Anna woke. Her heart thumped painfully against her ribs. There was cold sweat on her neck and shoulders, and the duvet had hobbled her legs. She lay curled and panting in the dark, fighting off the heavy pull of sleep. Bits of her nightmares kept replaying themselves in meaningless juxtaposition. One moment she was in some deserted house, opening a door; the next she was trying to make progress through a crowd of refugees. The house, she could have sworn, was one she knew. She recognised those corridors, those uneven walls. The war zone, though, was unrecognisable. A man cried out in a distant street. There were klaxons blaring, megaphones commanding everyone to keep moving. Anna struggled on against the tide, getting an elbow in her chest, a hand in her face, a dragging at her feet. Dismal concrete structures towered above her, mortar-scarred, their windows shattered by bullets. Someone she loved was held against his will in that town. The war was barely a prelude to the disaster that would ensue if she did not reach him.
Sleep was impossible in the face of this. She sighed and flung the covers off. The air was freezing. Why hadn’t the central heating come on? Tilting her watch to catch what little light there was in the room, Anna saw that it was only ten to four. She groaned, then, draping the duvet round her shoulders, knelt on the window-seat to gaze out on the dismal morning. Ashmore was in the grip of a heavy frost. There were feathers of it around the edges of the window. The herringbone brick in her front garden was crazed with it: rosemary and lavender stood stark and rimy against the bitter earth. Across the road, the pond was a skating rink, except for a dark hole in the centre where it looked to Anna as if something like a small log had broken the surface.
‘You might as well get up,’ she told herself.
She rubbed her hand over her face and stumbled into the bathroom. In the middle of her shower, her heart began to pound again and she thought: It’s John! John is in danger! Then she thought: it was only a dream.
She remembered his hands on her and lifted her face to the showerhead and let the water fall unchecked.
Half an hour later, she had combed her wet hair back from her face and put on a fleece jumper, a pair of warm moleskin jeans and some bulky woollen socks. She sat at the table downstairs, her hands cupped round a mug of tea, and leafed through the printouts she had made from the internet the previous night. In the glum morning light, the abused animals looked even more forlorn. They looked wrenched, and tired out and scared. This is no good, she said to herself. People would do this to each other if we let them, they would find the best of reasons. I can’t just sit here feeling like this. I have to do something, I have to go and tell Stella what I think of her.
On the way, she would go and apologise to John. It wasn’t fair to blame him: the bars of his cage were emotional, but he was as trapped by them as any research animal.
Before she left, she took the empty mug out into the kitchen. Orlando and Vita had been back in the night. Their bowls were empty. You greedy pair, she thought with relief. Then she thought: what on earth do they find to do out there in weather like this?
Cats. Cats and their strange little lives. She smiled.
Outside, it was so cold that each breath she took felt like a separate block of frigid air forcing its way into her lungs. She tucked her scarf firmly into the neck of her Barbour jacket and set off, with her hands deep in her pockets. The lanes were full of broken sticks, and even quite large branches, as if high winds had swooped over the edge of the downs during the night, then vanished like the turmoil in her dreams.
*
Down at the Brindley cut, the narrowboats huddled on the motionless brown water, their upperwork lumbered with bicycles, leaky water-cans and tubs of doomed geraniums.
John Dawe’s boat looked a little more alive than the rest, its fresh paint and recently polished brasswork bright in the developing light of day. A line of frozen washing – towels the consistency of crisp bread, jeans with sculpted wrinkles – stretched from a hook on the cabin roof to the raised mooring post on the towpath. Boat life, bohemian life: it was a cheerful scene. Her spirits raised, Anna addressed the washing. When it resisted, she ducked smartly under it, and peered into the Magpie’s shadowy interior.
She could see some furniture. The foldaway bed was down, blankets trailing off it. His laptop, open but switched off, remained connected to the cellphone following some recent transaction. There was unwashed crockery stacked in the sink. Otherwise, it was dust and objects: she made out the skull of a crow; the long yellowed spine of some foreign snake; a leather backgammon set; dyed feathers, tied to a stick. She had grown used to these things. There were days when she even missed them. This is no good, she thought, and jumped up on deck. Everything there was shut down, put away, tidied up. There was no smoke from the chimney, which meant that the stove had gone out. She rattled the door against its little brass padlock. She looked hopefully across at the other boats, but they were silent. Everyone was asleep, or had fled wherever canal people flee in winter from the muddy towpaths and grim lines of willows. She banged the cabin roof with the flat of her hand.
‘John?’ she called. ‘John!’
But she knew he wasn’t there.
She got down off the upperwork and tried to see in through the windows again. She had more luck this time, and it was all bad. On the Formica-topped table, by the bread board and milk jug stood a bottle of Calvados and a jar of instant coffee with the lid off – the things he had used to fill his flask for the ‘picnic’ the day before. He hadn’t been home since. After she left him at Cresset Beacon he had headed straight for Nonesuch, and whatever solace he was used to finding there. Anna stood on the towpath, banging her hands together in the cold. If that was what he wanted, then let him. They so richly deserved one another. She could walk away from them both now, leave them to the emotional prison they had constructed for themselves up at Nonesuch all those years ago. Damn, she thought. Oh, damn, damn, damn. Because she knew in her heart that he didn’t want the prison, and only she could free him. He was manacled to the thirteen-year-old boy he had once been, and she would have to go and separate them and prise him out of that place. It was time to break his dependence on Stella forever. Gritting her teeth, she retraced her steps to the lane and started up the long hill back into the village.
*
The sun cleared the trees in the birchwood as she came up towards the common. It was a wintry sun, pale and brassy, and it was doing little to help burn off the frost, which had cemented the tangles of couch grass in the verge and shellacked every dip in the road. Past the post-box, amid a litter of broken branches, she came upon a dead squirrel. It didn’t seem to have been run over. Perhaps, she thought, it had misjudged a leap during last night’s gale, come down with all these shattered limbs of birch. Were squirrels active at night? She had no idea. She bent to retrieve the stiff little carcass. It lay as light as a paper carton in her hands, its lips curled back over curved orange teeth, its black eyes bulging in astonishment.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ she whispered, dropping it gently into the brambled hedge. ‘No time to give you a decent burial.’
She squinted into the sunshine that spilled between the birches. There really were a lot of branches down. Something made her quicken her pace, and by the time she reached the corner of Allbright Lane, she had broken into a jog. A light breeze rose, and brought the hoarfrost off the trees and telephone wires in hard little flurries like dry snow.
*
It was a strange morning.
Some way along Allbright Lane she came upon an elderly man kneeling in the road. He was dressed in a neat, old-fashioned camel overcoat and a tweed hat. She knew him by sight – he and his small wire-haired terrier were fixtures at the Green Man – but couldn’t remember what he was called. The dog had wrapped its lead around the base of a broken lamp-post, and he was trying to disengage it. Excited by the novelty of this situation, the dog ran round and round in tight little circles, barking and snapping and winding the lead tighter.
‘Can I help?’ said Anna.
At that moment the dog seemed to get free of its own accord. The man regarded her with a kind of flaccid irritability. When he stood up, she saw that he was grey in the face. Melted frost had left dark patches on the knees of his trousers, a dark bruise discoloured his left cheek. ‘Mind your own business,’ he said. He yanked the dog smartly away and pushed past her without another word, as if she had made him some shameful offer.
Anna watched him go.
Suddenly she remembered his name.
‘Mr Cunningham!’ she called. ‘Are you all right?’
No reply. With a mental shrug she passed on, beneath the towering yew hedges, until she reached the gates of Nonesuch House.
*
In 1482, Joshua Hering, determined on the New Build but fearing the effect of Ashmore’s winter easterlies on his susceptible second wife Elizabeth Marchmount, had been as cunning in his choice of location as in any other enterprise. The site was sheltered by the landforms themselves. As a result, Nonesuch had done well in last night’s gale. The terraces were tidy, the great plantings untouched. But still air encourages frost (as Joshua himself had soon discovered), and as Anna made her way up the long drive, it seemed to her that every twig, every needle, every blade of grass was sheathed in transparent ice. The air was laden, hard to breathe. Her fingers and toes grew numb. It was a bitter place for a human being, let alone a small animal; yet halfway to the house, she heard a mewing sound quite close.
From the shelter of some rhododendrons emerged a tabby-and-white cat, long in the leg but sturdy in the body, with a bizarre little crest of fur on its head and an odd look in its eyes, companionable and cautious at the same time. It stood, shifting its weight from one paw to another on the cold ground, and purred. Anna knelt down. She made soft clicking noises. ‘Puss,’ she said. ‘Puss?’ The tabby had a look around, then approached her. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘I’m all right. I’m OK.’ It sniffed at her fingers, its nose cold against her skin. It butted her hand. She stroked its cool, smooth fur for a few moments, running her hand firmly down its spine and off its long tail.
‘Who are you then?’ Anna asked, rubbing it under the chin. There was no collar. ‘One of Stella’s strays?’
Even as the words left her mouth she realised, given what she now knew, how frightening and paradoxical an idea that had become. But the cat left her no time to meditate on this. Instead it wove itself twice more round her legs then set off at a brisk trot, tail up, through a gap in the rhododendrons and on to one of the great lawns at the front of the house. About ten yards off, as if it had realised Anna was not following, it stopped and looked back enquiringly over one shoulder.
Anna smiled. ‘Goodbye then,’ she said, and she carried on up the drive. The tabby ran in front of her, and wound itself so tightly round her legs again she had to stop or tread on it. It mewed insistently. It made very direct eye contact with her.
‘What do you want?’
Not to be stroked, clearly: as soon as she bent down, it ran off again.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous.’
Nevertheless, she followed. The tabby set off into the middle of the bleak, icy expanse of the lawn, stopping from time to time to make sure Anna was still there. It was nervous in the open, she could see. Whenever it looked up and noticed the walls of Nonesuch, it crouched suddenly, and seemed likely to change its mind; finally it put back its ears and took off at a run, leaving behind a faint curve of footprints in the frozen turf. Reaching the corner of the house, it looked back once and disappeared. ‘Damn!’ said Anna, who had become involved despite herself. She followed the footprints, and was soon confronted by an old wall of soft orange brick, beyond which could be seen the tops of a number of gnarled and leafless trees. The Nonesuch orchard: Stella’s famous medlars from sixteenth-century stock, with their soft and rotten-tasting fruit. The cat waited for a moment, then it was off again, running more confidently along the base of the wall, through an open gate, down a leafless walk—
—and into the knot garden.
Paths of coloured gravel separated the carefully clipped lines of box and germander which crossed and re-crossed the open space in great whorls and spirals, hidden in the geometrical complexities of which you might never suspect the Herringe initials, the Herringe ego – waiting like a spider, trapped like a bird, since 1482. Anna came to a halt. She stared. While the little cat sat and watched, she put one foot carefully in front of another and walked three sides of the design. She admired the accuracy of it, the precision. It was a clock which told Herringe time, a site of mystery and arrogance. Anyone watching from the house would have seen her frown, as if she had half-solved some puzzle. Should she walk on? This way, or that? The whole thing was somewhat spoiled, she noted, by a mass of broken and flattened stems at the centre of the maze, where the coloured gravels had been scuffed away to reveal the soil beneath, sticky with some dark residue.
*
When I came to, I had no idea where I was. The surface I lay on was dark and cold. It stank, of urine and faeces, and something sweet and cloying to which I could put no name.
I struggled up, feeling dizzy, every muscle aching from my ordeals, to find myself in a kind of narrow concrete run hemmed in on both sides by metal cages, a hundred of them or more, piled up higgledy-piggledy and glinting in the red light of dawn. At one end of the run was a closed door; at the other a blank wall. Inside each cage was a cat or kitten, each one of which regarded me with deep curiosity.
‘Who are you?’
A skinny female Siamese, her blue eyes crossed in concentration.
‘He’s a boy—’
A tiny black-and-white.
‘He’s just another stud—’
A big old tabby, past her best.
‘Let me see!’
Many of the cages contained more than one animal. They crowded to the bars to get a look at me, and now I could see that they were all queens, some mated, some not. If I tuned out the rank smell of the place itself, their common scent washed over me, resolving into a hundred signatures impressed on the air like graffiti on a wall, musky, distinctive, strange.
‘I’m Orlando.’ I croaked.
My throat was still clogged with scraps of the Dream.
‘Orlando? Is it you?’
I was only half conscious until then. The sound of that voice turned me round so fast my head spun.
‘Liddy!’
There she was, her perfect face pressed up to the wire of a cage near the bottom of the stack! I made a few unsteady steps across the concrete and stared up at her.
‘Oh, Liddy!’
‘It’s Lydia,’ she reminded me.
At once there was a chorus of, ‘Hark at Lady Muck—’, ‘Ooh, Queenie’s off again’ and ‘Little Ms High and Mighty—’
‘Oh, leave her alone,’ said a bored voice.
My heart swelled. ‘Lidd— oh, Lydia. I’ve found you at last.’
This brought some cackling from the tiered cages.
‘Found her at last, has he?’ ‘Oh he has. He’s found her all right.’ Then: ‘You’ve arrived a bit late to be the gallant champion. Sonny Jim. Someone got to her before you. ’E was quite forceful.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said: ’e was quite forceful.’
More cackles, and a certain amount of rough mimicry.
‘Lydia,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong?’
She turned away. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said dully.
It was the cruellest of disappointments.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, as much to myself as her.
‘No need to be sorry,’ said Lydia. ‘Although if you’d come earlier, of course—’ She sighed.
At this I looked so glum even the chorus of queens could think of nothing to add. Then one of them, a brindled matron little more than a vast slack belly topped by the tiny, wedged-shaped face and slanting yellow eyes that spoke of early good looks, said, ‘Hey, don’t take it personally. We’re all up the spout here; or will be soon.’ Some private thought occupied her for a moment. ‘I always wanted a lot of kits,’ she said. ‘This’ll be my third litter in eighteen months.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Not that I’ve ever seen a one of them.’
‘Who has?’ said a voice I couldn’t locate.
‘Count your blessings, honey,’ someone else advised. ‘I see mine all the time. In my dreams.’
With this, a fierce inturned silence descended on them all.
I stared from face to face, bemused. ‘Who are you? Why are you here?’
Their spirits were restored. A gale of amusement swept the cages.
‘He in’t the stud, darlin’, that’s for sure.’
‘He surely ain’t.’
‘Pretty, though.’
‘Oh he’s surely pretty.’
And then, to me:
‘Something’s happening here, sweetheart, and you don’t know what it is. None of you cats outside know what it is.’
‘How could we?’ I said.
‘You don’t care to know.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Lydia suddenly, from the back of her cage. ‘He can’t help the things humans do.’
‘What things?’ I said. ‘What things?’
One of the older queens took pity on me. ‘Some get brought in like your friend,’ she said. ‘Most are born here. Our lines go so far back we can’t remember them. We’ve lost the thread.’ She looked at me with a kind of shy regard. ‘We were never outdoor cats like you.’
Other cats took up the story, and passed it from cage to cage.
‘We’re bred here and it’s what we know as home,’ said one.
Another said: ‘She mates us until we die. You quicken, you’re ready to drop, but she lays you open with a knife, and takes the kittens every time—’
‘We never see the kittens.’
‘She takes the kittens every time—’
‘—and what she does with ‘em then is anyone’s guess, since we never see ’em again.’
‘—never see them again.’
Silence.
‘This woman,’ I said. ‘Who is she?’
‘Oh, we’re in hell,’ said the bored voice from the back. ‘And she’s the devil.’
Dreamcatching, I thought, was nothing compared to this. All that running and fighting, it was hard work, yes: but how simple and clear-cut compared to this slow, deadly penance, worked out without reward in the stink and grey light of the cages. I felt humbled. The cats before me might have taken refuge in madness and depression. Instead, they bore the misery of their lives, the futility of their dearest impulses, with humour and companionship. I looked from face to face. Every one of them seemed as beautiful as Lydia.
‘And you’ve never tried to escape,’ I said.
‘Look around you, sonny,’ said the voice from the back. ‘How would you do it?’
I stared at the bars, the seeping concrete, and felt foolish. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I see. No one could get out of here.’
‘Except when you’re finished with,’ someone said, ‘and you go out in a plastic bag.’ Lydia made a noise of suppressed terror and began to fling herself against the bars. There was some attempt to calm her. Then the voice from the back said:
‘I only asked how you would do it. I didn’t say that no one had ever escaped.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t listen to her dear,’ I was advised. ‘She’s mad.’
Several voices hastened to agree.
‘I’m not mad,’ said the voice from the back. ‘I often wish I was. I had a life before I turned up in this hell. It was a good life. If I was mad I might be able to forget it.’ There was a pause, and in the silence I could almost feel the invisible cat shrug. ‘Still, I’m not mad yet, and there it is. Unless it’s mad to be awake while this lot sleep, and see something they all missed. If that’s mad, of course, then I am.’
‘There’s no need for sarcasm, dear,’ the fat queen reminded her gently.
‘No, no, I suppose not. We’re all in this together. Well, this is the story: it wasn’t that long ago, the end of last winter. I’d guess, though it’s hard to keep track of the changing seasons in here. It was night, deep night, and dark, that kind of dark in which you can still see but you’re never sure what you can see. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s the most exciting darkness there is.’
The voice received this with amusement. ‘You’ll grow out of that, sonny,’ it assured me. ‘You’ll grow bored, because the dark promises so much and delivers so little. Or you’ll grow to fear it precisely because of what it delivers.’ Another pause. ‘So. Silence, but for the breath of sleeping cats. Darkness, but not perfect. The concrete floor seemed to shimmer faintly. I could see the bars of the cages, the indistinct outlines of the rooftops against the sky. Suddenly, I smelt last year’s leaves, and there, in the middle of the floor, dancing round in a little eddy, dim sparks and motes of light! The air felt damp and charged, the way it feels before a storm. A silent lightning-flash blanched the faces of the sleeping queens. I turned my head away; when I looked again, a great red fox stood in the middle of the floor. His reek filled the place. He looked around him and I swear he laughed.’
‘Laughed?’ I said. I knew that fox. I knew that laugh. But what had he been doing here?
‘He laughed, that animal, and said, “Well here’s a go. Got it first time.” Then he saw where he was, and that gave him something to think about, and he was silent after that.’
‘What happened then?’ I said.
‘Do you think I know? I have no idea to this day what happened. I can tell you what I saw, though. The fox – he had a grey patch on one flank, I remember that, where it looked as if some old injury had healed – counted his way along the tiers of cages. When he reached a certain point, he looked up. There was that extraordinary flash of light again, and he was inside the third cage up, with the astonished tabby who lived there. She hardly had time to wake up. Even as I watched, he was picking her up in his cunning great mouth. There was another flash, and they were both back on the floor. That fox could open a highway wherever he wanted. I’ve never seen a talent like it.’
‘I don’t understand!’ I cried. ‘Lydia! I know this fox!’ But Lydia was shivering to herself at the back of her pen and gave no sign that she had heard. ‘Did he say why he was here?’ I asked the cages at large. ‘Some of you must have woken? Some of you must know something?’
They know nothing,’ said the voice of the unseen cat. ‘And neither do I. He walked to the centre of the floor, put the tabby down for a moment, and stared around him. Then he looked straight at me, as if he’d known all along I was awake, and said, “I can’t help now, but I’ll send someone when I can. Tell them to endure a little longer.” Then he picked up the tabby and ran full tilt at that wall over there. They were both gone long before he reached it.’
Silence.
‘I’ll never know what he meant. How can we do anything else but “endure”? We’re in hell.’ There was a dry laugh. ‘Goodness knows what he wanted that tabby for. She was a poorly little thing. And she was so pregnant she probably had her kits in his mouth.’
While I was trying to make something of all this, Lydia threw herself against her bars again. ‘Please help me!’ she called. ‘Orlando!’
I had no idea what to say. The fox had promised they would be saved. Circumstances had conspired to bring me here, but what could I do? I was as trapped as them. I ran up and down between the cages. They watched me silently. I stared helplessly at the blank wall towards which the fox had run before he disappeared. At that very moment, I heard a faint scraping noise from the other side. Then, rather louder, a thud. Dust trickled down. I felt the fur rise on the back of my neck.
*
The cat Millefleur watched Anna Prescott tread the little maze, then stand stock-still as if she had been switched off. That was the problem with human beings: you never had the slightest idea why they did the things they did. And it was so hard to get their attention. Right, she thought. That’s enough. This won’t save Orlando. She opened her mouth and produced the most penetrating noise in her vocabulary. It was impressive, and had worked for her, she recalled, even when she was a kitten.
*
A piercing yowl. Anna roused herself. Visions, dreams, inchoate images of times she didn’t remember. The little box hedges at the edge of the knot garden had been planted and trimmed, she thought, to make the words ‘Tempus Fugit’. It was difficult to get a decent perspective so close up, and some of the letters had perhaps become fused together over the years. What did it mean? If she tried, she felt, it would come back to her: but the tabby-and-white cat – now stalking about on the doorstep of a French window Anna recognised from her last visit to the house – wouldn’t let her concentrate.
‘What?’ said Anna.
The cat stared at her. It closed its mouth deliberately, then, as if performing a charade for the benefit of a half-wit, began scratching at the closed door. ‘Why don’t I help you with that?’ enquired Anna sarcastically. The handle gave beneath her hand. The cat slipped inside so easily, and vanished so completely, it was like a conjuring trick. Anna put her head round the door.
‘Stella?’ she called. ‘John?’
Silence.
With a quick intake of breath, she stepped out of the light and into Nonesuch. At once, she was overcome by a sharp chill – but whether this was merely physical or caused by the guilt of entering Stella Herringe’s house uninvited, it was hard to know. To judge by the hardwood floors and white walls, she was somewhere in Stella’s apartment. But where the rest of the flat maintained a pristine chic, here was all the evidence of life lived day-to-day.
Items of clothing had been strewn over the furniture and on the floor, including a frayed and unglamorous old candlewick dressing gown. (It was pink, Anna remarked, and rather grubby, and it had been dropped just inside the French window, as if someone had let it fall at their feet before stepping into their bathroom, rather than their garden, dropped as if shedding an old skin.) Antique mirrors hung like paintings on every wall, arranged so that you couldn’t move without catching a glimpse of yourself from some unnerving – not to say unflattering – angle: no wonder Stella found it so hard to relax. Cosmetics lay scattered on every surface – lipsticks without their tops; bronzing pearls and tinctures; eyeshadows in every imaginable shade; brushes and pencils and eyelash curlers. An open pot spilled pale, translucent powder across a black marble mantelpiece. Firming creams, wrinkle creams, creams to feed the skin. Many of them bore the Engelion label. Others, however, had been put together in a distinctly amateurish fashion, bearing cheap stationers’ sticky labels applied untidily over the original packaging. The labels offered no clue to the contents of the pots other than a handwritten scattering of numbers that appeared at second glance to be a collection of dates. Lids off, they spilled their thick, disturbing perfume into the morning air.
Anna stared at herself in a mirror. She raised her hand to her face, lowered it again. All around the walls, the same shadowy woman raised and lowered her hand.
On a Louis Quinze desk to the left of the door she found a collection of photographs in antique silver frames. Stella in the sixties, all Twiggy hair and false eyelashes. Stella more recently, holding an elegant Russian Blue in her arms (a caption along the bottom read ‘Ms Stella Herringe and Grand Champion Circassian Gogol III’). The classy head-and-shoulders print used on the Engelion website. Here was John Dawe, sitting cross-legged on the deck of the Magpie, glowering into the camera with a tiny golden kitten cupped in his hands. And here were both the cousins, caught by some official photographer at a fancy dress party long ago. Stella had chosen a beaded gown which showed off her shoulders. The print was sepia-tinged, distressed with some cleverly applied brown mottle designed to look like mildew.
Anna picked it up and stared. John was dressed in a high-collared suit and remarkable fake mutton-chop sideburns. Despite that, he didn’t look more than fifteen.
All over the room, on chairs and coffee tables, on the floor with the discarded underwear and empty coffee cups, books were scattered. Many of them had been put aside carelessly, open and page-down, as if by a reader who couldn’t settle to one thing at a time. Some looked brand-new, others like original editions of very old works indeed. There were recent issues of Harpers & Queen and Vogue. There was an academic paper from an American university headed ‘Teratogenicity in feline fetuses’. Anna leafed through a battered volume of poetry by Robert Mannyng, inscribed Handlyng Synne: The Cursed Daunsers; a leatherbound tome bearing the legend Cosmetick Preparations (this, she put down quickly); and a pamphlet by one William Herringe, dated 1562 and entitled ‘The Diminutive Tyger’. A copy of Webster’s The White Devil lay among the make-up on the mantelpiece, its flyleaf inscribed to Stella in John’s distinctive hand:
‘For Stella,’ Anna read, ‘Your beauty, O, ten thousand curses on’t! / How long have I beheld the devil in crystal! / Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice / With music and with fatal yokes of flowers / To my eternal ruin. Woman to man / Is either a God or a wolf...’
‘A God or a wolf,’ Anna mused softly.
She shivered. Putting down the book, she stared around. The room was like a locked diary, its pages encoded in the obsessional languages of clutter, narcissism and waste. But the lock was also its own key. It was a visible show of character, of personal history. It was the key to Nonesuch. It was the key to Stella Herringe – who and what she really was. Before Anna had time to turn it in the lock, there was a noise behind her.
Anna, expecting John or his cousin, whirled round. Her hand flew guiltily to her mouth. ‘I didn’t—’ she began to say.
But it was only the tabby-and-white cat, which had leapt up from nowhere on to the gilt and ormolu dressing table and begun knocking down every small item it could find. After each outrage, it looked up at Anna deliberately as if to say, ‘There! What are you going to do about that?’ The tubes and tubs of make-up, the little white pots with their pink and gold labels, rolled and bounced across the floor.
‘Hey!’ cried Anna.
She tried to scoop the cat into her arms, but it evaded her deftly and fled into the next room. She chased it through the rest of Stella’s apartment, and then out into Nonesuch itself, where she quickly lost her bearings. Corridors multiplied, smelling of damp plaster and ancient floor polish. The cat scampered up one staircase, down another. ‘Wait!’ appealed Anna. The cat ignored her. ‘What am I doing?’ she asked herself. ‘What am I doing?’ Through the open doors of rooms she had never seen, she caught glimpses of broken furniture, fallen mouldings, nests of broken lath and horsehair stuffing. At one point there were noises, faint and distant, somewhere ahead of her: but when she stopped to listen, all she could hear was her own breath scraping in her throat; and if they had been human cries, they were not repeated. Then, without any warning, she was in the Long Corridor. Clara de Montfort stared down at her contemptuously from the wall. The cat took one look back to make sure Anna was still there, gathered speed as if for a last effort, and disappeared into the Painted Room.
*
Stella’s dinner party might never have taken place. The table and chairs had been spirited away, leaving for furniture a couple of long Jacobean benches scarred and blackened by use which, isolated in the middle of the room, somehow made it look emptier than it was. Brassy light spilled through the casements, to fall in long diagonal bars across the age-blackened boards. It gilded the dust-motes. It picked out the details of the trompe Toeil painting on the opposite wall. It discovered the tabby-and-white cat, sitting complacently in the middle of the floor, one leg stuck in the air while it thoughtfully washed its behind. When Anna entered the room, it stopped washing and looked up at her expectantly.
‘What?’ said Anna.
She shrugged. ‘I hate that painting,’ she said. She went over to examine it nonetheless. The fake courtyard lay under its fake illumination, less like life than ever. ‘Why would anyone do this?’
Her voice echoed in the amplified silence of the empty room.
She heard a faint cry.
The cat shot to its feet, darted between her legs, and began to claw frantically at the painting.
‘Stop that!’ said Anna.
The tabby only clawed harder. Little flakes of paint and decaying plaster fluttered to the ground. Everything’s rotten in this house, Anna thought suddenly. ‘You mustn’t do this!’ she warned the tabby, thinking how angry Stella would be. When the cat ignored her, she tried to drag it away. It writhed in her hands like a single coiled muscle: bit her wrist. ‘Ow!’ Fragments of last night’s dreams turned and shifted in Anna’s head. There was another faint cry from behind the painting.
‘There’s something there!’ said Anna. ‘Isn’t there?’
The tabby ignored her, but continued to claw and bite at the wall. Plaster fell away in lumps. Faint cold airs seeped into the Painted Room, bringing with them a sharp, ammoniacal smell. All at once there was a commotion, a barrage of yowling and mewling from the other side of the painting, and rising above that a demanding wail she recognised only too well. The tabby backed away and sat down suddenly, looking exhausted.
Anna got down on her knees and – all thoughts of Stella’s anger dispelled – began to try and enlarge the hole. She found that the tabby had given up for a good reason: the rotten plaster, which had been like damp icing sugar to the touch, had given way to firmer stuff. There were battens behind it, supporting the tough old lath. Anna got up and kicked at it awkwardly. This achieved nothing, though it caused the cats behind the wall to redouble their cries.
‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Damn!’
A familiar pink nose appeared in the hole. Anna stared puzzledly.
‘Orlando?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’ Then, with a growing sense of horror and disorientation: ‘Orlando? How did you get behind there?’
She renewed her efforts with the wall. A few minutes later, she was slumped at the base of it, panting. Her fingers were bruised and cut. She had broken most of her fingernails.
‘Orlando,’ she said. ‘How could you be so silly?’
She said: ‘I don’t know what to do!’
Then her eye was taken by the Jacobean benches in the centre of the room. They looked heavy, but manageable. Picking the nearest one up, she ran at the wall with it. There was a muffled booming noise, a shock ran up her arms, the bench clattered to the floor. She studied the wall. Once more, she thought, struggling to pick the bench up again. A minute or two later, bruised and exhausted, she was looking through the painting at the secret of Nonesuch. Beyond the fake courtyard, she now realised, the real one had always lain in wait for her.
*
Joshua Hering would not have recognised it. His tranquil outdoor space, not much larger than the Great Hall and designed, perhaps, to protect the ailing Elizabeth Marchmount from draughts as she took the air in the spring and early summer of her last haunted year, had been floored with concrete and roofed over with chicken wire. It was walled on three sides with cage upon cage of cats. On the fourth side – where the trompe l’œil painting had depicted the glassed-in arcade with the open door – was some kind of workroom housed in a modern lean-to construction resembling a Portakabin.
Anna stared at the rows of cages.
Stella’s rescue cats, was her first thought.
Her second was: But why hide them?
Orlando ended this speculation by pushing his face into the hole and purring loudly. He tried to rub his cheek against hers.
‘Now wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Just wait a minute!’
Too excited to move away while she kicked down the rest of the painting, Orlando got covered in plaster and stood there, blinking and sneezing and shaking himself vigorously, until she had finished. Then the tabby-and-white jumped through eagerly, and the two cats greeted one another with obvious delight.
‘Well!’ said Anna, a little jealous. ‘You are good friends!’
She gave them a moment or two, then swept Orlando up and squeezed him against her until he complained.
‘Oh, Orlando!’
*
The walk between the cages subdued her; but she never forgot the contents of the workroom.
Bright lights, even temperatures, the little hums and clicks of electricity busy about its work. Stainless-steel sinks with hospital taps. White walls racked at eye-level with what could only be surgical instruments. Shelves lined with jars of clear fluid. Once she had seen what was in the jars it was hard to look away from them. Hard not to. Beside one of the sinks was something she took to be a huge casserole dish – when she lifted the lid an inch, the smell was so thick it could have choked a cat. It was a thousand times more powerful than the smell of Engelion firming products – rawer, less dilute, less polite – but it was the same smell. It poured out all over her like the contents of a fat-rendering factory, until she shuddered and slammed down the lid.
At the back of the room stood a floor-to-ceiling industrial freezer, old-fashioned but powerful, cased in bare metal. A gust of vapour engulfed her as she pulled it open. Vacuum-sealed plastic packages, hundreds of them, were stacked on the shelves. She picked one up at random and turned it over. Whatever it was looked like a piece of pink meat. It was hard to tell what animal it might have come from when its original shape was so distorted by the sealing process. It was labelled with a cheerful-looking sticker featuring a design of hand-drawn flowers. Anna had seen the same labels on the produce of the Ashmore WI – mincemeat, jams, fruit preserves. She had even bought a bundle of them herself, against the far-off and unlikely day when she bottled the fruit from the espaliered quince in her garden. On the sticker was written in a spiky, old-fashioned hand: ‘7/9/00: (m) s: CG III: d: 13834’. The handwriting was identical to the handwriting on the pots in Stella’s room.
She replaced the package, picked another. The label on this one offered a date from the previous winter and the following cryptic description: ‘f: 1 day old. d: 9378, remvd gdn Pond Cott’. Anna stared at it, a horrible suspicion forming in her head. She turned the package over, to find herself confronted by a bulbous, rather deformed blue eye. It was Orlando and Vita’s sister: the poor, dead kitten she had buried, now shrinkwrapped, naked and skinned. Anna shrieked and ran out into the courtyard. She began running from cage to cage, undoing the doors and banging them open.
‘Get out!’ she cried. ‘Get out, get out!’ The cats stared at her. Some had leg muscles so withered they were unable to stand; they hunkered down and stared at her, paralysed, perhaps, by the idea of freedom. Other jumped down happily enough, only to mill puzzledly around the ankles, looking up for guidance. All the cages were numbered. When she found 13834, its occupant turned out to be a black cat with a huge, debased body and tiny, wedge-shaped head. It looked at her nervously. ‘Get out!’ she cried. Tears were pouring down her face. ‘Oh please get out!’ She reached in and lifted it down. Once it had the idea, it ran off quickly enough, heading for the hole in the wall. Anna stared wildly about. She was at the heart of Nonesuch. The cages reeked. The whole courtyard reeked. Everything she had found was a betrayal, and it made her numb with anger and misery. I should have left the poor things locked up, she thought, until I could get the RSPCA in here. Then she thought: But I’ll never be able to lock an animal up again.
She was trying to decide what to do next when a human cry rang out from somewhere in the house. It was cut off suddenly, and not repeated.
The cats shifted uncomfortably, ears flat to their skulls.
‘John!’ called Anna. ‘John!’
Silence, heavy and forbidding.
Full of dread and last night’s dreams, she rushed back into the Painted Room. She had to wade through cats. They milled about indecisively for a moment, then followed her. One moment the courtyard was full of them: the next they were gone like smoke.
Anna poked her head out into the Long Corridor. Nothing. She looked right and left; then, under the sardonic gaze of Clara de Montfort, moved deeper into the house. An open hallway, known for some reasons as the Courseway, led her to a servants’ staircase with steep, narrow risers and walls polished at shoulder-height by generations of maids. Up went Anna, and the rescue cats flowed after her, maintaining a cautious distance: when she looked back all she could see were eyes; flat, reflectant, neutral, in the brown-stained light of the old stairwell. Orlando and his friend were among them somewhere. She wasn’t sure how comfortable that made her.
Deep Nonesuch, where time hung in the air like a smell: sounds were muffled or curiously amplified here, swallowed by passageways, sucked out of the thick old leaded lights and into the open air. You couldn’t trust a sound in Nonesuch. It was hard to track down. The house was like a maze, as if it had deliberately replicated itself and overlaid room upon room, doubling and redoubling its passageways. Up on the top floor, all the bedrooms had names – the Rose Room, the Chinese Room, the De Montfort Chamber. They were all old. They were all empty. They all smelled of mildew and decay. At the door of Lady Germain’s Solar, Anna thought she heard a noise. She pushed the heavy door tentatively, and it swung open without a sound, as if to welcome her in. She stuck her head through the opening. The Solar did not live up to its name: inside it was dim and brooding, the coved and ribbed ceiling looming over monumental Jacobean furniture. Voluminous swathes of jacquard-framed diamond-paned windows which allowed through only the feeblest glimmers of winter light. The sound came again, muffled, indistinct, as if someone were trying to suppress it. Compelled now, she stepped inside. The room, however, revealed itself to be entirely uninhabited: it had been, she sensed, from the heavy, thick air, for years and years. Even so, she found herself seized by an unaccountable dread, to the extent that the hairs on the back of her neck began to lift, one by one, as if in warning. But warning of what? There was no question that the room was empty, but still she turned wildly around and around, assailed suddenly, irrationally, by thoughts of haunted houses, slamming doors, bulging walls; by fears that she might find herself immured, swallowed up by the house and its history, as had the maker of the muffled cry.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she told herself sternly. ‘It’s only an old house. Old houses make strange noises all the time.’
At last, she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and turned to leave.
She had just reached the doorjamb, her fingers closing on the rough, lacquered old wood, when she heard a moan: low, anguished, male. She froze where she stood, heart hammering, cold waves of reaction rippling through her stomach and spine. The sound had come from somewhere so close at hand that she felt it almost as a physical presence, and she was overwhelmed at once by the need to run away and save herself and the conviction that the source of the noise had been John.
The next door down the corridor was identified as Jonathan Herringe’s original Great Chamber. Its door – all dark oak in bossed squares – stood open two inches. Anna peered in with considerable reluctance.
Heavy felt curtains had been drawn against the day. The room stank of wax from the candles that burned in the old cressets and wall-sconces. Replaced again and again as they consumed themselves, they had made contorted, dripping sculptures. For all this effort, their light seemed undependable, and the bedroom furniture – ebony cabinets, a tallboy, a massive walnut chest inlaid with marquetry and ivory panels – seemed to emerge from a smoky brownish haze. In the middle of the room stood the monstrous four-poster bed imported from Esting House in Leicestershire by Anne Barnes early in the seventeenth century, its drapes of muslin and brocade swagged back to reveal two figures.
Some time in the night, Stella Herringe had cut off her hair. During this process, completed with the help of a Sabatier knife, she had also cut herself, in several places. There was still some hair on her head, and some on the floor around the bed. She was wearing a long old-fashioned nightdress, and the stiff linen folds of that were also full of hair. How she had found enough to tie her cousin’s wrists and ankles to the pillars of the bed was unclear: but there he lay, looking exhausted. Had she tried to cut his hair off first? If so, the knife had laid open his scalp in one or two places, and blood had run into the stubble along the line of his jaw. Had she cut his clothes off him before or after he was tied down? That was unclear, too, but there they were, in a heap at the side of the bed. She was kneeling astride him, with the nightdress hitched up.
She still had hold of the knife.
‘Don’t you remember?’ she was saying, in the dull, patient tones of a woman who has been arguing all night and still sees no hope of regaining what she knows she has lost – who suspects, indeed, that the point of the argument had already been lost when the argument began. She sighed and got up, walked stiffly across the room to relight a candle which had guttered out. She trailed her fingers across the walnut chest.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘You must remember this.’ She laughed. ‘A kiss is just a kiss,’ she sang. ‘As time goes by.’
Something had happened to Stella. When she moved into the light, Anna could see that the lace at the throat of the nightdress was not lace at all, but the papery white folds of her skin, where it hung from her neck and chin. Pale blue veins marbled its surface. Her cheeks had sagged and withered, her bottom lip dragged away from her mouth at one side, her blue eyes stared out vague and watery. She sat on the end of the bed and began to pick at her yellowed feet. ‘Surely you remember how we used to meet after evensong, run at barley-break with the children, dance in the ring while old man Worsley and young Jack Corbett played pipe and tabor for us?’
She laughed like a girl.
‘Do you remember when I was Clara de Montfort and you were John Mountjoy? Oh John, surely you remember that!’
This brought no response from the bed.
‘At Knole?’ she said suddenly. ‘With that little bitch when she was Anne Clifford? I knew you two had only been reading Chaucer together!’ A laugh. ‘She hoped I would be jealous, but I’m not stupid, John, I was never stupid. I knew you’d be there in the formal garden. Midsummer’s Eve, to dance with me. Why don’t you dance with me any more? You never do.’ She brooded for some seconds on the unfairness of this. ‘I never wanted the bolts of silk, John, even if they were the colour of my eyes. I only wanted you to be looking at me. You knew that.’
Silence.
‘You used to know that.’ She looked at the knife in her hand. ‘You knew everything. All those ancient languages, John! It was you who taught me them. Why, it was you who started it all!’ She got up and hammered angrily on the walnut chest with the heel of her hand. ‘And, also, you know, I had you on this, the night the Great War finished. You brought me in here and fucked me until I could barely breathe, while your mousy wife snored in the room next door. Have you still got the mark where I bit you? I suppose not. And what did she call herself in those days. Was it Olivia, John? Was that what the little whore called herself?’
She sat down and took his head gently in her hands.
‘I want you to remember, John,’ she urged him. ‘Four hundred years together, dying and returning, dying and returning, always in love. Why can I remember when you can’t? Is that fair?’ She stroked his forehead, then touched it with the tip of the knife. ‘It must be so damned convenient to just die and forget. Because really, John, you’re a coward, aren’t you?’ She put the knife down and pulled his head towards her. His face disappeared into the loose skin of her throat. ‘Shush, shush, there. Such a coward! There aren’t many like us. We should take care of each other, you and me, but you run away every time. First you run to her, and then you run to death.’
She let his head drop.
‘Well this time,’ she said, ‘I’m going to keep you.’
The man on the bed cleared his throat. It made a thick, painful sound in the room. ‘I think you’re mad,’ he said. ‘Can I have a drink?’
‘No. Not if I’m mad.’
He swallowed. ‘I’m really thirsty,’ he said.
She shook her head.
He said: ‘If any of this is true— Well, how desperate you must be to hang on to it all. Desperate and frightened.’ He lifted his head to peer at her. ‘There’s something wrong with you, Stella, something I don’t understand. Whatever it is, though, I think you’re as mortal as me. We all have to die.’
‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Wrong.’
She looked down at him thoughtfully. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘you’re going to try some of my special elixir.’ She poked around vaguely among the clutter on the floor by the bed. There was a click as the lid came off a little pot. A faint but unmistakable smell in the smoky air. ‘Look,’ and Stella. She straddled him. ‘Here. No, don’t move your head like that!’ She bent and kissed his mouth, then straightened up again.
‘All right then,’ she said.
She picked up the kitchen knife and drew it lightly down his chest. After a moment, a line of blood appeared.
‘I’ll just rub some in,’ she said. ‘This stuff can really get under your skin. It’s the formula I make only for myself: my own secret recipe, but for you, my darling, I will make an exception. Once you’ve had it you won’t be able to get enough. I use it every day. What Mark and Oliver sell for Engelion is very diluted mix by comparison, yet sales are going through the roof!’
Anna, who had been watching all this with a kind of stupefied horror, felt something brush against her leg. She looked down.
‘Oh!’ she whispered. ‘But you mustn’t!’
‘Who’s that?’ called Stella Herringe. ‘Who’s there?’
A hundred cats pooled around Anna’s legs – cats large and small, young and old, fat and thin, sick and well, cats tawny and orange, tabby and black, cats patched and striped and spotted – they flooded into the Great Chamber, where they ebbed and flowed like a sea, jumping on and off the furniture as they pleased. They singed themselves in the candles. They sniffed and blinked in the waxy smoke. They coughed up hairballs. They had brought with them a rank and honest smell. Their eyes glittered. They no longer had the air of victims. Stella Herringe stared. She made feeble pushing motions, as if trying to shoo them back into their cages. They had the energy of long imprisonment and the consistency of smoke.
‘But my work,’ she said. ‘All my work.’
She looked from the cats to Anna.
‘You!’ she said. ‘You again! Who are you this time? Olivia Herley, Phyllida Howard, Lady Anne Clifford? No, this time you’re just some jumped-up little trader from the City. Well you can’t have him.’ She looked down at the knife in her hand. Anna, who had come further into the room, took a couple of steps back. Stella said, ‘You always have him.’ She seemed bewildered. ‘Do you see?’ she said. ‘We’re two halves of the same thing. We complete one another. What would you know about that? Look, Anna dear,’ she said, as if she was offering milk and sugar in some Drychester tea-room, ‘there’s a symmetry to this, and all you ever do is break it—’
Her rheumy old eyes brimmed with tears.
‘Can’t you just leave us alone?’
‘You don’t love him,’ said Anna, who was keeping her eye on the knife and trying very hard not to think about the implications of what Stella had just said. ‘You don’t love anyone. I found out your dirty secret: I found your victims, your vile little beauty parlour. You made a monster of yourself, and now you’re trying to make monsters of the rest of us.’
Stella looked around at the cats. ‘All that work,’ she whispered. ‘All those careful breeding-plans. Some of those lines went back unbroken four hundred years.’
She threw the knife away. She smiled into Anna’s face. ‘Who would ever want to look like this?’ she said reasonably, pinching at the loose skin of her jowls. ‘Would you? Wait until it starts happening to you, we’ll see what you have to say then! No woman should have to age: our youth, our beauty is the only power we have over the world. And now we don’t have to lose it! Who can deny us the right to keep it? Who can deny us?’
Anna pushed her aside. ‘There isn’t any “us” here,’ she said. ‘There’s only you. And look what you’ve done.’
Stella tottered backwards. The cats, seizing their chance, swept across the room and engulfed her. She clutched at them as if to save herself, then stumbled heavily into the big oak tallboy. Candles toppled and fell. There was a moment of calm. Anna stared at Stella, Stella stared at the cats: hot candlewax sizzled where it lay. Then, with a soft whoosh of displaced air, the draperies round the bed caught light and the whole room seemed to fill with fire.
‘Christ,’ said John Dawe.
Stella got up and put her hands over her face. She ran about aimlessly. She did a kind of jig at the foot of the bed. ‘John, look,’ she said. ‘I’m on fire.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t help.’
She dragged herself towards him, then caught sight of the discarded pot of Engelion cream and reached for that instead. The linen nightgown smoked off her back. She got some of the cream on her fingers, and from there on to one cheek, where it sizzled like fat in a pan and gave off such an appalling stench that it overpowered the reek of burning cloth and wood. ‘Help!’ she called. She struggled towards the door, one arm outstretched in front of her. The cats, maddened with fear, falling over each other to escape the flames, knocked her down again and fled, pell-mell, from the room.
Anna, meanwhile, worked at John Dawe’s bonds. Fear made it hard for him to keep still. Her eyes streamed, the smoke was already in her lungs. She kept giving up in despair and holding his face in her hands to kiss him, then scrabbling furiously again at the knots in Stella’s hair. Who would have thought it would be so strong?
‘I’m sorry, John—’
‘The knife,’ he said. ‘Anna, the knife!’
Anna stared at him, struggling to make sense of the words. Knife, she thought dully.
‘Stella’s knife. It went on the floor.’
‘Oh, the knife!’ she said.
The smoke was so thick she couldn’t see. Eyes streaming, she dropped to her knees and swept her hands across the floorboards. Nothing. She crawled a little further away, made another pass with her hands. Something gripped her by the ankle, and she was pulled under the bed. She screamed. There was something under there, rolling about, hissing and panting to itself, clutching at Anna’s ankle, her thigh, her arm. Stella Herringe, face blackened, teeth white as a toothpaste advertisement. ‘I’ll outlive you, Anna,’ she said. Then her agony rolled her off somewhere else. Anna dragged herself out into the smoke again.
‘I can’t see you!’ John called.
‘I’m still here.’
‘Anna, I can’t see you. Get out while you can!’
‘I won’t go without you,’ she said. She tried to get up, but her legs wouldn’t obey her. It got harder and harder to concentrate. The heat had shrivelled her tear ducts, and she thought the back of her coat might be on fire. This is how it happens, she told herself. You’re bemused and you can’t do anything and you die. She located the edge of the bed and used it to drag herself upright. Come on, she encouraged herself fiercely: Come on! John was calling out all the time, his voice frightened and alone, ‘I can’t see you! I can’t see you!’ She couldn’t bear it. Then the blade of the knife made a grating noise beneath her foot. She bent down dizzily and there it was, gleaming silver through the smoke. She had it in her fingers when the windows blew in. Glass sprayed about. The fire rumbled and sucked air. There was a kind of blink, a shift in the light, as if the laws of physics were suspended for a moment, subsumed under a more flexible description of things. Long splinters of glass seemed to turn over and over in the air in slow motion. Then the flashover roared across the room two or three feet below the ceiling, vaporising everything in its path. The associated blast picked Anna up like a doll and threw her across the bed. She lay there for a moment with her mouth open.
‘Are you there?’ said John Dawe. He made a choking noise.
She sawed and sawed at the binding hair. It was hopeless. His legs came free, then his arms. But his eyes were closed and he didn’t seem to be breathing any more. She shook him. ‘I was here,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go away.’ She said: ‘Don’t you dare give up. Don’t you dare!’ His eyes flickered open for a moment, then closed again. She was pummelling helplessly at his chest when she heard a fresh commotion in the room behind her. Voices. Hands grasped her firmly by the shoulders and tried to pull her away. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not without him! Don’t you dare!’ She held on to him for dear life. Her tear ducts burned but she couldn’t cry. ‘Not without him.’
*
Outside on the lawn, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she lay wrapped in a damp blanket looking up at the sky. It was the most extraordinary fragile blue – one of those winter skies that shades away to a green so tentative you aren’t entirely sure it’s there at all – and across it moved a single pure white vapour trail the shape of a cat’s whisker. Anna didn’t think she would ever see anything so perfect. She wasn’t aware of pain, in fact she felt rather drowsy much of the time. Seconds stretched out to minutes as her thoughts drifted by. Occasionally she got cold. Occasionally, she became aware of Alice and Max as they swam in and out of her field of view. Max would lean over her and smile and say, ‘How do you feel?’ and she would answer, ‘Not as good as you,’ or just: ‘Safe.’ Then Alice would say:
‘The ambulance won’t be long now.’
Alice held her hand. Sometimes they talked together, too quietly for Anna to hear. She wondered what she looked like. She was too dazed to be frightened.
‘Are you discussing me?’ she said.
‘Only your awful taste in country houses,’ said Max.
She smiled up at him. ‘Are the fire brigade here?’ she asked. And: ‘Have you told me that before? I keep forgetting.’
‘We called them first,’ Max said.
‘From the bike, it didn’t look too bad,’ said Alice. ‘Of course, we were going quite fast,’ she admitted. ‘We didn’t think of an ambulance. Then, when we got here, there were all these cats milling about on the front steps. I remembered what you’d said about Stella running a refuge, so we went charging inside in case some of them hadn’t managed to get out, and that’s when I saw Orlando. He was in one of those bloody awful old passageways, miaowing his head off in the smoke. When I tried to pick him up he ran off. I thought the fire had panicked him.’ She spread her hands. ‘That’s how we found you, by trying to catch Orlando.’
‘Orlando,’ Anna said.
She drifted off.
*
Time echoed around her like a huge and complex old house. ‘Cross a threshold here,’ she remembered Stella Herringe saying, ‘and you’ve moved two hundred years before you know it.’ That was true, Anna now saw, as much for life as it was for Nonesuch. If you were lucky – or perhaps unlucky – you would cross the threshold of all your other lives, remember who you had been. Perhaps in dreams like these, you would approach the edge, look out over the mists of time, fall into...
*
She shook herself awake, full of panic, with oddly familiar names – Anna Clifford, Olivia Herley, John Mountjoy – tumbling through her mind. ‘Lift me up!’ she said. ‘Lift me up. Max. I want to see him again. I want to make sure he’s all right.’
‘Steady on now.’
‘Lift me. Max.’
Max helped her to sit up. The scene that met her eyes was a curious mixture. Two bright red fire engines were parked on the drive. Firemen ran purposefully about, shouting orders, lugging hoses. Smoke was still pouring up out of the roof of the house; there was even some seeping out from between the great front doors. But only a little way away from all this activity, the lawns of Nonesuch spread themselves tranquilly in the winter sun. And there, beneath the grandest of the cedars, only a little way away from where Anna sat, a large marmalade cat sprawled on his side, licking the smell of fire out of his coat. One of his ears was a little charred, and every so often he twitched it and looked thoughtful; but he shone in the sun like a bowl of oranges. A short way away from him, John Dawe’s cat Lydia was sitting up as elegant as a drawing in gold ink, to have her neck groomed by the tabby-and-white, which seemed to have lost to the fire its odd little crest of fur. Suddenly Anna thought: I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that.
‘I’m so glad they’re all right,’ she said firmly. ‘But that’s not what I want to see. Help me. Max.’
‘He’s OK, Anna,’ said Alice. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘John? John?’
‘He should rest, Anna.’
‘I want to know he’s all right. John?’
John Dawe coughed. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You look beautiful, even with no hair.’
He chuckled.
‘Just look over there,’ she said after a moment, ‘at that cat. Atum-Ra, to the life.’ She thought about this. ‘Lord of Life,’ she amended. ‘They’re so much more resilient than people. Do you think they have any idea of the things that go on around them?’
John Dawe, her beautiful, beautiful man, looked up at her, his eyes bright in the smoke-blackened mask of his face, and took her hand. His fingers closed tightly on hers for a moment, then he started to cough again. After a moment, the cough turned into a laugh.
‘I doubt Lydia does,’ he said. ‘She sleeps too well.’
*
Later that day, the bodies of two of Ashmore’s oldest inhabitants came to light. The first was discovered by Mrs Anscombe when she came, as she did every afternoon, to feed the ducks. The surface ice had receded on the edge of the pond, where it was melting into a kind of slurry at the base of the reeds. Something dark had come to rest there, half-submerged in the slush. When Mrs Anscombe bent to examine it, her hands flew up to her face. ‘Oh my word, you poor old chap,’ she said. ‘You poor old beggar.’
Unwrapping the strands of weed from the old cat’s legs, she lifted the body of Ashmore’s dream-catcher free of the ice.
*
The firemen found Stella Herringe.
She had, by some miracle or force of will, made it through the house and out of the French windows. There her luck and her life had run out, and she had finished up near the centre of the knot garden, bent into a foetal curve like something dug out of volcanic ash. With the exception of a single patch of pink skin – curiously, it was on her right check, which had been as exposed to the fire as any other part of her – she was charred from head to toe. Her knees had curled rigidly up to her chin as if she were protecting something precious, but this position is found all too often in victims of fire; and all the pathologist could say later was that he had found an unrecognisable twist of plastic fused into her fingers.