Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

  Lillian Trench glanced first at Hilary Inchbald, and then at me. And then she put down her cup.

  “Get out,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  “Get out.”

  I’ll admit I was flabbergasted. Other than by my own sisters, I had never in my life been chucked out of a place. How awkward it felt, and how awful.

  I turned to Hilary, hoping he might intervene, but my hopes were dashed immediately.

  Hilary Inchbald was in tears, his frail shoulders shaking, his face pressed tightly into the tortoiseshell fur of Thomas More.

  I took a step towards him, wanting nothing more than to throw my arms around him and hug him, to rub his back and say “There, there,” and perhaps, even, to ask him what the matter was.

  “Get out!” Lillian Trench shrieked, her eyes blazing, her voice seeming to come in blue smoke from the trenches of Hell, and in that moment, I knew that she really was a witch.

  And so I did what anyone else in her right mind would do.

  I got out.

  · THIRTEEN ·

  I CRUNCHED MY WAY cautiously across the icy road and, with a few words of whispered comfort, retrieved Gladys from her entanglement with the holly hedge.

  Were my feelings hurt? Of course they were, and so would yours have been.

  What hurt the most, though, was the fact that Lillian Trench had seen through me. She had not for a moment believed that I had fallen off Gladys and injured myself. She had known—or at least suspected—from the beginning that my “accident” was no more than an act. I was quite sure of it. In a day when everyone in England over the age of five had received some kind of Red Cross training, she had not offered so much as a sticking plaster.

  Why then, had she invited me into her cottage? What had she hoped to gain by it?

  Information?

  If that were the case, she certainly had a strange way of going about it.

  And then I was struck with this horrible thought: What if she had poisoned the tea?

  The usual effect of holly berries upon adults is much the same as prunes, only more so, although the berries may be fatal to children if eaten in quantity. Their poisonous element, theobromine, is contained also in cocoa, which Daffy says might explain why chocolate is so often given to children at bedtime.

  There was much to think about here, but now was not the time.

  It seemed unlikely that Lillian Trench, if she were a competent witch at all, would have slipped me a cup of holly berry tea. No, she would have used something far, far more subtle.

  In the coming hours I would need to pay very close attention to my pulse, my vision, my taste, and my hearing—all of my senses, in fact. At the slightest sign of numbness I would ring up (a) Dr. Darby and (b) Inspector Hewitt, then race to my laboratory to concoct an antidote.

  When it comes to poisoning, planning is paramount.

  “Isn’t it, Gladys?” I asked, giving her an affectionate pat between the handlebars to make up for having abandoned her in a freezing holly hedge.

  Ahead was Pauper’s Well, where I would need to make a decision.

  I didn’t much fancy an icy downhill run with the north wind at my back and, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t really want to go home.

  To the right—and not that far away—was the village of East Finching, where Rosie, the talkative barmaid at the Goose and Garter, might be willing to fill my ears with tales of the “morose” Mr. Sambridge.

  I turned to the north and gave Gladys her head.

  The going was grueling, pedaling against the freezing gusts. A shifting crosswind made it even more tricky, and by the time I reached the high street of East Finching, I was in need of a blazing fire.

  I would walk, all rosy-cheeked, into the warmth of the saloon bar at the Goose and Garter and order a pint of hot Ovaltine, then treat myself to a dish of Christmas trifle. My salivary glands were already hanging out of my face at the thought.

  Such is the stuff as dreams are made on.

  The Goose and Garter turned out to be a villainous, cold, dark den with low ceilings which smelled of damaged drains and old mutton fat. A fierce draft from a broken window—crudely patched with what appeared to be the sole of an old boot—made it seem even colder than the out-of-doors.

  Two old codgers in flat caps looked up from their game of checkers, then bowed their heads again in play. One of them muttered something to the other from the side of his mouth, but I could not make out the words.

  A halfhearted fire guttered in the grate, as if it couldn’t decide whether to stay or go out. For the moment it seemed content to spew smoke into the room, reducing the visibility to an arm’s length.

  A bare arm appeared out of the gloom, and then a large, red, hovering face topped with a Union Jack bandanna.

  “Age?” the face demanded.

  “Fourteen,” I lied, without batting an eye. “Last Thursday.”

  “And I’m the Queen of the Royal Marines. What would you like?”

  “August, please,” I said, “and a plate of summer sunshine.”

  “Sorry, luv,” the woman said, without missing a beat. “It’s off the menu till next summer.”

  She looked me fiercely in the eye until I laughed.

  “You must be Rosie,” I said.

  “Who sez?” she demanded, propping her arm on her hip.

  This was not going to be easy.

  “Mordecai,” I told her.

  “Ah, well, then. I must be. Mordecai is never wrong. Friend of yours, is he?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “He’s a friend of a friend.”

  She examined her fingernails. “That would be Carl Pendracka.”

  “A neat bit of deduction,” I said with a smile, and I meant it.

  “Not so much as you might think. Mordecai only has the one friend.”

  Like so many of us, I thought.

  “You’re the one was asking about Roger Sambridge.”

  I admitted that I was.

  Rosie pulled out a chair and sat down beside me. “He’s a rum bloke,” she said. “Or at least he was, and I’m blowed if I know the reason why. Started coming in here last summer. Used to wander in of a night, sit over there in that chair with the short leg, with his back to the corner, have three half-pints of half-and-half, and never say a word. Seemed as if he was watching people. Sometimes he’d haul out a little pocket diary and pencil and write something down. ‘You a reporter, then?’ I asked him once, and the devil snarled at me. Snarled! ‘Arggghhh!’ Like one of those pirates, Long John Silver, or someone. He put his book away quick, before I could get a good look at it. I thought he might be making those lightning sketches for the newspapers, but it was writing he was doing, not drawing. I asked Bert Blaney one time—Bert used to be a churchwarden at St. Barnaby’s over in Beeching Norton before his accident. Anything you ever wanted to know about the Church of England, you could ask Bert. Make your hair curl. Anyway, Bert said he—Sambridge, I mean, not Bert—was a church wood-carver. Specialized in misericords—you know the things I mean, those little devils under the seats in the choir. Wicked-looking little imps. Never could stand the sight of them myself. Give me the jimjams, kind of like invisible bats in your hair or a goose walking over your grave.”

  She gestured, with a nervous laugh, to a miniature above the bar of the inn’s painted signpost, THE GOOSE AND GARTER, in which an enraged goose had seized hold of a frowzy—but laughing—barmaid’s garter, which it was stretching to incredible lengths. One was expected, I suppose, to smile at the thought of what would happen when the goose let go.

  “So you never chatted him up, then?” I asked.

  “Good heavens, no! He wasn’t the chatty type. Morose, is the word. That’s what I told Mordecai. ‘Morose, he is,’ I said. ‘Makes it plain he doesn’t want company.’ ”

  “Or questions,” I said.

  “Good point,” Rosie said, biting at a blood-red thumbnail. “I never thought of that.

  “
Besides,” she added, “he had such fierce arthritis you were always afraid of treading on one of his toes, or banging his legs, or something. Odd occupation, isn’t it, for someone like him—having to hang about in those damp, drafty old churches?”

  An image flashed into my mind of Mr. Sambridge hanging about on the back of his bedroom door. Did Rosie know more than she was letting on? I couldn’t imagine that Inspector Hewitt had yet made public the details of the death chamber.

  “Perhaps it was the pain that made him so miserable,” I said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Rosie said. “There’s pain that comes from the body and pain that comes from the heart. This was heart pain. Take my word for it. I’m older than you. I know about these things.”

  Ordinarily, I’d have considered her words a slap on the wrist, but Rosie’s face told me that she was speaking the truth.

  I nodded—wisely, I hoped.

  “How about Lillian Trench?” I asked suddenly, blurting it out on a whim.

  “Her? The weekend witch? All I know is what I’ve heard, which isn’t good. She lives in London and comes down for the full moon and the mummers.”

  I knew what she meant. Clarence Mundy, our taxicab driver, who had taken the part of the Hobbyhorse in the Bishop’s Lacey Horn Dance—and had done so since time immemorial, except for his war service as a flying-boat pilot—was always grumbling about what he called “Horn Gawkers”: those tourists who, thinking us quaint and backward villagers, came down for every winter solstice with their kit and Kodaks and littered the churchyard with their droppings.

  “Like Canada geese, they are,” Clarence would say. To which he would usually add a truly rude comment which I cannot reproduce here, much as I’d like to.

  The Horn Dance dated back to the Middle Ages, and the Hobbyhorse, who made daring—and sometimes quite frightening—dashes at the spectators, was one of the most popular figures. It had not occurred to me until this very moment that Oliver Inchbald’s book Hobbyhorse House was linked, at least by name, with the ancient dance at Bishop’s Lacey.

  Did this mean anything, or was it simply a coincidence?

  And then another thought struck me: The Horn Dance was held every year on the winter solstice, which would fall, this year, on the twenty-second of December.

  Which was today.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, leaping to my feet. “I’ve just remembered an appointment. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” Rosie said, getting to her feet. “Go in safety,” she said. “They say the roads are deadly.”

  —

  Rosie was right. The falling temperature had reduced the road to a ribbon of dark ice. In the end, I had to walk Gladys down the long hill and back to Bishop’s Lacey. By the time we reached the village, it was afternoon.

  In spite of the cold, a merry crowd had already gathered in the churchyard to watch the players climb into their costumes.

  “No fair peeking now,” Bert Archer called from the east door. “We always dress up in the vestry, and you’re not allowed to look till we’re ready.”

  Bert took the part of Hector: “A Rude Mechanical,” as the character was described in the history of the play that the vicar had written to sell to the tourists for tuppence.

  As Cynthia had confided, because these now cost ten pence each to print, the vicar had to make up the difference out of his own pocket.

  “Prices unchanged since before the war,” he used to call out to potential buyers as he went among the crowd hawking his little booklets in the churchyard.

  Tully Stoker, already dressed in the Stag Man costume, crept from behind a chest tomb and into the west porch where, I knew, he would strap a great wobbling array of antlers onto his head.

  After the dance he would return them to hang for the rest of the year in their traditional place in the bell tower, where visitors could view, with a shudder, for an extra penny, their impressive expanse and wickedly sharp points.

  As I crossed the churchyard the music began. The tune, the traditional “Wot Sonn,” which had once been played on homemade sackbuts, drums, hurdy-gurdies, and bagpipes, was now performed by members of the Bishop’s Lacey Silver Band on modern cornets, tubas, and trombones made by Boosey & Hawkes in London.

  It is not just cold weather that can make you shiver, I thought.

  A hand seized my arm so roughly that my liver tried to escape.

  “Flavia! What are you doing here?”

  It was Carla Sherrinford-Cameron.

  “It’s my parish,” I replied rather testily, shaking off her hand and sweeping my arm round in a broad circle for emphasis. “I was baptized here. My ancestors are buried here.

  “And you?” I asked, not in the nicest tone of voice.

  “Miss Lavinia and Miss Aurelia arranged an invitation for me to sing,” she said. “Isn’t it exciting? I’m doing ‘Hark, the Horn.’ ”

  “Splendid,” I said, even though I thought I was going to vomit.

  Why on earth would anyone invite an outsider like Carla—someone from Hinley, for heaven’s sake!—to take one of the key parts in the Horn Dance: a role which had been performed exclusively by the girls and women of Bishop’s Lacey since the British Lion was a kitten?

  Carla was wearing a winter coat to which what appeared to be hundreds of dead oak leaves had been fastened with safety pins. In spite of the freezing air, her face glowed like a Sunday School stove.

  “Miss Aurelia usually sings the part herself, but she’s been stricken with a bit of tummy trouble at the last minute, and Miss Lavinia asked me to step in and fill her shoes.”

  I’m afraid I had rather an uncharitable thought, but I won’t repeat it here.

  “I’ve been to Bishop’s Lacey so often this week that I’m beginning to feel like a native,” Carla burbled. Her forehead was already covered with an oily sheen, even though the singing had not yet begun.

  “Perhaps you’ll be buried here, too,” I said, and turned away. There is only so much that the human mind can endure.

  Miss Lavinia came pushing her way through the crowd, casting horrible toothy smiles to the left and right like the sower with his seed. She was dressed in an ancient suffragette outfit which, ruffled lace and all, had gone brown with the years, and as she passed, the biting north wind brought to my nostrils the odor of naphthalene (C10H8) moth tablets, whose chemical makeup, I recalled with pleasure, had been described in 1826 by the great Michael Faraday.

  Miss Lavinia whispered a few words to Carla, who plunged her hand into a coat pocket and pulled out an ancient throat sprayer. After an apologetic smile to the crowd, she gave a wide yawn that displayed her tonsils, stuck the silver nozzle deep into her mouth, gave the rubber bulb a couple of businesslike squeezes, arranged her adenoids, and gave the signal that she was ready. I could smell her breath even from where I stood.

  Miss Lavinia fished a pitch pipe from a tiny handbag of beaded black jet and blew a frail note.

  And Carla, clasping her hands, began to sing.

  “Hark the horn, the sound of winter

  Hark the hunter on the hill…”

  Actually, the way she sang it was:

  “Har-ar-ar-ar-ar-ark the horn, the sow-ow-ownd of winter

  Har-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar—ark the hun-un-un-un-un-un-ter ah-hah-hah-hah-hon the hihhih-ill-ill-ill-ill-ill-ill…”

  To suggest the steepness of the hill, Carla caused the intensity and pitch of her voice to rise until it was almost beyond the range of human hearing.

  Distant dogs would be raising their ears in their sleep.

  Meanwhile, Miss Lavinia was conducting with both hands, glorying in the moment, and I wondered vaguely if Miss Aurelia’s tummy were as upset as mine.

  Carla was still at it:

  “Air the speeding arrow doth splinter

  Flying forth to make the kill.”

  To be perfectly honest, she had not too bad a voice between the gasps.

  It was the custom that “Hark, the
Horn” was sung unaccompanied, and as Carla’s voice cracked the cold air, the members of the Bishop’s Lacey Silver Band fiddled with their instruments, blew into their hands, and stamped their feet to keep warm.

  I caught a quick glimpse of Feely’s face among the tourists.

  What is she doing here, I wondered, with Father so gravely ill in hospital?

  But then I thought, What am I doing here? and I forgave her.

  When at last Carla finished her song, there was a smattering of light applause, accompanied by more than a few heavy sighs of relief, one of them mine.

  Turning to each of the cardinal points of the compass, Carla and Miss Lavinia took their bows, fetching up their skirts with thumbs and forefingers, crossing their ankles, and sinking into curtsies as overcooked as if they were a pair of rival ballerinas taking their umpteenth curtain call at the Royal Opera House.

  As her audience drifted away, Carla made for me like a homing bee.

  “Well done,” I said, having a fried egg in mind.

  “Oh, thank you!” she said, blushing. “I am so pleased to have delighted you.”

  Gaaaaaakkkkkk! I thought. Was someone feeding her this stuff?

  “Listen,” I said. “While the crowd’s out here, I’m going to sneak into the church for a close look at the misericords and the gargoyles. Would you care to join me?”

  Once inside, I could easily shift the topic from wood-carvings to wood-carver, and why her signed copy of Hobbyhorse House had been at the dead man’s bedside.

  “N-no,” she said. “Miss Lavinia says if I am to be a truly great singer, I must look only at beautiful things.”

  “And do you?” I asked. I could be merciless when I felt like it.

  “Mostly, yes,” she said.

  “Tell me about the others,” I said. “What’s the least beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “I shouldn’t like to say,” she said, blushing.

  “Have you ever been to Stowe Pontefract? Or to Thornfield Chase?”

  “I—I have to go now. Miss Lavinia will be—”

  “You ought to, you know,” I told her. “The holly hedges there are very beautiful. They ought to improve your singing no end.”