Kaspar the Titanic Cat

by Michael Morpurgo

  That was when I spotted Lizziebeth. I could see at once what she was trying to do. She was on her hands and knees and climbing out of the gutter up onto the roof tiles. Ahead of her was a pigeon, hopping ever upward on one leg toward the ridge of the roof. Its other leg hung useless. Lizziebeth was following it, cooing as she climbed, stopping from time to time to throw it some crumbs, trying all she could to entice it down. She seemed quite unaware of the danger she was in.

  My first instinct was to shout to her, to warn her, but something told me that to alarm her at that moment was the worst thing I could do. Instead I climbed out of the window, closing it behind me so that Kaspar couldn’t follow me, and crept along the gutter, trying not to look over the parapet and down into the street, eight stories below. Lizziebeth had almost reached the ridge above me, but by now the pigeon was hopping away from her along the ridge toward the chimney stack. I climbed up after her. Only when I was right below her did I venture to call out to her, and then only as softly as I could.

  “Lizziebeth,” I said, “it’s me. It’s Johnny. I’m right below you. You mustn’t go any higher. You mustn’t.”

  She didn’t look down at first. She just kept climbing.

  “It’s the pigeon,” she told me. “He’s awful hurt. Looks like he’s broke his leg or something.”

  That was the moment she looked down. Only then did she realize just how high she was. All her fearlessness left her in an instant. She slipped at once and clung there, frozen with terror. The ridge was only a short distance above her, but I could see that she wasn’t going to be able to get up there on her own, not now, and that there was no possible way she could come down either.

  “Stay right where you are, Lizziebeth,” I told her. “Don’t move—I’m coming up.”

  All I could think of was that somehow I had to get her up onto that ridge. We’d just sit there until we were seen and rescue came. But between me and her was a steep tiled roof, acres of tiles, it seemed, and with no foothold, nothing to hold on to.

  One slip, one loose tile, and I’d be slipping and sliding back down the roof and probably over the parapet. It didn’t bear thinking about. So I tried not to. That was why I talked to her all the way up as I climbed. I wasn’t only trying to calm her fears, I was desperately trying to calm my own as well.

  “Just hang on, Lizziebeth. Look up at the pigeon. Whatever you do, don’t look down. I’m coming. I’ll be right there. Promise.”

  I climbed as fast as my shaking legs would allow. I went sideways across the tiles like a crab, zigzagging up the roof. It was longer, but it made it easier, safer, less steep. I just fixed my mind on reaching that ridge and climbed. More than once I dislodged a tile and sent it crashing down into the gutter below. Then at last I was up there and sitting astride the ridge. Now I was able to reach down, grasp Lizziebeth by the wrists, and haul her up. We sat there facing each other, safe for the moment, but both of us breathless with fear. The pigeon was quite oblivious to all that had been done to help it. It hopped one-legged back down the roof, along the gutter, and then up onto the parapet, pecking away at the crumbs as it went. It flew off quite happily.

  Someone must have been watching all this drama unfold, because the fire brigade came soon enough. There were bells clanging in the street below, and firemen in shiny helmets began to appear all along the gutter, one of them talking to us all the while, telling us again and again not to move. The truth is that neither of us could have moved even if we’d wanted to. They ran ladders up to us and lifted us down, Lizziebeth first. When at last I was carried in through the big window at the end of our corridor, I saw it was crowded with people. The hotel manager was there, also Skullface, Mary, Luke, Mr. Freddie, everyone. As I walked by, they all began to clap me on the back. It was only then that I really understood what I’d done. The manager pumped my hand and told me I was a proper little hero. But Skullface wasn’t clapping. She wasn’t smiling either. She knew something wasn’t quite as it should be, but I could tell she didn’t know what it was. I smiled at her, though, defiantly, triumphantly. I think I enjoyed that moment more than all the backslapping and handshaking. Although that was fun too.

  They served a celebratory supper for me down in the kitchens that night, and sat me at the head of the table. They sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” over and over again. We had quite a night of it. After a while the manager came to fetch me away. He was taking me up to the Stantons’ rooms, he told me, because the family wanted to thank me personally. When I was ushered in, I found the three of them lined up in the sitting room to greet me, Lizziebeth in her dressing gown. It was all very formal and proper. I stood before them, trying all I could not to catch Lizziebeth’s eye. I knew that just one look between us could give everything away.

  “Young man,” Mr. Stanton began, “Mrs. Stanton and I, but most of all Elizabeth, of course, owe you a very great debt of gratitude.”

  Suddenly I saw, and I could not have been more surprised, that there were tears in his eyes, and his voice broke. I had never imagined that men such as this could ever cry.

  “Elizabeth is our only child,” he went on, his voice charged with emotion. “She is very precious to us, and today you saved her life. We shall not forget this.”

  He stepped forward, shook my hand, and presented me with a large white envelope. “No money could ever be enough, of course, young man, but this is just a token of our deep appreciation for what you did, for your extraordinary courage.”

  I took the envelope from him and opened it. In it were five ten-pound notes. I had never in my life seen so much money. Before I could say thank you, or indeed say anything at all, Lizziebeth was standing there in front of me, holding out a large piece of paper. I was looking down at a picture of Kaspar.

  “I drew it for you,” she said. She was speaking to me as if we hardly knew each other. She was an amazing actress. “I like drawing pictures. It’s a cat. I hope you like it. I did it for you because I especially like black cats. And on the other side, you can see . . .” She turned the paper over for me. “On the other side I’ve done a picture of the ship we’re sailing home on next week. It’s got four big funnels, and Papa says it’s the biggest, fastest ship in the whole wide world. It’s true, isn’t it, Papa?”

  “She’s called the Titanic,” Mrs. Stanton added. “It’ll be her maiden voyage, you know. Isn’t she the most magnificent ship you ever saw?”

  * * *

  Stowaway

  I should have taken more notice of Lizziebeth’s drawings, appreciated them more when she gave them to me and afterward, but the truth was I’d never in my life seen so much money. Sitting on my bed late that night, I kept counting it to make sure I wasn’t dreaming it. Everyone on the corridor came in. They had to see it with their own eyes. Mary O’Connell held each note up to the light, I remember, to check it wasn’t a forgery. “Well, you never know, do you? Not with these rich folk,” she said. I told Mary something I hadn’t spoken about with the others: how I’d been thinking about it and was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about taking the money. Mary was always good about right and wrong; she understood these things.

  “I didn’t do it for the money, Mary,” I told her. “I did it because it was Lizziebeth up there.”

  “I know that, Johnny,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it, does it? This money is your ticket out of here. It’s a God-given fortune, so it is. There’s two years’ wages here. For God’s sakes, you could go anywhere, do anything. Wouldn’t any one of us like to do that! You don’t want to be having to shine shoes for the rest of your life, do you?”

  I lay awake most of that night, talking it all through with Kaspar; he was a good listener. By dawn I felt that despite everything Mary had said, I might have to give the money back. Lizziebeth’s drawings were a thank-you, and that was fine; but I couldn’t help thinking that the money was in some way a kind of payoff, reward money for a bellboy. No, I didn’t like being treated like a bellboy, and I d
idn’t want a reward. I’d give the money back. But then by morning I’d almost changed my mind again. Maybe Mary had been right after all. I’d keep the money. Why shouldn’t I?

  I was still lying there propped up on my pillows, with Kaspar curled up at the end of the bed, looking at Lizziebeth’s picture of the great ship with the four funnels steaming through the ocean, gulls flying overhead, when the door suddenly flew open. Skullface stood there. “I thought so. I thought as much!” she said. “First that girl was in here meowing like a cat, and that was odd enough. Then a day later she was up here again, wasn’t she? But this time up on the roof, just outside your window. Strange that. Strange sort of coincidence, I thought. D’you know something, Johnny Trott? I don’t believe in coincidences. And now you’re quite the little hero, aren’t you? Well, I weren’t born yesterday. I’m no one’s fool, Johnny Trott. I knew something fishy was going on. But now I can see it weren’t fishy at all; it were catty, more like.”

  She came into the room, shutting the door behind her, and stood over me, a nasty vindictive grin on her face. Kaspar had leaped onto the windowsill and was hissing and wailing at her furiously. “Well now,” she went on, “I hear you’ve come into the money, Johnny Trott, is that right?”

  I nodded.

  “Here’s the deal then,” she went on. “Either you pack your bags, hand in your uniform, and you’re out in the streets within the hour, or you hand over the money. It’s that simple. Hand over the money, and you can stay. I’ll even let you keep your horrible cat up here, for a while anyway. There, I can’t be more generous than that, can I now?”

  A few moments later, as she walked out of my room, tucking the envelope into her pocket, I was almost grateful to her. After all, she’d made my decision for me. I sat down on my bed, where Kaspar soon joined me for some petting and reassurance. I was thinking things through. I was no poorer than I had been before it all happened. And now at least I had her word, for what it was worth, that Kaspar would be safe, for a while anyway. I still had my job. I felt a great sense of relief, but that was very soon overwhelmed by a wave of sadness. All too soon now Lizziebeth would be leaving and sailing back to America. “I’m going to miss her. We’re both going to miss her, Kaspar,” I said aloud. “We won’t miss the money—we never really had it, did we?—but we will miss Lizziebeth. What are we going to do without her?”

  I shouldn’t have said anything. Kaspar must have understood enough of it, or maybe he just picked up on my sadness, I don’t know. But either way, it became clear to me as the days passed that he understood all too well that Lizziebeth would soon be going. After the very public rooftop rescue—it had been in all the papers too—Lizziebeth had the perfect excuse now to come up and see me often, even for us to be seen talking down in the lobby. So at least we were able to spend more and more time together during those final days.

  Time and again I was tempted to tell her about how Skullface had blackmailed me and taken her father’s money, but I thought how angry it would make her, how it was too much to expect a young girl of that age to keep quiet about such a thing. So I didn’t tell her anything about that, but I did tell her things I’d never told anyone else: about my life in the orphanage in Islington, about Harry, the cockroach that I’d kept as a pet in a matchbox, about Mr. Wellington, who was supposed to look after us, but who must have hated children so much because he’d caned us so often for the slightest thing. He caned me for keeping Harry, then took him away and stamped on him right in front of my eyes, in front of all of us. That was what made me run away in the end; I’d often thought of it before, but never dared. I told her how I’d wandered the streets of London for weeks, living rough, before finding work as a bellboy at the Savoy. And of course she wanted to know all about Countess Kandinsky. I told her my dream of finding my mother one day. I told her so many of my hopes and dreams. And all the while she listened wide-eyed.

  That last week together, things changed between Lizziebeth and me. From the moment we were sitting up on that roof, holding hands and sharing our fear, she was no longer a little rich girl from America, and I wasn’t a fourteen-year-old orphan from London. We had become proper friends, the best of friends. She no longer gabbled on all the time about herself or about Kaspar, as she had when I’d first known her. She asked questions, and she wanted answers. “We haven’t got much more time together,” she said one morning, “so you have to tell me everything, because I want to remember everything about you and about Kaspar forever and ever.”

  She’d bring me new drawings every day: of her house in New York, of the Statue of Liberty, of her island home in Maine, of her dressed as a pirate, of her with Kaspar, of me in my uniform, but mostly of Kaspar—Kaspar sleeping, Kaspar sitting, Kaspar hunting. But as the day for her to leave came ever closer, we became more silent together, more sad together. She would hug Kaspar close all the time she was with us in my room, and I could feel her wanting to stretch every minute into an hour, into a week, into a month. I wanted the same.

  It was on the last evening that she first suggested the idea. She was cradling Kaspar, rocking him gently, her head buried in his neck, when suddenly she looked up at me, her eyes filled with tears.

  “You could come, Johnny. You and Kaspar, you could come with us. We could go on the ship together. You could come and live in New York. You’d love it. I know you would. And in America you wouldn’t have to be a bellboy. In America you can be whatever you want to be; that’s what Papa says. It’s the land of the free. You could be president of the United States. Anyone could be. Please come, Johnny, please come.” As she was talking, I felt a sudden hope surging inside me at the prospect of a new and exciting life across the ocean, in America, but immediately I could see how impossible it was.

  “I can’t, Lizziebeth,” I said. “I mean, I couldn’t even pay for my passage…”

  “What about the money?” she replied. “What about the money my father gave you?”

  I told her everything, all about how Skullface had blackmailed me. I hadn’t intended to. It just came pouring out.

  Lizziebeth was silent for a while.

  “She’s a witch,” she said finally, “and I hate her.” Then she brightened suddenly. “I could ask Papa,” she went on. “He’s got a lot of money. He could pay for your passage.”

  “No,” I told her firmly. “I don’t want money from him.”

  She looked hurt and crestfallen at this, and I wished at once I hadn’t spoken so directly. “You don’t want to come, do you?” she said.

  “I do,” I told her. “I really do. I don’t want to be carrying luggage and polishing shoes all my life, do I? And I’d love to go across to America in that big ship you drew for me—what was it called again?”

  “The Titanic,” Lizziebeth said, in tears now. “We’re going early in the morning. We’ve got to go by train first, Ma says, before we can get to the ship. You could come with us. You could come and see us off. And you could bring Kaspar.”

  “I suppose I could see the ship then, couldn’t I?” I said, but I knew even as I spoke that I was grasping at straws. “It’s no good, Lizziebeth. Skullface wouldn’t let me have a day off work. I know she wouldn’t. I’d really like to see the Titanic too. Is it really the biggest ship in the world?”

  “And the fastest,” she said, getting up suddenly and handing me Kaspar. “I’m going to speak to Papa. You saved my life, didn’t you? I’m going to ask him, and I’m going to tell him about Skullface too.”

  She was out of my room and gone before I could stop her.

  The very same day, only a few hours later, Skullface was seen walking grim faced out of the tradesmen’s entrance with her suitcase, “never to return,” as Mr. Freddie told me with a smile all over his face. But I never saw my money again.

  The next morning I found myself sitting in a first-class train carriage with the Stanton family on the way to Southampton. The manager had told me that he’d had a special request from Mr. Stanton that Kaspar and I be allowed to
accompany the family to Southampton and help them with their luggage on board ship. He said that considering recent events and how I had enhanced the good name of the hotel, he was happy this one time to let me go. But I would be on duty, he reminded me. I had to wear my Savoy uniform, carry all their trunks and bags on board, and see to their every need until the ship sailed.

  In among the luggage I carried out of the hotel that day was a picnic basket Mary O’Connell had “borrowed” from the stores. Inside the basket was Kaspar. He yowled all the way down in the elevator, wailed all the way across the lobby, past Mr. Freddie, who lifted his hat to him in farewell. He only stopped his complaining once we were in the cab, when Lizziebeth took him out and cradled him in her arms. That was when she began telling her mother and father the whole story of our secret, of how we’d met, all about Kaspar and me, and Countess Kandinsky, and my orphanage, and Harry the cockroach, and Mr. Wellington, and how I’d run away. One story flowed into the next, my life story and Kaspar’s in a torrent of words that tumbled over one another in her excitement to tell the whole thing. She hardly paused for breath until we got to the station.