‘Wake up!’
A sharp dig in the ribs made me catch my breath.
‘Wake up, Orlando!’
I opened one bleary eye. Sunlight fell into it, as sharp as an unexpected twig. I blinked the haze away and squinted. There sat Lydia, pursing her mouth. This I could tell not because I could see the detail of her expression – she sat with the light behind her so that it made a golden glow of her fur: an attitude adopted out of both vanity and sun worship but by the disapproving set of her head. It was an expression that had become habitual whenever she regarded me. Time had not improved our relationship. ‘What?’ I muttered, my eyes closing again.
‘You’re moaning in your sleep,’ she said crossly. ‘I wish you’d stop it. Moaning and striking out with your paws. It’s really quite infuriating.’
I struggled for consciousness; failed. It was like falling down a dark rabbit hole, this sudden jolt back into the dream. A pair of feet – as neat and white as any rabbit’s – fled before me again, darting around corners, disappearing down impossible perspectives, until I was left only with the impression of a shock of tabby fur above the white; a sharp tang of female scent. The scent was that of an intact queen, her mark as familiar as my own and yet as strange as a bird’s. My feet twitched in their phantom pursuit and I opened my mouth to call after her—
Another dig, this time, painfully, in the kidneys; a hiss, ‘You’re doing it again!’
I woke up properly this time, heart thumping, though it was hard to tell why. A sensation of despair hung over me, like a small and personal cloud. Something was lost, something very dear—
‘Honestly, Orlando, you’re worse than the children. How in the world am I supposed to catch up on my beauty sleep with you tossing and turning and groaning away like that? It’s so incredibly selfish of you.’
And before I could even think to retort – for it had been I who had taken her three little darlings bird hunting that morning till my feet were sore; I who had admonished them for making too much noise while their mother dozed in the marjoram; I who had played with them till they were so exhausted they had fallen in a heap – she had turned her back on me, shifting unceremoniously backwards with one of those exquisite golden haunches until she had pushed me entirely out of the pool of sunlight we had until that moment shared, leaving me swallowed by cold shadow.
Within moments she was unconscious and snoring.
I lay there, but try as I might, sleep evaded me. Perhaps it was the chill in the air, or the stertorous drone of Lydia’s breathing that prevented me; or perhaps it was my unwillingness to give myself back to the dream. I had been experiencing this same flicker of images, this by-play of events and sensations, in subtly different guises, for the past several days and nights, and whenever I awoke it was to anxiety and a hollow and unfocused dread. It was the sort of sleep that leaves you feeling less rested than when you laid your head down in the first place, so I was not unhappy to abandon my attempt.
I sat up and stretched, and considered Lydia’s snoring form. She was still beautiful, I thought with a certain detachment, despite the kittens, despite her recent obsession with food of all kinds and the consequences of that greed. I noted the way the dark ticking of that golden fur added definition to the smooth muscles, the long flanks, the elegantly coiled tail; though her beauty no longer had the power to make me catch my breath or stumble over my speech; no longer sent me howling, hot-eyed and furious, into the rhododendrons from yet another slight or rebuttal. The sharp peaks and deep valleys of my grand passion had been worn away into some vast and limitless plain, eroded down and spun away as fine dust under the climate of her selfishness. But here I was, still at the manor house with her and the girls, and I did not altogether know why.
After all – as my friend Millefleur constantly reminded me – the kittens were not even mine. Whose they were was the subject of much conjecture. I had more cause than most to hazard a guess at how they might have been conceived, but because Lydia, in her usual superior manner, refused outright to discuss the matter, she had earned the enmity of the local gossips. ‘She always was a proper little madam,’ they would say, reminding each other of her flirtations with those erstwhile jack-the-lads who used to hang out on the canal banks on sultry summer nights and were now solid young cats, just beginning to spread around the midriff, with convoluted family ties and several families of their own.
‘Not what you’d call choosy…’
‘If she’d take one, she’d take all.’
‘A complete tart, if you ask me.’
Which reminded me of something Millie had once said; though during the intervening two years I had never seen her treat Lydia with anything but friendship and compassion. Even so, she kept on nagging at me to leave.
‘Have a break, Orlando. Take to the wild roads,’ she would advise me, the little tuft of fur on her head that was so like a jay’s crest bobbing with her impatience. ‘Leave Miss High-and-Mighty to get on with it for a while. Come with me. I’ve found this extraordinary rocky little dell that runs down to the sea, full of lily of the valley and sweet briar. In the summer it’s so warm that the air steams around you; and in the winter the stream freezes over so you can stand right above the fishes and watch them swim beneath your feet. There are voles as big as rats there, and rats as big as kittens. Come and chase them with me!’
But I would shake my head sadly and watch her bound across the lawns, to disappear with a flick of the tail into the animal highway that ran down by the old yew hedge. One minute she was there, the white patches of her fur contrasting sharply against the dense, dark foliage, with her head turned slightly towards me – the greatest concession she would make to bidding me farewell – the next she was gone; vanished from sight as if she had winked suddenly out of existence. Which, to all practical purposes, she had: for to travel the wild roads is to travel in dimensions other than those that are obvious to the eye.
I do not think it was even Lydia that kept me at Nonesuch. Yet neither was it the big house – with its gaping rooms and the disturbing smell of the old fire – or its grounds, which were infested by the cats that had existed here all their sad lives, both breathing and dead. Nor yet was it because of Nonesuch’s human occupants, though Anna had fed and sheltered me since my first days and I felt nothing but fondness for her. I liked the dark man with the careful hands, who had for years been Lydia’s feeder; and even the child intrigued me as much as it annoyed me, clutching at my tail with those hot, sticky paws babies have, or cheerfully banging me on the head with its toys. No; there was something else that kept me from charging blithely into the nearest highway and barrelling off to the sunlit coast or the heart of some distant, dappled wood: something that had caught me as firmly in its toils as any spider catches prey in its web. There was a mystery here that haunted my dreams and plagued the edges of my waking thoughts, and I knew that until I had hunted it down and caught it wriggling by the neck, I could not rest.
Lydia made a grumbling sound and twisted up against me. She had started to dream. I could tell this not only by the way her nose was twitching, but because I could see the substance of her dream appear in the form of a pale golden ball in the air above her head. There it rose, trembling as if shy of the world, and in its centre the matter of her dream twisted and pulsed, like frogspawn in its translucent gel.
I leaned forward and gazed into the globe. Of all creatures, only cats have the ability to see another’s dream; of cats, only a dreamcatcher and then only through a trick of birth. My grandfather had been a dreamcatcher, and his before him, and so it went, always skipping a generation. Old Hawkweed; Granfer. Strange how I missed him, when for so long he had been my bane…
Lydia’s dream hung there, a paw-span or two above her head, for a few moments – offering me the prospect of a cat’s pink tongue licking ice cream off a carton lid; then jaws crunching down on a virulent-looking orange snack dropped by a child’s hand and finally a golden muzzle pressed down firmly into a bowl of ‘seafood delight’: Liddy’s favourite tinned treat.
And then it popped, just like a soap bubble. Liddy’s dreams were always like this – hazy and fragile – as if her inner life had no more faith in itself than to focus on where the next meal was coming from.
I smiled. For all her complexity and fractiousness, she was blessed with the simplest of dreams. I sometimes wondered – or perhaps consoled myself with the thought – whether it was because she knew I could see into the very heart of her world that she was so awkward with me.
Unlike the kittens. They were fascinated by my gift.
‘What was I dreaming about. Uncle O?’
‘Could you see me?’
‘Did I fly?’
The questions were constant.
In the early days, when they were no more than a few weeks old, I would often amuse myself by sitting over them as they lay in their affectionately tangled heap and watch their dreams forming. At first they had been vague and broken: inchoate images of teats and noses, toes and tails; barely recognisable versions of the world of which they were trying to make sense. Tall dark shapes with waving arms: trees, or humans? Flickers of light before a dark background – the swift passage of bird, bee or butterfly? Something huge and fuzzy that could have been anything from a cat’s head seen up close to a person’s looming hand. Now, though, their dreams were the usual dreams of young cats: as boisterous in sleep as they were when awake; chasing and tussling; eating so enthusiastically (they were their mother’s daughters, after all) some ghost meal that you could see the saliva gathering in the whiskers on their chins.
They always cheered me up, the girls. They loved life. They ate it all up.
Abandoning Lydia, I trotted off across the garden in search of their hiding place.
*
I found them some minutes later, tucked in among the roots of the big cedar where I had once chased the dream that had interrupted my one and only night of sexual congress with their lovely mother. They were all curled together as was their preference, in an endearing jumble of furry limbs.
That fur! I could never quite get used to it. I had seen nothing like it on any cat in the village. It was a short, dense blue-grey – the colour of an August thundercloud, or the wing of an elderly nuthatch. It was regal and striking, and as far from their mother’s showy gold as you could possibly get. Liddy, in a moment of unusual amity, had once told me a little about her parents, no doubt to establish her social superiority over my own questionable origins. Her mother, Nefertiti, Flower of Egypt II, had been a pedigree Abyssinian who had won prizes at cat shows up and down the country; her father, Coromandel Ozymandias, a seal-point Siamese. It was from these two that she had inherited her mystique and fabulously exotic colouring, she had informed me, with no apparent sense of irony. And a golden-furred mother and a seal-point father gave no clue as to the bizarre blue appearance of her offspring.
Thug and Beetle and Squash, I thought fondly. These were, of course, Millie’s names for the kittens; not Lydia’s. Their mother had failed to name the three girls for several weeks. It was as if by leaving them nameless she somehow repudiated her part in their birth, even though they had suckled and butted and mewed and had left her in no doubt at all as to their continued presence. Since then, of course, she had bestowed far grander titles upon them. Thug had become Letitia (Letty for short); Beetle, Arabella (Belle – or sometimes Belly); and Squash, Caterina (Cat). I did not think their new names a great improvement on Millie’s, but the girls seemed happy enough with them.
I sat down quietly beside them and curled my tail comfortably around my feet. It was hard to tell them apart, when they lay all tangled up like this. Cat had an odd little bony lump on either side of her head just below her ears, as if she had decided to grow horns there and then given up on the project, and Letty a pale star in the middle of her forehead, as if someone had deliberately set about decorating her; but all three of them had their heads turned away under their paws, so there was no sign of these markings. Belle’s fur, in certain lights, was a shade darker than her sisters’ and she had one white foot – but how to tell whose foot was whose in this great heap?
Even their dreams were hard to distinguish.
A welter of tiny golden globes were even now bobbling around above the three of them, bumping into the serrated bark of the tree, blundering into one another and bursting in tiny little explosions of air that only I could hear. Like their mother’s, their dreams were pale and shimmering, lacking the hot, fiery edge that denoted a dream that might do damage, and even on closer inspection they yielded up little further detail that might help me tell them apart. Even the subject of their dreams tended to similarity – blue paws, blue-grey muzzles, blue tails – for if the girls did not dream of themselves, they dreamed of their sisters, almost to the exclusion of anything else. Peering closer, I could make out a chase going on in one globe; a tussle with a length of pink wool, which I recognised as part of an unravelling garment that someone had brought for the child Ellie only last week, and which Letty and Cat had stolen. In another globe a small brown bird skipped and fluttered, darting here and there to avoid a questing blue paw. The first one drifted away, only to be replaced by another offering a glimpse of milk in a bowl, bubbles rising where the greedy dreamer had immersed her face in it.
Another globe had been obscured behind its fellows all this while, but now, as one of the kittens – a glimpse of that little fawn star identifying her as Letty – stirred and yawned, her dream popped out of existence, leaving the other open to my view. And as if revelling in its sudden exposure, it swelled a little and glowed brighter, revealing a dark orange corona that flared along its circumference. I leaned in closer. No grey-blue fur here, but a kaleidoscope of colours, all as sharp and vivid as those that showed themselves on the big black metal box that John and Anna would sometimes sit in front of in the evenings, the one that made voices and animal speech and birdsong, even though it gave out no scent of other life.
I squinted, then drew back, alarmed. The dull glint of a cage had caught my eye, the bars gone from silver to a brutal grey, where years of anxious faces and paws pressing against the metal had worn away its sheen.
No cat likes a cage, even in another’s dream – and I had seen such cages before. I dreamed of them still, on those bad nights, especially in the middle of winter, when the aches came upon me and I smelled again the char of wood; the singe of fur. Fascinated and horrified in equal part, I watched as a hand came towards the bars. I saw how its long pale fingers with their oddly shiny nails – opalescent pink and white-tipped – made complicated motions with the device that controlled the door of the cage; saw how the latch at last sprang open and the hands came in, fingers spread like an owl’s talons when it stoops for a mouse, ready to grasp and to carry away. I saw how the hands came towards me. Unable to help myself, I shied away.
The view changed. Now I was confronted by a human face, far too close for comfort. It was hard to gather detail from that blurred impression, but what I could glean made the cold trickle through me as if I had swallowed an icicle. I knew those green, green eyes, the way the hands felt, tight and uncompassionate about my ribs, as if a bruise or two would do no harm; for it was not me she wanted…
I struggled.
The face went away, to be replaced by those white hands coming at me with black webbing trailing between the fingers; and this image was superseded by a sense of struggle, of force employed, of constriction, and then I was looking down at my own paw, stretched out tight and flat against a white surface, mesmerised by how the black strap cut into the grain of my golden fur—
‘Uncle O!’
My head shot up.
‘Uncle O – you were spying on our dreams again!’
Suddenly they were all awake and the tangle of limbs had resolved itself into three handsome young female cats, all trace of kittenhood gone from those lithe blue-grey bodies, mocking black lips and alluring orange eyes. I shook my skull to dislodge the image.
Letitia, forehead and star all ruffled and spiky from being squashed up against her siblings, came over and butted at me affectionately. She sniffed. ‘What’s the matter. Uncle Orlando?’ she said softly, regarding me with her head on one side. ‘You smell afraid.’
I blinked. ‘Nothing,’ I lied smoothly, though I was taken aback by her perspicacity and by the fact that somehow, somehow, one of the girls appeared to have the ability to channel her mother’s nightmares. But two years of hiding my true feelings from Lydia had not gone to waste.
‘Nothing at all.’
I said no more about the dream at the time; there seemed no use in it. It had rattled me, certainly, that sense of capture, of defeat, of incipient horror, especially coming out of the blue as it had and from a youngster whose life till now had been marked by no greater tragedy than the temporary loss of a catnip mouse. Besides, there was no way of telling – from their demeanour, at least – which of the girls the dream belonged to; they were all as blithe as ever, apparently untouched by the shadows it had cast in my mind, and I had no wish to alarm them.
Or make them think you stranger than they already do, a small voice reminded me. Uncle Orlando, doing his weird thing again. Foolish as it may seem, I cared about how the girls perceived me, preferring to appear to them solid and genial and trustworthy, as opposed to disturbed and tetchy and somehow adrift from the world, and this also had some bearing on my decision to let the matter lie. But over the days that followed I found myself returning again and again to those dark images as to the itch of an old wound that can be relieved by a swift rasp of the tongue, a scratch with the claws. The sight of those eyes had left me anxious and jumpy in a way I had not been since the weeks immediately following the fire.
A few days later I decided to go and visit the Besom in an attempt to understand why such dire images were haunting me again and, I hoped, to put them to rest at last.
*
I owed Millefleur for my recent acquaintance with the Besom. She was an odd old soul who lived a couple of miles out of Ashmore village, but she was the best listener and the wisest cat I ever met. Millie had run into her on one of her many journeys away from Nonesuch and had returned one evening about a year or more ago, brimming over with enthusiasm for her new friend, saying that at last she’d found a cat who knew about the world and its ways, and that I should go straight away to see her and ‘get my head sorted out’. Of course, that had just served to make me bristle.
‘She’ll be another of those poisonous old gossips,’ I had retorted to Millie’s suggestion. I was still stinging from the rumours about Lydia’s pregnancy. ‘Another old biddy with time on her paws and nothing better to do than spin tall tales.’
But Millefleur had been insistent. ‘You need someone to talk to. Lydia’s hopeless in her state, I’m obviously not good enough for you’ – she shot me a direct look that made me wince – ‘so why not unburden yourself to a wise old cat who’s seen it all? You can’t just sit here and mope; it’s not healthy.’
Which was easy for her to say, I thought bitterly; she hadn’t seen what was in the witch’s secret room, hadn’t witnessed her nearest relatives coming to grief right in front of her eyes, helpless to do anything to save them; and since she wasn’t a dream-catcher, she hadn’t been able to see the dream that had done such violent damage to Ashmore and its inhabitants, a dream that could distort place and time, a dream that had the power to wrap you about with fiery tentacles in which you were sure you could spy human hair, human eyes, human teeth… There was only one other cat in the world with whom I could have shared the cold shivers of my daytime reveries, the sudden clutch of terror in the middle of the night, the awful surreal flashes of memory – and that was my grandfather, dead, long dead.
And that, paradoxically, had been what had persuaded me in the end.
‘You’ll like her,’ Millie had persisted in her characteristically blunt and determined fashion. Like a digging mole, Millie went straight through obstacles as though they deserved to occupy no space in her world, attacking them with a mindless energy that could leave you mentally bludgeoned and as weak as a worm in her wake. ‘She knew old Hawkweed. Rather well. I’d guess.’
*
So I had been persuaded out of the grounds of the old house for the first time in several months. During that time I had rather neglected my duties as the local dreamcatcher, but to no obvious ill effect in the world. I think it was partly a reluctance to use the wild roads that had held me back; the thought of venturing once more into regions that could play such tricks on you, could foster monsters and turn your sense of direction, your entire understanding of local geography, inside-out and upside-down, had been my greatest anxiety of all, and so that first time Millefleur had walked with me we had taken the human highways of Ashmore out to the isolated cottage where the Besom made her home.
Even such a simple journey – plodding one foot before another down the long miles of sun-warmed road – was hard enough. Everywhere we went we were assailed by scents and sights that would signal to anyone else that daily life was continuing as normal, but to me they were powerfully unwanted reminders of the very nightmares I was seeking to dispel. The simplest of smells – the burned oil from the rumbling vehicles that passed us; the scent of a gardener’s bonfire, all wood smoke and licking flame – transported me back to the fire at Nonesuch, making me tremble and slink into the long grass at the roadside, my joints weak and my head buzzing.
When we passed the cottage I had lived in since my earliest days, I remembered clearly how Dellifer, our nurse, would lie – a great, thin bolster of a cat – stretched out along the windowsill of the bedroom at the front of the house, just where the afternoon sun struck through the tendrils of clematis and climbing rose; but just as that peaceful scene was establishing itself before my eyes, it was abruptly displaced by the sight of her body – just as long and limp as if she were in repose – stretched out across the road where the witch’s car had struck her, a single line of bloody mucus dribbling from her nose. That was not precisely the last I had seen of old Dellifer; but that final image I kept firmly pushed away into the back of my head.
Two people were out in the front garden of the cottage as Millie and I walked by on the other side of the road. They took no notice of us, caught up as they were in their task: they just kept shouting to one another and laughing, and as they did so, another plant would go flying through the air to join the heap of debris they were collecting there upon the brick path. I saw the rambling mint that had run riot through the cranesbill and giant daisies and had even tried to get involved with the hawthorn hedge, defeated at last, in a wilting pile by their car, a gleaming silver object with no roof. Trays of brightly coloured pansies and begonias were arrayed on its back seat and balanced precariously on its bonnet. The overgrown rosemary bush lay on its side next to the car, the earth already drying on its disinterred roots. Even from the opposite side of the road I could smell that hot, aromatic odour, the scent of summer and roasting lamb; we always knew when Anna came out to pick a sprig that we would be in for a treat of titbits that evening…
Then they started rooting up the leggy old lavenders that Anna had tended with such care, among which my sister Vita and I had played, chasing one another neatly in and out of the woody stems until we were overcome by the heady aroma of the herbs and fell asleep together in the same tangle of paws I so loved to see in Liddy’s girls…
I had felt my heart leap painfully and hurried on.
The pond – an almost opaque green in the strong light – was as tranquil as you could imagine. Half a dozen ducks promenaded serenely around the fringes, each on separate trajectories that seemed designed specifically to avoid crossing another’s path, as if some tacit agreement had been made that afternoon not to squabble or break the peace in any way. The willows swept down to the water like living curtains: between them, a heron had watched us pass with its cold yellow gaze.
Despite the beauty of the scene I had not lingered. My last sight of the Ashmore pond would remain indelibly etched on my memory: the perfect white of the frozen surface marred by the crazed hole through which Hawkweed, my granfer, had vanished; the sight of the clawmarks on its circumference where he had tried to drag himself up again; the glow of his single orange-gold eye staring up at me from beneath the murky water. I remember shivering, for all the late summer sun.
By the time we reached the Besom’s cottage I had felt as shaky as a new-born foal, but Millie had no patience where others’ infirmities were concerned. ‘Don’t lag, Orlando,’ she’d chided. ‘I haven’t got all day, even if you have.’ She’d become quite abrupt with me since the night and day of those traumatic events, as if she had deliberately grown a hard and brittle skin over her heart to ward off any trace of the affection she had felt for me; but sometimes I could catch her out of the corner of my eye watching me, her face all soft and yearning. If I could only have loved Millefleur life would have been good to us both. But, for all the stupidity of it, I was still in Liddy’s thrall.
We had wormed our way through the prickly holly hedge and there, crouched in a pool of shadow, watching lines of ants crossing the broken flagstones, had been the old cat. I had been disappointed by her at first, with her bony head and dusty coat. I’d been expecting someone more impressive: a big cat, perhaps, or one gifted with great charisma. But the Besom was small and neat-looking, a little sunken at the haunches and cheeks, and her eyes were glazed with age.
‘Orlando, this is Ma Tregenna,’ purred Millie. The two of them had exchanged brief cheek rubs, then Millie promptly left, casting a sharp glance over her shoulder at me. I knew that look. It said as plainly as speech: ‘Put away your disbelief and behave politely.’ It was a look as chiding as any you’d give a kitten.
The old cat had greeted me politely, explaining that I should follow her round to the back garden, which was quieter. She had warned me not to tread on the ants. ‘There’s rain coming,’ she’d said cryptically. When she spoke, a soft, rasping cough punctuated her words, as if she had fur caught in her throat.
The little garden behind the cottage was a haven for cats, overgrown as it was with briars and ferns. I loved it at first sight. It was all I wanted from a garden, it defined the very idea for me. Bees rumbled lazily from rose to rose and hoverflies hung almost silent in the air above us, before whizzing away at high speed to suspend themselves a few feet away, as if eavesdropping on our conversation. Suddenly I found I could talk, and talk I did, all that afternoon.
She had hardly uttered a word until I finished, other than to encourage me to continue, or to clarify a point in the story; and at last all she said was, ‘Have a sleep now, Orlando. Feel your eyes closing, and have a proper old snooze.’ And I had suddenly found myself exhausted, as if all the time I had been with her I had been fighting back a weariness that went even beyond my bones, and had fallen into a long, deep sleep.
As I slept, I had dreamed. I know this, for she told me so. She had sat there beside me, amid the brambles and briars, as the sun dipped over the distant downs, and watched my dreams forming. And when I woke, she told me what she had observed.
For the Besom was a dreamcatcher, too.
*
I had not until then realised that a female cat could be a dreamcatcher. It had shocked me to think of a young queen out on the highways, chasing down and ripping apart the evil dreams of humankind, putting herself in the way of danger and discomfort – for such had always seemed to me a measure of masculine prowess and pride, the thing that set me apart from my fellows and gave me a private pleasure when they boasted of their own tame experiences of the wild roads. It was yet another failing of my own imagination, I suppose, but I was learning all the time.
Old Ma Tregenna (a title she preferred to Millie’s rather less respectful name for her) was to prove a fine, if eccentric, teacher. She had not, like my grandfather, ranged far and wide via the vast network of wild roads, chasing dreams, fornicating and fighting across the country. No, she had lived and worked on the edge of Ashmore all her life – or should I say, all her lives? – accumulating wisdom and observing the world in her quiet, thorough, unsensational way. She had never settled with a mate in this life, at least, though when she spoke of my grandfather it was with a wistful nostalgia and a certain gleam in the eye; nor had she had kittens of her own, as a result of some cruel trick of nature, though she admitted to having fostered a dozen or more of those abandoned by their mothers in harder times, and I suppose I sought her out in place of my own lost mother. In the months in which I had sloped off from Nonesuch to talk to her, my own dreams had become less troubled and I had found in me the strength of purpose to return to the wild roads of Ashmore as its dreamcatcher. I had thought of my world returning to its natural shape, my life resuming a rhythm of peace and domesticity, punctuated only by my night-time duties.
But the image of the witch’s green eyes and her strong white hands flickered before my vision even as I lay dozing on the lawn, as I ate from my bowl, as I watched the girls play, and I knew that if I could not dispel it I would go quite mad.
*
I found the Besom curled up at the foot of a quickthorn, one ear to the ground, apparently fast asleep. However, even before I could address her she said, ‘Get on over here, Orlando. En’t no need to tiptoe.’ And her pouchy old eyes were suddenly fixed on me with the acuity of a hunting cat.
She was always doing this sort of thing. It no longer phased me, though at the beginning I had found it most disconcerting.
‘I need your advice.’
‘A dream?’ she asked, head cocked, interested now.
I did not bother to ask her how she knew. So I told her what I had witnessed – the cages, the poor, desperate cats awaiting their turn in that cold white room; the straps and the table. I finished simply with, ‘What I don’t know is whether it came from the girls, or if it was always in my own head; whether it’s something or nothing; a memory or something I made up.’ I took a breath. ‘What I don’t know, and have got to find out, is whether it’s just an echo of old horrors, or an omen of some kind.’
The Besom said nothing for some moments. Then she gathered herself into a sitting position, her spine as straight as a foxglove’s, her paws ranged together as neatly as the disposition of her thoughts.
‘Cats, as a species, are a mite superstitious,’ she stated calmly.
I stared at her, disappointed, again. Clearly, she thought me a fool to disparage my fears so casually. ‘Oh,’ I said dully. ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’
She laughed: a rusty hinge of a sound. ‘For good reason. For cats, things en’t simply what they seem. Just think – all them lives, time after time after time, and whenever we come back, back come shades of all them old lives – shadows of old events, old fears all formless and detached from what caused them in the first place. It can make us nervy about the littlest things, things them with no imagination – dogs, say, or sheep – wouldn’t hardly even notice. To those who look only as far as their nose a toad is just a toad; the shriek of an owl is only a mating cry and the sight of a magpie mantling over a maggoty old rabbit en’t no more than a bird with its meal. But when you’ve lived a few lives and carried them images with you time out of time, you got a bit of a tendency to make connections quicker than others; you’re going to sense danger where others just keep drifting thoughtlessly into its path.
‘Something has started this dream off: something from now, however innocent it might seem. What you seen was not your own dream. And it wuzn’t just an old echo. You say you thought it might be one of the kittens?’
I nodded.
A silence fell between us, during which the white membrane over the Besom’s old eyes shuttled back and forth at an alarming rate. At last she said, ‘I knew a blue cat, once.’
I frowned. ‘Oh, yes?’
‘Oh, yes. He wuz right handsome, he wuz, a really gracious old chap, even if he was a foreigner of some sort; had a fine set to his head, he did, and these amazing eyes – colour of a bee’s belly, as I recall – all soft and hazy gold.’ A little pink tongue flicked out over her black lips. ‘He had an odd way of talking, but he wuz very refined; had a son taken on as the dreamcatcher in Drychester after old Figgis passed over and his grandson fell dead of the flu. Can’t quite remember the lad’s name now: must be gone fifty seasons or more…’ Her brow furrowed; then she shook her head. ‘Ah well, it’ll come back to me, most likely at an inconvenient time. He’d made his escape from some posh pedigree breeding place, determined to catch all those dreams he kept seeing, and the others thinking him off his head; but it wuz his grandson was the curiosity. There was some scandal attached to that one: they kept it hushed up, they did, never spoke much of him, said he’d “gone away” somewhere. But I knew better.’
She leaned forward. The sun beat down on us. In the distance I could hear a blackbird shouting threatening insults at an intruder. I stifled a yawn. Was it always the province of old folk to reminisce like this?
‘Witch’s familiar, it wuz whispered, he became.’
My head shot up. ‘What?’
She gave me her gap-toothed grin. ‘He wuz blue, too; ran in the family; finest of bloodlines, for those who care about such stuff and nonsense. You said the mother wuz golden-furred, did you not?’
I nodded.
‘And the girls—?’
‘Blue-grey; definitely blue.’
‘Ah. Does Lydia ever speak of her trials?’
‘No.’
‘And you’ve never seen her dream of such things?’
‘Never. All she seems to dream about is her own comfort.’
The old cat gave a twitch of the shoulders; more a tic than a shrug. ‘Can you blame her, Orlando? Do you blame her for that?’
I supposed I did: for she never dreamed of me. To deflect this line of questioning I said, ‘But why should one of the girls dream Liddy’s dream?’
Ma Tregenna patted my paw. ‘The bond between mother and daughter always lies deep, lad; deeper than love, some say deeper than thought.’
‘But why now?’ I persisted. ‘What has caused this dream? They all seem so contented…’
‘Something must’ve changed,’ the Besom mused. She considered this statement for a moment, then added, ‘I don’t suppose any of them has eaten the weed, have they?’
It was a little yellow plant she meant by ‘the weed’: simple mouse-ear hawkweed that grew in the wild places of the world and carried the Great Cat’s own message to those chosen as her dream-catchers. But I hadn’t seen any of the scruffy hawkweed plant growing in the lush and artificial grounds of Nonesuch. I shook my head slowly. ‘No, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Then think, Orlando; something must have happened to draw this dream out into your sight. Think what changes there may have been.’
I thought. I racked my memory. The builders were in at Nonesuch – robust-looking men in dusty overalls who carried heavy things around between them and talked a lot. They had clumped about the house in their big boots, while John followed them with his notepad and pen, but they had done very little in the way of work yet. The only real impact they’d had, as far as I was concerned, was the welcome change in diet they brought with them: I particularly enjoyed the foreman’s tuna sandwiches. But their comings and goings had caused no great anxiety and I could not believe that their cheerful presence could have triggered a dream of old horror.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said at last. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
The Besom looked deflated. ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘Keep your eyes open. Come and see me again if one of the girlies has another dream.’
‘I will.’
‘And bring me some more of that feverfew next time.’
I’d had a bit of this herb caught in my fur a couple of weeks ago, and Ma Tregenna had plucked it off and chewed it up with remarkable alacrity for such an aged cat, claiming that it was good for ‘her ticker’.
I turned to leave. It had been little Ellie who had stuck the feverfew on me; that and a bit of goose-grass for good measure; and since that hadn’t seemed to affect me too greatly, she’d lately taken to belabouring me with a horrible old doll’s head she’d found somewhere in the house. It smelled old and mildewed, though there was no sign of actual mould on it, and I had taken an entirely disproportionate hatred to it. (Though if you have a small child hitting you with its favourite toy, you, too, would most likely find it abhorrent.) She must have sensed this, for she kept the thing with her all the time and whenever I was near, would grin from ear to ear and start to chatter at me, eyes open so wide it was almost as if she thought she could communicate with me by the sheer force of her tiny will, before bashing it at me with all the strength she could muster.
‘Tell me,’ the Besom said suddenly, breaking into my reverie. ‘Are the inhabitants of your house sleeping well?’
I considered this for perhaps a second. ‘No,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘No, they’re not. Just recently they haven’t been sleeping well at all.’