Touch Not the Cat Read online

  While she was talking she had taken her apron down and put it on, helped me finish clearing the breakfast things, stacked them, run hot water into the sink, and started to wash up. I found the tea towel and wiped, letting the monologue run over me as I had let it run over me every time I met Mrs Henderson, even after an absence of less than twenty-four hours. Sooner or later she ran down and stopped for breath, and then from long practice I was adept at picking out the one topic which I might want to pursue; or rather, at ignoring the dozen or so topics I wanted to avoid. I spared a thought for the Vicar and Rob Granger; how, each day, did they cope with this? Then I realised I had seen the answer; the Vicar went down to the greenhouses, and Rob, when she arrived, smiled sweetly and left by the other door.

  ‘Mr Howard’s wife is not coloured,’ I said, ‘she’s Spanish. And if you remember the portrait on the stair, we’ve had a Spanish lady here before, and it seemed to work. I’m told Mrs Howard’s very beautiful, and she probably is an R.C., but I doubt very much if they’ll come to Ashley. Have you seen my cousin Emory lately? or Francis?’

  But Mrs Henderson was just as good as I was at fixing on the topics she wanted. ‘Now you come to mention it, of course I knew about the Spanish lady. There was that song about her, wasn’t there? But that was in the days when everybody was Catholics, anyway, so it didn’t matter. The Vicar told me. And now I come to think about it it wouldn’t be her children that came to Ashley Court, it’s Mr Howard’s own. And when I say “own”, of course I mean –’

  ‘Yes, of course. The twins and Francis. Have any of them been here recently?’

  ‘And of course if Mr Howard doesn’t come back,’ said Mrs Henderson, with obvious regret for a rich source of gossip slipping from her grasp, ‘then it’ll be Mr Emory and his wife, and a very nice girl she is, and everyone says the same, though a bit young for it—’

  ‘What wife?’

  ‘Not for marriage, I don’t mean, because nowadays they’re ready and willing for anything before they’re turned fifteen, though I can’t see myself that marriage and a family brings you much except a load of housework and cooking, but they will do it, and I suppose it’s nature’s way—’

  ‘What wife?’

  ‘What’s that, Miss Bryony?’

  ‘I said what wife? You said Mr Emory and his wife. Is he married?’

  She had certainly captured all my attention at last. She shot me a glance of triumph, turned on the hot tap and held a jug under it to rinse, taking her time. ‘Well, not yet, but take it from me, it’s only a matter of time. It’s that Miss Underhill, Cathy her name is. Didn’t Rob say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If that isn’t just like a man. They never take a blind bit of notice of anything that goes on under their noses, more interested in the football pools and the tomatoes down in those greenhouses than in what’s happening right here in our village. Now, that’s the dishes done. Don’t you bother any more, I’ll put them away. You don’t know where they go.’

  ‘Of course I do. I’ll do them. So my cousin Emory’s been going out with the Underhill girl? Are they actually engaged?’

  She wrung out her dishcloth and draped it over the edge of the draining board, then fished below the sink, brought up a red plastic bucket, and began to fill it with hot water. ‘I don’t know about engaged, they don’t call it that now, do they? They go with someone, or they have a steady, or they have a thing going, or they have it off with someone, if I’ve got that right—’

  ‘I don’t think you have, quite, but never mind, I know what you mean. How long has this been going on, and do you really think it’s serious?’

  ‘Knowing Mr Emory, I’d say it was.’ She turned off the taps and for the first time stopped working and stood looking at me, the bright blue eyes shrewd and quite serious. ‘You know him, he was always one that knew his own mind and went straight for what he wanted, and pity help anything that stood in his way. Nice about it, oh yes, of course, being an Ashley, but he gets what he wants.’

  The smiler with the knife under the cloak. Yes, we could do you down and smile at you with great charm while we did it. It was a useful talent, I supposed. At any rate it had got the Ashleys where they were, and kept them there for a few hundred years. I said: ‘Is she pretty? Tell me all about her.’

  She told me, but I wasn’t listening. I would meet Cathy Underhill soon enough. I was thinking about my cousin Emory, that determined and clever man. Whatever he wanted to do, he would succeed in. Now, it appeared, he wanted the Underhill girl. If he had picked her and was serious about her, he must count her fortune just as a bonus; he had plenty himself, even though the business in Bristol (which had been very much Emory’s pigeon for years) hardly put him in the Underhill bracket. ‘Never marry money, but go where money is.’ It was like Emory’s hard good sense – the steel-hard Ashley wish for continuity – to marry an asset; and if he was fond of her it was the affection, and not the fortune, that was the bonus.

  I was also thinking about my lover. Where did this leave us? And why, for heaven’s sake why, could he not be as open with me as I was with him? I was rapidly, I thought, having more than enough of mystery.

  Trust me. It came suddenly, clear and close.

  Oh, you were reading me, were you? Well, you’ll know what I think about you. Where are you?

  Not far. It was fading. Not far.

  Where, though? Here at Ashley?

  The faintest quiver of amusement came through, mischief, but with a touch of comfort, like a pat on the shoulder which tells you to relax and it will be all right soon . . .

  ‘. . . Going down to the cottage this morning?’ Mrs Henderson was asking.

  ‘Yes. Rob tells me you’ve opened it up for me already. It’s marvellous of you, Mrs Henderson. Do you mean I can move straight in?’

  ‘Yes, indeed you can. It’s all aired and clean, and if it’s a matter of stores, groceries and such, I put what I thought you’d need for a start, and there’s a list on the kitchen table, and you can pay me when you feel like it. And when I pop down to the village this morning, as I shall have to do, the Vicar being out of butter and self-raising, I’ll call at the farm and tell the milk to come, and if I let Miss Marget at the Post Office know, then you’ll be settled in in no time, and very nice it’ll be. And the meat comes Tuesdays and Fridays, you’ll remember that. I can take any orders you want up at the Vicarage, and pop them down to you—’

  I left eventually, overwhelmed with kindness and offers of every sort of help under the sun, and made my way down to the cottage.

  The Vicar was in the orchard, spraying the apple trees with fervour and a lavish hand. I could hear him talking busily, but then I saw Rob’s dark head some distance off on the far side of a hedge, and realised that the latter could not hear a word. Nor was he meant to. The Vicar was talking to the apple trees. Rob’s dog lay near him, head cocked and deeply interested, but when he saw me he got up and came over, tail waving. Neither the Vicar nor Rob seemed to notice me as I crossed the orchard and pushed open the wicket which gave on the cottage garden.

  The first thing that struck me was the tidiness. If I had thought about it all I would have expected the cottage garden to match the outlying parts of the Court gardens for enforced neglect, but this garden was a small marvel of neatness. The two plum trees were pruned and well shaped and budding fatly; the Fribourg rose around the window had been carefully trimmed, and the clematis was a cloud of blossom as high as the roof; the rows of raspberries were as regular as guardsmen, the strawberries were already strawed, and the plots to either side of the path were hoed and raked and planted within an inch of their lives. The path where I stood was clear of weeds, and thickly edged with chives and parsley. The brimming rain barrel below the gutter was painted the same new green as the door, and had a fresh metal ring. The step was clean, and the door open.

  Inside was the same; Mrs Henderson had put all to rights, and it was charming and neat, with a pot of pink geraniums in the window,
and the fresh smell of polish everywhere. The box of groceries stood on the kitchen table. Upstairs, I knew, all would be ready for me. I had only to pay my bill at the Hog and Oak, get my things brought over here, and walk in.

  Which was no reason why, leaning my elbows on the sill of the dormer window that looked from the bedroom eaves out over the apple trees, I should find myself, for the first time since my father’s death, crying helplessly as if there was neither love nor hope left in the world.

  Ashley, 1835.

  My God, he thought. I’ve forgotten the list. My father was right to rave at me for a vicious libertine. It had seemed amusing, once, to keep a list of them, like the stable books; physical marks, breeding, performance, staying power . . .

  And her name on it, too.

  I’ll burn the list. Not even read it again. I’ll burn the books, too, all of them. No more lights o’ love. She is the last, I promise it. Only let her come tonight.

  But something in him, remembering, cast a lingering backward look at the time past, and he felt heavy and full of dread, as if he were signalling in vain across a waste of blowing darkness.

  7

  I’ll go along, no such sight to be shown,

  But to rejoice in splendour of mine own.

  Romeo and Juliet, I, ii

  Two bus-loads of quarter-pounders were already lining up when I got to the gate. There was a trestle table set up the other side of the bridge, inside the gate-house, and here a young woman sat taking the money. I had never seen her before, and she obviously did not recognise me. She didn’t even give me a glance as I took my ticket, declined to buy a coloured brochure on Ashley Court, and wandered out into the sunshine of the courtyard to join the group waiting outside the main door.

  The girl from the gate-house escorted us round. She had read what there was to read, and did her best to make the place come to life.

  ‘This is the Great Hall. It’s from Henry VIII’s time, but there’s no record that the King was ever here. You see that little winding stair over there . . . ? It leads to the gallery. When Cardinal Wolsey was a young priest he lived here for a time; he was the family chaplain and had to read aloud to them during meals. I suppose he got his food afterwards . . . Notice the carving on the gallery rail. It’s original. But the shield in the centre with the crest was added later, in the nineteenth century, when the family took the motto “Touch Not The Cat But A Glove” from their Scottish connection. You can see the motto again carved on the stone shield above the fireplace. It was William Ashley the author who had the old Tudor chimney-breast taken out and this Gothic one put in. It was much admired. Thomas Lovell Beddoes mentions this room in one of his poems. You’ll find it quoted in the brochure. This way, please.’

  We straggled along after her. It was a comprehensive tour, good value for money. We saw it all. The Tudor parlour where the priest’s hole stood open to view, the Council Chamber with the carved ceiling and the coats of arms and the panelling polished like silk; the dining-room with the Queen Anne ceiling where the water-light from the moat rocked and rippled as the swans floated by below; the long drawing-room with its terrace of narrow lawn and rose-hung parapet edging the drop straight to the moat. We saw the pantries and the still-room, the cellars, the kitchens with the spits and the vast chimney (we ourselves had done our cooking in one of the pantries); then upstairs to the bedrooms and the gallery, and, at last, the library.

  This ran the full length of the north wing of the house. It was a tall room with a heavily corniced ceiling, and pillared Corinthian openings for doors and windows. The walls were completely clothed with shelves, and at intervals shelves stood out from the walls to create bays, each bay a self-contained room in itself, with table and heavy chairs of Spanish leather. Here and there stood glass-topped display tables for more valuable volumes; and in earlier days there had been, one to either side of the fireplace, a pair of ancient celestial and terrestial globes. The fireplace was in keeping with the room, being a wide affair with a carved marble mantelpiece, the top slab upheld by Atlas-like gentlemen with suffering expressions, and the cross-piece decorated with carefree and rather charming putti. The huge metal basket below, which had been designed for logs, was empty, and in front of it, inside the leather-seated high fender, stood the unlovely device which was heater and humidifier all in one. The library had once been my favourite of all the rooms at Ashley; I could remember the firelight on the mellow leather of the books, and the warmth of the big rug before the blaze, and being allowed to turn one of the big globes while my father told me about the countries which passed by so quickly under my childish hands.

  Now its only beauty was one of proportion; it was a sad ghost of a room, with the cool north light showing the empty shelves, or, sadder still, the shelves where two or three worthless and abandoned volumes took the space of twenty, and lay fallen in their places. Under the glass of the display tables the faded velvet showed darker patches where treasures had once lain. The globes had gone long since under the hammer. In the farthest bay were the locked sections, three sets of shelves behind gilded grilles. The section which had held valuable books was, like the display tables, empty of them; the other two were still filled with the books that Emory had striven in vain to be allowed to read – the private collections of Scholar William, and of Nicholas Ashley, his son.

  The guide was saying something about Nick Ashley now, and people were smiling. One or two of them drifted over to look at the titles behind the grille, and I went with them.

  The topmost shelves in William’s section were filled with a miscellaneous assortment of volumes; a herbal, a few bird books, a county history or two, and a book of county maps, books on hunting and game preserving, a history of the Clan Chattan, and one or two thin reprints about local affairs. There were also a few stray volumes from the Journal of Emma Ashley. But on the more accessible shelves, Shakespeare predominated. The Complete Works, in a massive, illustrated edition, comprised ten of the volumes, and I could see at least three other editions, flanked by commentaries and essays, and a few separate copies of some of the plays, Notably, there were three different copies of Romeo and Juliet, and beside them the volume which explained this interest, a book entitled A New Romeo to His Juliet, which contained, I knew, William Ashley’s poems to his wife Julia McCombie, whose badge he had scattered so lavishly through the house. It was a marvel, I thought, that he had not removed the Italian putti and put Julia’s badge there instead: it appeared in every other room; it was scrolled over the front gate, carved in the panels of the staircase, even in two of the misericords of the church choir. It was also carved – a country job this – in the pavilion which stood at the centre of the maze. Even looked at down the centuries, such devotion was a trifle overpowering; and to William’s contemporaries, and possibly even to Julia herself, it must have been formidable, not to say stifling. After her death at twenty-six her widower, distracted with grief, had shut himself away with his books and his writing, and had had little, if anything, to do with the son who was too like the dead wife.

  Our guide was telling the story now, under the portrait of Nicholas, aged eighteen, which hung over the chimneypiece.

  ‘. . . He was only seven when she died, and he was more or less left alone, one gathers, except for a series of tutors, none of whom lasted very long. He grew up wild, and he got wilder. I suppose it all sounds very corny and over-dramatic now, because it’s been overdone as a story – line, but of course this story’s true, and it did have a really dramatic ending.’

  It was certainly dramatic, and it was probably most of it true. What we knew about ‘Wicked Nick’s’ life and death came mainly from the journal of his successor’s wife, a lady almost as wordy as Queen Victoria, and every bit as virtuous. Poor Nicholas suffered a good deal in the telling, and the girl – the last of his girls – had been allowed to sink into oblivion. But the main facts were there in Emma Ashley’s diaries, and were, indeed, the only interesting part of them.

  Nicholas
, who had adored his gentle mother, found himself, at her death, almost completely ignored by his father, and in turn bullied, deferred to, or encouraged in his growing wilfulness by a quickly changing series of tutors. What must have started as normal, healthy high spirits, changed with this mishandling into wildness; and (one could read between Emma Ashley’s disapproving lines) an affectionate nature, starved and repulsed, became sullen and intractable. Spoiled in the truest sense of the word, Nick Ashley had early succumbed to what his Aunt Emma called ‘corruption’, though, from the veiled hints in the diaries, it was hard to gather whether this had been vice on the Gilles de Rais scale, or merely the sexual experimenting normal for a young gentleman of his time.

  Nicholas’ father fell ill when the young man was a few months short of twenty-two years old. William Ashley, who was sixty-one, was thought to be dying, but was sufficiently in command of his senses to worry about who should succeed him. A marriage contract was hastily drawn up between Nicholas and the Lady Helen Colwall, younger daughter of the family then living at Ledworth Castle. It is not known what the betrothed couple thought of one another, but the very drawing up of the contract must have been a miracle of diplomacy, because – vide the virtuous Emma Ashley – Nicholas, with his father safely bedridden, was indulging himself with nightly ‘orgies’ of illicit love.

  ‘There’s a tradition,’ our guide was saying, ‘that he used to meet them in the pavilion in the centre of the maze. How they found the way in I don’t know; his valet is supposed to have led them in, like girls being brought to the Grand Turk. His father must have known something about it, and there are stories of terrible quarrels, because William kept the pavilion sacred to Julia’s memory, and most of his poems were written there. Well, Nicholas took it over. There are engravings showing it made over as a love nest, with a huge bed, and a big mirror let into the ceiling above it, and lots of silk curtains and shaded lamps, but I should think that was just a myth; it doesn’t seem likely that Nick could have had the pavilion done up like that while William was still alive . . . Anyway, just a month before Nicholas was due to be married to Lady Helen, William Ashley died. Nick had been keeping company with a girl from a nearby village, and this time he’d been a bit rash, because one of the girl’s brothers was the Court gamekeeper, and on this particular night – the night after William died – the man was out after a poacher, and his brother was with him for company, when they saw their sister coming out of the maze. Well, they knew what that meant. They waited outside till Nick Ashley came out. Nobody knows what happened, whether they quarrelled with him, or just lay in wait and shot him down, but Nick Ashley was shot dead. The brothers weren’t ever caught. They took a ship from Bristol, and got clear away. The Ashley estate went to Nick’s uncle – his father’s brother. That was the Charles Ashley whose wife wrote the diaries.’ She smiled. ‘And that’s the only story I’ve got for you. It’s certainly the only tragedy recorded at the Court. For a place as old as this, it’s got a strange reputation for peacefulness. There isn’t even the breath of a ghost.’