Aunt Maria (21 page)

“Good day to you, ma'am,” he said. “We were expecting you. My sister's in here.” He brought us into the room where Miss Phelps sat like a gnome in her high chair. They were so much expecting us that there were four cups of coffee waiting on the table and a plate of ginger cookies.

Mum went and shook hands with Miss Phelps, and we were all awfully polite for quite a while. Then Mum said, “About Antony Green—” and both Phelpses leaned forward until Miss Phelps nearly fell out of her chair. Mum said, “I think one or other of you might have told someone he's buried alive! How long has he been missing?”

“Twenty years,” said Miss Phelps. Mum began to steam at the ears. Miss Phelps held up a little monkey paw to stop her. “I assure you neither of us knew what had become of him,” she said, “until Margaret described him yesterday.”

“Christian didn't mention the dreams,” Mr. Phelps said. “Understandable.”

“You mean, how like a boy to cover up nasty emotions,” Miss Phelps said. “We have been trying to find out about the person you're concerned about for twenty years. Neither of us liked to see the women ruling unchecked.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mum. “I'd hoped—You see, he told me last night that he had to be let out by the same person who buried him.”

“
Did
he?” I said. “I didn't hear him say a word.”

“It was very faint,” Mum said. “You could only hear if you concentrated hard.”

“Oh,” I said. “It did sound rather like a telephone conversation. All I heard was you. But what do we do? We don't even know where he is, let alone who put him there.”

“I know where,” said Mum. “It was in the dream. It's a kind of mound with bushes growing on it, and people keep running across it all the time.”

“
Oh!
” all three of the rest of us cried out. “Just by the Greens' old house,” said Miss Phelps. “It's an orphanage now, but I used to play on that mound as a child.”

I found I was looking at Mr. Phelps. We both felt stupid. “Chris knew,” I said. “Didn't he even tell
you
?”

“Er … mm. He may not have known when I spoke to him,” said Mr. Phelps. “The question now is, who put him there?” He looked across at Miss Phelps.

“Time travel, I think,” she said briskly. “Or do either of you get travel-sick? Nathaniel finds he can only travel as an animal, but probably that is just as well. A cat or a dog is never much noticed and never, of course, in the wrong clothes.”

Mum and I sort of gooped at one another.

“We do know almost the exact day and hour Antony disappeared, ma'am,” Mr. Phelps said. “But we never narrowed down the place. We thought it must be somewhere in Loup Woods. His coat was found there, you know. In fact, I was sure it was the woods, though I've been over nearly every inch of them now in some form or other.”

Mum went on staring.

“Or maybe they don't trust us, Nathaniel,” said Miss Phelps. “This was why I suggested Nathaniel should go with you. I would offer myself, only I fear I would make a very crippled cat and slow you down dreadfully. You
have
offered to go, haven't you, Nathaniel?”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Phelps, though he didn't look as if he liked the idea. “As Antony Green's chief lieutenant, this concerns me, too.”

“It's just,” I said, “that Mum and I aren't used to … time travel and so forth.”

“It's the way you both speak—so matter-of-factly,” Mum said, and added warily, “You did say cats, did you?”

“A demonstration, ma'am,” said Mr. Phelps. He stood up and slipped off his dressing gown. While it was still in the air as he threw it to the sofa, he was not there. But there was a bundle of clothes on the floor where he had been, and a tabby cat with slightly fanatical eyes was sitting on them looking at us.

“Quite painless, you see,” said Miss Phelps. And she called out, “Nathaniel, I may as well send you off now. No time like the present.” She turned to Mum. “I believe that is a joke. Will you go next?”

I delayed things a bit. I did so love being a cat. It was a bit puzzling at first, when I climbed out of my clothes, because my muscles moved my light little body twice as easily as I expected. I shot forward into the middle of the floor and landed with my legs spread out in all directions. I could hear Miss Phelps laughing somewhere very high up. The way I heard things was different. The way I saw things was
very
different. I blinked and blinked until I got used to my magnifying cat-eyes, which showed me all sorts of interesting bits of fluff right in the distance in the dark places under the sofa. I smelled the fluff. Seeing and smelling were mixed up together really closely, and I could tell things from smells you wouldn't believe—like Mr. Phelps's dressing gown was more of a robe of office and the green box was in its pocket.

I meant to go over and sniff it, but I got waylaid by the sofa. You know, if you dig your fingernails—I mean claws—into a sofa you can rush all over it, up and down and along the back, in seconds. Your tail whips from side to side and balances you. Then I jumped to the coffee table. It's so easy. You pick your place, just to the side of the cookie plate, and you sail halfway across the room, and you're there. I got ambitious then. I saw the mantel with a clock and ornaments on it, high up and right on the other side of the room. I aimed carefully. I waggled my back parts to get tuned up, and I sprang. I zoomed upward. And I did sort of get there with the front part of me. I had just an instant's glimpse in the mirror behind the clock of a fluffy black kitten with startled blue eyes, and then before I'd quite realized the kitten was me, I fell off. I turned over in the air and landed on my feet in the hearth, feeling cross.

“That will do, I think,” said Miss Phelps's voice, high up, and zizzing and booming in my ears. “You must be used to yourself now.”

Then I fell over sideways—
flip
!—and found myself on the mound outside the orphanage.

I understood almost at once why Mr. Phelps found it easier to time travel as a cat. The first thing I did was to stick up a black fluffy hind leg and wash it while I let my nose adjust me to everything around. I was sitting in rushes—no, grass—among forest trees covered with huge pale green, heart-shaped buds which I smelled out as the bushes on the mound. Lilac, probably. In the same instant, I knew it was a warm day in a different year, and that, though spring was much further advanced than the year I had come from, by the sun it was almost the same day of the year. The quarreling of the birds in the bushes made my mouth water. I stood up and thought about hunting.

An elegant grown-up black cat stood up, too, about a foot away. Mum makes a wonderful cat, like a small panther. As she stood up, a stripy tomcat came swaggering round the nearest forest bush and plainly decided that Mum was the next wife in his life. Tomcats are like that. “How about it, sweetheart?” he went in cat gestures.

Mum simply swung one velvet forepaw loaded with claws.
Scat!
A fast stabbing swipe that got the tabby hard over one ear. It was wonderful. Then she sauntered over to me, leaving the tabby cat crouched down with both ears flat. Poor Mr. Phelps. He was only behaving according to cat nature. So was Mum, I suppose. She gave me a swift rasping lick, to show the tabby she was still in charge of a kitten and not ready to be any cat's wife. Mr. Phelps backed to a respectful distance and then sat up, looking aloof.

Then we all realized that there were human voices coming from the field side of the mound. We'd been too occupied with cat business to notice before then. We all raced in that direction—using the low stealthy run, where you move each leg alternately like wading—until one of the little open paths gave us a view down into the field. Cats are perfect for hiding. Mum and I lay flat on our haunches. Mr. Phelps, like an old trouper, settled into a tuffet and doubled his front paws restfully under.

There were two humans down there. When we got there, they were doubled over in fits of laughter. One was a girl about Zenobia Bailey's age with long, long black hair, hanging loose and straight so that it hid what she was like. The other was a man who looked like a student to me—that sort of age, anyway.

“I don't think it's possible!” he said, as he stood up and tried to stop laughing. I nearly didn't recognize him, even then, not until he stopped laughing enough to be just smiling. Then I saw he had the same long, long grin as the ghost. He had light mouse-colored hair, and he did wear it longish and swept back, and his nose did have a slight bend to it, but it was not enough to make it like a parrot's beak. And his face only reminded you of a court jester if you had seen the ghost. I think Mum was right. The ghost was Antony Green's
idea
of himself, not what he really looked like. He looked almost normal, standing in the sun, in old-fashioned trousers, laughing with the girl.

“Can a person pass through death?” he said. “You mean, can a person pass through
earth
, don't you?”

The girl stood up and shoved her hair back. She had one of those long, gaunt faces fashion models used to have, and her clothes made me want to laugh, they were so out-of-date. I expect she was good-looking, but I didn't like her eyes. “You said it. Not me,” she said. “I just talked of the tradition. I want to know if you really can increase your power by going into the earth. Don't you want to try?”

Antony Green shrugged. “Not really.”

She laughed and patted his arm. “Well, I think you're perfect as you are. Let's forget all about it.”

I got rather embarrassed to look then, because he grabbed her by her shoulders and said, “I'm not perfect. But I do love you, Naomi.”

She kissed him and said, “Ah, but do you trust me? You go on a lot about men and women all being the same this way, but I don't think you trust me as I trust you, or you'd let me put you in that mound and call you out again.”

“Then I'd better do it just to show you,” said Antony Green. He smiled his long smile, the getting-out-of-things smile, and I didn't think he meant it.

But Mum did. She took off in a sort of tiger spring and went running down the mound. When she got to the grass of the meadow, she slowed down to a trot and sort of picked her way toward them.

“Oh, look, there's a cat,” said Antony Green. He was glad for the distraction.

Naomi glanced at Mum. “A black cat for luck,” she said. Some of what I didn't like in her eyes was the way they calculated the use of things as they looked at them. Mum was useful. “To show you there's no harm in my test,” she said.

Mum tried to show Antony Green that there
was
harm in it by weaving in figure eights round their legs. He looked down at her and said, “In America a black cat means the opposite. Bad luck.”

“So you don't trust me,” said Naomi. “After all your talk, you take the first excuse to back out.”

“No, I don't,” he said. “I'll do it. I told you.” He bent and picked up a sort of green coat that had been lying in the grass till then. He sort of shrugged himself into it. It was long and full and dark green. He stood there grinning his long grin at Naomi. Suddenly he did look much more like the ghost. “On condition you do the same after me,” he said.

There was that thing in Naomi's eyes again—a flash of calculation. “Yes, of course,” she said. “The moment you come out.”

She looked at him in a clear, truthful way then, and Antony Green tried to go on grinning, but it was the way you do when you have butterflies in the stomach. I saw he really was going to believe the beastly girl, and I dashed off down the mound to try and stop him.

“Oh, look!” he said. “There's a kitten now. What a beauty.” He kneeled down and put his hand out for me to smell, to take his mind off what he was going to do. Smelling a human hand is a sort of an acquired taste for cats. I liked the way his smelled, but it made me sneeze. Mum came and barged against him warningly. “I'm not going to hurt your kitten,” he said.

“No, just my feelings!” Naomi said. “You'd rather play with two cats than do a little simple thing for me.”

Antony Green took back his hand and stood up. “It's not a simple thing,” he said.

“Well, I know that, really,” Naomi said hastily. “Trust isn't a little thing.”

“That's why I'll do it,” he said.

Mum and I sat side by side and stared at him. We both knew we had been no help at all. I sneezed again. The breeze had veered and there was a strong smell of Aunt Maria somewhere. The end of Mum's tail twitched, and I saw one of her ears turn to try for a sound to go with the scent.

“Are you going to do it or
not
?” Naomi said with real impatience.

“Starting now,” said Antony Green. He took the green box from the pocket of his green coat, all shining and fascinating and bright. Mum's eyes followed it in amazement. He opened it just a fraction so that just one strong wisp of stuff escaped and swirled around him. “I wish you two wouldn't stare so,” he remarked to Mum and me. “You put me off.”

“A cat can look at a king,” Naomi said, laughing.

“True,” said Antony Green, and tried to give her the green box. She stepped back from it in a hurry. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot you don't like touching it.” And he dropped it carelessly on the grass. Mum was so curious that she got up and sniffed at it. Neither of the humans noticed, because they were standing face to face.