Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

by Alan Bradley

  Painfully, lifting Gladys out of the way, I climbed into a kneeling position, hanging on to the holly hedge to assist me. In fact, I didn’t really have to act too much: I had taken more of a battering than I expected. My hands and face were scratched by the holly and my bones felt as if they had been dumped into a sack and shaken.

  Authenticity comes at a cost.

  I unwound my scarf and wrapped it round my head, taking care to cover one eye. A couple of holly berries, secretly seized and crushed between thumb and finger, provided an admirable substitute for additional blood, which I smeared dramatically on the far side of my face while adjusting my makeshift bandage.

  That done, I hauled myself fully to my feet, staggered across the road and up the path, and banged on the door.

  I listened intently but there was not a sound from inside. No footsteps, no voice calling out for me to wait. Nothing.

  I banged again, harder this time.

  “Help!” I shouted.

  I know it wasn’t the most original thing to call out, but it was short and to the point.

  I put my ear to the door and was immediately overcome with the most odd feeling. It was as if someone on the other side had their ear to the door also—no more than an inch from my own. I could almost feel the warmth—almost hear their heartbeat.

  I gave the spot a good raking with my fingernails—which, thankfully, I had begun to grow again since being transported to Canada and back. The wooden grating sound so close to the ear would be sickening to the listener on the other side, as if I were gnawing through the door with my teeth.

  “Help!” I pleaded, more weakly this time, vibrating my lips with a forefinger to add a bubbly quality to my voice. If my calculations were correct, it would sound as if I were suffering a bronchial hemorrhage.

  And by all that is holy, it worked!

  A bolt clicked, the knob turned, the door came slightly open, and an eye appeared—a flustered eye, which looked me up and down.

  “Yes?” asked a voice. “What is it?”

  “I fell on your ice,” I said, pointing painfully with my thumb. The “your” was a masterstroke. With just four letters and a single syllable it raised the twin specters of blame and a possible lawsuit.

  The eye, now looking frightened, shifted focus to the road and back again.

  “You’d better come in,” the voice said, and the door came open, but barely wide enough to allow me to squeeze inside.

  The woman who stood facing me was no taller than I am, although her short hair was completely gray. She was dressed rather smartly and entirely in black: black jumper set with dainty black pearls and earrings, black skirt, black shoes, and I saw at once that what I had mistaken for fear in her eyes was, in fact, grief.

  This, without doubt, was Lillian Trench, the witch—even though she didn’t look like one.

  I judged her to be about the same age as Cynthia Richardson, or perhaps a bit older, which made her about forty. There was something vaguely familiar about the woman, but I could not for the moment think what it was. Had she been at the recital at which Carla had sung? Or had I, perhaps, met her—or at least seen her, unlikely as it might seem—somewhere in Canada?

  As I waited for Miss—or was it Mrs.?—Trench to speak, I had a quick look round before she found an opportunity to chuck me out. We were standing in rather a cramped and overheated hall: a bedraggled hanging fern, an ebony bench with coat rack, umbrella stand with two black umbrellas, a cast-iron frog which I guessed was a doorstop, and a coconut mat upon which were placed a pair of galoshes. A pair of wet galoshes. Ladies’ galoshes.

  Three doors opened off the little room, all of them presently closed.

  I could hear the woman breathing.

  “Are you all right?” she asked at last.

  It was one of those questions to which a wrong answer could result in the loss of empires; the kind of question that comes up time and again in fairy tales.

  “Are you all right?” she asked again, a little more impatiently this time.

  “I—I’m not sure,” I said. “I think I need to lie down.”

  It was a clever maneuver.

  Had I asked to sit, she would have parked me on the seat of the hall-stand. To let me lie down, she would need to open one of the three closed doors and allow me into her inner sanctum.

  She looked at me intently, making a decision. With my head still half swathed in my scarf and the backs of my hands covered with bloody scratches, I must have looked a fright.

  “Very well, then,” she said, raising her voice to an unnecessary loudness. “You’d better come in.”

  She paused, as if to count to three, before opening the door on the right.

  We passed slowly—the woman leading me—into a small drawing room, where she walked me to a Victorian horsehair sofa. I lowered myself and began to lift my feet.

  “No, wait—” she said, eyeing my wet galoshes, and reached for a newspaper.

  Today’s Times, I noted.

  “Put this under your feet.”

  I obeyed, peering meekly out at her from beneath my makeshift bandage.

  “Let’s have a look at you,” she said, reaching out to remove it. I shrank back.

  “No,” I said. “I could have concussion. I’m seeing double at times.”

  Thanks to my Girl Guide training, I was able to bluff convincingly when required. All those wet and windy Wednesday evenings spent in cold, drafty parish halls were paying off at last.

  “Could I please have a glass of water?” I asked, then quickly: “No, sorry. I think tea would be better.”

  I had no idea whether this was true or not, but it sounded plausible. Besides, tea took longer to make: With water, she’d be back too quickly.

  “Hot, sweet tea may be beneficial in cases of shock,” I added, trying to give my words that condescending and slightly snotty tone that first-aid manuals have, as if I were quoting from something I had memorized.

  She started for the door, then stopped. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  I waited for several moments, as if racking my brains for the correct answer.

  “De Luce,” I said, slowly. “Flavia de Luce.”

  “I thought so.”

  And with that, she left the room.

  There was no time to waste. I sprang to my feet and pressed an ear to the door panel.

  Nothing but silence on the other side.

  I made a quick survey of the room. Nothing unusual caught my eye—at least at first. I ran my fingers along the gap behind the upholstered seat of the sofa and came up with thruppence ha’penny and a chromium cigar clipper.

  Aha! Gentlemen guests.

  I peeled back the carpet: a prime hiding place for personal papers, as I knew from my own experience. Nothing under it but dust and grit. Lillian would win no prizes for housekeeping.

  A small library housed on a couple of bookshelves contained just what you would expect to find in a cottage: Dickens, Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson, Ethel Mannin, Elizabeth Goudge, E. M. Delafield, Christie, Marsh, and—I must admit my heart gave a little gazelle-like leap—Hobbyhorse House.

  I remembered something Daffy had once told me:

  “One can learn from a glance at a person’s library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.”

  Almost on instinct I plucked the book from the shelf and flipped it open to the title page:

  “To Elsie,” it said, “with love and yarning.”

  And it was signed, in mauve ink, by the author: Oliver Inchbald.

  Elsie? Who on earth was Elsie? And what could yarning mean? Storytelling? Yearning? Or did Oliver Inchbald and Elsie used to knit together?

  Time was running out. Lillian Trench would be back at any instant with the tea.

  A quick scan of the fireplace and the hearth showed none of the witchlike implements you would expect: no cauldron hanging from an iron hook, no besom broomstick, no bundles of mandrake roots dangling at the end of a cord to dry�
��not so much as a trace of a black cat.

  But then, I realized, a modern-day witch would work at a bank in the city. She would be a wizard at shorthand, listen to Nat King Cole on the wireless, drive a Morris Minor tourer, type up her spells on alphabetical index cards, and buy her potions—along with her Number Seven complexion milk and foundation lotion—at Boots the Chemists.

  Cats, brooms, and pointed hats would be as out of fashion nowadays as whalebone corsets.

  The room was disappointingly bare of clues. All that remained to search was a horrid oak sideboard: the kind of thing which would be stuffed, I knew, with Victorian sheet music, smelly Georgian chamber pots, boxes of tarnished silver cutlery, and candles and safety matches for when the lights fused.

  From the kitchen came the rattle of china, signaling that tea was on the way. There was no time left for further investigation. I needed to get back to the sofa with my feet on the newspaper before Lillian Trench returned. While I was no more superstitious than the next person, I knew that snooping through the belongings of a witch might not be the healthiest of occupations.

  In the seconds remaining, and in one last attempt to gather even a crumb of information, I flung open the front doors of the sideboard.

  Inside, folded up like an accordion, his knees tucked up against his chin, was a person whom I took at first to be a leprechaun. A shock of white hair gave him an ageless and somehow childlike look.

  His head turned slowly and he gazed out at me, his big, sad eyes made even larger by the impossibly thick glass of his spectacles.

  “Ah,” he said, his voice like a ghost in a bottle. “You’ve found me.”

  Then slowly, and wincing with pain, he unfolded himself into the room, as if he were an aviator emerging from his cramped cockpit after a record-breaking ocean flight.

  I recognized him instantly, of course.

  It was Hilary Inchbald…better known as Crispian Crumpet.

  At one time, and perhaps still even now, the most famous boy in the world.

  What do you say to someone who is as well-known as the King of England?

  And then I remembered that I had actually met the King of England: his Royal Highness George the Sixth, who had turned out to be a lovely man, and not at all like his pictures. He had first thanked me for returning a rare and stolen stamp to him and then gone on to chat for much of the afternoon about potassium and, rather sadly, I thought, the ways of the wasp in winter.

  As I have said—an altogether lovely man.

  I was still searching for words when Lillian Trench pushed open the door with her behind and entered the drawing room carrying a tea tray.

  “Ah, Hilary,” she said. “Had I known you were going to join us, I’d have brought an extra cup.”

  She seemed not at all surprised to find me off the sofa.

  “You’ve made a remarkable recovery,” she said, with an amused glance at the scarf in which half of my head and one eye was still wrapped.

  Sheepishly, I unwound the thing and stuffed it into my pocket, stepping somewhat clumsily out of her way.

  “Mind the Auditories,” she said, placing the tray on the table. “They’re difficult to see against the pattern of the carpet, but they do tend to get underfoot, the dear silly things.”

  I must have gaped at her.

  “The Auditories,” she explained, pouring milk into her tea and raising an eyebrow to ask if I wanted the same. “The Listeners.”

  I knew, of course, the poem by Mr. de la Mare in which a traveler knocks at the door of an abandoned house by night. Daffy had scared the blue daylights out of me by reading it aloud barely before I was out of the cradle.

  “You may not believe in them,” Lillian Trench continued, “but that doesn’t mean you aren’t stepping on them.”

  I stared hard at the carpet. Had something shifted against the pattern?

  It was hard to say, but it made me feel uneasy.

  Crispian Crumpet—or Hilary Inchbald, I should say—meanwhile stood quietly by.

  If I were being asked to describe him in a word, as we often were in the rowdy and frequently violent Girl Guide game of Name Your Poison, I should have said “insignificant.”

  His whole being seemed to be apologizing for being there, and it was this uncanny sense of his being simultaneously present and absent that made me think I had seen him before. Had it been in the photos Frank Borley had shown me at the offices of Lancelot Gath, in London? I was too startled to think properly, and set the idea aside for another occasion.

  What was Hilary Inchbald doing at Lillian Trench’s cottage? Why had he been hiding in the sideboard?

  One of these two people, I knew, had just come down from London, arriving no more than minutes ahead of me. I needed time to sort things out, and it seemed to me that the best way to do so was to remain in this house for as long as I could possibly manage.

  Most people, I suppose, would shy away from commenting on someone who had just crawled out of a cupboard, but I am not most people.

  “You must be very stiff and sore,” I said. Judging by his posture and the way he was rubbing his wrists, this was obvious enough.

  “Would you like me to rub your shoulders?” I asked, risking all.

  Hilary Inchbald looked at me with surprise in his enormous eyes.

  “Yes, thank you,” he said, sitting down on a chair, trying to keep his crooked back straight.

  I moved behind him and gently took hold of his shoulders. His bones were tiny, bowed and birdlike beneath my fingers, and I could have cried.

  “Quite cold suddenly, isn’t it?” I asked, with a glance at Lillian Trench, who was sipping her tea as calmly as if she were a duchess at a Buckingham Palace garden party.

  No doubt about it: She was a cool customer.

  Neither of them replied, but I could already feel Hilary Inchbald’s muscles begin to relax under my probing fingers.

  “They say it’s to be westerly for Rockall, veering northwesterly, force six to nine, with occasional gusts to force ten,” I said, desperate to keep the talk going.

  I had gathered the information from the Shipping Forecast on the wireless.

  Could this be Flavia de Luce speaking? Flavia de Luce—who despises small talk as the mongoose despises the snake—prattling on about the stupid weather in some godforsaken corner of the ocean simply in order to give artificial respiration to a dying conversation?

  You can imagine my relief when Hilary Inchbald said, “Yes. Yes, I believe that is so.”

  All this civility was getting on Lillian Trench’s nerves. I knew this by the way she put down her cup with a saucer-cracking clatter.

  “You were seen…the day before yesterday…coming out of Thornfield Chase,” she said, thrusting her chin forward into a slightly accusing position.

  “I know I was,” I said. “I saw your curtains move.”

  Two could play at this game.

  Again the air went slightly frigid. I could already see that conversation with this woman was doomed to lurch along in a series of freezes and thaws, like all of the earth’s Ice Ages advancing and receding and advancing again in speeded-up motion, as in a comedy from the days of the silent cinema.

  A yowl and a scratching behind me made me turn round. Outside on the windowsill, a cat of many colors was standing full length on its back legs, clawing at the window frame.

  “Oh, Thomas More,” Lillian Trench said, moving quickly to raise the sash. “There you are. I thought you were—”

  So the woman did have a cat after all. At least, I assumed it was hers, since cats don’t cry at doors or windows other than their own.

  The cat stepped in through the transom with as little regard for any of us as royalty has for the anonymous footman who holds open a door.

  My scalp was already prickling with recognition as I realized that this marbled cat—this Thomas More—was the same cat I had seen in the room where I had found Mr. Sambridge hanging dead behind the door.

  I was sure of it.r />
  “Thomas More is inclined to wander,” Lillian Trench said, as if an explanation were necessary.

  The cat ignored her and went straight to Hilary Inchbald, looking up at him adoringly, making little cries of pleasure as it rubbed against his legs.

  The sound of its purring seemed to fill the room.

  Hilary bent over and lifted the cat into his arms. They began to nuzzle each other in a way which might have been censored had they been a man and woman in a cinema film.

  Still, in spite of that, I had to give him credit: He knew how to hold the animal correctly, with one hand spread under it to cradle its breastbone, the other making a firm ledge for its back feet. Altogether unlike those ignoramuses who dangle their pets as if they were a cargo of rice sacks being hoisted by a crane from dock to deck on an East China steamer.

  This man knew cats.

  Thomas More bumped the top of his head against the underside of Hilary’s chin.

  It was obvious that the affection was mutual.

  That should have told me something, but it didn’t. The significance of this rather odd scene—Hilary Inchbald, Lillian Trench, and Thomas More—did not come until it was almost too late.

  Perhaps it was the unreality of the day—the Mad-Hatter’s-tea-party feel about the place—that threw me off the beam. I was disorientated, as Alf Mullet puts it: lost in a twilight world which I wasn’t sure was not mostly of my own making.

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to organize my thoughts.

  What was this strange woman to Hilary Inchbald, I wondered, and he to her? What could they possibly have in common, these two odd ducks, one of them allegedly a witch and the other no more than a pale shadow in a mirror?

  “Did you know Mr. Sambridge well?” I asked.

  It was a bold shot out of the blue, calculated to shake up the situation; otherwise, we might have sat there all day talking of the weather, tea, and cats.