Cat Bearing Gifts by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

meant to try.
    Since Tessa and her family had arrived in the village, and then Pan had followed them there, the other four speaking cats had come to know the child, too, and to care about her, as had their human friends. Maybe only they saw Tessa’s hidden joy in life, saw the secret pleasures that she so carefully concealed from the dominance of her mother and sister. They watched and waited. They stood by Tessa when they could, hindered by a tangle of legalities specific to the human world, rules that no cat would pay attention to.
    But Pan, with his own goal clearly in mind, sought to lead Tessa with his whispered suggestions, to slowly strengthen and transform the silent little Cinderella into a bold young princess. “Don’t let their talk hurt you,” he told her over and over as she slept. “Inside yourself, you can laugh at them. You are stronger than they are, that’s your secret. You are your own strong person, and you never need to be afraid.
    â€œYou can be quiet and secret in your thoughts, but all the while you can see the world clearly. You can be wary of others but strong in yourself, and you will grow up stronger than they are. One day, you will pity their stubborn ignorance.
    â€œYou’re little now, Tessa. But you grow bigger every day and already, on the inside, you’re bigger than they are. You’re stronger than they are, you have a wall of strength inside you that no one’s meanness can hurt. Your mother and sister can’t hurt you, they can’t touch the part of you that’s whole and bright and that loves the world around you.”
    As Pan whispered, reaching deep into Tessa’s sleeping mind, he thought about his pa, too, and about that other little girl so long ago. That child far back in time who had also needed a special friend, the little girl Misto remembered from an earlier life among his nine cat lives.
    How strange, Pan thought, the mirroring of father’s and son’s connections with the two little girls from two different times. Tessa here in this time. Misto’s friend, Sammie, from sixty years past and from the other side of the continent.
    How strange that Sammie, now dead, lay buried right here in this village, a continent away from where Misto had known her. Sammie Miller, found shot to death right there beneath her own house, that she had willed to Emmylou Warren. What a strange tale it was and a convoluted one, a saga of three generations, Sammie’s part of it ending here, in this village.
    It had been young Sammie Miller’s photograph that had stirred Misto’s memory of his earlier life, a picture that the yellow tomcat discovered when he visited Emmylou, a childhood picture that had drawn him back again and again to look at little Sammie, his visits generating a comfortable friendship with the old woman though he never spoke to her, he never breached the cats’ secret.
    The grown-up Sammie Miller, having no family but her wandering brother who could never stay in one place, had willed her cottage and the old stone building in the woods above to Emmylou. She told Emmylou more than once that Birely had no use for a house, that he preferred to travel footloose and free. Nice euphemisms, Pan thought, for a man with no ambition, for a drifter who let the world do with him as it would.
    In the warm bed beside him, Tessa stirred suddenly and Pan drew back, crouching on the pillow. But the child only whimpered and turned over, dreaming. Often Kit came with him on his nighttime visits, she was his lookout, watching Debbie through the kitchen window, ready to hiss a warning if the woman rose and headed for the bedroom. But this night Kit was off up the coast with her humans, visiting the city. Or maybe they were already on their way home, after a week of shopping in what Kit said were “elegant stores that smell so good.” How long it seemed, and how he missed her.
    He had loved Kit since that first day he