Читать книгу A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas! - Trisha Ashley - Страница 13
Chapter 8: Clouded Mirrors
ОглавлениеQ: What do you call a cat that falls down a chimney?
A: Santa Claws!
I followed my new employer into a large, flagged inner hallway, from which a wide staircase ascended into darkness. We went through a door to the left into a huge and rather splendid room, wood-panelled to dado height and with an intricately moulded ceiling.
For all Mercy’s assurances that Mote Farm was not a grand house, it seemed pretty impressive to me. An immense, dimly hued carpet covered most of the floor, and old sofas, chairs and tables were randomly grouped around, like early guests at a party.
There was a larger cluster around the flickering fire, which as I drew nearer proved to be a realistic gas log one. The room resembled a surreal filmset and I began to feel somewhat swimmy-headed with tiredness and the stress and emotions of the day.
‘Now, Silas,’ Mercy said loudly, advancing on a small elderly man who was peacefully dozing in a high-backed chair before the fire. ‘Here’s Tabitha come to join us.’
He started awake and bestowed a look of acute loathing on both his sister and myself, before struggling painfully to his feet.
‘Please don’t get up!’ I begged him, but he ignored me, tottering forward to shake my hand, using only his sandpaper-dry fingertips.
‘One must do these things, however agonising it is. Rheumatism is a dreadful thing and bouts of sciatica even worse,’ he said, in a martyred way that seemed to cheer him up. Then, relieved from the burden of good manners, he subsided back into his chair.
‘Mercy says you’ve come to help with the cracker factory at the mill. It was too much for me. I’m a sad invalid, you know.’
‘You’re a sad, grumpy old malingerer,’ Mercy said. ‘You just couldn’t be bothered, I know.’
He glowered at her. Then his eye fell on the jumping and increasingly shredded cardboard pet carrier. Pye had been quiet for some minutes, but now emitted a bloodcurdling scream.
‘Tabitha’s brought her sweet little pussycat with her,’ Mercy told him. ‘I was going to get a cat now I was home again, so that has saved me the trouble. I think he’d like to get out, Tabby.’
‘I’m afraid he’s very far from being a sweet little pussycat,’ I began to warn her, but before I could leap forward and stop her, she’d popped open the carrier and out shot Pyewacket, all snarl and claws.
His first view of the strange, vast room stopped him dead in his tracks, his odd-coloured eyes wide. If he’d been able to raise his eyebrows, he’d have done it.
He sat down, in order to take it all in and better consider his options, his tail lashing from side to side like a slow metronome.
‘Pye,’ I warned him, ‘behave yourself!’
‘Mmmrow!’ he said crossly, expressing his indignation that first I’d abandoned him for weeks on end, then closed him up in a box for a couple of hours. He decided to show me how far from favour I’d fallen by getting up and advancing in a friendly way on Mercy, who made much of him. Then he turned his attention to Silas, even going so far as to jump on his lap and sit looking triumphantly at me.
‘This place is more like it!’ he seemed to be saying.
‘He must know that Silas and I are fond of cats,’ Mercy said. ‘What a clever, handsome creature he is!’
‘Speak for yourself. Unless they catch mice, I’ve no use for the creatures,’ Silas snapped, though his thin hand, knobbed with rheumatic joints, was slowly stroking Pye’s black fur. ‘Are we never to have any dinner?’ he added, obviously feeling the civilities had been completed.
‘Of course, but it’s still so early that you’ve not long since had your tea! I’ll just show Tabitha her rooms and then call you into the kitchen when dinner’s ready to dish out. There’s no point in setting the dining table just for the three of us.’
I picked up my bags again and followed Mercy through another door into a small dining parlour and on into a big kitchen with an outside door equipped with a cat-flap. Pye, who had elected to follow us, was a large cat and looked at it dubiously before sticking his head through to see whether what was on the other side was worth the effort.
‘Should you let him go out right away?’ asked Mercy. ‘Perhaps we should keep him in for a day or two, so that he knows this is his new home? Or put butter on his paws?’
‘Please, don’t even attempt that,’ I begged her. ‘And he won’t go far from me, because we’re sort of joined at the hip, even though he’s mad at me right now because he thinks I abandoned him.’
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ she said doubtfully as the rest of Pye squeezed out into the night like black ectoplasm. ‘Come on, let’s just put your bags in your room and then you can unpack and settle in properly later.’
‘Yes, the tagging people could turn up at any minute, too. They said they’d be here between five and seven and it’s well past five now.’
From the back of the kitchen a short passage led past a pantry, scullery and a cloakroom to a tiny, square parlour furnished and decorated in Victorian style, except for a new electric fire in the grate. The boxes containing my worldly belongings – and, I hoped, Pye’s litter tray, bowls and other necessities – were piled against one wall, along with the small yellow velvet nursing chair that was the one piece of furniture I’d not parted with after Mum died.
‘The chair looks very well in here, doesn’t it?’ said Mercy. ‘We managed to squeeze all your belongings into the back of the car quite comfortably. And through here is the bedroom – not palatial, but in the days when the family had a cook-housekeeper, having her own plumbed washbasin was the pinnacle of luxury. I’m told she was the envy even of the housekeepers in the local big houses.’
It was indeed a small room, containing a single brass bedstead covered in a fluffy modern duvet, a chest of drawers with a clouded mirror on top and a narrow wardrobe. The walls had been papered in a leafy William Morris design and an oval braided rag rug sat like a faded Technicolor island on the green lino.
‘All Victorian mod cons, as you see,’ Mercy said, indicating the solid washbasin in the corner. ‘And the cloakroom is just down the passage, too. I hope you’ll be comfortable here – the central heating does run this far, but it’s not terribly efficient,’ she added. Then she opened what I’d thought to be a cupboard door in the passage right outside the parlour, revealing a small spiral stone staircase.
‘This takes you up to the west wing, where the door directly ahead is a bathroom. My room is further along the landing, in the central part of the house, and Silas has a small suite downstairs in the east wing, behind the library, so he doesn’t have to tackle the stairs.’
‘Right,’ I said, wondering if her energy ever flagged, because mine certainly had!
I think she noticed I was tiring, because she said, ‘Not to worry, I’ll give you the guided tour in the morning, when you’re rested – and here comes Pussy again.’
Pye stalked down the passage towards us and then head-butted my legs meaningfully.
‘I think he’s hungry.’
‘Like Silas,’ she said.
‘I hope there are some tins of catfood in one of those boxes along with his dishes and stuff,’ I said.
‘No matter for tonight, for I’m sure I can find a tin of tuna in the cupboard, if he would like that, and I have lots of odd saucers he can use until you find his own crockery.’
She made it sound as if he always travelled with a complete Minton dinner service, but I agreed that he would love tuna.
‘Did you say he was called Pie?’
‘Yes, but spelled P-Y-E, short for Pyewacket. It’s from an old film called Bell, Book and Candle, which my mother loved.’
Too late, I thought that perhaps Quakers might not be that keen on films about witchcraft, but she said cheerfully enough, ‘Oh, I remember that one – hokum, but amusing. I used to be very fond of going to the cinema when I was a young thing. Now, come along with me, Pye, while Tabitha freshens up. Join us in the drawing room when you’re ready, dear. I’ll pop the nice hotpot I made earlier in a slow oven to reheat and we can have dinner as soon as these Tag People have been.’
She made them sound like a tribe.
When I arrived back at the drawing room, it was to find two strangers there and Mercy explaining to Silas what they were going to do.
‘I did tell you earlier, Silas,’ she pointed out. ‘I knew you weren’t listening.’
‘I’d have heard if you’d told me someone was going to come and put a tag on the new girl’s leg, as if she was a pigeon,’ he said testily. ‘Load of nonsense.’
‘It’s so they know if Tabitha has left the house at night,’ Mercy said.
‘Yes, I can’t leave between seven at night and seven in the morning, until the tag is removed in a couple of months – isn’t that right?’ I turned for corroboration from the newcomers, a man and a woman, and they said it was.
The tagging was soon done, but the layout of the house gave them problems, it being very much wider than it was deep. My tag must allow me to walk from one end to the other – but then, it would also allow me to leave the house and walk a short way. But when Mercy pointed out that I still couldn’t get beyond the moat, they thought that would be acceptable.
Mercy invited them to stay to dinner and seemed genuinely disappointed when they said they couldn’t, even waving them off from the front door as if they had been old friends she hadn’t wanted to part with. I deduced that she extended this amicable spirit to most people she met, because although the taggers (whose names I hadn’t managed to catch) were nice, they weren’t that nice. I mean, I’ve never indulged in an ankle bracelet because I think they’re naff, and now I had a super-naff semi-permanent plastic one.
In our absence, Silas had hobbled through to the kitchen and was now seated at one end of the long pine table, with a checked napkin tucked into his blue lambswool jumper. Pye was sitting on a Windsor chair by the big Aga stove, though I noticed there was a utilitarian electric one nearby, too.
It was a strangely homely meal. Mercy dished out bowls of rich brown casserole in which bobbed dumplings and chunks of beef and carrots, served along with a basket of warm and floury soft bread rolls, and we set to. I discovered I was hungry. I’d forgotten what that felt like.
We followed that with cheese and biscuits and the remains of a big sherry trifle, into which I nearly slumped, since by then I was so dazed with food and exhaustion my backbone seemed to be wilting.
‘Here, take the coffee tray through to the drawing room, Tabby, and sit with Silas, while I pop everything in the dishwasher,’ Mercy suggested.
‘I’ll help you first,’ I said.
‘No, no, you’re too tired tonight. Go and pour the coffee and I’ll be with you in a minute. We keep early hours here, so you can get off to bed as soon as we’ve had it.’
‘I’ll be off to my bed straight after the coffee, too,’ Silas agreed.
‘I know you like to watch the news on the TV first,’ Mercy said, then explained to me, ‘I’m afraid Silas has the only TV in the house. I don’t bother, because I like to listen to the radio. But I could get a little one for your room, if you missed it.’
‘No, I don’t mind in the least. I like to read, or work on my papercuts, in the evening.’
Pye came into the drawing room with us and continued to make much of Silas, who seemed to like him more than he did me, for he still glowered at me from time to time. But then, that might just be his natural expression. His nose and chin appeared to be attempting to join forces and his eyes were sunken under amazingly bushy eyebrows, which didn’t help.
Silas went to his rooms the moment he had had his coffee, and I told Mercy I would, too.
‘Yes, do go, dear. I’ll lock up and follow suit. Of course, when I’m away Job makes sure that the house is secured for the night before he leaves, after serving Silas his dinner. Silas has those frozen ready meals delivered that you just heat up in the microwave – he loves them – but when I’m home I cook the dinner with a little preparation beforehand by Freda, Job’s wife, and we eat together. Then, in the morning, do help yourself to breakfast in the kitchen if I’m not there, and give Pye anything he wants.’
I nodded, taking in only half of this through crashing tidal waves of tiredness. Mercy seemed to produce a running commentary to her life, but I thought perhaps if I missed something it would come round again … and probably again after that, too.
‘It will be such fun, showing you over the house and mill tomorrow!’ she said, before kissing me warmly and with such kindness to someone who was not only a stranger but, for all she knew, a criminal, that it brought tears to my eyes.
‘I hope you’ll be very happy here,’ she said. ‘Good night, my dear.’
Pye, following me back into the kitchen wing, made brief use of the cat-flap again, before joining me in my quarters and watching with interest as I unpacked the basic necessities before getting into bed. It was soft, lavender-scented and warm, and felt as if it was undulating … perhaps it was and I was floating away on the moat among the quacking ducks …
I half woke as four furry feet landed next to me with a heavy thump.
‘Good night, Pye,’ I said, wondering, as I fell asleep, at the astonishing turn my life had taken.