The Unseen (16 page)

‘Cat.’ Hester smiles. ‘Now, I have had some mild complaints from Mrs Bell, that you do not always show her the proper respect— No, please, do let me finish,’ she says, when Cat seems poised to speak. ‘Obviously it has taken you a while to settle in here, and that’s only to be expected after … what you have experienced. I quizzed Mrs Bell quite closely about your day-to-day
work and she can find no fault in it. And I have to say, if Sophie Bell can find no fault in your work, then there can be no fault to find!’

‘That woman hates me,’ Cat says, flatly.

‘Well! I’m sure she doesn’t! If she is hard with you, well, then it’s because she cares a great deal that things should be done in the correct way … Anyway. The vicar and I are quite happy with your work, and more than happy to have you continue here, but I must ask that you show Mrs Bell the respect due to one in her position – she is, after all, the housekeeper here; and she has been with me for several years now. It simply will not do to antagonise her,’ Hester finishes. Cat gazes at her steadily, and says nothing, which Hester hopes is acquiescence. ‘Well, that’s settled then. Here, Cat – I made this for you. A little welcoming present to help you decorate your room.’ She hands Cat the cross-stitch embroidery in its frame. Cat looks at it in silence for a moment, and when she raises her head again her eyes are bright with emotion.

‘Thank you, madam,’ she says, the words clipped, as if stifled. Hester smiles, seeing that Cat is near overcome.

‘You’re most welcome, child. Please do carry on,’ she says, by way of a dismissal. Cat stalks from the room with her shoulders rigid.

In the kitchen, Cat throws the embroidery onto the table and stares at it, holding her bottom lip savagely between her teeth. The grocer’s boy is bringing in boxes of goods, struggling to see through piled packages of flour and rice and gelatine.

‘Can you believe this?’ Cat demands of him, gesturing angrily at the frame.

‘What, miss?’ the boy asks. He is not more than twelve years old.

‘This!’ Cat picks it up and shakes it furiously at him. The boy steps closer, screws his eyes myopically at it, reads haltingly.

‘Hum … hum …’

‘Humility!’ Cat snaps.

‘Humility is a Servant’s True Dig … nity,’ the boy says, glancing up to see if he’s got it right.

‘Can you believe that?’ Cat demands again. The boy shrugs, at a loss.

‘Don’t rightly know, miss,’ he mumbles, and hurries away from her.

‘What are you belly-aching about now?’ asks Mrs Bell, waddling into the kitchen and slamming the kettle onto the stove.

‘Nothing that concerns you, Mrs Bell,’ Cat says, flatly.

‘Everything in this house concerns me, my girl,’ the housekeeper points out. She spots the embroidery on the table, picks it up and examines it. ‘She’s made this for you, has she?’ Cat nods. ‘So, what are you so steamed up about?’

‘I … I do
not
agree with the sentiment.’

Mrs Bell eyes her shrewdly. ‘No, well, I dare say you don’t, being so full of hot air and your own opinions. Just you be grateful that you’ve the kind of mistress who wants to make pretty things for you, rather than beat you about with a stick. The first gentleman I worked for would come down and beat the kitchen-maids if he thought his tea was too cold, or too hot, or stewed too long; so you mark my words – you’ve landed on your feet here and you’ll do well to remember it!’ Her arms, folded over her bosom, look like ham hocks.

‘Why should there be different rules for us, Sophie? Aren’t we human beings, just like them upstairs?’ Cat asks. She picks up the embroidered motto again, and examines it. Hester has stitched a small tabby cat into one corner, arching its spine amidst blue cornflowers. Cat runs her thumb over the neat little creature, and frowns.

‘What are you
talking
about, girl? Of course there are different rules for them and us!’

‘But why should there be?’ Cat asks, keenly.

‘Because it’s always been that way, and it always will be that way! What can have happened to you that you’ve forgot your place in the world?’ Mrs Bell blusters.

‘I don’t believe I have a place in the world,’ Cat murmurs.

‘Well, you have. It’s here, in this kitchen helping me get the tea trays ready.’ Mrs Bell bustles back to the stove.

Later on, Cat hangs Hester’s embroidery on her bedroom wall, where once the crucifix had hung. Though she can’t read the motto without her blood rising, she likes the little tabby cat, skulking in the cornflowers. Cat feels reckless this night. She hardly waits until the household has retired before slipping from her room, down the back stairs and out into the courtyard. Mrs Bell is not yet snoring. When she looks up at the house, bedroom lights are still lit. She could still be called upon, to make a hot drink or fetch a book from the library. The thought makes her heart beat faster. But she will not be kept in; she will not be checked upon. Let the vicar’s wife find her gone, she thinks, savagely. Let them cast her out. Better that than to be a prisoner. The night is still, and warm. From the meadows comes the occasional throaty call of a frog, the creak and whine of insect life. The scent on the air is of hot bricks and dry grass, the slight damp of dew falling.

Cat makes her way on soft feet to the far side of the house and to the little collection of outbuildings that flanks the courtyard. Here are the woodsheds and the gardener’s den, the greenhouses and tool sheds. This latter is where the vicar stores his bicycle. Cat fumbles for it in the darkness, cursing when her questing hands make things shift and clatter; when her foot kicks a shovel, sending it toppling towards the concrete floor. She catches it at the last moment, with hands that shake. She has only ridden a bicycle once before – borrowed for a turn from the butcher’s boy in London. She silently curses the soft squeaking of the wheels as she pushes it along the garden path and out of the gate. She does not see, behind her, the bloom of a cigarette in the darkness, nor Robin Durrant’s
gaze following her as he leans against the front wall of the house, blowing plumes of blue smoke up into the gentle sky.

Cat wheels the bicycle a long way down the lane before mounting it, in case she should fall; and fall she does, so startled to be moving forwards that she forgets to steer, and wobbles into the grass verge before clattering to the ground. She brushes grit from grazes on her hands and one knee, picks the thing up, gathers her skirt and swings her leg over it again. She will not fail at something the
vicar
does so easily, with his too-short trousers and his milksop complexion. Gradually, she gathers speed, and finds that the faster she goes, the easier it is to stay upright, and to steer. With a few more near disasters she makes fine progress, wheeling the bicycle down the grassy path to the canal side. She does not need a light. The pale dusty towpath is straight and well visible, cutting through the deep green rushes and cow parsley, the thistles and dock and dandelions. Cat pedals as fast as she dares, the wind fingering through her cropped hair, making her eyes water and cooling her skin. She finds herself grinning in the darkness, thrilled and carefree. She would have cycled right past the barge boat where George sleeps each night, and sought him out in Thatcham, but there is a light on in the cabin, so she judders to a halt.

Suddenly still, Cat is dizzy, and stands for a while on the path, catching her breath, finding her feet. The water of the canal lies still and silent, and in the faint light of the stars she sees water birds drift noiselessly past. Reaching from the bank, Cat knocks softly on the side of the boat. Flaking paint comes off on her knuckles. There is a thump from within, the scrape of boots on wood. George opens the cabin door and holds up a lantern, which stabs at Cat’s eyes, makes her clap her hands to her face.

‘You’ll blind me!’ she calls. Talking makes her chest tighten, and she coughs violently, bending over at the sudden pain behind her ribs. This cough still waits inside her, then. It has not left her yet.

‘Cat, is that you? Are you all right?’ George peers into the darkness, shutting the lamp halfway to dim it.

‘How many other girls call upon you in the night, George Hobson?’ she asks tartly, when the fit subsides.

‘Only you, Black Cat.’ He smiles.

‘Well then, it is me. Are you busy? Why aren’t you in town?’

‘I can’t go to town every night, Cat Morley. I’d drink myself impoverished before long. Indeed, before very long at all,’ he says, ruefully. ‘Why are you puffing? Did you run?’

‘I bicycled,’ Cat says. ‘I borrowed the vicar’s bicycle, and got here in a fraction of the time it takes walking! So I can be back again in a fraction of the time, and can stay longer with you instead.’

‘You
borrowed
his bicycle? That tends to mean you got permission …’

‘Don’t be daft. What he doesn’t know can’t harm him. What do you do in there of an evening, in such a small space?’

‘Come aboard and I’ll show you,’ George offers. In the muted lamplight, his face is thrown into contours. The creases around his eyes that the sun has carved, the furrow above his brows, the strong line of his jaw. The bruises of his last fight have faded now, leaving only vague brownish smears, like grubby thumb prints. His shirt is open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up. So much skin he shows. So much of his living flesh; so much evidence of vitality. Cat drinks in the sight of him, feeling herself stronger with each second that passes. Something inside her unfurls when he smiles, like the new green leaves of a fragile plant. She takes his hand and steps onto the deck, but hesitates at the cabin door. The space within is confined indeed.

‘I … I do not like small spaces,’ she says.

‘I shan’t shut us in, if you don’t want me to,’ George says, not at all troubled by her admission. Cat goes down a couple of the narrow wooden stairs and then sits, wrapping her arms around her knees. Behind her head the night sky still spreads, huge and reassuring.

The cabin is low and narrow. Nothing in it really but a bed
along one side, some shelves and a stove along the other. The bed is made up with rag rugs for a mattress, and worn blankets as covers. A tin kettle sits on the stove, but the embers within it have long gone cold. George watches her eyes flit briefly around his living space. He frowns slightly, seems suddenly uncertain.

‘It’s not much, I’ll grant you. It must seem poor indeed, to one used to living in fine houses.’

‘I work in the fine house,’ Cat corrects him. ‘But I live in a cramped attic room that swelters in this heat,’ she says.

‘It’s hot indeed. I couldn’t bear to light the stove, so can’t even offer you tea, or cocoa.’

‘You keep cocoa about the place, as a rule?’ Cat asks, raising an eyebrow.

‘Truthfully, no,’ George admits. ‘But I do keep ginger beer.’

‘
Ginger
beer?’

‘I’ve been fond of it since childhood.’ George shrugs, bashfully. ‘Would you like some, then?’

‘All right then. I will. My throat’s bone dry from coughing.’

‘What is that cough? I hear it sometimes, when you talk. That there’s a snag in your breathing, waiting to catch you.’ He takes a brown bottle down from a shelf, pours the contents into two tin mugs. Cat thinks before answering. She does not like to hear this – that others can detect the taint on her.

‘I caught pneumonia, when I was in gaol,’ she says, shortly. ‘It lingers. The doctor said it would, though I admit I’d hoped it would go sooner.’

‘It must have been a damp and dreary place, to give you an infection like that,’ George says, carefully.

‘It was. But that’s not what gave me it. It was the handling I was given. The way we were … treated,’ she says, sipping her ginger beer, eyes focused on the darkness at the bottom of the cup.

George puts out one thick, rough thumb, crooks it under her chin and lifts her gaze to meet his. ‘I would have words with any
person who gave you rough handling,’ he says, solemnly. ‘More than words, in fact. And you nothing but a slip of a thing. I’ve no time for those that box below their weight.’

‘That’s something I would dearly love to have seen. Pitting you against the villains in there that called themselves guardians.’ Cat smiles. ‘They could have done with a taste of their own medicine.’

‘The job is one of cruelty and brutality, as I understand it. Small wonder that cruel brutes find their way into it. My father was gaoled once – and it was no bad thing for us kids, nor for my mother. He set about the rozzers that were trying to escort him home from the pub, drunk half dead as was his habit. They frogmarched him face down right past all his chums – that made his blood boil! I was glad they kept him in for we’d have felt the brunt of that indignity if he’d been allowed home.’ He shakes his head at the memory.

‘What was his profession, your father?’

‘His profession? That’s not the word for it. He did labouring, farm work, odd jobs. Whatever he could get. If there was something needing doing that was too hard or too dirty for anybody else, they sent for my old man. He used to dock the puppies’ tails, each time there was a new litter. He would bite them off.’

‘He
bit
them off? That’s horrible!’

‘It’s considered the proper way – the crushing of teeth closes the skin around the wound. But only a savage could do it thus, and so my father was called,’ George explains. ‘I remember hearing their poor little cries, all those pups. It made my blood run cold, but my father never flinched.’

‘But I was no drunken brute. I only did what I was told to do, in gaol.’

‘What the wardens told you to do? Always?’

‘Well … perhaps not always,’ she admits, dropping her face again. In truth she’d sought countless little ways to flout the rules, to pretend rebellion. It was her behaviour that brought Tess to the warders’ attention, when she had been good and quiet enough to
go unnoticed, until then. Cat swallows convulsively. ‘Can we talk about other things?’

‘We can talk about whatever you wish to talk about, Cat Morley,’ George says, softly.

Cat looks around the cabin again, sips her ginger beer.

‘Why don’t you take rooms in town?’