2006 - Wildcat Moon Read Free Page B

cough drops and dying roses. She wears a hairnet at night and has varicose veins that look like swollen rivers beneath her skin.
    Nanny Bea was Papa’s Nanny when he was a little boy and she does not like Mama although she pretends to.
    Romilly sniffed again and then drew in her breath sharply.
    There it was, the peculiar smell growing stronger, a strong musty whiff of a smell. The smell she dreaded most of all.
    The smell of tigers on the prowl.
    Nanny Bea said that on a damp day the house still stinks of tiger’s piss that no amount of scrubbing can remove.
    Romilly shivered.
    Once, when Great Grandpa Greswode was alive, Killivray House had been full of wild animals that he had brought back from foreign places.
    There were servants with black faces at Killivray then and there were parrots in the drawing room and peacocks on the lawn. Monkeys with red fez hats climbed the shelves in the library and fat snakes coiled in wicker laundry baskets frightened the scullery maids.
    And once a baby elephant ran amok, crashing through the rhododendrons and flattening the pergola.
    Amok is one of Romilly’s favourite words. She would like to run amok.
    She would like to turn cartwheels down the smooth striped lawns, swing through the branches of the horse chestnut trees, kick cow pats and roll over and over in the mud at the end of the far field.
    She would like to take off her clothes and run into the cool sea on a hot summer’s day.
    All of Great Grandpa Greswode’s animals were dead now; some of them had been stuffed and given awful eyes made of glass.
    But sometimes in the night, the animals come alive again and stalk the corridors of Killivray House.
    Mama once said they should have had Great Grandpa Greswode stuffed and mounted in the study.
    Romilly is glad that they hadn’t. If they had then he may have walked at night too, like the animals did. Great Grandpa Greswode is buried in the overgrown graveyard beneath a giant stone angel with feathered wings. She was put there to keep a lid on him, making sure that he can’t get out.
    Charles Lewis Lloyd Greswode.
    Romilly stiffened.
    From across the room the black and white rocking horse eyed Romilly fearfully, the whites of his eyes bright in the moonlit room.
    He could smell tigers a mile off. They spooked him.
    The one-eared teddy bear perched oh the window seat stared ahead unfazed.
    The tiny light inside the dolls’ house illuminated the lattice window panes.
    All was safe inside there.
    Romilly wished that she could magic herself so tiny that she could go in through the little front door, climb the stairs, and get beneath the pretty pink gingham counterpane in the spare bedroom.
    Inside the house the doll people would be sleeping soundly. The mother and father dolls were cuddled up snugly beneath their pink and blue patchwork quilt.
    In the nursery two identical girl children slept in single beds. Sisters. A black and white collie dog was curled up in a basket in the corner of the room.
    Up in the attic the two maids were asleep, lying top to tail, their wooden feet and mob caps peeping out from beneath the grey blankets.
    The rocking horse creaked fearfully.
    The dying embers of the nursery fire glowed behind the fireguard and a stray spark drifted away up the chimney.
    The tigers were on the move now. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing to attention and her heart thumped noisily against her flannelette nightgown.
    She heard them climbing up the steps from the dark, cobwebby cellars, then the jingle of ladles and spoons as they squeezed through the kitchen…Now the pad of their velvet paws on the worn hallway carpet.
    Moving past the drawing room where tempers are frayed.
    Where Papa is shouting at Mama.
    “The child needs to be here with her mother.”
    “She needs to go to school and have friends of her own age.” Mama now, pleading.
    “School! Don’t talk to me of school! No child of mine will ever set foot in a damned school.”
    “I’ve