The Sign of the Cat (12 page)

The cats on the wharf were still raising a ruckus. He caught a few words; he was pretty sure one was “kittens.” The spyglass brought them so close that he could see their individual mouths meowing, but the sounds were too confused to hear clearly.

Fia stirred inside Duncan's shirt. Her tiny claws pricked his skin as she stretched. “It's stuffy in here,” she complained, and Duncan undid the top button.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asked. “After your fall?”

Fia's pointed face peered up at him from inside his shirt. “I'm all right
now
.”

“How did you end up in that crate?” Duncan squinted through the spyglass again. There was Old Tom—he had climbed up on a pier. He was meowing something that Duncan couldn't quite make out.

“I can't remember exactly,” Fia said. “There was something—something good—in the street. I smelled it. And then I came out, and it was only this little pile of leaves, but it was wonderful! You could smell it, and taste it, and
roll
in it.” Fia shut her eyes, purring in remembered ecstasy.

“And then?” Duncan prompted.

Fia curled up against his chest. “Next thing I knew, I was stuffed in a smelly bag with a lot of kittens. We were put in a crate and then it crashed and you found me.”

Suddenly there was a lull in the meowing, and Duncan could hear Old Tom's yowl clearly above all the rest. “Kitnip! Kitnip found in the streets! Keep your kittens with you at all times!”

So Old Tom had been right all along.

Fia's head lifted sharply, as if she had heard a trumpet call. “Mommy?” she mewed.

Duncan hung the telescope up, ashamed. It was time to get Fia back to her mother; he had delayed too long.…

It took a minute before Duncan understood why the cabin door wasn't opening. Someone had locked him in.

He banged on the door's heavy panels, but no one came. All at once there seemed to be a lot more noise on the ship—a thunderous stamping, a metallic clanking, a creaking of timbers. The deck tilted under his feet. He looked out the porthole, where the line of cats grew suddenly smaller.

They were sailing away.

 

CHAPTER 9

A Glass of Cherry Punch

“H
EY
! HEY!
”
D
UNCAN BANGED
on the cabin's low ceiling. Then he yelped out the round porthole, twisting his head so that his voice might be heard on the deck above. “I'm still here! Take me back to the docks!”

Above him a powerful voice struck up a sea chanty—“From Isle of Dulle we're bound away”—and a thunder of male voices joined in with “Away, lads, heave away!” Duncan's cries were drowned out by loud, tuneless singing and the slap of canvas as the sails billowed out to catch the sea breeze.

If only the deadlights hadn't been in place! Duncan rattled at the bars, but the pins were locked and the earl had taken the key. He ran to the porthole again and tried to push one shoulder out, with no success.

Fia wriggled against his chest. “You're squishing me!”

“Sorry.” Duncan stared out the porthole. If a fishing boat came by, he would wave and call for help.

Fia clambered up to his shoulder. “Are we prisoners?”

In a way they were. But accidental prisoners? Or had Bertram locked them in on purpose? There was no reason Duncan could think of why
anyone
would lock him up.

He blinked at the circle of tossing water and tilting sky. The waves crested and curled and subsided, foaming in hypnotic curving lines that were always changing and yet always the same; he watched them as if the answer were contained somewhere in their endless motion.

But Fia's small mews were worried—too worried for a baby cat. Duncan tried to cheer her up despite the hollow feeling at his core. “Maybe you'll get to stay and be a shipboard cat. You said you wanted to explore, right?”

Fia sniffed. “Not on a ship where they put kittens in dark crates.”

Duncan put the telescope to his eye. He could still see the line of cats, but they were tiny specks, for the ship had passed the mouth of the bay.

All at once he lurched, caught off balance. There was a hesitation in the ship's forward motion, as if the schooner had paused to catch her breath, and then the deck tilted under him the other way. The ship had come about. A glance out the porthole told him that the ship had cleared the point and was now sailing along the west side of the island.

He braced his feet for the new slant and looked keenly through the spyglass up at the familiar cliffs. He knew the landmarks from the sea. The narrow entrance to the cove must be coming up, and above it, the stone throne where he loved to sit. This would be his last glimpse of his home for two days, he knew, for even if the earl discovered in the next minute that Duncan had been locked in, there was no way the ship would be turned back for the sake of one stowaway. The earl would have lost his tide; once docked, the ship would not be able to leave for another twelve hours. Duncan wasn't important enough to cause that sort of delay.

A small glee unfurled in Duncan's middle. He was going to be a ship's boy after all—and with no blame to him, for hadn't he turned down the earl? His mother would be upset, of course, but there was nothing he could do about it now. In two days, when he returned from Capital City, she would be so happy that it would make up for all the worry.

Fia curled around his neck and patted the telescope curiously with her paw. Duncan showed her how to put her small eye to the lens.

“Can you see the stone throne?” he asked. “That big boulder that looks like a chair for a giant?”

Fia pressed against the eyepiece. Her tail went up like a flag. “Why is Grizel on the cliff?”

Duncan nudged Fia aside. He scanned—it
was
Grizel! Why had she run all the way to the cliff? She was waving her tail … no, lashing it.…

Duncan took in his breath sharply. She was signaling. She was not signaling in semaphore, holding flags in different positions, the way human sailors did. She was signaling with her tail in Cataphore, the language of seagoing cats. Unlike the subtle motions of whiskers and ears that cats used face-to-face, Cataphore could be seen at long distances. Grizel had tried to teach him once, but since he didn't have a tail, he hadn't paid much attention.

“Let me see!” Fia's whiskers tickled as she butted her head against Duncan's jaw.

Duncan stared intently through the telescope at the small moving figure on the clifftop. Grizel arched her back, clawed the air, put her tail straight up—no, now it was sideways—and now it was at an angle.

Duncan clicked his tongue with impatience. He couldn't understand any of her signals.

“Have you learned Cataphore yet?” he asked Fia as he yielded the telescope. “Tell me what she's saying.”

Fia hesitated. “Cataphore's kind of advanced. I haven't even passed my kitten examinations.”

“Try anyway,” urged Duncan. “You're a cat. It might come naturally to you.”

Fia shrugged her tiny shoulders. “That looks like ‘keep your back up,'” she meowed. “And maybe ‘keep your claws out.' Then … let's see … she's making the number seven.”

Duncan chewed on a fingernail. “Cat tricks go by number,” he said abruptly. “Number seven—that's Perky Ears, right?”

Fia hesitated. “Now she's making letters with her tail, but I'm not very good at spelling yet.”

Duncan fought the urge to grab the telescope away and see for himself. “Just do the best you can. Say the letters out loud to me.” He fumbled with his free hand for the pen and pulled a fresh sheet of paper out of the drawer. He wrote “Back up, claws out,” as fast as he could, and waited, pen poised, for more.

“
W … A…,
” said Fia. “
C … H … O … W … T … F … O … R.
”

Duncan looked at what he had written. Wachowtfor. It didn't make any sense. He mouthed the syllables aloud, slowly, and the sound created meaning in his brain. “Watch out for!” he said, excited. “She's telling us to watch out for something—what? What else is she spelling?”

But Fia said nothing. One eye had become distracted by the reflection of light on the water that played across the cabin wall. Now she was swaying on her hind feet, her paws outstretched to catch the dancing bits of light.

“Hey!” Duncan dropped the pen. “Pay attention! Tell me the next letters!”

Fia glanced carelessly through the telescope. “
E
,” she said.

“
E?
What's the rest of it?” cried Duncan. “Come
on
, Fia!”

“
E
,
L
,
S
,” Fia rattled off, and pulled her eye away again, entranced by the darting flecks of light.

“Eels? Watch out for
eels
? Are you sure?”

“They're moving!” cried Fia, pawing the air. “I can catch one, I know I can!”

Duncan stifled a groan as he put his eye to the telescope. He should have known better than to trust such an important job to a kitten. By the time he managed to focus on Grizel once more, she was so small he could barely see her lashing tail.

“When she whips her tail back and forth, what does that mean?” he demanded.

Fia had given up on the dancing sparkles and was investigating the swinging cot, but she answered promptly. “Danger,” she said. “If it's three long lashes and one short. Or maybe—” She twined her paws together uncertainly. “Maybe it's three short lashes and one long. And if it's two long and two short, I think it means ‘you have a wood tick.' Or maybe ‘your mother has fleas.' It's something bad, anyway, I'm pretty sure.”

Duncan doubted his cat had run all the way to the cliff just to tell him about wood ticks or fleas. Somehow Grizel must have known he was on the schooner and had tried to warn him of danger. But what kind of danger? He was supposed to worry about
eels
?

He watched with a strange catch at his heart as Grizel's form blended into the cliffside and disappeared. The island of Dulle was faded and misty in the distance when at last he took the telescope from his eye.

Duncan spread out his paper on the polished wooden table and puzzled over the words. Back up. Claws out. Perky Ears. Watch out for eels. They made sense individually, but not together.

He was thirsty. He picked up his glass of cherry punch and took a sip. It tasted strong, but not unpleasant. He jumped when Fia poked her head out from behind a curtain that hung to the deck.

“I'm exploring the earl's closet,” she announced. “There's a place behind the walls and under the deck where I can squeeze through. And there's a smell of rat!”

“Watch out,” said Duncan. He yawned widely, suddenly sleepy. “You're not much bigger than a rat yourself.”

“I hope there
is
a rat,” said Fia. “I can practice my pouncing skills!”

She popped out of sight. A scrabbling sound came from behind the closet curtain, then faded into the rest of the ship's noises and was gone. Duncan yawned again and hoped Fia had the sense to run away if she met a rat bigger than herself.

He looked at the drink in his hand. If he was going to be on the ship for a while, he had better not insult the cook. He lifted the glass to his lips and drank deeply.

It was odd how tired he was all of a sudden. He leaned his head against the bulkhead wall. In a minute, he would look at the paper again and try to figure out what Grizel had been trying to tell him. It was something important, he was sure. He would just close his eyes for a little while.…

The glass of punch slipped from his hand and shattered on the wooden planks. Duncan's knees buckled, and he slumped to the deck.

 

CHAPTER 10

Dangerous Duty