Touch Not the Cat Page 9

  ‘Not even at the pavilion?’ asked someone.

  ‘Not that we know of. But they say that no one except the family – and of course gardeners and so on – has been there since. So perhaps the sad ghost of Wicked Nick haunts the maze to this day, but nobody meets him, and the family keep him dark.’

  Did we? I never remembered feeling anything but sympathy for poor Nick Ashley, bracketed, so to speak, between the melancholy William, and the pharisaically virtuous uncle and aunt who had inherited the place on his death. The young face in the picture showed weakness, rather than wickedness, and along with it a good deal of charm. And already, at eighteen, the painter had caught, in the expression of the long grey eyes, a look of settled unhappiness. The story made the legends of the maze and its ‘orgies’, the tilted love-mirror, and the collection of pornography later locked in the Court library, appear in an altogether kindlier light.

  ‘The portrait is by Stevens,’ the guide was saying, ‘but it was sold, and that’s a copy. Now, the clock underneath it . . .’

  Nick Ashley was dismissed, and everyone looked obediently at the French ormolu clock which stood below the portrait, its gently swinging internal organs winking through the glass. I noticed in passing that it was still ten minutes or so lag of the truth, but then my attention fixed itself with a click about eighteen inches to the right of the clock. When I had last been in this room there had been a small T’ang horse there, which, though it was damaged, was worth five or six hundred pounds in any market.

  But it was not going to market, not again. It was not there.

  There was nowhere else for it to stand in the library, except perhaps in the safety of one of the display tables. I looked with a flicker of worry at the space where it had been. If the Underhills had taken a fancy to it and moved it across into one of the rooms they rented, it was their responsibility, and perhaps they had no idea of its value.

  The party was beginning to leave the library. As I followed them, I lingered to look inside the display tables; it was just possible that some careful hand had removed the little horse to the safety of velvet and glass. But no, And, now that I looked with attention, there were fresh shapes showing in unfaded velvet among the remaining objects of virtu. Here, too, things were missing. A little oval – that had surely been a miniature? And that irregular bit of dark-green had held a Chinese jade seal carved with a lion dog.

  ‘Please?’ said the guide. I looked up with a start. She was standing by the open door, waiting for me. All the others had gone. I could hear them making their way, chattering like a crowd let out of school, down the staircase. ‘I have to lock up,’ said the girl.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘keeping you waiting. I was interested . . . You do it very well, the place comes alive. I’ve enjoyed it such a lot. Er, did you say “lock up”? You mean you lock the rooms behind you each time as you go?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s such a big, rambling place, and there are still a lot of valuable things here. We have to be very careful. All the rooms are locked except the ones that are being lived in. We open and shut them as we go through.’

  ‘The keys you use; who keeps them as a rule?’

  She looked faintly surprised, but answered me readily enough. ‘I have to give them back to the people who live here. They’re tenants; the family’s abroad just now.’

  ‘Oh. Well, thanks very much,’ I said, and went thoughtfully out in the wake of the others.

  Ashley, 1835.

  She was here at last.

  The light step on the verandah, the hand on the door, the slight figure in the shabby cloak slipping quickly into the room, then shutting the door carefully behind her so that no faint silver showed. The cloak, thrown aside, falling across the writing-table where, year after year, his father had sat alone, writing those sterile verses to his love.

  ‘My love.’

  Her hair, loosened from the hood, fell like rain, straight and dark, but full of rainbow lights from the candle. Her dress slipped to her knees. She stepped from it, and her hands went to the laces at her breast.

  Outside, as if at a signal, a nightingale began to sing.

  His thoughts spiralled. The light, the night, the nightingale. O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright. Her breasts were bare now, her waist. Her petticoat followed her dress to the floor.

  The room echoed with the nightingale’s singing. That damned keeper, he remembered, had threatened to shoot the bird . . . Damned keeper, indeed. Her brother. My brother’s keeper . . . He was getting light-headed.

  ‘What are you laughing at, then, love?’

  ‘I’ll tell you afterwards. Here, my sweetest girl, come here to me.’

  8

  . . . the wild-goose chase.

  Romeo and Juliet, II, iv

  ‘Aren’t you Miss Ashley?’ The voice, a woman’s, and American, brought me out of my thoughts with a thump, and back to the sunlight of the courtyard, where I now saw a big American car parked in the shade on the other side of the yard. A man was just vanishing through the side door, carrying a suitcase; from his tailoring I guessed it was Mr Underhill. I turned to greet the woman who had spoken. ‘Yes, I am. And you must be Mrs Underhill?’

  She was a woman in her middle forties, groomed to a high gloss with that combination American women have of know-how and sheer hard work and skilled use of materials. She was shortish, and without the hard work she might have been dumpy, but instead she was dainty, in a creaseless cream suit that might as well have borne its Fifth Avenue tag on the outside. A high-necked silk sweater hid her neck, and her face had the paled-off sunburn which afflicts Californians when they have been too long in sadder climates. Her skin was dry, with fine lines showing at eyes and mouth, and showed evidence of ceaseless care. The dark-brown lashes were a giveaway for the blonde hair.

  ‘I’m so glad to meet you.’ She put out a hand. ‘But Jeff and I are really grieved that it had to be for this reason. It was terrible news about your father; I’m so sorry. We’ve both been very distressed for you. Everybody says what a very fine person he was.’

  She talked on for a little while about Daddy, asked where I was staying, and seemed pleased when I said I planned to live for a while in the cottage by the lake. She had a gentle voice and manner that went with her Dresden-china appearance, and seemed to feel a genuine regret about my father, and a real concern for me.

  ‘How did you know me?’ I asked her. ‘Did Mr Emerson tell you I was coming?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. I knew you from the picture in our bedroom.’

  My parents’ room, of course. I said: ‘Is it so like? It isn’t a very good one, and it was painted years ago.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, I can see you’re not seventeen any more, but you’re not that much older, are you?’

  ‘I feel it. I’m twenty-two.’

  ‘Look, what are we standing out here for? Come right in, Jeff’s wild to meet you, I know. He’s just flown in from Houston, and he’ll be home for a few days. Isn’t that marvellous? It seems kind of strange inviting you into your own home, but come right in.’

  Like us, the Underhills used a side door. We went in together. I said: ‘I didn’t actually come over just to call. I was planning to do that this afternoon. I’ve been down at the cottage seeing what was needed, and then I came up here, and –’ I laughed rather apologetically – ‘actually I went round with the guided tour. It seems silly, but I was rather curious to see how they did it.’

  ‘Did you really? Well, fancy!’ Her eyes danced. ‘So I needn’t feel so bad at inviting you into your own home, when you’ve had to pay twenty-five cents to go round . . . And I have to tell you, Cathy and I have been round a couple of times ourselves. It was a good way to learn all the history, and boy, have you had some history! Kind of uncomfortable, some of it, but very interesting, and seeing everything right here in its own place beats the schoolbooks hollow . . .’ She paused at a corner. ‘We’re in what they call the small drawing-room; I don’t have to tell
you the way. You’ll stay to lunch with us, won’t you? Now—’ as I made the ritual protest ‘—I won’t take no for an answer. We have a light lunch, salad and such, and it couldn’t be easier. In any case, we’re having a guest already, so it’s easy to stretch it.’ She smiled like someone with a secret that she knew would delight me. ‘Guess who it is? Your own cousin.’

  Any delight I felt was certainly tempered with questions and uneasy memories of last night in the churchyard, and, too, with some speculation about the gossip Mrs Henderson had passed on to me. I said: ‘You mean Emory? How lovely!’ with what was meant to sound like unmixed pleasure, but as Mrs Underhill opened the drawing-room door and gestured me past her, I saw her eyeing me with her own brand of speculation, a slightly wary look, which, under the circumstances, was natural. One up to Mrs Henderson and the village gossip, I thought: it was just such a look as might be given to the about-to-be-dispossessed Miss Ashley, whose privilege ticket back to the Court had been picked up by Miss Underhill.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Emory.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that nice!’ I said cheerfully. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages. And of course I’d love to meet your daughter. Thank you, I’d like to stay, very much.’

  The ‘small drawing-room’ opened from the longer drawing-room, from which it could be divided by a pair of tall doors. These were shut now, making a room about thirty feet by eighteen, with three long windows looking out on the strip of lawn and rose beds which was the terrace above the moat. The water-light moved prettily on the ceiling. They had hardly rearranged the room at all, I saw, and there were bowls of tulips and bluebells, and stands of cherry blossom which lighted the alcoves to beauty, and which must have been arranged by Mrs Underhill herself.

  ‘Let’s sit down, shall we?’ she said.

  There was a fire of logs in the hearth. She motioned me to a seat near it in the corner of the big chesterfield, and took the other corner herself.

  ‘I gather,’ I said, ‘that you know my cousin quite well?’

  ‘Yes. He and Cathy – Cathy’s my daughter – met a while back, and after they got acquainted they found there was this connection, that she was staying at Ashley Court. A real coincidence, you might say. Well, of course she asked him over, and he’s visited here a few times. He’s a real charmer, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve always thought so,’ I agreed, ‘and so’s his twin. You’ve met James? And Francis, the youngest brother? No, well, he’s been abroad a lot in the last few months. They used to live here with us, most of the time, when we were children; I expect Emory will have told you all about that.’ I hesitated fractionally, then hit the ball into the open field. ‘You know, I suppose, that the Court will belong to Emory’s family now?’

  She looked embarrassed, and made quite a little business of picking up a cigarette box, offering me one, then taking one herself and lighting it. ‘He did tell us something about the way things were left, but of course it was all seemingly in the future then. Your father was still a young man, as things go, and nobody ever thought of a tragedy like this.’ She seemed to be going to say more, then let it go. ‘It seems you had some ancestor who tied everything up so that it had to be inherited by a man. I can think of some ladies I know who’d be hell-bent on doing something about that right now . . .’ She smiled, leaned across to tap ash off her cigarette, then looked up at me frankly. ‘I must say, Miss Ashley, it seems kind of tough to me. Isn’t there anything that can be done?’

  She sounded as if she meant it. Some tension that I hardly knew I had been feeling slacked in me.

  ‘I doubt it. Certainly there’s nothing to be done about the “heirs male” inheritance; that’s been built in ever since the place started. The really awkward “trying up” that the old man did was the trust that stops even the heir from selling any of the unentailed property without the consent of the whole family. Luckily, so far, we haven’t fought much over it.’ I smiled. ‘And I don’t see why we should start now. I expect Emory will do all right; he usually does.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you minded one bit.’

  ‘I don’t believe I do. People like the Ashleys had a very good run for their money, after all.’

  She got up then to shift one of the logs in the fireplace, and I turned the subject with some compliment about the flowers, and the talk went off at a comfortable tangent to the garden, and the contrast between California and the cool temperate climate that we in Britain use as a daily basis for grumbling, but that produces the loveliest gardens in the world . . . I listened with only half an ear; I was looking round the room, trying not to do it too obviously, to see if the T’ang horse was there, or the seal, or anything else which should have been in the locked part of the house. I saw none of them, but I knew that soon, and the sooner the better for her own sake as well as mine, I would have to tell her about the missing objects. I wondered a little desperately how in the world one broached such a subject. For a lunch guest, however much a part of the furnishings, to ask her hostess suddenly where the valuables were and who kept the keys to the rooms they had been removed from, was one of those things that even Aunt Edna of the Problem Page would have found tricky. Well, I thought, it wasn’t something that would improve with keeping. If you have to ask something, then ask.

  ‘Mrs Underhill, there’s something I’ve been wondering about. Perhaps you can help me. The guide who took the party round told me that the rooms on the public side of the house – the ones you don’t use – are always locked, and that she gives the keys back to you and your husband for safe keeping. What happens if you’re out, or away from home?’

  ‘They’re left with that nice Rob Granger. He has the other set, and he always keeps an eye on things if we’re not here. He’s hardly ever away, but if he is, he leaves keys at the Vicarage. Why do you ask? Don’t you have keys yourself?’

  ‘It’s not that; I can get Rob’s if I need them. It’s just . . . Mrs Underhill, I noticed something this morning that worried me – maybe I should say puzzled me, because I’m quite sure there’ll be a simple reason for it.’ I hesitated, then plunged. ‘One or two small things that used to be in the library aren’t there any more. I wondered if you knew where they’d been moved to.’

  She looked startled, and her cigarette froze still, halfway up to her mouth. ‘Miss Ashley, there’s nothing been moved that I know of. What sort of things?’

  ‘Small things, ornaments. I wondered if perhaps they’d been put in the strong-room for safe keeping.’

  She shook her head. I noticed how sharply the lipstick outlined her mouth, standing out blue-red against the creamy colourless skin. ‘Do you mean really valuable things?’

  ‘Well, there’s a little Chinese horse, in unglazed earthenware, a sort of biscuit colour, with a mended leg. It doesn’t look much, but—’

  ‘A Chinese horse? Unglazed biscuit? For heaven’s sake, not a T’ang horse?’ She looked so horrified that I realised that, coming from America’s West Coast, she probably knew far more about the value of Oriental ceramics than I did.

  I said hastily: ‘Yes, but not a very good one; it was small, and it was damaged. Please don’t look so worried! I just noticed that it had gone from the mantelpiece in the library, and there was a miniature gone from one of the showcases, just a little Victorian thing, and a piece of jade, a seal with a lion dog on it. You haven’t seen them anywhere else, have you?’

  ‘No, I have not. They’re not in this part of the house, that’s for sure. Miss Ashley, this is just terrible!’

  I saw with remorse that she had lost the remains of what colour she had. Her lips, under the paint, had puckered into fine, dry lines. I began to feel a bit like an executioner. ‘Look, please don’t worry so, I only asked. The odds are that Mr Emerson’s put them away in the strong-room. He may have decided they were too easily portable, with loads of people going through the rooms every day. I can ring him up and ask him. I should have done that before I bothered you. Please forgive me.’
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br />   ‘Well, of course, but – oh, here’s Jeff. He might know something about it . . . Jeff, this is Miss Ashley. She’s coming back to stay for a piece, and she’ll be living in the cottage by the lake. Isn’t that wonderful? But right now she’s staying to lunch with us. Miss Ashley, this is Jeff, my husband.’

  We said how do you do and shook hands, and like her, he said the right things about my father with the enviable American warmth and ease of manner. He was a big man, broad in body, and of heavy build, with the same look as his wife of physical health worked for and maintained at concert pitch. He had dark hair greying, and a broad face with slightly flattened features, oddly familiar, though for the moment I could not place them. The cheekbones were wide, with a slightly Slavic look, and the eyes were dark and very shrewd. The long mouth gave nothing away. He looked just what he was; a rich, clever man, a killer in business hours, and kindness itself in his time off.