Touch Not The Cat (19 page)

It came back to the one answer: Cathy. And here I had even less right to judge. I had no idea of the strength of Emory's feeling for her; nor had I stopped to question the circumstances under which she had "stolen" the missing articles for my cousins. For Emory, that is. My father had long ago said that Howard would never take on Ashley or any part of its responsibility; it was squarely on Emory's shoulders, and if Emory had chosen to jump the legal gun . . . Yes, it was to be laid at Emory's door; I still did not believe that James was, in this, anything other than a follower, loyal as ever to whatever course his twin suggested.

I sat down on the wall, still facing the lake, forcing myself to calmness. I owed my cousins something better than this shocked recoil. I thought again of the quiet nights filled with my lover's presence, of his support and warmth and love, of the strength he had given me. I thought, too, of the recent strange hesitancy, the impression of guilt and insecurity which, now, I thought I could understand.

It had only showed itself since I had come back to England; it had begun last night, when I had seen James in the church vestry. Doing what? That, too, I had begun to guess. The object he had been carrying was large and flat, like a book, or a portfolio. He must just have picked up the Rackham pictures from some hiding place; not the vestry itself—that would have been asking for discovery. But, except on church-cleaning days, there were a hundred places—under the seats in the side aisles, under the pulpit, behind the stacked hassocks near the font—any of these places would have made a cache, safe and dry, where Cathy could have hidden the objects she had abstracted from the Court.

So James had snatched a cassock from the choir men's pegs, had fled up the nave in front of me, switched off the mains, and, while I was approaching up the church, fumbled with and opened the catch of the vestry door. Whoever came into the church would only see the vanishing cassocked figure, and would come to the same conclusion as I had done. . . .

Well, now I knew. And I understood my lover's refusal to come into the open. It was because the affairs of daylight must be settled first. Before anything could be complete between us, we had to settle with the realities of a difficult situa-tion, the hard economics of how and where to live, of Ashley Court and Daddy's Will and the theft of the jade and pictures. What I had called to myself the facts of the daylight world. And the other world, the starlight one, where love was easy because it ran like poetry from mind to mind, that would have to wait. I knew now what he meant by his repeated
Not yet,
not yet;
I had to come to terms with what he really was; the outer man, not just that other half of me whom I knew as well as I knew myself. We had reversed the norm, he and I. It had always seemed to me that the love we had, being fuller, must be easier than most; now I saw that it was harder. Nor was the outcome certain. It would depend on my handling of this un-easy and tangled affair, on my finding out what my father had meant and what he had wanted. I must do my job as Jon Ashley's deputy, and then, when Ashley was accounted for, my lover and I could come to terms. This was what he had seen already. He knew me, and he knew that there were things about him which I might find it hard to accept. He could not be sure of me until I had seen the whole truth about him, and accepted it with love and understanding.

I do not think that at that moment I had any doubts about his identity. I stared at the water and opened my mind to him, the query forming in the dimming air.
This is why we have to
wait?

He came in.
This is why.

But I understand now, and I accept it all. Won't that do? You know I love you, you
know that. I have to. That's the point, isn't it? Whatever you may have done. Whoever you are.

A flurry of love, as real as petals falling, and the little catch of amusement that I knew so well.

I'll hold you to that.

There really were petals falling. A spray of clematis, caught in the breeze of evening, shed its fading petals on the dim grass. I looked at my cousin at last, across the dusk-filled space. He was watching me steadily, saying nothing, just watching, patient and intent. Then he smiled, and something twisted inside me, like a cord stretched between us that had felt a sudden tug. Blood thicker than water, whatever that might mean; or creatures inhabiting the same pool, over whom the same wave breaks. There seemed no need to speak. There were the Ashley eyes, shadowed in the growing dusk, the fair hair, the casual pose that masked tension. The picture of the real man was blurring, almost as if the imagined picture of my lover was beginning to superimpose itself over the reality of the cousin who sat under the lilac tree and watched me. The outlines wouldn't quite fit. Not yet. Not, I suppose, until I had accepted him whole, starlight and dreams and the harsh light of tomorrow.

A shadow moved along the lakeside. Something flew up from the reeds with a squawk and a splashing of water. Rob's collie, hunting along the water's edge, had disturbed a moorhen from her nest. As if it had broken a spell, I spoke aloud.

"It's all right, James. Please don't worry about this any more. You've a perfect right to do what you think best about the stuff in the house. . . . It's yours, after all, and if you need it now instead of later, well, that's your affair, too. I suppose we'll have to think what to say to the Underhills, but let's leave it for tonight, shall we?"

"I wasn't worrying," he said, "not really. Blood's thicker than water, whatever that may mean."

I heard the smile in his voice. His easy assumption of my complicity (why did that hard word occur to me?) took me off balance again. I said nothing.

The flash of the smile then, and he got to his feet. He must after all have misinterpreted my silence.

Almost before I knew he had moved, he had crossed the grass as silently as a cat, and putting out his hands, pulled me to my feet and into his arms. His mouth found mine, gently at first, then with quickly growing excitement.

"Bryony. Bryony. It's been so long."

A thrush broke out of the lilac boughs and went skimming across the orchard wall with a cry of alarm. I put my hands against my cousin's breast and held myself away from him. "James. But I thought—"

He kissed me again, stifling what I was trying to say. He said, against my mouth: "You've always known it was me, haven't you?"

"I—yes. I wasn't sure. It used to seem so easy once, but —no, wait, please."

"Why?" He pulled me close again, and when I moved my head away he began to kiss my hair, my cheekbones, my throat.

"No, please, don't make it any harder. I've just begun to understand. We've got to get all this business over first."

He persisted for a little while, but, meeting with no response, finally let me go, and laid a gentle hand to my cheek. "All right, all right. This isn't the time. But don't let's be too long about it. I'm so afraid you'll get away from me again."

"I won't do that. Let's go in, shall we, James? Do you mind bringing the cups?" He stooped and picked them up, then followed me back into the cottage. "Are you staying at the Court tonight?" I asked him.

"No. I'll go back to Bristol." That heart-twisting smile again. "I may as well, since you're turning me down."

"For heaven's sake!" I tried for a light tone, but it came out edged. "Did you really expect me to ask you to stay here?"

"Well, perhaps that would have been pushing it a bit. I'm a patient man." No overtone to suggest that there had been any other sort of conversation between us. "I'll telephone Herr Gothard tonight, I think, to see if there's any news. Have you got his number handy?"

"Yes. I'll write it down for you, shall I?"

I went to the bureau, and switched the lamp on. I found a pen and a used envelope, scribbled down the number, and handed it to him.

He glanced at it, and pocketed it. "Thanks. Oh, where did you find my pen? I dropped it somewhere, and I've been looking for it all over the place."

"Yours? Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure. It's mine all right. Look at the initials. Where on earth did you find it?"

"In—in the churchyard. Beside the path."

I thought he must have noticed my hesitation, but apparently he did not. "Oh. Yes. Well, thank you."

He pocketed it, kissed me again, and went. I stood for a long time beside the lamp, thinking of nothing, my mind closed, a gate slammed shut in sudden panic to keep him out.

Because I knew something, now, that I dared not let him guess at. He and Emory had done more than know my father was ill when they had come to Ashley to check the "disposable assets." They had known he was dead.

The pen I had picked up, from among the small clutter of objects in the bureau, was the silver ballpoint pen with the initials
J
.
A.
It had been lying there, along with my father's other effects that Herr Gothard had handed to me. I had not recognized it as Daddy's, but there had seemed no doubt that it was his. It had been found, Herr Gothard had told me, beside his body, on that lonely country road in Bavaria.

I don't know how long I stood there, staring, but without seeing it, at the lamp and the big grey moth which had blundered in through the open door behind me and was crazily beating itself to death against the light. My mind, like the moth, beat and fluttered against a truth so alien and so destructive that I could not, would not, believe it on the evidence of the facts.

Heaven knew I did not want to draw the conclusions that followed from it, but they had to be drawn. The first, which seemed now hardly to matter, and which followed from his easy acceptance of my lie about finding the pen in the churchyard, was that James had in fact been the prowler in the vestry.

The second was one that mattered very much indeed. James must have been there, beside my father's body. And he had neither helped the injured man, nor made his presence known.

I could see only one further conclusion to come to. James had driven the hit-and-run car that had knocked Daddy down. James had killed my father.

That night, lying wakeful in the quiet little bedroom, I watched the moonlight moving slowly across the floor and, with every ounce of effort I could summon, kept the doors slammed against my lover. So strongly insistent was his presence at times that, as on that night in Madeira, I could have sworn I saw his very shadow move across the floor. In my grief and loneliness I must have faltered, because I caught it, as clear as a whisper; just my name, insistent and appealing. Then I turned away and shut him out again, and listened, for the rest of the night, to the church clock chiming in the tower.

Ashley, 1835

The candle guttered in a pool of wax. Beside him she stirred, and murmured something, then sank back into sleep. Light, cast by the mirror, slid over her bare shoulder and the curve of a breast. Light o'

love, he thought. It's a beautiful phrase. She is my light of love.

He reached a hand and doused the small, fluttering flame.

... a divine, a ghostly confessor,

A sin-absolver, and my friend profess'd. . . .

—Romeo and Juliet,
III, iii 

Next morning, as soon as I could, I went to see the Vicar.

He was on his knees in the biggest of the ruinous greenhouses, contentedly rummaging about among the young tomato plants. The hothouse stood against the twelve-foot wall of the old kitchen garden, and many of its panes were broken, and had been replaced by odd pieces of plywood or polythene sheeting.

The heating system, of course, had long been out of use. The original staging, too, had long since rotted; Rob Granger had dragged it out and burned it, and rigged benches from old trestles and some planks from one of the derelict farm buildings. The sun was pouring in, reflecting warmly back from the whitewashed wall, and the place smelled pleasantly of newly watered soil steaming in the warmth, and the musky scent of tomato leaves.

"Hullo, my dear. Were you comfortable in the cottage last night?"

"Very, thank you. What are you doing?"

"Tying up the tomatoes. Rob strung all these canes last week, and now the plants are big enough to train. Excellent young plants, aren't they? I don't know what's so fascinating about tomatoes, but they really are delightful to work with. So easy, and such a big return for such a small investment."

I laughed. "That's too worldly by half, Vicar. You should be drawing morals about it; tall oaks from little acorns grow, and something something fountains flow."

"So I should, so I should. Well, there's a moral in it somewhere, I'm sure. . . . Dear me, now I sound like the Duchess in
Alice in Wonderland.
Do you want me for anything special?"

"I wondered if I might talk to you," I said. "Sometime when it's convenient. There's no rush."

His hands, holding the furred leaves gently, paused. His eyes, distorted so grotesquely behind the thick glasses, searched my face. "It's always convenient." He let go the plant, and began to get to his feet. "Here and now, or shall we go up to the Vicarage and make a cup of coffee?"

"Here and now, if that's all right. No, don't leave the tomatoes. Can't I help you with them? I know how to do it."

He made no demur, knowing, I suppose, how much easier it is to talk when one's hands are occupied. He started work again, and I moved to the other side of the row from him, and followed suit.

Above us the robin, who was always on the watch for whoever was gardening, flew in through a broken pane, saw there was nothing doing, scolded for a moment, then flew away. Silence, except for the rustling of the tomato leaves, the snip of scissors cutting twine, and the drip of a tap into the tank.

"Mr. Bryanston, do you believe in telepathy?"

"'Believe in'? I don't query its existence; I don't think one reasonably can. There have been too many instances of it, thoroughly documented; and now I think it is being seriously researched. Can you be more specific? I take it you mean thought-transference, but this takes a variety of forms."