s influence. I’m surprised he didn’t suggest something a bit more robust.’
They watched the cricket for a minute or two, then Ruth said: ‘How are your hands today?’
Anna looked own. Her scars were almost invisible now, but they would always show a little against a tan. She flexed her fingers. The sun glinted off the white gold of her wedding ring.
‘Oh, they’re not so bad,’ she said softly. ‘Not so bad now.’
They sat sipping their tea, enjoying the sun. A white pigeon fluttered down from one of Nonesuch’s gables and began to peck about on the grass in front of them. There was a sudden squawk, a considerable flapping of wings, and a small, aggrieved wail.
‘That damned kitten!’ said Anna.
*
‘Look at that kitten!’
Orlando the cat lay with his elbows tucked under him, eyes half-closed against the sun. ‘Lydia, you should teach her better: she’ll never catch anything if she chatters at it first like that.’
‘Criticise other people’s kittens when you’ve had some of your own,’ Lydia replied. ‘She was only playing anyway. Weren’t you, my darling?’
The kitten regarded its mother with scorn, then ran full tilt at Orlando, paws out for a fight. They rolled around growling at one another, and were soon joined by the rest of the litter. All three kittens were boxy and short-coupled, with dense blue-grey fur. Lydia didn’t seem to have passed on much of her heritage. And maybe that was as it should be, Orlando thought, perhaps unfairly. He regarded Lydia askance and felt strangely empty. There had been a time when to lie beside her on the grass like this; to share a house with her, to share a life with her, would have been his wildest dream. Now he was less sure of what he wanted.
Lydia, meanwhile, had turned her head to the other cat present. ‘Millefleur, whatever am I going to do with them? They’re too old to rough and tumble like this. And he keeps encouraging them.’
But Millie wasn’t listening. With a faraway look in her eye, she had watched the pigeon fly up into the shadow of Nonesuch: a flash of white disappearing into the dark, and remembered a small tabby cat whose white socks had flashed just so, before she disappeared for ever into the maw of the highways.
‘When I have kittens, I shall call my daughter Vita,’ she said.
Orlando, upside-down with three little ruffians on top of him, looked sad.
‘If you have kittens,’ said Lydia.
*
‘If I had a boy,’ said Anna, ‘I think I’d call him Barnaby.’
Ruth wasn’t going to have this. ‘Anna, Barnaby is the name of a cat. You can’t call your offspring after a cat. Besides, it shortens to Barney. Do you want that for you child? You aren’t pregnant again, are you?’
‘No, no I’m not.’
‘Because you only just had Eleanor.’
‘I know that, Ruth.’
As if summoned by this conversation, Eleanor herself arrived, pushed by her father in a buggy of sturdy off-road design. Neither the fall of Nonesuch nor the death of his cousin had changed John Dawe much. He still had the rangy, energetic walk. He still wore black Levi’s and cotton sweaters with the sleeves pushed up. He still wore the most ridiculous boots. And yet he looks so much more himself, Anna thought, watching him exchange a few words with Sam. What she meant by this she couldn’t quite say. Being a father had grown him up: perhaps that was it. She thought: I’m his wife. I never expected to be a wife. Or a mother. As for the darker side of it all, they rarely discussed it. You cannot be an ordinary couple if you admit that you have lived other lives, or that much of the behaviour that brought you together has somehow been programmed by a past with which you have no familiarity. Stella Herringe had known herself – or something in her had. Stella Herringe had been aware of her past lives. She had remembered them in detail – or believed she had. Past and future had all been one to her. But John had nothing but a few odd dreams – fading, now that he was a father, like his obsession with dreams themselves – like echoes of something heard at a distance: a sense, as he sometimes said, that there was more to him than met the eye. As for Anna, she remembered nothing at all of the past. She was Anna Dawe, née Prescott, no more, no less. And her dreams, she preferred to believe, were only dreams.
‘Do you think she was right? Do you think we really have lived all this out before?’ she had asked him, the day they moved into Nonesuch. ‘Some awful triangle, repeating and repeating itself?’
But they both knew there was no answer to that. John Dawe laughed at something Sam had said, then pushed the buggy over to Anna and Ruth. ‘Your turn now.’
‘Is she asleep?’
He made a face. ‘At last. I wish I was.’
‘Dylan was the same,’ said Ruth. ‘He didn’t want to miss out on life for a minute.’ She stood up to get a better view. ‘Anna, every time I see her she’s more beautiful!’
Anna admitted this, with some complacency. ‘I suppose she is. That black hair! I thought it was all supposed to fall off after the birth.’
Eleanor opened her eyes suddenly. ‘What an unusual shade of green,’ said Ruth. ‘She doesn’t get that from either of you, does she? Look at me – no, both of you. I thought so. Hazel and brown.’
She laughed up at John. ‘Anyone in your family have eyes like that?’ she asked him.
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Acknowledgements
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p; About Gabriel King
The Wild Road Series
An Invitation from the Publisher
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Cath for Hackney and light ale, and Jamie for the country lore; to Sara and Alex for Agas and cottages, and to Sarah, whose garden quickly became Anna’s. Thanks must also go to Jonathan Lloyd for his encouragement, and to Kate Parkin and Kate Elton, for their patience and enthusiasm; and to all at Century and Arrow.
About Gabriel King
A lifelong cat lover, GABRIEL KING has shared a home with every variety of feline from stray moggy to pedigree. Born in Cornwall and raised in Warwickshire, the author now lives between London and Shropshire.
The Wild Roads Series
Behind the realm of man lie the wild roads. Weaving through time and space, these hidden pathways carry the natural energies – the spirits, the dreams – of the world.
No creature can slip into the shadows and travel the wild roads better than the cat. For millennia, cats have patrolled the tangled paths, maintaining balance and order, guarding against corruption and chaos. It is dangerous territory: for those who control the wild roads hold the key to the world.
Amid the struggle between the purest good and the darkest evil, here are tales of duty and destiny, of courage and comradeship among the extraordinary creatures who brave the wild roads...
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