Touch Not The Cat (7 page)

The cupboard . . . yes, that's all right. And there was nothing in this drawer but pencils and so on, and there is my spare cassock still hanging by the door, so that was not what you saw. . . ."

He turned finally, with reluctance, to look at the safe. "Well, let us hope not. . . ."

But when he stooped over the big clumsy metal cupboard the look of anxiety deepened. I saw him fingering some scratches near the lock. "These, would you say they look new? It's so hard to tell.

Unless something happens like this to make you look closely, you don't notice the marks that your own keys make every day. I'm afraid we had better look inside." He reached into his cassock pocket and pulled out a ring of keys.

"I suppose you keep the Communion plate in the safe," I said. "Anything else?"

"Nothing that anyone might want to steal. Only our own registers. And the Communion plate itself is of very little value—though value, as always, is relative. The plate we use now is quite modern, as you probably know; it was your father who suggested that we lodge the old plate in a safer place than this, when the prices went up so steeply, though I doubt if anyone else would have realized how very valuable the old church silver was. Did you know that the chalice and paten were Elizabethan, by John Pikenynge, and the alms dish even rarer? 1534, I believe, with the maker's mark of a basket. The ones we use now, though pleasant enough, are not—Ah," as the safe door swung open, "thank God."

He said it as if he meant it. I was looking over his shoulder. It certainly looked as if nothing had been touched. The back of the safe was stacked with registers, and some baize-wrapped shapes stood in line in front of these. "Exactly as I always put them," said the Vicar, counting. "Yes, yes, all present and correct. He didn't try the safe at all, or else he found the lock too much for him. I prefer to think—I do think—that his visit was an innocent one. Yes, indeed, that is almost certainly so. We live in sad times when one can entertain suspicions on such slender grounds." He shut the safe, locked it, and got to his feet. "However, this is a lesson to me. I cannot bring myself to lock the church, but perhaps I will—yes, I think I must-lock the vestry. And I shall do so straight away. There. Perhaps you'll come out this way after all. . . . Dear me, it's really quite dark now, isn't it? Can you see your way to the farm?"

"Yes, thank you. And don't worry about it, Vicar, I'm sure you'll find it was one of the wardens, or someone quite harmless like that. May I come and see you in the morning? If you're in the apple orchard, I'll see you anyway, when I go to the cottage. I'm moving in tomorrow. I'll give Rob your message."

"Thank you, my dear. God bless you. Good night."

Ashley, 1835

Seeming a long way off, the church clock chimed the three-quarters. He glanced at the gilt carriage clock on the bed table. It was fast. Five minutes.

He fidgeted about the room, fretting like a spurred horse. His foot struck one of his father's books, lying with the papers, where it had fallen. He stooped, and began mechanically to collect the scattered things together. The book, lying spine uppermost, showed the name
Juliet,
glinting in gold.

He slapped it shut, and, straightening, stuffed book and papers together in the table drawer, and shut it.

The sound was sharp, final. The old man was dead. His father was dead. He was Ashley now, Nicholas Ashley, Esquire, of the Court. Now, he thought, it will soon be over and done with. If each of us, in our own ways, can find the courage.

But habit made him twitch the curtains closer over the shuttered windows, to hide even a glimpse of the candlelight.

O Lord! I could have stay'd here all the night To hear good counsel. . . .

—Romeo and Juliet,
III, iii

The buildings of what had once been a fine home farm lay about a hundred and fifty yards beyond the churchyard. The quickest way to get there from the church was by the lych-gate, and through a corner of the Court gardens. I made my way carefully along the pitch-dark tunnel of the yew walk. I was conscious of my empty hands. The black yews smelled unbearably sad, sharp and smoky; frankincense and myrrh, memory and grief.

I would not think that way. I would not.

The Yew alone burns lamps of peace For them that lie forlorn.

That was the way to think of them. Peace I had had offered to me, and loss was not yet. This was still my home, and it still held what I had come here to find.

I went slowly down the muffled path towards the gate. The shadows of home reached out for me, comforting me, closing me round.

So, at the same moment, in the same shadows, did my lover. He was here. He was here in the cool night, stronger and closer than at any time since I had left Ashley. Every shade of feeling came, direct as if spoken, strong as the scent of the breeze sieving the yew trees. There was welcome, pleasure, and with it all a kind of apprehension. I paused to identify this, and unbelievingly registered it as guilt, or shame. . . .

I had just reached the lych-gate. The darkness here, cast by the roof, was palpable. I paused, groping before me for the latch of the gate. Guilt or shame? From him? From me he must have been getting a mixture almost as confusing: surprise, questioning, reassurance making it clear that whatever it was, I was with him, and part of it. . . .

My hand, groping in the dark, touched cloth. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was here, and that I had touched his sleeve. Then through the loose folds I felt the wood of the gate.

Some garment or rug had been left there, draped over the top bar. My brain identified it even before my fingers had felt the ribbed silky surface, the weight of the cloth. A cassock. The robe I had seen him wearing, flung down here as he left the churchyard . . . Guilt and shame indeed. The kind of thing he might be feeling if he had recently been in the vestry, trying locks he should not have tried, carrying away things he did not want anyone to see?

What is it? Was it you in the church?
I asked the question sharply, but got no reply. The patterns were fading. He was moving away.

At the same moment I heard, close at hand, steps going fast through the graveyard grass, away from me. He must have been standing all this while, motionless, on the other side of the wall of yew.

Lover? Lover!

He ignored me. The steps quickened. I heard the faint
ping
and thrill of the wire that crossed a gap in the broken wall between the churchyard and the Court gardens. Beyond the gap was the tangle of a neglected shrubbery, and a door into the old, high-walled garden where the glasshouses were. And now, faintly behind the black of the trees, I saw the light slacken into silver. The moon was rising. In a moment she would be above the trees, and there would be light enough to see.

Near me was a gap between the yews. I thrust through it, and ran across the grave-humped grass.

I knew every tombstone, and its name, as well as I knew the books in the schoolroom shelves. The dead would not mind my step; we had known each other a long time. I reached the gap in the wall just as the moon showed enough to send a gleam along the wire. I laid a hand to it; it was humming still. I clambered through into the whippy undergrowth of the shrubbery. Elderberry and ash saplings, raspberry canes gone wild, ivy trailing snares along the ground, and somewhere the peppery sweetness of lad's-love. Nettles, too, knee high. I swore under my breath, and plunged forward onto the trodden twist of moss that was the path to the walled garden. The gate in the high wall stood ajar, and there was moonlight on the apple trees beyond. I ran through, and paused at the head of the shallow, slippery steps.

Across the center of the garden, from east gate to west, ran a wide avenue of apple trees, espaliered with stretched arms like stiff ranks holding hands. The moon, sailing as swiftly as a galleon with a fair breeze, cleared a beech tree to light the ranked blossoms, and between them the empty pathway hatched with their shadows. Nothing moved, except the boughs of the high trees beyond the wall, shifting in the light wind and sending dark and glitter flying across the glasshouse roofs.

Then I saw him, for the second time that night, still no more than a tall shadow melting into the other shadows. He, too, had paused. He was standing in the shelter of the far gate. Beyond him lay the old rose garden, and then the maze, and the apple orchard where my cottage stood, and the water meadows beyond the Pool, where the field path led to the village.

I hesitated. He must know who was pursuing him. If he wanted me, he had only to wait for me. In fact—I realized it now—he
had
waited for me. I had been a long time in the church. He could not have failed to catch my response to him, back there at the lych-gate, and now, standing as I was full in the moonlight, he must see me and know I had followed him.

He was looking, I was certain of it. I heard the creak of the gate opening in the far wall, and then the pause. I stood getting my breath and trying to open my mind to reach him again. But nothing came except that muddled mixture of exhilaration and amazement and guilt. I wondered again, but this time wholly without blame, what he had been doing in the church. Whatever it was, I was with him; I had to be. I sent him all I had of love, and need and longing, and got the answer, more clearly even than the wind across the trees.
Not yet. Trust me. Not yet.
There was another creak as the garden gate shut fast. The latch dropped. I was alone in the garden.

I trudged back the way I had come, and, regaining the churchyard, went by the normal route to the farm.

The darkness hid the dilapidation of the big farmyard. Barns and sheds lay on the left, and on the other side the chimney stacks of the farmhouse stood up into the moonlight. The house had been empty ever since the farmlands, which were not part of the trust, were sold. The farmer who had bought the land had not found it worth his while to repair the house, which had stood empty now for years; it was used as a storehouse and even, occasionally, to house young stock. The hens roosted there, and pigeons nested in the attics. Adjoining it, and in heartening contrast, were the two farm cottages, which still belonged to Ashley. These showed whitewashed walls reflecting the moonlight, and brightly lit windows with gay curtains.

In the cottage nearest to the farmhouse the Hendersons lived; Mr. Henderson, a man well into his sixties, was sexton and gravedigger to Ashley and One Ash; his wife "did for" the Vicar, and obliged at the Court when asked. She also cleaned and mended for Rob Granger, who lived in the other cottage.

When I was a child the Grangers had lived at the big farmhouse, but a couple of years after Mr.

Granger's death, when the farm was sold, Rob and his mother moved into the cottage. Mrs. Granger herself had died not long after, and now Rob lived alone.

As I crossed the yard the door of his cottage opened, and he peered out, silhouetted against the light.

"That you, Miss Bryony?"

"Oh, Rob, hullo! How nice to see you again. Yes, it's me. How did you guess?"

"Well, I reckoned you'd be coming across for the bike. I knew you were here. I saw you come out of the church. You went after him, did you?"

I stopped dead. "You were there? Do you mean to tell me you saw him?"

"I did. Quick as a hare out of the vestry door and behind the yew walk. He stood there the best part of an hour."

"You actually
watched
him?"

"Aye, I did."

"And you didn't ask him what he was doing?"

"I didn't rightly like to, seeing who it was."

There was a pause of seconds. At the moment when it would have been remarkable, I asked:

"Well, who was it?"

He looked surprised. "You didn't talk to him, then? I made sure he was waiting for you."

"Apparently not. Who was it?"

Something, in spite of me, must have come through my voice. He said quickly: "You've no call to worry. It was only your cousin. One of them, that is. I couldn't tell for sure, not in that light, or lack of it.

But an Ashley; I couldn't mistake that."

"Then why did you stay to watch him?"

"I don't rightly know." He showed no resentment at the rather sharp question. "The way he came running out of the vestry . . . I didn't recognize him at first, so I went up, careful, under the bushes by the wall, where I could see. I saw the church lights go on then, for a minute, and I saw it was one of the Ashleys. I guessed that it might be you in the church. Then the main lights went off again, but you didn't come out."

"No," I said. "I—I wanted the dark."

"I guessed that. And I think he did, too. He stayed there, waiting for you."

I said nothing. I was fighting back disappointment so acute that I was afraid he would notice it. I stood looking down, uncertain what to say next. I had quite forgotten my errand to the farm.

"Won't you come in?" said Rob. "No sense in standing out in the yard. Come in now, do."

He stood back in the doorway to let me through. I went into the kitchen where, it was obvious, he had just been about to cook his supper. There was a place set for one at the table, and beside the stove were a pack of sausages and some tomatoes, with a packet of peas defrosting in the warmth.

I checked. "I'm afraid I've come at a bad time."

He went past me and threw a couple of billets of wood on the fire, then hooked a foot round the leg of a chair and hitched it forward.

"You haven't at all. I've got your bike here for you; it's not in the barn; I brought it into the scullery.

And I got a can of petrol for it. It'll not take a minute to fill up and get it ready. But look, why don't you stay a bit first? I was just making a bite of supper, and you're welcome to have some. There's plenty. It's only sausages, dead easy if it suits you."

Since I had obviously interrupted his cooking, and just as obviously he wanted his meal before he started getting the bike ready for me, I accepted. "I'd love that. Look, I'll cook while you set for me, shall I?"

"O.K. Want some chips with it?"