Touch Not The Cat (4 page)

"Why should I not believe you?" he asked calmly. "It's reasonably common."

"I know, but you'd be surprised—or perhaps you wouldn't—what people don't believe, or don't want to believe. The Ashleys have had this thing in one degree or another as far back as about the sixteen hundreds when the Jacobean Ashley married a gorgeous girl called Bess Smith, who was half gipsy. She was burned for witchcraft in the end. After that it seems to have cropped up every so often, but we kept quiet about it. Anyway, it isn't the kind of thing you tell people.

Nobody likes being laughed at."

"You really think this is what your father meant?"

"It might be. I've sometimes wondered. We never spoke about it, but I'm pretty sure he had it to some extent. I know once when I was at school and fell out of a tree and broke my leg, he telephoned about ten minutes later to ask if I was all right. And last night in Madeira . . . Well, I felt something, and I think some of it came from him. And on the way here in the plane this morning, at ten o'clock, I knew."

He said nothing for a while. An early bee zoomed in through the open window, circled droning in the sunlight, then homed in on the hyacinths and crawled up them, its wings quiet. Walther stirred. "I see. But at the end, as you see, he states that he 'told' someone, presumably meaning that he told him about this important paper, and about this danger to you. If it is so very important, no doubt 'he' will tell you. And if 'the boy knows,' then perhaps 'the boy' may tell you, too?"

I watched the bee. I wasn't prepared to meet those kind, clever eyes. I still had this one to think about, myself.
"I did tell Bryony's . . . Perhaps the boy knows."
Bryony's lover? It would take a bit of adjustment to come to terms with the fact that my father had known. And if he had told my lover something that mattered urgently to me, then my lover could tell me, and the mystery was no mystery.

The bee, abandoning the hyacinths, shot straight for the window like a bullet, achieved the open pane by a beewing's breadth, and was gone.

Walther straightened in the big chair. "Well, we shall leave it, I think. Yes? You must try to forget it for the moment. When you have rested, and when the next few days are over, then you may find your mind fresher, and you will see. It is very possible that Mr. Emerson may have the answers already, or whoever of your family comes over on Friday. One of them surely will, and will take you home? It may be 'Bryony's cousin,' the one who knows it all."

"So it may. Dr. Gothard, will you tell me something truly?"

"If I can."

I knew from his eyes that from a doctor that meant "If I may," but that was fair enough. I said: "If the driver of that car had brought Daddy straight up to you here, could you have saved him?"

I saw the wariness relax into relief. That meant he would tell me the truth. "No. If he had been brought straight in he might have lived a little longer, but I could not have saved him."

"Not even till I got here?"

"I think not. It was a matter of hours only."

I drew a breath. He looked at me curiously. I shook my head. "No, I wasn't thinking of anything as dramatic and useless as revenge. That's a kind of self-defeat, I always feel. But if you had said 'Yes' I'd never have slept until the police found the driver who did it. As it is, he ran away out of fear and stupidity, and maybe he's being punished enough already. If the police ever do find him—" I paused.

"Yes?" he prompted.

I said flatly: "I don't want to know. I mean, I don't want to be told who it is. I won't burden myself with a useless hate. Daddy's gone, and I'm here, with a life to live. Those are the facts."

I didn't add what I was thinking: that he might not be quite gone, not from me, not from such as me.

I would go back to Ashley, and there, perhaps . . . But I wasn't sure where that path would lead, and anyway that was another secret that was not for daylight. Walther said something about its being a sensible attitude, and something more about my being very like my father, and then we talked about the arrangements for the cremation on Friday, and for the day after that, when nothing more would remain for me but to take my father's ashes home.

Ashley, 1835

The wind moved in the boughs outside. Creepers shifted and tapped against the walls of the pavilion. Since the old man had been ill, the place had been neglected—mercifully, he thought, with a wryness that made the young mouth look soured and wary.

He strained his eyes against the darkness. Still no movement, no sign. He pushed the casement open a fraction, listened. Nothing, except the rush of the overflow conduit past the maze, and the wind in the beeches. Sudden gusts combed the crests of the yew hedges towards him, as if something were flying past, invisible. A soul on its way home, he thought, and the shudder took him again.

At least let us have some light. He shut the window, and the night sounds died. He pulled the shutters close, and fastened them, then drew the heavy curtains across.

A candle stood on the writing table. He found a lucifer and lit it. At once the room flowered with light; golden curtains, rose-wreathed carpet, the bed's rich covering, the glittering sconces on the walls.

If he ever came here again, he would light those, too.

Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives. . . .

—Romeo and Juliet,
III, i 

I didn't go straight home when I got to England. The first priority was a visit to Mr. Emerson, our solicitor, to find out if he had had a letter from my father, and if he could throw any light on the jumble of words on Walther's paper.

No one had come to the cremation. Emory had telephoned from England, not to me but to Walther, to say that Cousin Howard was still very ill, and that since Francis was away on leave, James was tied to the Jerez office. Emory himself could not be free on Friday, but would come to Ashley as soon as possible. He had no idea where Francis was; walking somewhere, he thought, in the Peak District. Presumably the news had not got to him yet. No doubt he would call me as soon as he came back. Meanwhile, said Emory, love to Bryony . . .

So much for Bryony's cousin who would tell me what Daddy had meant, and take me home. And so much for Bryony's lover, who said nothing, either by day or night.

When I arrived in London I took the train straight to Worcester and booked in at a small hotel where no one knew me. Next morning I telephoned Mr. Emerson, and went to see him.

He was a youngish man, somewhere (I guessed) in his upper thirties, of medium height and running a bit to flesh, with a round, good-tempered face and hair cut fashionably long. He had a small shrewd mouth, and small shrewd brown eyes camouflaged behind modishly huge, tinted spectacles, like a television spy's. Otherwise he was correctly dressed and almost over-conventionally mannered; but I had seen him fishing the Wye in stained old tweeds and a snagged sweater, up to the crotch in the river and swearing in the far-from-legal sense of the word as he slipped and splashed over the boulders, trying to land a big salmon single-handed. I liked him, and Daddy, I knew, had trusted him completely.

It was almost a week now since my father's death, but Mr. Emerson did not make the mistake of being too kind. We got the first civilities over, then he cleared his throat, shifted a paper or two, and said: "Well now, Miss Ashley, you do know that you may call on me to help you in any way.

. . . It will take a fair amount of time to sort out your father's affairs, as you know. None of that need trouble you, as long as you find yourself quite clear about the way the house and property are left."

I nodded. I had practically been brought up with the terms of the Ashley Trust, as it was called, which had been designed by an ancestor of mine, one James Christian Ashley, who had inherited the property in 1850. He was a farsighted man, who had seen, even in the spacious days of Victoria, that there might come a time when the incumbent of a place like Ashley might find it hard to protect what he, James Christian, thought of as a national treasure, and might even seek to disperse it.

This, James Christian was determined to prevent. He created a trust whereby, though the Court itself must go outright to the nearest male heir, no part of the "said messuages" might be sold or disposed of unless with the consent in writing of all adult Ashley descendants existing at the time of the proposed disposal. My grandfather James Emory had managed, with the connivance of his brothers and one distant cousin, to sell a couple of outlying farms which edged the main road, and to make a tidy sum out of some meadowland earnestly desired by the Midland Railway, and the proceeds had kept the place in good heart until the cold winds sharpened to the killing frosts of the Second World War. Since then, apart from the family silver, which had been sold with his cousin's consent, all the articles my father had sold had been things bought since 1850 or brought in by marriage, and consequently uncontrolled by the trust. If my cousins had been in need of funds they would, I knew, have found themselves fairly well down to the scrapings.

Mr. Emerson was going on. "There's no immediate hurry over that. We can perhaps have another meeting when you are less, er, pressed." I knew that Walther had told him what my first business was at the Court. He shied delicately away from that, and went on: "Then there is your father's Will. He told me you have seen a copy, and know all about its contents. It covers everything not included in the entail, or embraced by the trust. The most important item is of course the cottage which is now your home. This, with the orchard and garden, and the strip of land running along the lake as far as the main road, was purchased after the creation of the trust, and comes, in consequence, outside its terms. It is left to you in its entirety. The Will is quite straightforward. There may be things that you wish to discuss at a later stage, but for the moment, would you like me just to take everything over for you? Settle what bills there are, and sort your father's correspondence? Or perhaps you would rather go through his letters yourself?"

"The personal ones, yes, I think so, please. I'd be glad if you'd deal with any business. Mr.

Emerson—"

"Yes?"

"Has Daddy written to you recently? I mean, in the last few days?"

"No." He looked down at his fingernails for a moment, then back at me. "I was talking to Dr.

Gothard on the telephone yesterday, as a matter of fact."

"Oh. Did he ask you about a letter, too?"

"Yes."

"And tell you about the paper?"

"Paper?"

"The notes he took about what Daddy said before he died."

"Ah, yes. Of course he did not tell me what had been said. This"—with a sudden, dry primness—"was on the telephone."

"I wanted to ask you about that, too. Most of it Herr Gothard and I couldn't make out at all, but there is one reference to you, which we thought you'd be able to clear up for us. I made a copy for you. Here."

He took the paper and read it swiftly, glanced briefly up at me, went through it again slowly, and then a third time. Finally he laid it on the desk. He leaned back in his chair, with his hands flat on the blotter.

"Well. Yes. I see."

"It's nonsense to you as well?"

"Pretty much, I'm afraid. But I think I can explain the reference to me. The tenants of the Court have a set of keys, but not a complete one. Certain keys were detached from that set, and are in my keeping. I have, for instance, the strong room key, and the one to the old muniment chest in the Great Hall, and—yes, the small wall safe in the master bedroom, and also the key that opens the locked cases in the library."

"Have
you?" Here, at last, was a fragment that might make sense, though I was still far from knowing what sort. The locked cases in the library at Ashley housed William Ashley's collection of Shakespeariana, and his own mercifully slim volume of verses, along with the distinctly curious (in the book-trade sense of the word) collection made by William's son, the scapegrace Nick Ashley. The grilles had been fixed after my father had found Emory and James, at the age of twelve, happily conning one of Nick's tomes called
Erotica Curiosa,
fortunately in Latin, but with illustrations. Within a few days it was behind bars, along with the rest of Nick's additions to the library, and those of William Ashley's Shakespeare books that we imagined might be valuable, and a few other odd volumes, mostly in Latin. I remember how Emory worked at his Latin for a whole term, till he found he would never get near the keys anyway, so he went back to normal.

"The wall safe's empty, I know that," I said. "Do you know what's in the strong-room nowadays?"

"There's very little. Only what's left of the eighteenth-century silver, and one or two small things. I believe there are some pieces of your mother's which are to be yours."

"Those, yes, I know about them. Nothing else? No papers, letters, maps?"

"Not that I recollect. No, I'm sure there aren't. All the Ashley papers are lodged with us. That goes for the muniment chest, too. There's nothing there now but spare blankets and the old stable books and various other oddments. Oh, and a dozen or so volumes of Emma Ashley's diaries." He added, drily: "A voluble lady. She was James Christian's mother, wasn't she?"

"She was. Is that where the diaries are? They used to be in the locked section of the library, along with the other family books, but heaven knows
they
never needed to be locked away from anyone. She was a very good woman, and a fearful bore. I think she spent her whole life trying to expiate poor Wicked Nick's sins." I thought for a moment. All the rest of the family books were presumably still in the locked cases, and by the terms of the trust they would go with the house. Most of the valuable books that did not come under those terms had already been sold. Perhaps it would not be such a formidable job after all. "Do I need Cousin Howard's permission to look around in there?"

"No."

"Then—" I stopped and sat up. "I've just remembered something."

"What is it?"

I said slowly, thinking back, "I think Daddy was going through the books in that section not long before we went to Bavaria. I remember seeing a stack of leatherbound books on one of the library tables. He'd been dressing the bindings. He'd done that with other valuable books from time to time, so I thought nothing of it. He took one or two of them home, too, to the cottage. Perhaps he found something about the family, or even about the trust, that he thought we ought to know."