Touch Not the Cat, Page 4

  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 leather-bound 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.’

  ‘It sounds reasonable. It could be checked, but it’ll be a big job. Books always take the devil of a time to look through. You can hardly tackle that library on your own.’

  ‘I could look, though, couldn’t I? The shelves are pretty empty now, apart from the family tomes, and they’ll all still be there.’ I smiled. ‘I might for decency’s sake have to hand some of Nick Ashley’s lot over to my cousins to go through. If they don’t want to be bothered, I’ve a friend who would help, Leslie Oker, who has the secondhand bookshop in Ashbury. I suppose that, in any case, everything will have to be valued?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Well, I think you’re right to take this very seriously.’ He laid the paper down on the desk in front of him. ‘Anything that was so much on your father’s mind at such a time . . .’ He let it hang. His eyes went to the paper again, and he read for a minute, frowning. Then, with a quick movement like a dismissal, he opened a drawer and slipped the paper into it. ‘You’re going to Ashley today?’

  ‘Yes. This afternoon. Mr Emerson, what’s the position about the Court? Am I still allowed access to everything?’

  ‘Certainly. Nothing may be removed or sold, naturally, but it is still your home until your father’s Will is proved and the estate is wound up. That will take quite some time.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘The mills of God work like lightning, compared with the law.’

  ‘So they say. What about the tycoons?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Sorry. It slipped out. It’s what Daddy and I used to call the Underhills.’

  He laughed. ‘It figures. They have a year’s lease, which will be up in November. Mr Underhill spoke to me on the telephone and offered to move out straight away if it would help you, but I told him that I imagined you and your cousins would wish him to stay put, at any rate for the time being. Things won’t be settled for months, and at the least it means the Court will have a caretaker. Do you approve?’

  ‘That’s the kind of thing I leave to you. It sounds fine to me.’

  ‘Good. Your cousin Emory agreed, too. He was speaking for his father. You knew Mr Howard Ashley was ill? Yes, of course . . .’ He cleared his throat again. ‘Look, I know you want to go back to Ashley as soon as you can, but do you really want to stay there on your own? My wife and I would be delighted if you’d come to us for a few days . . . And it was her suggestion that I should ask you, so I’m not putting my head on the domestic chopping-block, I promise you.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much. It’s terribly good of you both, but honestly, you don’t have to worry. I’ll be all right, really I will.’ I didn’t add that I would not be quite alone. I never was. I thanked him again, moved by the kindness of these people who had known my father well, but me hardly at all.

  He waved my thanks aside. ‘Still, I’ll give you our number – not the office, which you have, but my home number. I think you’re going to find the next few weeks very difficult ones, and I want to insist to you that though we – my firm – will be acting for Ashley as before, which will in future mean on Mr Howard Ashley’s behalf, we’ll do all that we can to help you. I know it goes without saying, but still one says it.’

  ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘And have I made it clear I don’t only mean legal help? For instance, how do you propose to get out to Ashley this afternoon? Have you a car?’

  ‘No, I came up by train. I’ll take the bus to Ashley village. There’s a good one that stops at the road end beyond the church.’

  ‘And on your way back?’

  ‘I’ve got a Lambretta. It’s stabled at the farm.’

  ‘What about your luggage? If you’re going to move back into your cottage tomorrow—’

  ‘I haven’t much, most of it’s still in Madeira. But Rob Granger can come in for that. He has a car.’

  He nodded, and we talked for a while longer. He still seemed worried about my decision to stay alone in the cottage, and I spent some time in reassuring him. He also cast out feelers, very delicately, to find out what I proposed to do with my future, when Ashley was no longer mine. Would I, he asked, go back to Madeira when everything was, er, settled?

  ‘I don’t think so. They’ll have replaced me by now, anyway; you just can’t do without a receptionist for an indefinite period. In any case, I’d thought of that job as strictly temporary, just till Daddy was well enough to come home. I don’t suppose my old job in Ashbury’s still open, but I expect I’ll find some
thing.’

  ‘What’s the money situation? I can advance you something, you know, out of what your father has left you.’

  ‘I’m all right for a bit, but thanks.’ I got to my feet. ‘You said you had a lunch appointment, and it’s nearly half past twelve. I’d better go.’ I held out my hand. ‘And thank you for everything, Mr Emerson. You’ve been terribly kind. Believe me, I’ll come running to you the moment I need help of any kind.’

  ‘I hope you will.’

  We shook hands, and he moved to open the door for me. I paused in the doorway. ‘I almost forgot . . . I wonder, would it be all right for you to let me have the keys to the Court? I don’t want to go to the house today, but I might go in tomorrow, and I’d rather not trouble the Underhills yet.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Of course. But surely, you can use your father’s keys? The master set has them all.’

  ‘I haven’t got them. I thought you must have. Do you mean you only have the ones you mentioned?’

  ‘Yes, only the four. I gather they were detached from the ring Mr Underhill has. The other set, the complete master set, was certainly in your father’s possession. Didn’t Dr Gothard give you his things?’

  ‘Yes. He did have keys on him, but only the ones for the cottage, and for the side door to the Court – the kitchen door, really, at the East Bridge.’ I hesitated, obscurely troubled. ‘If you haven’t got them, who could he have left them with? One of my cousins?’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Mr Emerson, slowly. ‘How very strange.’ He frowned over it for a few moments, then the professional mask was smoothly back in place. He went to a drawer, unlocked it, and took out a small ring of keys, which he gave me. ‘You must certainly have these. I’ll get in touch with your cousin Emory and see if he knows anything about it. It may even be that both sets were left with the Underhills, or with someone else at Ashley. Whoever has them will probably give them to you as soon as it’s known you’re home. Otherwise, I’m afraid you will have to approach the Underhills.’

  ‘So it seems,’ I said. ‘But it is all right for me to go in?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And if I get the keys, to keep them for the time being?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ He opened the door for me. The brown eyes behind the trendy spectacles were anxious and kind. ‘Miss Ashley, let me insist to you that the Court is still yours until the Will is proved, and the estate duly handed over.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘As for the keys, no doubt there will be some perfectly rational explanation,’ he said, as he showed me out. I got the impression that he was talking to reassure himself as well as me, and that in reality he disliked and distrusted mystery as much as I did myself.

  ‘No doubt,’ I agreed, and went downstairs and out into the street.

  Just outside the offices of Meyer, Meyer, and Hardy there is a pedestrian crossing. The light was at red, ‘Wait.’ Just under it, on the very edge of the pavement, a black cat was sitting, waiting apparently for the light to change to green. As I paused beside him he glanced up. I said to him: ‘Can’t you reach? Allow me,’ and pressed the button. I have a theory that the button never has the least effect on the lights, which are totally unaffected by pedestrians’ needs, but at that exact moment the light switched to green. ‘Cross now.’ The cat got straight up and walked across the zebra-striped way, tail in air. He was black as coal. ‘I may need you yet,’ I told him, and followed him onto the crossing.

  There was a shriek of brakes. I jumped half out of my skin, and stepped back to the pavement. The cat bolted clear across and vanished into a shop doorway. A white E-type clenched its big groundhog tyres to the road, and stopped dead half a foot from the crossing. The girl who was driving glanced neither at me nor at the fleeing cat. She sat watching the red light with impatience, one hand tapping the wheel, the other pushing back the long, dark-blonde hair. I had a glimpse of dark eyes shadowed under an inch or so of mink eyelash, a sallow, small-featured face, with that Pekinese look which is for some reason typically American, and a wide unpainted mouth. When I had gained the other pavement in the black cat’s wake, the lights changed behind me, and the E-type snarled off into the traffic of the crowded street, cut competently between two buses, and vanished. Something made me glance back. On the other pavement Mr Emerson had emerged from his office, complete with bowler and rolled umbrella, presumably on the way to his lunch date. He, too, had paused, and was watching the E-type out of sight. Then he noticed me, and mouthed something across the roaring flood of traffic pouring between us. I thought he said, ‘The cat,’ but he was pointing after the vanished Jaguar. I nodded, waved, and smiled, and walked back to my hotel.

  Ashley, 1835.

  On the writing-table, beside the candle, lay his father’s books and papers, held down by a glass weight shaped like a peeled orange. The waxlight glimmered in the curved segments, and a dozen tiny images mocked him; the fair young man, a slight figure in frilled shirt and pantaloons, standing there, somehow incongruous and lonely against the richly elegant background of his mother’s room.

  He moved abruptly, striding over to the table, scattering the papers that lay there. He pulled open a drawer. From inside it, his mother’s picture smiled up at him. Always, when he had used the pavilion, he had hidden her; or hidden from her. Now he lifted the portrait, and stood for a long time looking at it. Then, smiling, he set it back in its place on the writing-table, facing the room.

  Facing the bed.

  His father’s papers, those dry, exquisitely penned little verses, lay unheeded on the floor.

  4

  Come, he had hid himself among these trees . . .

  Blind is his love and best befits the dark.

  Romeo and Juliet, II, i

  The big gates at Ashley Court stood, as always, open. I went in, soft-footed on the mossed surface of the avenue, and walked up under the lime trees towards the bend from which one could see the house.

  Evening, and the last of the rich slanting sunlight threw the lovely tracery of the gates long-drawn across the uncut verges. Wind-flowers and pale blue speedwell sprinkled the grass, hazing the green as delicately as a breath misting glass. Fetlock deep in wild flowers, the lime boles shone bronze through their feathering of sorrel-coloured buds. The young leaves overhead, just unfurling, showed as transparent as stained glass against the light.

  I reached the bend in the drive. From here one could see the house, its walls of rosy Tudor brick reflected richly in the still glass of the moat. No one was about; no movement anywhere. I stood in the shadow, looking at Howard Ashley’s home.

  For anything so old it was curiously serene. It stood four square on its island, an oddly harmonious hotchpotch of the centuries’ building. The Norman keep still stood, altered and added to when the main gate with its battlements was built in the twelfth century. The original drawbridge had long ago been replaced by the single span of stone, just wide enough for a car, which now leads into the small, square courtyard. The Great Door lies opposite the main gateway, and is Tudor, giving straight onto the big hall with its vast fireplace and blackened beams. The rooms to the right of the courtyard are Tudor, too; the parlour with the priest’s hole (re-opened in 1880) and the small dark Council Chamber with its coffered ceiling and coats of arms. To the east of the main gate stands the banqueting hall, a fourteenth-century structure with the mediaeval timbering still intact. I had never known this used, except to show; it had been damaged in 1962, when money had been too tight for too long, and the big storm of mid-September brought the river down in flood and broke the High Sluice which controls the flow to the moat. Before the lower sluice could be opened to relieve the Overflow, and let the water safely into the lake, the cellars and the low-lying floors of banqueting hall and kitchens were flooded. My father repaired the High Sluice and made good the kitchen premises, then dried out the banqueting hall and left it alone. The only good thing, he had remarked, about the Court’s precarious situation between riv
er and lake, was that fire insurance premiums were almost nil . . .

  ‘Lake’ was rather too grand a name for the sheet of water which lay below the banked-up moat. I forget when the artificial pool was first dug; to begin with it had been a stewpond for keeping fish, then later it had been enlarged and planted with lilies, with a willow or two and a monstrous grove of gunneras. It was still called Mistress Nancy’s Pool, which sounded better than The Stew, as it was labelled on the maps. Between moat and Pool was a grassed bank which Rob, the gardener, kept cut after a fashion with the Flymo, just as he kept the beech walk and the main avenue clear and neat-looking. He kept some sort of order, too, in the walled garden with its two remaining glasshouses. We sold most of the produce, and this paid Rob’s wage and that of the village boy who helped him. Beyond that there was little that could be done. The rose garden with its mouldering statues was an impenetrable Sleeping Beauty affair, and the woods beyond the Pool had long since engulfed the orchards, with the exception of one stand of apple trees beside the water, where the cottage stood that was now my home.

  It was dusk already. As I stood there the sun, imperceptibly, withdrew, and the light cooled to blue and then to shadow. Still nothing had stirred except the two swans, serene on the moat, and the whisper of a rising breeze in the branches. No light showed in the house. I went quickly up the drive for another fifty yards or so to where, on the right, between banks of rhododendrons, the Court’s private pathway led to the churchyard.

  This had originally been the only way to the church. The lych-gate stood here, and beyond it a tunnel of ancient yews. The lych-gate cast a thick blanket of shadow as I went through, and suddenly, it seemed, day had gone and the evening was here. From overhead came that twilight sound, the rooks settling on their nests, their muttering broken from time to time by the sudden flap of a wing, or a throaty yell as some bird flung upwards, startled, from its perch. Ahead of me the church showed only as a looming shadow against the furred and shifting shadows of the trees. The yews flowed upwards in the breeze like smoke.