Spiral Path (Night Calls Series Book 3) (15 page)

“
I
don’t think so, but give them my regards,” I said aloud, and wondered if my
downdraft of air would fit in a closed carriage. I glanced up—yes, the sky
looked still darker than before. I really needed to let that energy return to
the winds.

I decided I’d let go after the carriage and the man
continued on.

“
Boy!
Boy!” the man yelled, waving for me to come closer. Pointing at the carriage,
he said: “Windward!”

This time I sighed and made no attempt to hide it. Well, I
hadn’t really expected to get back to the house, bathe and then show up for
dinner as if I’d never left the estate. That was too much to hope for. Slowly I
started toward the carriage.

After I’d kicked my way through snow back to the carriage,
an arm holding a tall, impressive hat folded itself out the window, followed by
a head. “Say, there! Li Sung tells me you are heading for Windward?”

This new person was male and middle-aged, with either a
well-curled head of white hair or a fine wig.

“
Yes,
sir, I am going to Windward,” I said, giving him a little bow.

“
Well,
no sense in you both trudging through the snow,” was his reply. “Come on in!”
The small door popped out, even as the elegantly-dressed driver tied up the
horses and sprang down to unfold a set of steps.

“
Ah . . . .
 
Thank you, but I had a bit of
trouble in town, and I smell like the floor of a tavern.”

The foreign man jumped into the carriage; I heard more
conversation, and this time I heard some English. I felt something dive at my
leg, and looked down at the cat standing by my feet on the road.

“
Well!
Since you don’t appear drunk, I see you must have some traveler’s stories to
tell. If you’d rather, sit up top with Edward, but if we want to be on time for
dinner, we must make haste.” He’d leaned back out the window, a single eyepiece
on a chain held to his right eye. “Ah . . . perhaps you could
release that vortex? We don’t want a whirling wind above us!”

I blinked. The cat thoroughly rubbed my legs, leaving some
of the dirt washed loose by the snow. “I am traveling with a cat.”

“
I
see that!” was his reply. “A fine ship’s cat, indeed, though a bit travel worn.
Bring him along!”

The tiny whirlwind soared as I nudged it back into the sky.

I looked at the cat. It looked at me. “Are you going to let
me pick you up?” I asked it.

My answer was his putting his paws against my leg,
stretching so much that his ears reached to my waist. “Chirp!”

That was an order.

I reached down and picked up the cat, rearranging him so his
front paws and chest pointed to one side. This was the largest cat I had ever
seen, and amazingly heavy. The animal immediately started purring. “You know
that some say that if you save the life of someone, you are responsible for
them forever,” I told him.

Did this make me the responsibility of the cat, or did that only
work for humans?

Then I looked up at the driver’s high seat. It was quite a
ways up.

In the end, the driver got behind me, and with one
well-placed shove boosted the cat and me up to the top seat.

The driver’s gaze was wary as he climbed back to his seat. I
relaxed and studied the snowy trees in the forest beyond. The cat alternated
between sitting contentedly and purring, and observing any movement within the
trees. A slight wiggle followed these discoveries, as if he was ready for the
chase.

“
I
think he’s a little big for you,” I murmured to the cat as a fine buck watched
us from a distance. A taunt stillness told me the cat was seriously thinking
about it, but the buck bounded away into the woods. I would have sworn the cat
sighed, but he settled back down on my lap.

We reached the open entrance of stone pillars before the
sunlight faded into twilight. Ironwork rose in a high arch above the path;
WINDWARD was spelled out in capital letters. I was surprised to see gargoyles
sitting on the stone pillars to either side of the archway.

Here I was, back where I’d started from, somewhat the worse
for wear, and toting a big, dirty cat. I hadn’t lasted two days.

Well. If they were going to pack me off home, I hope they’d
feed me—us—first. The big city sure worked up your appetite.

How many times in a day could I apologize to Margaret?

I sighed. And the man next to me chuckled. He had a deep
voice and a fine set of white teeth in his tanned face.

“
Don’t
worry, son,” he said softly. “Dr. Livingston is much more lenient about these
little escapades away from the school than Professor Livingston can be. And you
wouldn’t want to be at any other school for practitioners. This one is as far
as you can go before your majority.” He leaned over slightly and added: “And the
food is the best ever!”

Clearly he didn’t eat there on a Saturday.

“
Well,
I can stir a soup,” I replied. “You can tell me next week if the food was all
right.”

The driver laughed all the way up the drive to the
courtyard.

We turned into the covered drive between barns. As the
driver put on a brake, I looked at the wall. The light shimmered like the
reflection of sun on water.

The portal I’d come through was still there.

Someone in charge needed to know that I had found an open
door in the yard.

The two men from the carriage walked under the sheltered
part of the drive, their conversation animated. It was a sight, the lean man
wearing a white horsehair wig, in his tall hat and greatcoat of dark green
wool, and the short, wiry foreigner bundled in shapeless dark cloth and straw
hat. The only sign of wealth the Chinese man revealed was his set of leather
boots with lashing nearly to his knees.

Most of their swift conversation seemed to be in what I
guessed was Chinese. The wigged gentleman seemed to understand what was being
said, and kept his right hand to his single eyeglass piece, watching how the other
man gestured.

I waited to be noticed, the cat circling my legs in a way
that suggested he wanted food and expected me to find it.
I’m not sure I’ll get fed today, much less you
, I thought at the
cat.
Hope you’re a good mouser
.

The portal did not change while I watched. I could not smell
the street, only the odors of fresh manure and the promise of more snow.

Then I noticed another cat, a plush blue tortie with that
patched color of fur like a calico faded in the sun. Her eyes one might call
amber; if she’d been human I’d have said hazel. She sat in the entranceway of
the stable on the right, her full tail curled around her feet, gaze fixed on my
strutting companion. When my ship’s cat spotted her, I wondered if we were
going to have a fight.

My cat-companion promptly sat on my feet, staring back at tortie.

“Not even going to introduce yourself?” I murmured to him.

As day faded into twilight, the lanterns lit in the carriage
house and stable. Now the portal was no more than wavering air, the way a
freshly plowed field looks in spring.

The tortie’s head swiveled, following my gaze to the portal,
and she wandered past the conversing men, stopping almost on top of the portal.
Then she lifted her right paw, her claws extended, as if feeling heat from a
fire.

The gentleman held up his hand, nodding an apology to the
foreign gentleman, and looked from the tortie to me. “Oh, your catch, is it? Is
that how you ended up in town?”

“
Yes,
sir. I thought I was following Mr. Gardener to the succession houses, and
suddenly I was on the waterfront.”

Both men turned toward the portal, lifting their left hands
toward it. “Youngster, why don’t you go on and clean up, and come to the parlor
after you have some supper?” the gentleman said over his right shoulder.

My furry companion was still planted practically on my feet.
I bent and scooped him up. “Yes, sir,” I said, heading back to the house.

Now could I get inside and to my room without anyone
noticing? I needed to duck in through the mudroom by the kitchen. I could not
bear to track city dirt in on the rugs. I had not found the tub for baths yet,
but I surely needed to know now.

A lantern burned by the kitchen entrance. The heavy wood
door swung open, a flood of rich odors flowing out into the cold. Blocking
access was an impressive mountain of a woman, her bright gold hair softened by
white at her ears and temples. She looked both strong and shrewd, and she
managed to have her nose in the air even as she pinned me with her stare. This
was not the genial Mrs. Gardener . . . this was the Empress of
the Kitchen.

We looked at each other for a bit, and then I said: “I know
he’s a sight, but this cat saved me in town, so I think I owe him at least a
meal and his chance to fight for a corner of the barn.”

“
If
you think that cat is coming into my kitchen before he has a bath, you are
sadly mistaken, young lady,” the woman announced. She pointed off in the
direction of the huge food sinks, and the pump near them. One candle burned,
tossing dark shadows over the entire area—which was spotless, I noted. “Have
you ever washed a cat?”

“
No,
ma’am,” I replied.

The woman smiled.

Hell, Hull and
Halifax.

I sure hoped Cousin Esme was good at stitching people up.

o0o

The cat washing went better than you might expect, if you
know anything about cats. My new friend was quite patient, sitting quietly on
the wood counter while I went to get hot water and re-filled the cauldron in
the fireplace before lugging my own bucket back to the big sink. I pumped up a
bucket of cold water, too, and made sure the mixture was comfortable. I didn’t
reach for the cat until I had found a scrap of old towel and had it ready to
dry him off.

Everything was fine until I tried to put the cat into the
water. Then he suddenly had as many arms as a heathen goddess, and braced
himself on the lip of the sink, suspended like the nest of a Baltimore-bird.

We compromised. He must have decided that this was not going
to be too bad—maybe the heat rising against his stomach felt good?—because he
let me lower his hind legs into the sink. The cat wasn’t as dirty as I’d
feared. There was just a lot of old, loose gray hair hanging from his body, and
most of it pulled off with only a few cat complaints. Vocal complaints only,
luckily—he batted at me a couple of times, but he did not use his claws.

Elizabeth rescued both of us. The young maid who lit the
fire my first morning at Windward arrived with a large towel and, wonder of
wonders, my slippers! “I made up a bath,” she murmured to me, setting down the
towel to one side of the sink.

I dried off the cat with the scraps, and then reached for
Elizabeth’s towel (no mean trick while keeping one hand on a cat). I had to get
out of my boots and into those slippers, so I could get cleaned up to see The
Doktor, as my Chinese man had called him.

Shaking her head and hiding a smile, Elizabeth made me sit
on a wooden chest near the door, and showed me how to use a big metal fork to
pull off my boots. “Best pay John to clean them,” she whispered, and led me off
down a narrow hall that ended up at the back staircase. “I’ll clean the sink!
This way!”

I headed for my bedroom, towel-wrapped cat in arms. Since
all these people couldn’t bathe down by the kitchen fire, they must bring the
tub to the person. My heart sank down to my toes. What could I do to say thank
you to Elizabeth for all her trouble?

“
Miss
Alfreda! Here!” Elizabeth’s hiss stopped me in my tracks. She was gesturing to
the room right next to mine, the door open a crack. As I approached, I could
feel warm, moist air flowing into the hallway.

I looked around the door. A lit candle sat on a shelf up
above our heads, its light glimmering on a wooden chair, a small, polished
table, and a long, low surface that glowed like marble.

“
You
will
love
this,” Elizabeth whispered, inviting me with a crook of her
finger.

There was a room just for bathing?

“I’ll start the fire in your room, and get your robe,”
Elizabeth said, her smile blossoming. “Better wash your hair, too! Can you do
it by yourself?”

“
Oh,
yes. I had to—no sisters to help me,” I told her, setting the bundled cat down
on the one chair in the room. “I’m going to owe a lot of favors to whoever got
all this water up here!”

Elizabeth took hold of my arm (gingerly, because the sweater
was matted with straw and muck) and turned me slightly, pointing to a faucet
high above the tub. “There is a tank of water up there that comes from the
well.”

“
But
it’s hot,” I said aloud, staring at the iron pipe.

“
We
heat bath water when we need it. We don’t waste timber keeping it hot!” She
reached up to remove a glass chimney from a sconce attached to the wall, and
lit the wick of the beeswax candle within with a touch of her finger. Doubled, the
light revealed the high ceiling, which looked like painted, embossed metal.

“
Is
that
how you heated the water?” I remembered how quickly she had started
that fire the previous day.

This time she grinned. “Not quite, but close. I’m a
salamander, you know!” With that she bustled off, pulling the door shut behind
her.

Salamanders can shape
shift into people? Or is this something else?

I have so much to
learn
.

Now I knew how the King of England lived. Not only the
necessary room inside and clean, but a special room for bathing!