Touch Not The Cat Read Free

bit more of the silver, shut the cottage up, and went to Bad Tolz, a little spa town in Bavaria, pleasantly situated on the River Isar. My father had often been there as a young man, visiting a friend of his, one Walther Gothard, who now had a considerable reputation as a Kur-Doktor, and had turned his house into a sanatorium.
    Daddy went there simply to rest, and to be cared for by Herr Gothard, who, for old times' sake, took him cheaply. I stayed for a month, but he mended so rapidly in that air that it was impossible to worry any more, so, when the Madeira job was suggested, I was easily persuaded to go. Even my lover, when I asked him, said there was nothing to go home for. I only half liked this kind of reassurance, but it was true that none of my cousins was at Ashley, and the cottage in winter and the damps of early spring looked lonely and uninviting; so in the end I took the job, and went off happily enough to the sun and flowers of Funchal, with no idea in the world that I would never see my father alive again.
    Bryony?
    Yes. I'm awake. What is it? But the trouble was there already, in the room. It settled over me in a formless way, like fog; no colour, neither dark nor light, no smell, no sound; just a clenching tension of pain and the fear of death. The sweat sprang hot on my skin, and the sheet scraped under my nails. I sat up.
    I've got it, I think. It's Daddy. . . . He must have been taken ill again.
    Yes. There's something wrong. I can't tell more than that, but you ought to go.
    I didn't stop then to wonder how he knew. There was only room for just the one thing, the distress and urgency, soon to be transmuted into action; the telephone, the airfield, the ghastly slow journey to be faced. . . . It only crossed my mind fleetingly then to wonder if my father himself had the Ashley gift; he had never given me a hint of it, but then neither had I told him about myself. Had he been "read" by my lover, or even been in touch with him . . . ? But there was denial stamped on the dark. With the denial came over a kind of uncertainty, puzzlement with an element of extra doubt running through it, like a thread of the wrong colour through a piece of weaving.
    But it didn't matter how, and through whom, it had got to him. It had reached him, and now it had reached me.
    Can you read me, Bryony? You're a long way off.
    Yes. I can read you. I'll go . . . I'll go straight away, tomorrow—today? There was a flight at eight; they would surely take me. . . . Then urgently, projecting it with everything I had: Love?
    It was fading. Yes?

    Will you be there?
    Again denial printed on the dark; denial, regret, fading . . .
    Oh, God, I said soundlessly. When?
    Something else came through then, strongly through the fading death cloud, shouldering it aside; comfort and love, as old-fashioned as potpourri and as sweet and sane and haunting. It was as if the rose shadows on the ceiling were showering their scent down into the empty room. Then there was nothing left but the shadows. I was alone.
    I threw the sheet off and knotted a robe round me, and ran for the telephone.
    As I put a hand on it, it began to ring.
    Ashley, 1835
    He stood at the window, looking out into the darkness. Would she come tonight? Perhaps, if she had heard the news, she would think he could not be here, waiting for her; and indeed, for very decency, he surely ought not to have come. . . .
    He scowled, chewing his lip. What, after all, was a little more scandal? And this was their last time—the last time it would be like this. Tomorrow was for the world, the angry voices, the laughter, the cold wind. Tonight was still their own.
    He glanced across in the direction of the Court. The upper stories showed, above the hedges, as a featureless bulk of shadow against a windy sky. No lights. No lights showing anywhere. His eye lingered on the south wing, where the old man lay behind a darkened window.
    Something like a shudder shook him. He tugged at his neckcloth, and