Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

  I couldn’t help myself.

  But I could have said more. Oh, so much more.

  · FOURTEEN ·

  PERHAPS I WAS TOO hard on Carla. When I realized I was treating her the way Feely and Daffy treated me, I broke off the conversation and walked away, curiously disappointed in myself.

  Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not so simple as it sounds. What it means, in fact, is being charitable—which, as the vicar is fond of pointing out, is the most difficult of the graces to master. Faith and hope are a piece of cake but charity is a Pandora’s box: the monster in the cistern which, when the lid is opened, comes swarming out to seize you by the throat.

  Carla could not help it that she was nauseating: the kind of person who makes your pores snap shut and your gullet lower the drawbridge.

  Most irritating, however, had been the fact that I could not winkle out her connection with Thornfield Chase and Mr. Sambridge.

  Until just now, that is.

  It was the thought of the holly that must have done it.

  I needed time to think.

  With eyes fixed firmly on the ground to make myself invisible, I made my way to the west door of the church and stepped into the porch. Peering round the corner I could see that, except for Cynthia Richardson, who was arranging Christmas flowers in front of the chancel rail, the place was empty.

  She nodded shyly without speaking, as one does when in a partial state of grace due to devotions. I knew enough to leave her alone until she decided to speak.

  I genuflected to the altar—whether it was required or not—and walked quietly past Cynthia to the choir stalls.

  Yes, here were the rows of hinged misericord seats with their carved, misshapen imps with their mocking faces, each one different in execution and detail. It was said that the wood-carvers of the Middle Ages had been allowed free rein, at the end of a long job, to mock their masters by cartooning them in wood.

  This, too, I had learned from listening to the vicar show summer tourists round the church. The world can be an interesting place to a girl who keeps her ears open.

  There was a monk with a goblin face, made by hauling the corners of his eyes down with his forefingers and the corners of his mouth up with his thumbs, just as we still do today behind the backs of certain members of our families. There was a mitered bishop whose eyes were popping almost to the point of explosion, like wooden grapes. There was a monk hoisting his robe to display his bare bottom as he grinned gleefully over his shoulder, and a nun with a bird on her head.

  All of these had been damaged by generations of choirboys carving their initials with knives or other sharp implements, and were now, in places, almost as frail as lace. Feely had once told me that the “W.S.” scratched onto the forehead of a wooden angel was said to have been made by a young William Shakespeare, whose family had some obscure agricultural connections to Bishop’s Lacey.

  It was no wonder that St. Tancred’s required the services of a specialist wood-carver. How else could recent vandalism be repaired and historically important vandalism left untouched—or even restored?

  I was puzzling over that when my eyes fell upon an obviously fresh bit of damage: On a clever figure, thought by experts to represent a cartoon version of the Annunciation, in which an archangel holds out, for the inspection of a surprised-looking woman, a scroll remarkably like a modern newspaper, were carved the raw initials C.S.C.—so fresh that they still had splinters.

  I was so surprised that I broke my own ban on talking.

  “Holy Moses, Cynthia!” I exclaimed. “Look at this!”

  Cynthia, still pink and watery round the eyes, turned from the Christmas roses and, as a subtle reminder that we were in church, touched lightly the velvet chorister’s hat which was pinned to her hair.

  “Look at this,” I repeated. “C.S.C. Carla Sherrinford-Cameron.”

  Cynthia said nothing, but looked at me sadly.

  “How many C.S.C.s could have been here so recently?” I asked, shaking with excitement.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that, Flavia,” she said. “I told Denwyn we should have covered it with something for the holidays. We had hoped that Mr. Sambridge would be able to—oh, dear. Christmas is such a nightmare. No, I’m sorry—I take that back. It’s just that with all the extra services, the parish visits, the hampers for the needy, the choir’s laundry, polishing the brass, and, oh, dear—people forget that even a church needs hoovering.”

  “I know,” I said. “And you’re right, it is a nightmare. At least for you—and the vicar,” I added. “If it isn’t the deathwatch beetle, it’s Carla Sherrinford-Cameron.”

  She nodded sadly, and her great moist brown eyes seemed as if they were about to burst, like those of the carved wooden bishop in the misericord.

  “We thought we could keep it quiet,” Cynthia said. “The churchwardens suggested that her parents ought to be informed; that they might be willing to make good—”

  “Before they were publicly exposed.” I grinned. Cynthia was the only person in the entire world to whom I could say such a thing.

  “Precisely,” she said. “However, Denwyn and I finally talked sense into them. We thought it a far better solution to send the girl herself to Mr. Sambridge, to confess the crime, as it were, and to beg him to make the repair.”

  “A little penance,” I said. I could almost sympathize with Carla, having been made to do so many of them myself.

  “A little penance,” Cynthia repeated. “We hated to impose upon the poor man when he suffered so horribly with rheumatism and arthritis, but our own needs so often seem more important. We forget that we can kill an old man by bringing him out in such inclement weather.”

  “But you didn’t kill him,” I pointed out. “He didn’t come.”

  “No,” Cynthia said. “But it might have been better if he had.”

  And I knew instantly what she meant.

  “Listen,” I said. “I have a plan,” and Cynthia gave me that crazy, skeptical, but awed look she always gives me when I say such a thing.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out the chewing gum—bless you, Carl Pendracka!—shoved all of it, one stick at a time, into my mouth, and began, as they say in the instructional films, to masticate.

  “Chemistry to the rescue,” I said to Cynthia round the wad, although I’m afraid it came out sounding more like “Emma’s three otters’ red shoes.”

  Cynthia covered her eyes as I extracted the mess from my mouth and began rolling it into a long string between my hands. When the proper thickness had been achieved, I broke off bits and, using my thumbs, worked and smoothed them like putty into the raw gouges.

  “Sit for a minute,” I told Cynthia, signaling with my hands, and as she sat, I darted out the vestry door and into the churchyard, which was now almost empty. The Horn Dance had apparently moved on to other haunts, to sing at other doors round the village, where they would be rewarded with cakes and ale.

  I dug out several dead oak leaves from the snow beneath the trees and returned to the choir stalls.

  Cynthia’s jaw fell open as I broke up bits of vegetation and began to chew them in a businesslike way.

  “Flavia!”

  But she said nothing else as, with no more than a bit of spit and patience, I manufactured a mouthful of oak mush: a perfect color match, if I do say so myself, for the ancient oak of the misericords. There was no risk of poisoning myself, I knew, since oak leaves had once been highly valued for their healing of all wounds.

  All that was required now was to produce my handkerchief and rub the stuff into the wood.

  When it came time to do my laundry next Monday, Mrs. Mullet, of course, would be furious. And I couldn’t blame her.

  “Job done,” I said, straightening up to let Cynthia have a squint. “Flavia’s Fine Furniture Repair. No task too big or too small. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

  “You’re a genius,” she said, and I couldn’t have agreed more.

  It was almost
a miracle. My improvised stain had blended so perfectly with the ancient oak that, if you hadn’t known where to look, you’d never have spotted it.

  “Why would Carla do something like that?” I asked. It was a question which had not occurred to me until now.

  It was unfair of me to ask Cynthia such a question. A vicar’s wife hears things that would peel the paint off battleships, and yet is expected to keep them to herself.

  Perhaps it was in gratitude because I had patched the pew; perhaps it was something more than that.

  But Cynthia said, “The poor girl has not had an easy life. Parents off somewhere doing something noble…”

  A pang snatched at my heart. To me, distant parents doing noble deeds was an old, familiar story.

  Don’t think that, something warned me. Now is not the time.

  “She was brought up by a distant aunt, now deceased,” Cynthia went on.

  That would be her auntie Loo, I thought, but I said nothing.

  “They’ve had similar problems with her destructiveness over at St. Aubyn’s, in Hinley. Denwyn had a word with the vicar there and they came up with the plan to encourage her singing.”

  “Hence ‘Hark, the Horn,’ ” I said.

  “Hence ‘Hark, the Horn.’ ” Cynthia smiled.

  And there fell between us one of those silences which I had come to love sharing with Cynthia, and which are the sign of a true friendship: a friendship in which no words are required.

  We both of us basked in it for a time, and then Cynthia said, suddenly: “I wish you’d befriend her.”

  Just like that. No preliminaries. Thank you, Cynthia Richardson!

  But none were needed.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and both of us grinned.

  “The poor are always with us,” she said, almost to herself. It was not entirely apt, but I knew what she meant. I myself had befriended a remarkable number of poor souls recently, including Cynthia herself and, even more recently, my own obnoxious cousin, Undine.

  “Call me Undies,” she had said, insisting on repeating this and shaking my hand firmly at breakfast every morning, and yet I had somehow managed to keep my cake hole shut.

  True charity, I had discovered, consists in swallowing an invisible flaming sword.

  “Brrrrr,” Cynthia said, gathering her cardigan tightly around her. “It’s too cold in here. Let’s go over to the vicarage and put the teapot on.”

  The churchyard was now completely deserted as we made our way across the grass. Only a couple of jackdaws broke the silence, squabbling over an acorn beneath the oak where I had excavated the healing leaves.

  As Cynthia opened the door, the smell of hot cloves told me that a ham was in the oven, and I suddenly felt as if I hadn’t eaten for a fortnight—perhaps even longer than that. In just moments she had the teapot ready on the table.

  “Electric kettle,” she explained. “Gift of Bunny Spirling: ‘A vicar and his vicarage ought not to be a fortress against the modern gadget,’ ” she said, striking a Bunny-like stance and sticking her stomach out in an affectionate parody of Father’s dear friend. “He also gave us an electric tin opener,” she confided, “but Denwyn refuses point-blank to use it.”

  Now she was putting on the vicar’s voice: “Would our good Lord have employed an electric fish gutter or a battery-operated bread slicer, had they been handed to him at Bethsaida?”

  Cynthia was a remarkable mimic and she captured her husband’s outraged remark to perfection.

  We were still wiping away the tears of laughter when Cynthia suddenly shoved back her chair and leaped to her feet. Someone had entered the kitchen and was standing behind me.

  “Oh! I didn’t see you there,” she said. “You gave me such a start!”

  “I’m sorry, Cynthia,” said a voice. “I didn’t mean to. It was just—”

  “Flavia,” Cynthia interrupted, “I’d like you to meet an old and very dear friend.”

  “We’ve already met,” I said, swinging round in my chair and offering my hand to Hilary Inchbald.

  —

  It is difficult indeed to describe what happened next. In the first place, it’s nearly impossible to convey what it’s like to sit in an overheated vicarage kitchen, with dinner in the oven, across a gingham Rexine tablecloth from a living legend, and yes, I’m not ashamed to say it, a god.

  Who isn’t familiar with the inky outlines of that dear curly-haired boy, striking an explorer’s stance or herding the barnyard geese with a pirate cutlass? Or navigating a raft of planks in a flooded meadow with a clothesline prop for a punting pole?

  Hilary Inchbald hadn’t changed all that much. He was larger and older, of course, than he had been in those famous illustrations, but yet he was somehow diminished.

  His confidence was gone.

  I watched him as he pecked, birdlike, at his tea cake, his unruly mop of prematurely white hair giving him the look of an elderly cockatoo: surely a comedown from the little boy who had once upon a time seemed destined to conquer the world.

  Is this what the world of Crispian Crumpet is really like? I couldn’t help wondering.

  It was a sad thought all round.

  Did he have children of his own and were they happy?

  A few words were exchanged about the weather and the flowers in the church, but all the time I was aware that, beneath the stiff superficial chat, deep currents were flowing in the conversation between Cynthia and Hilary Inchbald. Unspoken words hung in the air like the smoke of autumn bonfires—or the scent of a passing princess.

  Oh, no! I thought. Surely not!

  Love takes strange forms, I had learned—or overheard—especially in a village setting where close friendships and loneliness are one and the same thing. Hilary, to be sure, was an outsider, but probably all the more exciting to this country vicar’s wife: this Rapunzel whose hair was only ever let down for market gardeners and sheep herders who wouldn’t recognize a diamond if it tumbled out of heaven and bopped them on their crumpets.

  To begin with, Hilary and Cynthia were far too polite to each other. For another, they were both too red in the cheek.

  My heart sank deeper and deeper, like a waterlogged canoe.

  The vicar would be devastated when he found them out. He would fling himself from the top of the church tower and impale himself on the sharp iron spikes of the railings which surrounded the grave of Arabella Darling, Spinster of this Parish, who “died praising the Lord on the twenty-ninth day of November, seventeen hundred and sixty-seven. Amen. Amen. Amen.”

  I was ashamed for Cynthia—more ashamed than I had ever been for myself, and my face must have shown it.

  After a while the talk ground to a halt and I realized that both Cynthia and Hilary Inchbald were staring at me.

  I squirmed in my chair. I didn’t know what to do. My mental hands were tied. I had been flung into a part of life that was over my head and I was in danger of drowning in ignorance.

  And then Cynthia laughed.

  “Flavia, dear,” she said, “Hilary and I are old friends. We have known each other since we were in prams. We meet to share our sorrows.”

  As if she had been reading my mind.

  If I had been flustered before, I was now absolutely gaga. I would need to backpedal and pretend I hadn’t been thinking what she thought I had been thinking.

  I looked from one of them to the other, speechless.

  “Tell her, Cynthia,” Hilary said. “Go ahead. I shan’t mind.”

  No…no…no…, my brain was screaming. I don’t want to know. Keep your secrets to yourselves.

  I covered my ears with my hands, pleading with my eyes.

  Cynthia reached across the table, offering her wrists and forearms as if she were in a lifeboat and I a drowning swimmer.

  I took hold of them and hung on for dear life.

  Where did this woman get her strength? I had once—a few years ago—thought Cynthia to be pathetic. What a fool I had been! What I had mistaken fo
r jelly was a flexible fiber of the strongest steel. No wonder my mother, Harriet, had been so fond of her.

  “Hilary has been very sadly bereaved,” Cynthia told me. “We thought you might have already worked that out.”

  Hilary? Bereaved? What was she talking about? His father had been dead for years, and his mother…?

  Well, that remained to be seen. If she were still alive she had been remarkably successful in keeping her name out of the newspapers.

  Could I be losing my mind? Had I, without knowing it, tripped and fallen through a hole into another world in which turvy was topsy, and topsy turvy, and time ran backwards towards forever?

  But for as long as I live, I shall never forget the pale, frail man who, at the same time, was also the boy, Crispian Crumpet, leaning towards me in the vicarage kitchen and saying in a voice that came to my ears like a memory of last summer’s southern wind, “Roger Sambridge was Oliver Inchbald—my father.”

  · FIFTEEN ·

  I’D GIVE ANYTHING TO be able to say I had seen it coming—but I hadn’t. I had failed miserably.

  What a feather in my cap it would have been to be able to drop the bombshell at Inspector Hewitt’s feet:

  “Oh, by the way, Inspector, in case you haven’t already worked it out, Roger Sambridge, the ecclesiastical wood-carver, was actually the world-famous author Oliver Inchbald.”

  “What!” he would have expostulated, and if he’d worn a monocle—which he didn’t—it would have popped out of his eye like a cork.

  I’d have smiled modestly and let him take all the credit, as I had so often done before.

  But it was not to be. I had failed, and felt for the moment as if I had been doused with black paint.

  And yet at the same time I was beginning to burn with excitement. If Roger Sambridge was Oliver Inchbald, so many otherwise inexplicable things began to make sense.

  I thought he might be, I wanted to say, in order to salvage what was left of my pride. But some strange new Power was telling me to keep quiet.

  Except to say, “I’m awfully sorry to hear that, Mr. Inchbald. May I offer you my sympathy?”