Touch Not The Cat (3 page)

The transcript was typed, with no attempt at making sense. Just a string of words and phrases, punctuated seemingly at random.

Bryony. Tell Bryony. Tell her. Howard. James. Would have told. The paper, it's in William's brook. In the library. Emerson, the keys. The cat, it's the cat on the pavement. The map. The letter. In the brook.

It broke off there, and started again on a fresh line:

Tell Bryony. My little Bryony be careful. Danger. This thing I can feel. Should have told you, but one must be sure. I did tell Bryony's [word indistinguishable]. Perhaps the boy knows. Tell the boy.

Trust. Depend. Do what's right. Blessing.

I read it aloud slowly, then looked up at Walther. My face must have been blank. He nodded, answering the unspoken question.

"I'm sorry. That really is all, exactly as we heard him. You see where he found it too much for him, and stopped for a while. He was still conscious, and worrying at it, so we let him speak. The last word, I'm not sure about that. I thought it might have been 'bless him,' but the officer was sure it was 'blessing.' Does it make any sense to you at all?"

"No. Scraps here and there, but no. Nothing important enough to be so much on his mind then. I'd have thought—I mean, if he knew how ill he was, I'd have thought . . . you know, just messages."

"Yes, well, it may mean more later, when you have had time to study it."

"There's this about a letter. It might all be there. Did he leave a letter?" I knew the answer already. If there had been a letter for me, Walther would have given it to me straight away.

"I'm afraid not," he said, "and there was nothing mailed from here within the last day or so. I checked. But it is possible that he took something down with him to mail from Bad Tolz yesterday. In which case it will be on its way to Madeira. No doubt they will forward it straight away to your home."

The last sentence came with perceptible hesitation. There is something strange, I suppose, in the idea of a letter arriving from the dead. I didn't find it so. It was a break in the clouds of that dark day.

Something of the sort must have shown in my face, because Walther added, gently: "It's only a guess, Bryony. The word itself was a guess. If there is anything, it may not even be for you."

"I'll find out once I get home."

I would of course have to go home to England now, and it had already been arranged that I would take my father's ashes back to the Court, as he had wished.

Walther nodded. "And after that? Do you intend to stay there?"

"I'll have to, I think, until things are settled."

"It may take a long time."

"It's sure to. It'll be beastly complicated, I gather, but Mr. Emerson will do all the fixing. I suppose Daddy told you that the estate doesn't go to me, but is entailed to the nearest male heir? That's my father's cousin, Howard Ashley, who lives in Spain."

Walther nodded. "Your lawyer said something about it when we spoke over the telephone. He had not been able to get in touch directly with Mr. Howard Ashley, he said. It seems that he is ill."

"Yes. Daddy told me so last time he wrote. It's a virus pneumonia, and I gather that Cousin Howard's been pretty bad. I don't suppose he'll be able to attend to any business for a long time. Emory and James will have to see to things."

"So I imagine. It seems that this was one of the things your father had on his mind. Emory—a strange name, surely?"

"I suppose it is. It's an old Saxon name that crops up in the family from time to time. I think it's the same as Almeric."

"Ah, then I have also heard it in Germany. They are twins, are they not, this James and Emory?"

"Yes, identical twins. When they were boys, no one could tell them apart, except the family—and sometimes, when they were trying it on deliberately, not even the family. It's not so hard now, but I still wouldn't bet on it if they really tried to fool you. They're twenty-seven. Emory's the elder, half an hour's difference, something like that."

"A big difference when it comes to inheriting an estate," said Walther drily.

I said, just as drily: "A crumbling old house that never quite got over the flood ten years back, and a few acres of garden gone wild, and a ruined farm? Some legacy."

"As bad as that? Jon loved it."

"So do I."

"And your cousins?"

"I don't know. I don't see why they should. They were brought up there, the same as me; Cousin Howard had a house less than a mile away. But whether they want a beautiful old millstone round their necks I've no idea. Beautiful old millstones take money."

"I understood they had plenty of that."

"I suppose they have." Whether they would want to spend it on Ashley was another matter which I didn't pursue. I did not know a great deal about the wine shipper's business which Howard Ashley had started some years back, except that it had always seemed to prosper. In the early days, when it was relatively small, it had been based in Bristol, and the family had lived near us in Worcestershire. Then when the twins were about thirteen, and Francis eleven, the boys' mother died, and after that the three of them seemed more or less to live with us at the Court. Certainly they spent their school holidays with us; their father was in Bristol during the week, and his housekeeping arrangements were so erratic that my mother finally intervened and took my three cousins in. There would have been ample room, in those days, for Howard as well, but, though there had never been anything approaching coolness between him and my parents, they could not have happily settled to share a house. The three boys were dispatched home to their father most weekends, until, some five years after his wife's death, Cousin Howard went off to Mexico City to negotiate a deal of some kind, and met a Spanish-Mexican girl and married her. Her family was wealthy, and also connected with the wine trade. Howard's deal had been with the girl's father, Miguel Pereira, who owned a share of a prosperous business in Jerez. Howard took his new wife off to Europe, and they eventually settled in Spain. Emory took over the Bristol offices, and James more or less commuted between the two.

"Would your cousin Howard want to come back to live at Ashley?" asked Walther.

"I've no idea. I don't honestly know him so very well. I was only fourteen when he left, and I was away at school most of the time. I doubt if his wife would want to live there, though. She's years younger than Cousin Howard, and she'd hardly want to settle in a remote little place like Ashley. But I suppose one of the boys might."

"The boys . . ." Walther said it half to himself, and I realized that he was thinking of the paper I still held in my hand. But he only said: "I understand the two elder ones are in their father's business. What about the youngest?"

"Francis? Oh, he is, too. Rather reluctantly, I think. He doesn't have his family's head for business—he's more like our side. But he's with his father now in Jerez. I think he went into it almost absentmindedly, while he marked time and thought out what he really wanted to do. He has to earn a living some way, and I suppose Spain is as pleasant a place as any. He's a poet."

"Oh." Walther smiled. "A good one?"

"How would I know? I never got much beyond Yeats and Walter de la Mare. Didn't want to, considering the sort of things that get printed now. I can't understand a word Francis writes, but I like Francis, so let's say he is a good one."

The sun twinkled on the gold-rimmed glasses. "He's not married, is he?"

"No." I met his eyes. "And nor are the twins, Dr. Gothard. At least, they weren't when I last saw them. We're not wildly good correspondents, my cousins and I." (Except for you, Ashley my lover.

Emory? James? Francis?) I raised my brows at Walther. "You've been listening to Daddy, haven't you?

That was his plan, too. Get me back to Ashley somehow. . . . But Francis would be no good, obviously.

It would have to be the eldest, and that's Emory."

He smiled. "Something of the sort was in my mind, I confess. It is such an obvious solution. You stay at Ashley, and so do your children. I am sure your father had some sort of hope that it might happen. I think he saw you staying on there."

"He didn't say who with?" I was looking down at the paper in my hand.
"This thing 1 can feel. . . .

Perhaps the boy knows."
And then,
"I did tell Bryony's"—
Bryony's what? Bryony's lover? I wondered sharply, but with a kind of certainty about it, whether my father had known, or guessed, enough about my secret love to bank, entail or no, on my lifelong connection with Ashley Court.

"No," said Walther. "He didn't." My thoughts had gone on from my own question with such speed that for a moment I couldn't make out what he was referring to. He saw this; he was very quick, was Herr Doktor Gothard. He nodded to the paper in my hands. "You were studying that.

Have you worked some of it out?"

"Not really. It sounds as if there's some paper, perhaps the letter he speaks of, where he's written something important to me, and perhaps to Cousin Howard."

"And James."

"Yes, I suppose so. But why James? I mean if Daddy
had
told Howard, then Howard could have told the boys, whatever it was. It sounds as if it was a family matter. So why just James?" (Like a treasure hunt, I was thinking, the mystification of papers and letters and maps. It wasn't like him. Jon Ashley was sane and direct. So what did it mean? And why James?) I added, aloud: "This paper or map or whatever, he says it's 'in William's brook.' Well, that simply does not make sense."

"I know. A brook's another word for a stream, is it not? I thought it was, and I looked it up to make sure. It cannot mean anything else. I thought you might know what he meant."

"No idea. You said you were sure the words were right."

"Those, yes. To begin with he was pretty clear. I thought there might be a stream at Ashley, something with a local name, perhaps."

"Not that I know of. There was a William Ashley, certainly, early last century. 'Scholar Ashley' they called him; he was a bit of a Shakespeare scholar, in a strictly private and amateur way. He was a poet, too. But the only brook in the place, apart from the river, is the overflow channel that helps to control the level of the moat. It's never been called anything but the Overflow." I stopped, struck by an idea. "It might have been made by William, I suppose. There's a maze at Ashley, and he built a pavilion in the middle, where he used to retire to write. The stream runs past the maze."

"'The map'?" suggested Walther. "A map of the maze?"

"Perhaps. I don't see why it should matter. I've known the way in all my life, and so have my cousins." I shrugged. "In any case, it's nonsense. How could a paper—a map, whatever you like—how could it be in a stream?"

"I agree. But the next bit is surely more sensible. This paper could be in the library, of which perhaps Mr. Emerson has the keys? Does he keep keys to the Court?"

"I suppose he must have a set. One complete set was handed over to the tenants. They live in the south wing, and normally all the rest of the house is locked up, except for cleaning, and when the place is open to the public, but the Underhills have to have the keys to the locked rooms, because of fire regulations."

He merely nodded, and I didn't elaborate. I assumed that Daddy had told him about our latest tenants. The Underhills were wealthy Americans with permanent homes in Los Angeles and New York, and temporary ones, one gathered, here and there all over the world. Jeffrey Underhill was President of Sacco International, a heavy construction firm which carried out government contracts in every part of the globe. The family had been living in Los Angeles while the daughter, Cathy, was at school there, but now they had come to England for a year's stay, to be near Mrs. Underhill’s sister, whose husband was stationed at the USAF base near Bristol. As far as Mr. Underhill was concerned, it didn't seem to matter where he was based; I gathered he managed to struggle home most weekends, but spent his weeks shuttling between Paris, London, Mexico, and Teheran, where the company's current major operations were. He had told Mr. Emerson that it didn't make a bit of difference where he was actually domiciled as long as he got "back home" to Houston, Texas, for Board Meetings, and that his wife was keen to live for a while in a "real old English home," and that it would do Cathy a world of good to have a taste of country peace and quiet. Myself, I wondered about that; I had never been to Los Angeles, but one could imagine that Ashley, in contrast, might possibly not have much to offer to an eighteen-year-old girl with all the money in the world to burn. But they had stayed, and liked it, and I gathered that Cathy was still there with them.

"The bit about the cat," I said. "Do you think the car might have swerved to avoid a cat, or something, and was going too fast at the bend, and mounted the pavement and hit him?"

"It is possible. That's the way the police see it. There actually is no pavement on that section of the road, but there is a kind of footway worn in the verge of the wood, and, heaven knows, Jon might have been speaking loosely when he talks of a 'pavement.' That was where he had to stop talking and rest for a while."

"But this last bit, Dr. Gothard. He wasn't speaking loosely there. He says I have to be careful, and there's some danger."

"Indeed." His eyes were troubled. "When he speaks of 'this thing I can feel,' he seems to mean danger of some kind. It could hardly be pain; he was under sedation."

"He wouldn't mean that." I took a breath and met the kind pale eyes above the glinting half-moons of glass. "You're a doctor, so I don't expect you to believe me, but some of us— the Ashleys, I mean—have a sort of . . . I can only call it a kind of telepathy. Empathy, perhaps? Er, do you have that word?"

"Certainly. We say
'mit fuhlen.'
The power of entering imaginatively into someone else's feelings or experience."

"Yes, except that in our case it's not just imaginative, it's real. I've only known it work between members of the family, and it's kind of spasmodic, but if someone you love is hurt, you know."