My Friend Cousin Emmie

by Jane Duncan

  ‘Oh? Where are they?’

  ‘Out de back, sah. Charlie up in de laundry roof an’ cryin’ an’ Caleb think him stuck up dere, sah.’

  ‘All right. I’ll come and see, Clorinda.’

  ‘Excuse me a moment, Miss Morrison,’ I said and followed Twice to the back garden.

  In St Jago, daylight and dark are as sudden as all else, and the bright afternoon had turned into the five-minute twilight as we rounded the corner of the laundry building where Dram was looking anxiously up at the roof and whining. In the gable, there was a small square hole between roof and ceiling and Twice climbed the garden ladder up the gable, looked inside the hole and then put his hand in. Then he quickly jerked it out, shaking it, and cursed: ‘You bloody brute!’ He then peered in through the hole again and slowly descended to the ground.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Has he a mongoose up there?’

  ‘No he hasn’t,’ Twice said. ‘She is very busy having kittens.’

  ‘I always said—’

  At the voice that croaked from the twilight behind me, I turned round. There she was, a greyish-brown shade, the parasol in one hand, die canvas bag in the other.

  ‘I always said Charlie was a silly unnatural name for that cat,’ said my friend Cousin Emmie.

  Bello:

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  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of a good story, narrative and entertainment, and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  Jane Duncan

  Born in Scotland in 1910, Jane Duncan spent her childhood in Glasgow, going for holidays to the Black Isle of Inverness. After taking her degree at Glasgow University she moved to England in 1931, and when war broke out she was commissioned in the WAAF and worked in Photographic Intelligence.

  After the war she moved to the West Indies with her husband, who appears as ‘Twice’ Alexander in her novels. Shortly after her husband’s death, she returned to Jemimaville near Cromarty, not far from her grandparents’ croft which inspired the beloved ‘Reachfar’. Jane Duncan died in 1976.

  Copyright

  First published 1964 by Macmillan

  This edition published 2015 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan,

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

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  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-9786-4 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-9784-0 HB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-9785-7 PB

  Copyright © Elizabeth Jane Cameron, 1964

  The right of Elizabeth Jane Cameron to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by her in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means

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  without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations

  and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

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