Today it was just the Manor he had in mind—he wasn’t quite ready for the great English outdoors just yet. We started with the Arctic Circle, me showing off the new range and the cupboards Evan had put in—not to mention another new refrigerator—and Mister Cat sauntering along beside me, tail up like a snorkel, digging on everything, just as though he might be thinking about buying the place. My throat got achy again for a bit, watching him.
West wing, east wing, corridors, closets, rooms… we walked the whole first floor, taking our time, letting Mister Cat go where he wanted. You can’t ever figure what interests him—he hardly glanced into a couple of rooms that I’d have been curious about if I were a cat, but he took forever sniffing around one empty little alcove, looking up at me impatiently, as though I ought to know exactly what he was smelling and be doing something about it. I always disappoint Mister Cat, but he’s used to it. Like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
To get to the second floor, you climb a stair that curls around the west chimney—there’s no stair in the east wing, I don’t know why, but once we got to the second floor, Mister Cat’s whole attitude changed. He sort of slunk along, not quite with his belly to the ground, but more as though he were stalking something—a bird, a big rat. His ears were down flat, his tail stuck straight out behind him, and he was growling a thin, mean growl that I’d never heard before. I said, “What? What? Those things in my bathroom?” but he didn’t even look at me. Mister Cat was on the case, and there really are times when I wish I’d had a dog. Something fluffy.
Actually, he hadn’t even looked at the bathroom, once he’d used his box. But up here you’d have thought he was snaking through a minefield: Everything was suspicious, everything was dangerous, or it could be. When we came to the two rooms Julian wouldn’t go into that first day, Mister Cat stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t make a sound, he didn’t lash his tail, nothing like that. He just sat down on his haunches and looked at me.
“What?” I said again. “What, boggarts? What is going on?” I bent to pick him up, but he backed off and sprinted away from me down the corridor, and there wasn’t anything to do but follow him. I walked along after him, passing one closed oak door after another—all we’d done with the whole east wing in six months was to clear it out a bit, except for Tony setting up his studio there—and even today no one really uses the rooms on the second floor for anything. You could, there’s nothing wrong with them now. We just mostly don’t.
Mister Cat had turned a corner ahead of me, and I caught up with him at what I first thought was another door and then realized was a stairway, boarded up like the one in the west wing. We still hadn’t been up to the third floor, none of us, though you could get through pretty easily—here, all it would have taken was a squat and a shove. Not that I was about to, not unless I had to chase after Mister Cat, but he wasn’t going anywhere either. He was crouching at the foot of the stair, his whole body tight as a barbed-wire fence, his eyes wide and wild as I’d never seen them. I didn’t try to pick him up—I just kept saying, “What? What in the world is it with you?”
I couldn’t see anything past the boards on the stair. I couldn’t sense whatever he was smelling or hearing, or taking in through his whiskers or his tail. There wasn’t a thing to do but shut up and wait, like Dr. Watson.
And then he was Mister Cat again, Ultimate Cool, sitting up to give himself a fast facial and a good scratch. Then he turned and I got The Look, the one that says—unmistakable, no question— “Well, you’re deaf, dumb, blind, and funny looking, but we’ll make do.” When I knelt down, he jumped straight to my shoulder, which is how I used to carry him when he was a kitten. He’s been way too big for that for years, but he won’t give it up, even though he always skids and slides around up there and has to grab on so hard that I can’t pull him off. But this time he balanced perfectly, hardly digging in at all, and purring right into my ear so loud that I could feel it in my teeth as we walked back. Some days I really do know exactly what’s on his black furry mind. This wasn’t one of them.
Sally came into my room that night, which was nice, because we hadn’t had much time by ourselves for weeks, what with school and the farm, and me being with Meena a lot. She smiled when she saw Mister Cat asleep on my bed. She said, “So. All is forgiven? ”
“I guess,” I said. I wasn’t handing her any blank check like that, even if it was like what Meena said about keeping score. Sally sat down near my feet and petted Mister Cat, who couldn’t take the trouble to open his eyes. She asked if he’d been outside yet, and I said, no, he’d had quite enough excitement checking out the Manor. I didn’t mean to, but I wound up telling her the whole thing about the way he’d been in certain parts of the house, and what had happened at the third-floor stair in the east wing. I didn’t care how loony it all sounded. Sally listened without interrupting or saying anything. She looked tired—not bad, just tired.
“Well,” she said when I finished. “This is a very old house, Jenny, and I haven’t a clue about whatever’s gone on in it over three hundred years. And cats do seem to sense things we don’t, and nothing your big guy does would surprise me, anyway. So who knows?”
“Meena thinks the house really is haunted,” I said. “She says they have them all over the place in India. No biggie.”
Sally shook her head. “I don’t do ghosts. Although I had a very strange harpsichord once, before you were born…” But she stopped herself and shook her head again. “No. No ghosts. Brownies, gnomes, fairies at the bottom of my garden… Did you see the kitchen this morning?”
I’d seen it. Like woodchucks had been slamdancing in the pantry. I told her about Meena’s poltergeist, but she sighed and shrugged, and said it was probably altogether different in India. Then she asked, all of a sudden, “Baby, are you liking Evan any better? As a stepfather, I mean.”
I shrugged. “I’ve never not liked him,” I said, which was perfectly true. The only thing I really disliked about Evan was that I didn’t dislike him; because if somebody wrecks and devastates your entire life, he ought to at least have the decency to be a fullout, David Copperfield-style, vicious rat bastard, not a skinny Limey farmer who liked to play the guitar. “He’s all right. As a stepfather.”
“Well, that’s something,” Sally said. She put her hand on my cheek. “He likes you a lot, you know. Admires you, in fact, though I can’t think why.” I didn’t say anything. Sally sighed. “This is turning into a tough gig, Jenny. It’s going to be a much harder, longer job than Evan estimated, reclaiming this relic of a farm. But he’ll get it done. Of course, you may be pushing our wheelchairs by then, but it’ll be done. And somewhere along in there, we may even have found the time to sneak off for a honeymoon. Right now, as far as I can see, from here to senility we’re just going to be digging holes and tearing things down.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And the piano?” Sally looked at me. I said, “You haven’t touched the piano since we got here. I know you haven’t, because it’s way out of tune, you’ll have to get somebody from Dorchester or wherever. Unless you’re just going to let the boggarts have it—hey, it’s your piano.” I hadn’t realized I was really upset about her not playing the piano until I got started. Mister Cat finally opened his eyes, yawned, and walked up the bed to see if I was being uncool again. He always knows.
Sally didn’t get mad, though. She leaned forward and put her arms around me. Sometimes it used to make me prickly when she did that, and I’d turn into a bag of knees and elbows, but right then it felt good. I curled against her, with Mister Cat burrowed down against my stomach, so the three of us were comfortable and quiet together. I about fell asleep.