Touch Not the Cat Read online

  ‘I don’t know. Could it have been Emory?’

  ‘Well, the same applies, I would have thought.’ He looked at me. ‘What would he be doing there, and why on earth shouldn’t he stop and speak to you? What makes you think it was one of us?’

  ‘I got that impression. Only vaguely – but I thought it was one of you.’

  ‘Well, didn’t you try speaking to whoever it was?’

  He waited for my reply, his eyes wide now, and guileless. I knew that look. It was the ‘I was never even near the orchard’ look, with the apples literally tumbling out of his trouser-pocket. I smiled to myself, and let him see the smile, and watched the flicker in his eyes, and was certain. I turned away towards the window, picked up Pot, and set him on my knee. ‘No. Oh, well, never mind. What would you be doing there anyway? I just thought it must be one of you, and I got the impression it was you. And talking of Emory, what’s all this about him and Cathy Underhill? Have they really got a thing going?’

  ‘Yes. They met, quite by chance, at some do in town, and when they got talking they found the connection with Ashley. Then one thing led to another, and – yes, you might say they had something going.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘I’m not sure. That is, I’m not sure from Twin’s side of it.’

  ‘Then you are sure from Cathy’s?’ I asked.

  ‘As far as one can judge, yes again.’

  ‘You and Emory used not to have secrets from one another.’

  ‘We’re big boys now.’

  ‘Not too big, apparently,’ I said, rather sharply, ‘to go in still for all that “Twin” stuff that used to annoy everyone.’

  ‘It’s convenient,’ he said, with a slant of the eyebrows that he didn’t attempt to explain. Didn’t have to. I knew just when it had been ‘convenient’; when he and Emory were standing in for one another, either for fun and confusion’s sake, or even for pay. One twin, who had pressing business elsewhere, or who was avoiding trouble, would cajole, blackmail, or just plain pay the other to substitute for him. It was significant that as often as not James was the one who was blackmailed into ringing for Emory. The maddening way they had had of calling each other ‘Twin’ had made it desperately hard to catch them out when they wanted to confuse the issue. It was also typical that the habit had been deliberately cultivated. Even as boys, my cousins were to be reckoned with.

  ‘Do you mean,’ I said slowly, ‘that you haven’t just come here today with Emory and Cathy? That you brought Cathy yourself, and that she thinks you are Emory?’

  He gave me a sideways glance, half amused, half wary. ‘You sound very fierce.’

  ‘Well, damn it, it could matter. Why did you do it, James?’

  ‘Oh, nothing deadly. Just that he’d had to stand her up once before, and didn’t care to do it again. Besides, I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Surely you could have come anyway?’ I asked. A pause. ‘Who told you I was here?’

  The fair brows lifted a fraction. ‘Why, Emerson, of course. How else would I have known?’

  I glanced up, but he was looking out of the window over my head. ‘Have you stood in for Emory before – with Cathy, that is?’

  ‘Only once.’

  ‘And now here, today, in front of her parents. Do you really expect me to back you up?’

  ‘You always did.’

  ‘This could be different. I haven’t met her, but it sounds like the sort of situation one ought not to play about with. If she is serious about him, she might get hurt.’

  ‘Why should she get hurt if she doesn’t know? She’d be hurt if she knew she’d been stood up again.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said resignedly. ‘Damn you, James, you’ve no right to put me in this kind of position. We’re not children any more. It’s a bit late to tell the truth now, so I’ll try not to give you away.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’ There was nothing in his tone but the offhand approval that there had always been when I helped him. I smiled, and pulled Pot’s ears, and thought how little he’d changed, and how much.

  ‘Penny for them,’ said my cousin.

  ‘I was just thinking that we might never have been parted at all.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  I side-stepped the question. ‘Oh, only that it seems like yesterday, you and Emory playing your games. James, I meant what I said. Don’t ask me to do it again, because I won’t.’

  But he wasn’t listening. He was looking out of the window over my head, and I saw his gaze sharpen.

  ‘Did you know one of the beeches had gone?’

  ‘Yes. Rob told me it had to come down after a storm in February. It’s an awful pity, making a gap like that.’

  ‘Yes, but have you noticed what you can see through the gap?’

  I turned. ‘No. What?’

  He nodded downwards. ‘You can see the pavilion now, and almost all the layout of the maze. You could never see any of that from the house before – Bryony!’

  ‘What is it? You made me jump.’

  ‘I’ve seen it for the first time. Why didn’t we ever think of it? It’s the coat of arms!’

  ‘What is? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Look,’ he said impatiently. ‘The design. The layout of the maze. I know it’s overgrown and all blurred in places, but it’s the pattern – you know that queer geometric pattern carved on the fireplaces, round the “Touch Not The Cat” crest? That’s it, surely?’

  I stared down at the intersecting lines of the maze. Overgrown though it was, the sun picked out the pattern in shadows sufficiently clear to prove him right. ‘Good heavens, so it is! Well . . . After all, the maze was very much William Ashley’s fine and private place, wasn’t it? I always wondered why he put that odd square design behind Julia’s badge. He even uses it for a bookplate in his own books, I remember that. And talking of books—’ I looked up at him. ‘James, some things from the library seem to have disappeared.’

  He seemed hardly to be listening, still intent on the sunlit maze below. ‘Ah, yes.’ He said it absently. ‘The horse and the lion dog seal. Did you find anything else gone?’

  I didn’t answer. Not aloud, that is. So you knew, did you, Ashley?

  He seemed to come to himself with a start, and turned. ‘It’s very odd, that maze. It makes one wonder . . . I’m sorry, you were saying? Something about the T’ang horse and the jade seal going missing.’

  ‘I didn’t mention them. That was you.’

  He nodded. ‘The Underhills told me. They said you were looking round to see if anything else was gone. Have you checked?’

  ‘As well as I can, without an inventory. I haven’t found the things from the library, but then Mr Emerson may have put them away somewhere.’

  ‘No. Underhill had just telephoned Emerson when we got here. He knew nothing about the things. It’s certainly very odd. Did you find anything else missing?’

  ‘The pictures Great-Aunt Sophie gave me. The ones from there.’ I pointed to the wall.

  He frowned. ‘Those? Damn it, who on earth would have wanted a couple of nursery pictures?’

  ‘Those “nursery pictures”, as you call them, are originals, and they’re really pretty valuable now, though they’d be hard to sell. I mean, they couldn’t very well be advertised; they’re unique. James, what on earth can have happened to them?’

  ‘God knows. Are you quite sure they’re gone? They may have been put away somewhere. Take it from me, you’ll find them in a cupboard or something.’

  ‘I put them away myself, in that cupboard, and it was locked. It’s not locked now, and they’re gone. It’s the obvious conclusion that they’ve gone the same way as the T’ang horse and the seal.’

  The frown deepened. ‘You may be right.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, Bryony, I can see this is rather worrying, on top of everything else, but do try not to fret yourself over it. Can’t you just leave it to Twin and me, and Emerson? We’ll follow it up. There’ll be some harmless explanation, I’m sure. Who�
�d take this sort of thing, anyway? The schoolroom isn’t even on the public side.’

  ‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’

  He stopped, arrested. His brows shot up. ‘You can’t mean the Underhills?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t. I know nothing about them, except that I like them, and surely to goodness they were vetted when they took the house. But the point is, what earthly reason could people like that have for wanting to steal anything like this – or anything at all, for that matter?’

  ‘Well, leave it, honey.’ He hesitated. ‘Don’t take me up wrongly, but you really don’t have to worry yourself about it. That’s our job.’ He paused, then slanted a gentle look down at me. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Give me time. I don’t know.’ I began to uncurl from the window seat. ‘Did they send you to take me down to lunch? We’d better go, I suppose.’

  ‘Bryony.’ His arm fell lightly across my shoulders.

  I sat very still.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you. When can we talk? They said something about your moving into the cottage. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes. I was down there this morning. Rob and Mrs Henderson have got it ready, so I think I’ll move in today. I – I’d like to talk to you, James. There’s a lot to say . . . After lunch, perhaps? Or would “Emory” have to take Cathy somewhere?’

  ‘No. But after lunch he’s got to have a chat with Jeff Underhill about the lease of the Court. After that I might be able to come down. You’re going to stay the night there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll see you. Now I think we’d better go downstairs. It’s all right, there’s no hurry. Stephanie said to take our time; she knew we’d have a lot to say.’

  ‘What’s been decided about the lease?’

  ‘Officially speaking, they should be allowed to stay till it runs out. That’ll be in November. Neither Emory nor I see any reason why they shouldn’t. Do you?’

  ‘Does that matter?’ I asked.

  The arm moved a little on my shoulders. ‘So you do mind.’

  ‘I tell you, I don’t know.’ I got up abruptly from under the arm and moved to the door. ‘Let’s go down.’

  ‘Taking your old bedmate down with you?’

  ‘Taking my what?’ Then I realised that I was clutching Pot. I dumped him back on the window seat, said, ‘Damn you, James,’ but not aloud this time, and made once more for the door.

  He followed me. ‘When you were in the library, did you notice if all the books in the locked sections were still there?’

  ‘There again, I wouldn’t know without the catalogue. I didn’t notice any gaps.’

  We clattered down the schoolroom stairs. ‘Perhaps you’d better leave that job for us, anyway,’ he suggested.

  ‘Like hell I will. I’m of age, and in any case probably all the worst ones have gone. Don’t forget Emma Ashley burned a few of them.’

  ‘Grandmamma Savonarola. So she did. Pity,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Well, you’re more than welcome to William Ashley’s collection. All his dear little verses to his Julia, and his Roman studies, and his own personal editions of the simpler Shakespeare plays.’

  ‘Are any of them simple?’

  ‘I would have thought that Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar posed fewer problems than, say, Measure for Measure or Timon.’

  ‘Would you? You might be right.’ I said it absently. I was wondering whether to tell him now about my father’s last words to me, and my interest in William Ashley’s books. But we were already halfway down the great staircase. A portrait hung there, a dark girl, painted rather stiffly, but with beauty showing even through the stylised familiar features of the minor ‘society’ portraits of the time. She was standing beside the sundial in the old rose garden, one arm resting on the pillar, the other holding a basket of roses. She looked stiff and faintly ill at ease in the grey satin and starched lace of the seventeenth century. Bess Ashley, the gipsy girl who had talked to a lover no one could see, and who went to the stake for it. Behind her, almost obscured in the yellowing canvas, was a black cat, familiar of witches.

  I stopped. ‘James, do you ever have dreams?’

  ‘Dreams? Of course I do. Everyone does. What sort especially?’

  ‘Oh, about the future. People you’re going to meet, and then you do meet them. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Precognition, you mean?’

  I hesitated, then was deliberately vague. ‘I wouldn’t say – no, not really that. Just something that’s a bit more than coincidence . . . You dream about someone, and – and talk to them, someone you don’t really know, and then you seem to see them or hear from them almost straight away. Next day, even.’

  There was a little pause. He seemed all at once to notice that we were standing in front of Bess Ashley’s portrait. He shot me a look, hesitated, and opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment Mrs Underhill came out of the drawing-room to the foot of the stairs and spoke, and the moment passed. I ran down with an apology forming, but Stephanie Underhill brushed it aside and began to say something in an undertone which sounded like, ‘Do you mind, I wanted to ask you, don’t say anything—’ Then she stopped short, with a smile which didn’t do anything for the anxiety in her eyes, as a girl emerged from a door at the other side of the hall and ran across to take James’s hand in hers and say:

  ‘Emory! You’ve been an age! Where were you both, for heaven’s sake? In the middle of the maze?’

  It was the girl from the E-type Jaguar. I recognised her straight away, the look of her father somehow translated into long, dark-blonde hair and mink lashes, and the wide, unpainted mouth that had been sulky then, but now was full of laughter and charm. She was taller than her mother, but not by much, and slim to swooning point in a tight pair of blue jeans with big stitched pockets, and a loose sweater reaching like a tunic to the hips. The sweater should have been white, but wasn’t, and I saw that the edge of one sleeve was beginning to unravel. But the cult disorder didn’t seem to go deeper than the clothes; she was glowing with happiness and well-being, and the glow, it was very obvious, began and ended with my cousin. Her fingers twined in James’s and clung, and the look she sent him would have melted bedrock.

  ‘Cathy—’ began her mother, but James was already disentangling his fingers from hers, and saying:

  ‘You haven’t met my cousin yet. This is Bryony. Bryony, Cat Underhill.’

  ‘Hi, Bryony. Nice to meet you. I’d have known you anywhere.’

  She held out a hand, and I took it. ‘That’s what your mother said. That portrait must be better than we thought.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not just that picture. When you’ve lived here for a bit you certainly get to know the Ashley face.’ She sent a glancing look up at James again, then added, seriously, to me: ‘I’m sorry. I guess I should have said straight away, I’m really sorry about your father. It was awful.’

  ‘Thank you. Didn’t I see you in Worcester yesterday? You stopped at a crossing to let me and a black cat over.’

  ‘Gosh, sure, I remember that. At least I remember the cat; I’m afraid I didn’t notice you. He had his nerve, didn’t he? I nearly ran him down. And a black cat, too, just when I can do with all the luck I can get.’

  ‘Oh? Why, specially?’

  She took me by the arm as her mother began to shepherd us towards the drawing-room. ‘Not special. Just that I always seem to need more luck than I can get. Who doesn’t? Come along in and get a drink. Pop’s still away telephoning somebody. What’ll you have? Emory will pour it. Did you and the cat both get away all right?’

  ‘He was even quicker than I was. And I solved a problem, meeting you like this.’

  She widened her eyes at me over her Martini. They were dark like her father’s. The mink eyelashes made them look enormous, Bambi-type. ‘A problem?’

  ‘Yes. I’d just left the lawyer’s office. It’s beside that crossing, you probably know that? I saw him watching you, too; he pointed you out to me, and I thought he said �
��Cat”, and I couldn’t think why. I mean, if he’d meant the black cat, I could see that myself . . . Now I know. We’d been talking about the Court, and your family, and now I’ve just heard my cousin call you Cat. He must have been meaning you. Well, that’s one of the mysteries on the way out.’

  ‘“One of the mysteries?”’ she asked. ‘Are there some more?’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ said Mrs Underhill warmly. I glanced at her in surprise, but she hurried on: ‘All this time in a moated grange straight out of Tennyson, and not even the sniff of a ghost or a secret passage or any of the things you might expect! Miss Ashley, Cathy and I have been just longing for you to come and tell us the secrets about the Court that aren’t in the books. The guides seem pretty strong on history, but they can’t know all there is.’

  So she didn’t want to talk about the missing objects in front ofher daughter. Fair enough. I laughed. ‘I’m sorry if it hasn’t come up to expectation. There isn’t much, but there is a secret stair, as a matter of fact; it’s a very tame affair, but it may have been useful in its day. In a way it’s a sort of secret inside a secret – it goes down from the Priest’s Hole into the wine cellars.’

  While I had been speaking, Mr Underhill had come back into the room. He had his tycoon look again; he must have finished his call to Mr Emerson before James came up to the schoolroom, so perhaps he had been telephoning to business associates all this time. But he shed it, and said, genially: ‘I knew all those stories about priests were true.’

  ‘Would you show us this stairway, Bryony?’ Cathy sounded eager, genuinely so, I thought, in spite of the slightly over-anxious touch which meant either that she was nervous of the ‘real’ Ashley who had owned all this once, or that she was trying to placate the girl she was hoping to supplant. ‘Right away after lunch?’

  ‘Of course, if you want me to.’

  ‘Honey,’ her mother intervened, ‘maybe Miss Ashley doesn’t feel like doing that right now.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, I’m sorry . . .’ The contrition, like the eagerness, was a little too emphatic. ‘I guess I just forgot. What must you think of me?’