Touch Not The Cat (29 page)

I sat down on the stool beside the water tank and watched him in silence. In silence? The air was fizzing like champagne. The sun-motes sifting down through the tangle of white jasmine stung like sparks along the skin. Rob hadn't even looked at me again. He laid the screwdriver down and reached in a pocket for a fresh screw. Then, still with those steady, unhurried movements, he tackled the other hinge.

He might have been alone.

I thought it was time to calm things down into words. "Thank you for the picture books."

"Don't mention it. Like them?"

"Love them."

"So when do we start?"

"Any time you like. For our honeymoon, perhaps?"

He gave the screw a last twist. "I reckon our honeymoon will take care of itself."

"I reckon it will. Rob, how long have you had this New Zealand dream?"

"Years now. There was something on the telly a long time ago—colour it was; I saw it down at the Bull. It got at me, I don't know why. It seemed right for me, somehow. Ever since then I've read about it, off and on. Happen you never knew, but some folks of mine went out there, years back, and they've done well farming up in the North Island. Jerseys, mainly. Mum used to keep up with them, writing at Christmas, you know how it is. Then after she died I wrote to New Zealand House in London, and asked about emigrating. It seems there's no problem for a farm worker. I wouldn't need a sponsor, either; the Makepeaces—my folks out there—laid a welcome on the mat for me."

"But you didn't go."

"How could I? I was waiting for you." He said it quite simply, moving the creaking hinge experimentally as he talked. "It's true, you know that. After Mum died there wasn't anything much to keep me here. I liked your dad, but if it hadn't been for you I'd have gone, all that time back."

"I wondered why you stayed here. There didn't seem much future for you. Rob—"

"Mm?"

"Would you have asked me, if my father had still been alive?"

The mended hinge seemed to satisfy him. He picked an oilcan up off the top step of the ladder and began to trickle a few drops through into the rusty joint. "I don't know. I've asked myself that.

Maybe I'd have talked to him first. I don't know."

"If you had, he might have told you what he told the Vicar."

"He might," said Rob. "I still don't really understand that."

"Don't you?" I smiled to myself. He didn't look down, but he caught it, and a little current of affection ran between us, as settled and placid as if we had been married for years. The champagne sparkle had subsided slowly from the air; the place was a deep, still well of contentment. I laced my fingers round an upraised knee and tilted my head to him. "So you see you needn't have worried, after all."

"Maybe not. But I wasn't to know that. The way I saw it, it'd have been a queer enough thing anyway, a man like me and a girl like you, let alone having this link between us as well. . . .

That would have taken some explaining, wouldn't it?"

"He'd have understood."

He gave a slow nod. "I think so, too. I used to tell myself that. It didn't help much. There was always the moment when I was going to have to say, 'Mr. Ashley, sir, I want to marry Miss Bryony.'"

"I meant I think he'd have understood because he had something of the same gift." He looked, not surprised, but inquiring. I nodded. "He never said so, but I think he did."

"How d'you make that out?"

"Oh, one or two things that happened. There was a time once when I was hurt at school, and he knew without being told. That kind of thing. And I think that when he was dying he tried to get to me, and couldn't, but he had enough of a link with Ashley to get here. And you were here, and you got the signal and sent it on to me."

"A sort of Telstar?"

"Sort of, I suppose. Yes. It worked, anyway. The news came from you, not from him."

"It was a bad night, that." He propped the ventilator open, pocketed his tools, then leaned his elbows on the top step of the ladder, chin on fist, looking away from me to the creepers that festooned the rafters. "I'd been asleep, and I came awake, all very sudden, as if someone had kicked me in the head. It ached like that, too, I remember. First of all I thought I must be sickening for something, then after a bit I got there. And I didn't like what I got. Then somehow, like I always did, I began to think of you, and I knew what I was telling you. I suppose if boiling water or something flows through a pipe, the pipe gets scalded. That's what it felt like."

"Poor Rob. But you helped. Oh, my God, you did. If he hadn't been able to get to you . . . And that's another thing. This—this gift we share. I'm sure now that neither Emory nor James has it. James did tell me once that they could 'read each other's thoughts,' but I'm certain that—if it was true—he was just talking about the sort of link a lot of twins have with each other, a kind of sixth sense—intuition, really. Not what we have."

"And ours is the seventh, maybe?"

"Well, isn't it?" I tilted my head to smile at him. "That's how I think of it, anyway. Special and magic . . . I'm certain the twins don't have anything of the same sort. If they had, this last few days would have been even more difficult than they have. It was so awful having to shut you out."

He reached out a hand and began absently to guide the jasmine tendrils to their curled grip on the wires. "I once saw a picture," he said reminiscently, "called 'Love Locked Out.' It struck me at the time he shouldn't have been drooping there propped against the doorpost. He should have been hammering the bloody door down."

"You didn't. Not quite, anyway."

"Not for lack of wanting to."

"I suppose it was just as hard for you as it was for me. Harder, really." A spray of jasmine, too sharply jerked, loosed a tiny flight of fading flowers. They drifted past me, some of them to float on the water of the tank. I reached an idle finger to rescue the nearest. "Rob, there's something I still can't understand. It's what's been setting me wrong all this time about you, even though I know I must really have
wanted
it to be you. I thought it had to be an Ashley. So I never looked beyond my cousins, though heaven knows, since I grew up, I've never really felt anything about them at all. Not this way. It's really had me coming and going. But in that case, where do you fit in?"

He smiled. "Didn't you know? Straight down the wrong side of the blanket ever since donkey's years back. Makepeace, she was called, Ellen Makepeace. That ought to tell you that my stock's just as bad as yours, Miss Bryony Ashley."

"Ellen Makepeace? That was the girl Nick Ashley was shot for, surely. Her brothers shot him."

"That's the one. And they got on the next ship to Australia, and ended up in New Zealand." He started down the ladder. "And as for Ellen, a nice decent village lad called Granger married her, and they had a baby nearly nine months later. She said it was a Granger baby, and so did he, and everyone took it that way, it being easier. Our family certainly took it so. But now you and I know better, don't we? It must have been Nick's baby, and the Ashley thing—this mind-talking— came down with it, right to me." He stood over me, smiling. "What is it? Why are you staring? Can't stomach the idea of me being part Ashley, too?"

"I was wondering why I hadn't seen that, either. You've even got the looks. Oh, not what they call the Ashley looks, but you've got Bess Ashley's hair and eyes."

"The gipsy look. Aye." He laughed. "I could see it myself, once I knew where to look."

"Well, but if you know, then all the Grangers must have known. . . . Your father and mother—"

"No, why should they? It's only this mind-talking that made me even begin to guess at it. Oh, everyone knew the story about Nick Ashley, of course they did, but I never heard it told any other way except that the Granger boy made an honest woman of Ellen, and it was his own baby. It's a long time ago; why should anyone bother? But then this started, this between you and me.

When I was a kid I thought nothing about it, but since I've got older, and thought a bit more, that's the only explanation I can see. I'm the only one who guessed it, because no one else knew the way you and I can talk."

"Did you find it harder this morning?"

"Yes. And I reckon this might be why. . . ." His arms went round me, and we closed again, mouth to mouth, body to body. Two creatures becoming one, lost and oblivious, glassed in from the world in our own quiet well of content. "As good as last night?" he asked at length.

"Better, except there's no nightingale."

"What do you mean?"

"The nightingale last night, singing in the pear tree. Didn't you hear it?"

"There was nothing in the pear tree."

"There was a bird singing. It must have been a nightingale. Heavens, Rob—"

"You were imagining it. If that's what kissing me does for you—"

"I was not imagining it, and if kissing
me
stops up all your faculties—"

"Not all. Some it starts going."

"About the wedding, Rob—"

"Yes?"

"The license was all right? It really is today?"

"Eleven this morning. It's all arranged."

"It is?"
I got my breath. "Look, isn't that perhaps rushing it just a bit—?"

"Who was rushing it last night?"

"I didn't mean that way. I meant it's after half past nine now, and—"

"Great jumping beans, so it is, and I haven't fed the hens yet!" said the man who hadn't heard the nightingale. He kissed me hurriedly again, for good measure, then let me go and picked up the stepladder. On the way to the greenhouse door he hesitated, and turned. I got it again, the love and the longing and the uncertainty which, now, I understood. "Bryony, honey, am I rushing it? I thought when you said last night—I thought you wanted—"

"You thought right." I went to him, and put the palm of my hand gently against his still rough cheek.

"Oddly enough, my darling Rob, you read my very thoughts. . . . And now go and feed your hens, while I find something to wear for my wedding. See you in church."

Mr. and Mrs. Henderson were the witnesses, and Mr. Bryanston, gently beaming, took the service.

Rob even produced a ring, which fitted. The church was full of the smell of lilac, and the flowers massed by the chancel steps still had the dew on them. He must have picked them at first light. The church door stood open, and the churchyard scents came in, elder-flowers and dewy grasses and the violets that grew by the porch, along with a faint smoky spice from the avenue where the yew burned its lamps of peace. For me no longer. I would lie forlorn no more.

The Vicar flattened a hand on the pages of the register, and Rob signed it. Not "farmer" or

"gardener," but "man of all work." I liked that. It sounded proud, somehow, coming from him. When he put the pen in my hand I signed against my own name, "unemployed." I saw him watching over my shoulder, and the corners of his mouth deepened in a smile that did something severely clinical to the base of my spine.

"By the way," said the Vicar, "I almost forgot to tell you. The missing register is back, and I think quite unharmed."

"Which goes without saying"—this, unexpectedly, from Mrs. Henderson—"seeing as where I found it."

"You
brought it back?" asked the Vicar in surprise.

"I did. I'm sorry you've been worrying yourself, Vicar, because there was no call. It's been in my house since Sunday, safe and sound, and to tell you the truth I clean forgot about it."

"Well, I must say, I'm very glad to have it back." There was some restraint apparent in the Vicar's voice. "Though, my dear Mrs. Henderson, I wish you had told me. If you wanted to consult it—"

"Me consult it? Why, Vicar, what would I want with those old books?"

"Well, then—" began the Vicar, but I had seen Mrs. Henderson's sidelong look at me.

"Where did you find it, Mrs. H.?" I asked her.

"In your cottage, Miss Bryony. I found it when I tidied up ready for you to come home, and I took it home with me, meaning to take it straight to the Vicar, but then Martha Gray came up, wanting a bite of tea, and we got talking, and I clean forgot. I won't pretend I'm not at fault, because I am.

When your dad left he asked me most particular to take it back for him, him having been too ill to see to everything, and there, if I didn't forget it again till this very morning!"

"Talking about our wedding she was, and it put her in mind." Mr. Henderson made his first and last contribution to the conversation. It was hard to tell whether the dry sound of his voice was the result of long disuse, or of some disillusion provoked by the memory of that earlier wedding.

As ever, he was ignored. The Vicar, indeed, began to say something, but Mrs.

Henderson was still looking at me, and I raised my brows at her. "I'd no idea it was there. Just whereabouts did you find it?"

"In your dad's room, it was. I wouldn't be likely to have mentioned it to
you,
Miss Bryony, not wanting to remind you of things, and I thought nothing of it, seeing as I expected Mr. Ashley would have told the Vicar he had the book. If," said Mrs. Henderson, showing signs of taking umbrage,

"the Vicar had seen fit to mention to Henderson or me that it was missing—"

"I should have, I should have. The fault was mine. Indeed, now I come to think of it, I believe Mr.

Ashley did mention his interest. . . . Now, why did I not think of that? Of course no one blames you, Mrs. Henderson; indeed, we are most grateful to you for bringing the book back.

And now perhaps, this morning, on this very happy occasion . . ."

As the Vicar, soothing with long practice, trotted competently into the breach, Rob moved quietly past me to the table, and began to leaf through the pages of
One Ash: 1780-1837

which lay there.

I looked over his shoulder. The pages were all numbered, in beautiful copperplate, and they were all there. But Rob turned each one, looking, I knew, for some other paper which might have been hidden between the leaves. The paper. The letter. My father must have been studying this register, along with the family books, just before he had succumbed to the last attack that had banished him to Bad Tolz.