Touch Not The Cat by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online

over."
    "Yes. Thank you."
    "As for the keys, no doubt there will be some perfectly rational explanation," he said, as he showed me out. I got the impression that he was talking to reassure himself as well as me, and that in reality he disliked and distrusted mystery as much as I did myself.
    "No doubt," I agreed, and went downstairs and out into the street.
    Just outside the offices of Meyer, Meyer, and Hardy there is a pedestrian crossing. The light was at red, Don't Walk. Just under it, on the very edge of the pavement, a black cat was sitting, waiting apparently for the light to change to green. As I paused beside him he glanced up. I said to him, "Can't you reach? Allow me," and pressed the button. I have a theory that the button never has the least effect on the lights, which are totally unaffected by pedestrians' needs, but at that exact moment the light switched to green. Walk. The cat got straight up and walked across the zebra-striped way, tail in air.
    He was black as coal. "I may need you yet," I told him, and followed him onto the crossing.
    There was a shriek of brakes. I jumped half out of my skin, and stepped back to the pavement.
    The cat bolted clear across and vanished into a shop doorway. A white E-type Jaguar clenched its big groundhog tires to the road, and stopped dead half a foot from the crossing. The girl who was driving glanced neither at me nor at the fleeing cat. She sat watching the red light with impatience, one hand tapping the wheel, the other pushing back the long, dark-blond hair. I had a glimpse of dark eyes shadowed under an inch or so of mink eyelash, a sallow, small-featured face, with that Pekinese look which is for some reason typically American, and a wide unpainted mouth. When I had gained the other pavement in the black cat's wake, the lights changed behind me, and the E-type snarled off into the traffic of the crowded street, cut competently between two buses, and vanished. Something made me glance back. On the other pavement Mr. Emerson had emerged from his office, complete with bowler and rolled umbrella, presumably on the way to his lunch date. He, too, had paused, and was watching the E-type out of sight. Then he noticed me, and mouthed something across the roaring flood of traffic pouring between us. I thought he said, "The cat," but he was pointing after the vanished Jaguar. I nodded, waved, and smiled, and walked back to my hotel.
    Ashley, 1835
    On the writing table, beside the candle, lay his father's books and papers, held down by a glass weight shaped like a peeled orange. The waxlight glimmered in the curved segments, and a dozen tiny images mocked him; the fair young man, a slight figure in frilled shirt and pantaloons, standing there, somehow incongruous and lonely against the richly elegant background of his mother's room.
    He moved abruptly, striding over to the table, scattering the papers that lay there. He pulled open a drawer. From inside it, his mother's picture smiled up at him. Always, when he had used the pavilion, he had hidden her; or hidden from her. Now he lifted the portrait, and stood for a long time looking at it. Then, smiling, he set it back in its place on the writing table, facing the room.
    Facing the bed.

    His father's papers, those dry, exquisitely penned little verses, lay unheeded on the floor.
    Come, he hath hid himself among these trees . . . Blind is his love, and best befits the dark.
    —Romeo and Juliet, II, i
    The big gates at Ashley Court stood, as always, open. I went in, soft-footed on the mossed surface of the avenue, and walked up under the lime trees towards the bend from which one could see the house.
    Evening, and the last of the rich, slanting sunlight threw the lovely tracery of the gates long-drawn across the uncut verges. Windflowers and pale blue speedwell sprinkled the grass, hazing the green as delicately as a breath misting glass. Fetlock deep in wild flowers, the lime boles shone bronze through their feathering of