Touch Not The Cat by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

sorrel-coloured buds. The young leaves overhead, just unfurling, showed as transparent as stained glass against the light.
    I reached the bend in the drive. From here one could see the house, its walls of rosy Tudor brick reflected richly in the still glass of the moat. No one was about; no movement anywhere. I stood in the shadow, looking at Howard Ashley's home.
    For anything so old it was curiously serene. It stood foursquare on its island, an oddly harmonious hotchpotch of the centuries' building. The Norman keep still stood, altered and added to when the main gate with its battlements was built in the twelfth century. The original drawbridge had long ago been replaced by the single span of stone, just wide enough for a car, which now leads into the small, square courtyard. The Great Door lies opposite the main gateway, and is Tudor, giving straight onto the big hall with its vast fireplace and blackened beams. The rooms to the right of the courtyard are Tudor, too; the parlour with the priest's hole (reopened in 1880) and the small dark Council Chamber with its coffered ceiling and coats of arms. To the east of the main gate stands the banqueting hall, a fourteenth-century structure with the mediaeval timbering still intact. I had never known this used, except to show; it had been damaged in 1962, when money had been too tight for too long, and the big storm of mid-September brought the river down in flood and broke the High Sluice which controls the flow to the moat. Before the lower sluice could be opened to relieve the Overflow, and let the water safely into the lake, the cellars and the low-lying floors of banqueting hall and kitchens were flooded. My father repaired the High Sluice and made good the kitchen premises, then dried out the banqueting hall and left it alone. The only good thing, he had remarked, about the Court's precarious situation between river and lake was that fire insurance premiums were almost nil. . . .
    "Lake" was rather too grand a name for the sheet of water which lay below the banked-up moat. I forget when the artificial pool was first dug; to begin with it had been a stewpond for keeping fish, then later it had been enlarged and planted with lilies, with a willow or two and a monstrous grove of gunneras. It was still called Mistress Nancy's Pool, which sounded better than The Stew, as it was labelled on the maps. Between moat and Pool was a grassed bank which Rob, the gardener, kept cut after a fashion with the Flymo, just as he kept the beech walk and the main avenue clear and neat-looking. He kept some sort of order, too, in the walled garden with its two remaining glasshouses.
    We sold most of the produce, and this paid Rob's wage and that of the village boy who helped him. Beyond that there was little that could be done. The rose garden with its mouldering statues was an impenetrable Sleeping Beauty affair, and the woods beyond the Pool had long since engulfed the orchards, with the exception of one stand of apple trees beside the water, where the cottage stood that was now my home.
    It was dusk already. As I stood there the sun, imperceptibly, withdrew, and the light cooled to blue and then to shadow. Still nothing had stirred except the two swans, serene on the moat, and the whisper of a rising breeze in the branches. No light showed in the house. I went quickly up the drive for another fifty yards or so to where, on the right, between banks of rhododendrons, the Court's private pathway led to the churchyard.
    This had originally been the only way to the church. The lych-gate stood there, and beyond it a tunnel of ancient yews. The lych-gate cast a thick blanket of shadow as I went through, and suddenly, it seemed, day had gone and the evening was here. From overhead came that twilight sound, the rooks settling on their nests, their muttering broken from time to time by the sudden flap of a wing, or a throaty yell as some bird flung upwards, startled, from its perch. Ahead of me the