Touch Not the Cat
Page 28
They could not have shot him, they could not. It was to have been an accident. Surely I could not have guessed wrongly about that?
A sound came, breaking through the very thought, shattering it. A cracking, creaking noise, like a big door strained to breaking point. The noise was drowned by a lashing gust of wind, then in the lull behind the wind it came again.
Ashley? He had gone, as completely as if a line had fused. I think I was still calling him, on a silent, jagged pattern of terror, when, drowning out all the other storm sounds of the night, the Lower Sluice smashed under the weight of wind and water, and the flood came.
It came in a tidal wave, that smashed through the ancient walls of the maze and broke, filthy, and swirling with the weight of the whole moat behind it, against the pavilion. The old structure seemed to shake and groan as if it would tear from its moorings in the grass, and buck away down the flood like a ship dragging her anchor. Then the water found its way in. There was a choking, fighting eternity, in which every second seemed like an hour, when the water pounded the gaping walls, spurting through with terrifying power. The jets shot in from every side, splashing and swirling together to join in a whirlpool which started, as rapidly as a sink filling under the taps, to rise from ankle to crouching thigh, to waist, to breasts . . . And with it rose the debris of years, whirling and battering its way round the trap, so that even the imminence of drowning seemed less fearful than the blows from floating spars and fragments of planking with rusty nails still in them, and the weedlike nets of twigs loaded with the slime of mud and clods and trailing grass. I thrust myself upwards against the ceiling as hard as I could, holding both arms bent in front of my face to protect mouth and nostrils from the swirling filth. If the pavilion floor were only as solid as it had seemed, it might trap even an inch of air for me to breathe, until the flood poured past, as it surely would in minutes, then spread through maze and orchard and cottage garden, and went down . . .
The pavilion floor was not solid. As I pressed up hard against it, it lifted slightly, like magic, into clear air. There was a crash as a section of planking upended itself, and fell aside. I straightened up, breast-high in the pouring floodwater, then pulled myself clear, and up on to the pavilion floor.
Almost before I was clear, the flood was at the brim of the trap. I slammed the square of planking back again, grabbed the end of the day bed, and yanked it across the floor till a leg stood squarely on the trap, then jumped on the bed and craned to look out through the broken window-shutter.
What I saw was a worldful of moonlight, with neither bound nor horizon, just a glimmering, shadow-tossing expanse of water and sky merged into one, with clouds, and the shadows of clouds, driving and melting across the moon and the image of the moon. Trees billowed black against the sky, or flung down nets of branches to trap their own wild reflections. There was no maze, no orchard, no avenue of beeches between me and the Court; only this shining otherworld of moonlight, of trees like shadows, and shadows like clouds.
Something went past on the flood; an arm, a stiff hand clutching at air, a black shape slowly turning. Even as the terror took breath in me to cry out, I saw it for what it was, a dead branch borne along to lodge against the pavilion steps.
I shut my eyes, squeezing them tightly together, but inside the lids, against the fizzing darkness, there were still those images of death. I opened them again, straining through the chaos of emptiness and dying wind, to find my love.
There, as before, was the waste of moonlit water, broken with black shapes of trees and bushes, and, visible from moment to moment as ripples and wind swayed the intervening boughs aside, the smashed remains of the Lower Sluice where the loosened water of the moat plunged down to swell the flooded garden. No light glimmered now, where I knew the black bulk of the Court to be.
I stretched higher, straining to see. And I saw Rob.
He was bent half double, seemingly oblivious of danger, wrestling with the wheel of the sluice. For a numbed and speechless moment I looked to see my cousins jump out of the darkness at him, but nothing happened, and then I saw that where he stood the ground was dry, and willows grew there, and the monstrous shapes of gunneras, and I recognised, with no flicker of disbelief, or even surprise, the High Sluice, a full third of a mile away from me, and on the far side of the Court.
Whether I really did see anything, or whether – as happens with childhood memories – I have added his story to the shadowy and nightmare impressions that I, on the edge of the tragedy, received, I do not know. But it seems to me now as if, across the nearer scene, the other, now clear, now dislimning and fading like an image stamped on gauze, or an old film twice exposed, came and went, as real and vivid to me as the window-frame under my hands. It was something that had never happened before, nor has it again. I can only explain it by suggesting that in that time of near-death we were so close that there was more than communication between us, there was identity. I saw with his eyes, but at the same time I saw with my own.
The twins, intending to go back to the High Sluice, had left the wheel still in place. Rob wrenched at it, and it turned, smoothly in its oil, and the heavy gates surged slowly shut till, with a final suck and swish of water, their flanges met and gripped, held by the weight of the incoming river. He made sure of them, then tugged the wheel off its hub, picked up the torch which he had propped on the gate to light the job, and ran back the way he had come.
The path was still sodden along the moatside, but the level was dropping fast, as the bulk of the water poured through the broken sluice gate and the gaps it had torn in the southern bank of the moat. He sloshed and slithered past the end of the East Bridge, then paused to pitch the sluice wheel down among the roots of the nearest like tree. Then he switched off the torch, and, more cautiously, began to make his way down the path that led to the Overflow.
The water was still coming over here, pouring through the lip of the moat where it had torn its way. In places it rushed down with frightening power, carrying a dangerous freight of branches and stones and pieces of timber. The moon spun out from a bank of driving cloud to show the swans, wings set like sails and the six cygnets safely aboard, paddling past on the flood with ruffled dignity. The rooks were up in the high night, complaining. The farm dog barked, but no light showed there, nor any through the Vicarage trees.
He floundered down towards the maze. Under the beeches it was black dark and he went cautiously, straining his eyes for any movement that might be a man. Beyond the beech trunks, and the islanded bushes of the south shrubbery, the maze showed only as a moving flood laced with driftwood and the tracery of hedge tops. But the pavilion stood foursquare, with water no higher than the doorsill.
He paused, getting his breath, backing in against a beech bole in deep shadow. He held the heavy torch clubbed ready in his hand.
Safe, love? he asked me.
Safe.
At that moment, clearly audible above the noise of wind and flood, came another crack like an echo of the first, and with the crack a cry. It came from the Lower Sluice.
Rob ran forward. The water was almost to his waist. He struggled through the bushes, slipping and stumbling on mud, till he could see the sluice gate. Here, through the smashed gate, the water still poured in a white torrent, but the banks immediately to either side of the sluice were heavily reinforced with stone, and had held undamaged. Over them, where the double water-stair had fed the Overflow, loud slopes of smooth water slid to swell the flood below.
Then he saw James. The latter was kneeling by the sluice, half in the rushing water, one arm hooked for support across what remained of the smashed gate. In his other hand was an axe.
Ashley!
The warning burst in my head, and I saw Rob check momentarily. They were both clear to me now; James, the wet leather of his jacket gleaming like an otter’s, the axe poised and ready; Rob armed only with the torch, fighting for a foothold on the slimy stones as he scrambled up through the sliding slab of the cascade.
But my cousin made no move to attack him; he seemed, indeed, not to have noticed Rob’s approach. He was stooping low over the smashed rubble of timber wedged below the sluice. Still holding with his left hand, he bent forward and began to hack with what force he could at a spar which, wedged clear across the channel, held down a mass of wreckage.
Then Rob shouted something, thrust the torch into his pocket, ran forward to the edge of the channel, and dropped to his knees.
He had seen what lay below the spar, and so had I.
Emory was alive. His head and arms were clear of the rushing water, his hands gripping painfully at the rough stones of the wall, but his shoulders were pinned down by the wedged spar, and his body held submerged by the tangled mat of weeds and branches, invisible in the pouring flood.
Rob threw himself flat, and reached downwards to grip one of Emory’s wrists.
James, with his back to him, had apparently neither seen him, nor heard him shout. As Rob leaned down, reaching for Emory, my other cousin looked sharply round. He abandoned the spar he was attacking, turned quickly and got to his feet, axe in hand.
Neither Rob nor I was ever quite clear about what James had meant to do. He was yelling something, and the axe swung high. Then his foot shot from under him on the slimy wood. He lost his footing, and fell hard across the spar. The axe flew from his grip. He scrabbled there for a moment, his body down across his brother’s, then the water swept him away and down, out of sight past the trunks of the flooded trees. At the same moment the spar, loosened no doubt by James’s fall, cracked again, swung in the current, then spun loose and away. The clutching hands were torn loose from the stones, breaking Rob’s grip, and suddenly Rob was alone at the sluice, with the water roaring past his feet, and the moon sailing out high and white to light the waste of moving water where there had once been a fair garden.
Ashley, 1835.
He moved a hand. It met the familiar, soft folds of a coverlet. He was lying, warm and naked, in his bed in the pavilion. His limbs felt heavy still, but with the aftermath of loving. The linen under his cheek was wet with a forgotten grief.
Linen? It was silk, and smelled of lavender. He opened his eyes. Her hair, soft and silky and alive, was spread under his cheek on the pillow. As he raised himself, suddenly light and wide awake, she smiled up at him.
‘What is it, love? What ails thee?’
He ran a lock of her hair through his fingers. ‘I had such a dream, Nell. I dreamed I was dead, lying out there in the grass, and my ghost came drifting back to look for you, as they say ghosts drift back to whatever anchors them to earth. But you had gone, and all I could do was wait here, lonely, while the years passed, and were empty; only the other ghosts came and went. And while I waited here, watching for you, the trees grew, and the ways tangled, as if the place still shut its doors against you, and I thought you could never find your way to me again.’
‘But I came.’
His head went down to hers. His tears dried against her cheek. ‘You came. And they can never part us now, Nell, never again. This is ours, for ever, love. It was death that was the dream.’
21
Juliet: It is not yet near day.
It was the nightingale, and not the lark . . .
Romeo: It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale.
Romeo and Juliet, III, v
So much I believe I saw, then there was nothing but the sheen of water and the moon out over it, and a rack of cloud blown away down a dying wind. The trees still roared. The water still poured past the pavilion. It had flooded the steps, and crept in under the door, and was meandering across the wooden floor. Pool joined pool and runnel, runnel. But before the shining skin had joined and flooded the boards, the water’s impetus seemed spent. Movement ceased. The shallow pool lay, reaching from the threshold to the centre of the floor, but going no further, the last ripple of the flood that had drowned the garden, islanding the pavilion like a ship floating.
What brought me back to myself was the sound, distant yet unmistakable, of Emory’s car starting. I stiffened, turning my head to listen, guessing the direction. Yes, it was his, and parked by the sound of it on the curved sweep outside the church gate, near the road. I heard the driver – James, surely? – gun the engine hard, twice, and then the wheels gained the surface of the road, and the sound faded rapidly westwards. My cousins – both presumably, for neither would have left the place alone – had gone. Let them go, let them go. Whatever the reckoning had to be, that was for tomorrow.
There is a gap after that, while I tried to reach Rob again, but shock, or exhaustion, or cold must have so numbed me that I simply sat there on the bed waiting for him to come. It didn’t occur to me that he had never known his way into the maze, and that I was penned here at the centre, as inaccessible as any Sleeping Beauty.
I suppose I could have guided him through, if I had been able to hold my mind clear. Left and next right . . . straight . . . right and next left . . . straight . . . U-turn sharp left and repeat the lot in reverse . . . the first gate should now be beside you on your left-hand side . . .
But I didn’t, and he never asked. I felt something move out of the dark like a caress, and knew he was sensing my exhaustion. I got it faintly, very faintly: Hold up, love, I’m almost with you.
I didn’t know how. He was coming. I thought about nothing else. I waited.
Either he had found James’s axe, or he had been up to the farm for another. I could hear the steady, hacking sounds, and the splashes, coming gradually nearer as he approached me through the maze. Slowly, but straight. He was cutting his way through. The hedges, overgrown and already sparse through neglect, had been further damaged by the weight of the flood and the debris it carried. I could hear the ancient stems parting, and the swish and splashing as he forced his way through. The yews that some long-dead Ashley had planted, and that had taken two hundred years or so to grow and thicken into those lovely head-high walls; and now Rob was slicing his way straight through, to me.
Rob Ashley. No one had a better right.
The crashing stopped. I heard the surging splash as he thrust through the last hedge, then he waded across the moonlit water of the clearing, and ran up the steps to the door.
Love?
Here. The south window, Rob.
The shutter went back with a slam, and his shadow blacked out the moonlight in the window. It wasn’t James’s axe he was holding, it was a heavy woodman’s axe from the farmyard; he had even thought to bring a dry blanket, which he wore wrapped like a burnous round his head and shoulders. He clambered through, and landed with a thud and a squelch on the flooded boards. Then he was beside me on the bed, holding me tightly and kissing me, and I was kissing him, and somehow, at some point, our soaked clothes came off and we were together under the warm rug, while the accumulated terrors and tensions of the night swelled and broke in a fierce explosion of love, and, with no more thought or reservation than two wild creatures mating in the woods, we took each other and then lay together, clasped and quiet, and outside, I swear it, the nightingale began to sing.
If anyone told me now that I could have slept like that, in all the damp and discomfort of the flooded pavilion, I would not have believed them. But, between love and exhaustion and deep happiness, sleep I did, and so did Rob, wrapped tightly together under the rug, and neither of us stirred until the early sun, reaching the window, threw such a dazzle of light from the water outside on to the ceiling mirror that it beat against our eyelids and woke us.
‘It’s still singing,’ I said sleepily.
‘What is?’
‘The nightingale. I told you—’
‘That’s a lark.’
‘Oh? So it is.’ I came awake then, to the blaze of sunlight and the morning birds and the warmth of Rob’s body along mine. He was lying half on his back, eyes wide and wakeful, but with every muscle and line of his body relaxed, warm and still, into the morning’s contentment. ‘Have you been awake long?’
‘Mm?’
‘What did they put the mirror on the ceiling for?’
I gave a little snort of laughter, deep into his shoulder. ‘I forgot all about that. It was supposed to be put up there by some loose-screw – your ancestor Wicked Nick gets the blame – so he could watch himself in bed with his lady friends. Good thing it was dark last night. Just think how off-putting if one suddenly saw oneself—’
‘That’s the point. One couldn’t.’
‘But one can,’ I protested. ‘And very cosy we look, all bundled up like this.’
‘Aye. But then the bed isn’t where it ought to be. You can see where that was by the moulding on the wall over there. The way that mirror’s angled, if you were lying on the bed all you’d see was a piece of the floor hereabouts.’ He tilted his head back, examining it. ‘Is it meant to be like that, do you think? Or have the supports gone from one side? If so, maybe we should get out from under.’
‘It’s always been like that. Well,’ I said, ‘poor Nick’s been libelled about the mirror as he has about a few other things. Ellen Makepeace, for instance.’
He misunderstood me. ‘Oh, it was true enough about her. Funny, isn’t it, to think it all started here, him and her and the garden in the moonlight, and maybe even your nightingale . . . If he cared for her, that is.’
‘Oh, he did. He cared very much.’
I heard the smile in his voice. ‘You might just be prejudiced.’
‘Maybe I am. But he did. I know he did.’
I said no more. There would be time later to tell him what I had found out about Nick and Ellen Ashley, and what had happened in the cottage last night. Time to tell him about my narrow escape from the trap under this very floor. Time to find out what had happened to my cousins, and where they had gone. Time for all the things that the immediate future must hold; and after that, time for the real future, ours, Rob Ashley’s and mine. But for the moment, let it go, let it go. Let us keep, while we could, our own island world of joy. ‘It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale, and not the lark.’