The Sign of the Cat (8 page)

Grizel waved her tail. “No matter. I will delay them on the stairs with Cat Trick #17: Getting in the Way. I am particularly good at that.”

This turned out to be true. Duncan heard stumbling on the stairs, a loud irate
mrrrraaaoww!
, and then low, soothing, apologetic voices.

It was enough time to get his breath under control. By the time his mother was at his bedroom door with the strange man—Duncan saw their silhouettes in the doorway through his lashes—he was breathing deeply, as if he had been asleep for hours.

“Stand in the shadows,” came his mother's voice in a whisper.

There was a soft scraping of metal as a slide opened in a dark lantern and a ray of light speared out. The reddish glow through Duncan's eyelids told him when the light touched his face.

From the shadowed corner of the room came a low intake of breath. Duncan felt the floorboards tremble beneath the bed as someone moved silently closer. There was a fragrant, oddly familiar smell of salt, pipe tobacco, and dried sweat, and then a low, rough whisper—“He looks more like his father than ever. I would have known him anywhere.”

The metal slide scraped and the lantern went dark. “He looks
far
too much like his father,” said Duncan's mother. “Especially this year.”

“You could color his hair,” the man said slowly. “But of course you'd have to keep on doing it. All the hair dyes I've seen fade with time, and hair keeps growing out.”

“It costs too much,” Duncan's mother whispered with an edge of exasperation. “Shall I pay for dye and have no money to buy his food? And what could I give for the reason? He already has too many questions about things I dare not explain. Come away, now, you'll wake him.”

The man didn't move. “He knows nothing yet?”

“Come away!” The whisper was urgent.

Duncan had an overpowering desire to open his eyes. He rolled his head to one side, as if in sleep, and stole a glance from beneath his lashes. He could see the middle third of the man, silhouetted in the light from the window—a thick pair of breeches, a frayed shirtsleeve, a gnarled set of knuckles.

There was silence for a full minute after Duncan moved. Then the man spoke again, very low. “He should know there's danger, or he can't protect himself.”

“
I
protect him!” said Duncan's mother. “If he keeps to my rules, the danger is small.”

“But when are you going to tell him?”

She whispered something under her breath. Duncan thought the word was “never.” Then she said, “Not for years, anyway. I want to keep him safe and free of this—this burden—for as long as I can.”

Duncan's thoughts tumbled over each other like angry cats. Years? He couldn't wait years! Should he sit up this minute and demand to know everything? He had a right to know. But he was still in his clothes; his mother would know he had sneaked out of the house in the night. He might find out more if he kept silent.

Duncan lay tense and alert; his whole body strained to listen. He could still see the dark bulk of the man just outside the bedroom door.

The hall floorboards creaked under the man's shifting weight. “You want to keep him safe, my lady? A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what a ship is made for.”

Duncan stared up at the cracked plaster ceiling while the voices murmured indistinctly in the hall.

All this had something to do with his father. Over the years, his mother had told him a few things. Did they add up to any sort of clue?

His father had owned a boat. Duncan's mother had told him that on his seventh birthday. The following year, Duncan had spent a lot of time around the local fishing boats, learning to mend nets and spear fish in the shallows. Grizel had been very pleased with the fish heads that had come her way.

The next year, Sylvia McKay told him that his father had not been a fisherman. That was the year Duncan decided his father had been a sailor. He was not allowed to go to the wharf when a strange ship docked, but there were plenty of small craft that sailed the bay and around the island, and their owners often needed an extra pair of hands on a windy day. Duncan had learned to tie reef knots and bowlines, to trim a sail and to steer, and generally to make himself useful.

Then there had been the year when she told him his father was an excellent swordsman. Duncan had worked very hard at his fencing after that.

Could his father have been in the Island Patrol? They carried swords. They were like the King's Guard, only on ships, and they went from island to island as needed, to keep order and bring lawbreakers to Capital City for justice. There wasn't much crime on the island of Dulle (the worst thing Duncan could remember was when old Angus had had too much to drink at the wharf bar and stole three eggs from a henhouse), so the Island Patrol didn't come around very often. Of course, there was always the possibility of danger from strange ships. Maybe his father had made an enemy on another island.

The voices outside his door had stopped. Duncan flung back the covers and sat up, listening hard.

A faint mutter of conversation came floating up the stairs from the kitchen below. Suddenly he heard his mother saying sharply, “
No
. I'm not going to tell him yet.”

The front door closed. The double lock clicked twice. Through Duncan's open window came the quick tap of footsteps in the street, rapidly fading away.

*   *   *

Duncan awoke to a thin crack of sun, piercing through a gap in the curtains. He had been dreaming again, that same dream of the bright window high in the dark. This time, though, something had been chasing him. He got up abruptly and pushed the hair out of his eyes. The dream was already fading, leaving nothing but a faint memory of dread.

Downstairs, Grizel was happily crunching something in her bowl—sardines, by the smell—and there were rolls and fresh fruit on the table, along with a note. It said that his mother had gone to her first music lesson of the day, but she'd packed Duncan a lunch and hoped he would have a good day at school and remember to buckle his cap.

Duncan stared at the food. Fresh fish, rolls from the bayside bakery, fruit from the wharfside grocers—his mother must have gotten up very early indeed, if she had walked all the way down to the wharf and back up the long hill.

He sat down to eat and studied the note again. There was nothing about where she had gotten the money for food. Nothing about the strange visitor of the night before. He checked his lunch bag to see if, perhaps, there was another note in there, but there were only sandwiches and a chocolate bar that he recognized.

Duncan felt his heart twist under his ribs. What was he supposed to do with a mother like this? She wouldn't let him take a scholarship he had earned, she wouldn't tell him anything he wanted to know, she held him back at every turn—but at the same time, she'd gotten up hours before the sun rose just so he could have the freshest rolls for his breakfast, and she hadn't even taken one bite of Robert's chocolate. She had been hungry, too, he knew. Yet she had saved it for him.

Duncan shoved his chair back with a loud scrape. He went out to look for the key he had dropped the night before and found it behind the downspout. He washed his breakfast dishes and hung the towel to dry. Then he opened the new book that Robert had given him and walked slowly up the stairs to the sea chest by the window, where the light was better. He laid the book on the brass-bound chest and turned the thick, creamy pages with something like a return to happiness. Here was the picture of the ship being built that he had seen in the bookshop. He turned the next leaf with a careful hand and looked eagerly at the colored bookplate. It showed the ship at anchor, two men with bright uniforms and swords, and a small girl with a slim silver crown.

Duncan gave a grunt of satisfaction. It was the story of the Bad Duke and the Lost Princess. Everyone knew what had happened, but it was still a recent enough tale that it wasn't in the older history books. Here was the princess, only seven years old, her long dark hair in a single braid beneath her little crown. In the picture, she was just about to begin her royal tour of the islands of Arvidia so the people could see their future queen. The two men going with her were the king's most trusted advisers: Charles, Duke of Arvidia, in the tall, pointed hat with the plume, and the Earl of Merrick, wearing a shorter, rounded hat with a wide brim.

If the princess had lived, she would be almost fourteen by now. The king, her father, still had hope, but almost everyone else had given her up for dead.

Here was a picture of that strange animal, the tiger, that had been sent as a present to the king from a far land. And here was a whole page about the tragic hero, the Earl of Merrick.…

Duncan's hand curled around the book, and his thumb smoothed the corner of the page. The earl was shown in bright, vivid colors, his sword half drawn, his noble face wearing a look of surprise and fury mixed. Behind him, leaping from a rock, was the dark and twisted figure of Duke Charles, sword already slashing at the earl's unprotected head. In the background huddled the little princess and her serving woman, clasping each other, while bodies of various duke's and earl's men lay at their feet.

The artist had put in a lot of blood. Duncan gazed at the earl's head wound, just beginning to spout red. Suddenly, the picture was crumpled by two furry paws, then a leaping cat body.

“Hey!” Duncan glared at Grizel. “What did you do that for? Now you've torn it!”

Grizel flipped another page, as if to cover her mistake, and curled up in the sun. She blinked her golden eyes at Duncan. “Don't you have to go to school?”

Duncan put on his cap without enthusiasm. His feet lagged on the road to the monastery; they turned down the goat path to the stone throne instead. He lay on his stomach across the arm of stone, still cool from the night, and stared down at the dark indigo water in the shadow of the cliff. The cove was empty. The sailboat and the man who had come to visit his mother were gone.

The morning was clear, and the sky was a bowl of blue with ribbons of cloud. In the distance, the monastery bell rang, three tones that hung and shivered in the still air. Duncan gathered up his books slowly. He had never been late before, not once.

The wrought-iron gate was shut and locked; it rattled when Duncan pushed on it. Latecomers were supposed to ring the small bell that hung from the gatehouse. Then they had to go see the headmaster.

Duncan did not want to see the headmaster. He did not want to go to school at all. There wasn't much point if all his mother wanted him to do was fail.

A cream-colored cat brushed through a gap in the gate's iron scrolls, her whiskers held at a disapproving angle. It was Fia's mother, Mabel, and her meows were sharp as she questioned him.

Duncan shook his head. “I haven't seen Fia anywhere.” He thought that Fia was probably too embarrassed to show her face after failing her kitten examinations, but he didn't mention that to Mabel. “Isn't she with the other kittens?”

Mabel hissed her annoyance. “I can't find them, either. They'd better not be getting into mischief.” She stalked off, her claws clicking on the flagstone.

Duncan looked after her thoughtfully. He hoped the other kittens weren't picking on Fia.

He walked along the outside of the monastery wall. There was a stone missing where he could wedge his foot, and a tree branch just low enough to swing up on. He could see a lot from the top of the wall, and maybe he would see Fia. He was already late for school; a little later wouldn't hurt.

Duncan scrambled onto the stone wall. There was a friar cutting herbs in the monastery garden and another walking to chapel, but there was no white kitten anywhere.

He had a good view of the cliff road and the harbor below. The schooner he had seen last evening, becalmed, was now at the wharf. He could see the harbor crane swinging, as small as a toy from this height, and the dockworkers, like tiny ants, scurrying to unload the ship.

The wharf was a popular spot with cats. Could Fia have gone that far?

Duncan balanced on the wall. If he went down to the wharf, he would be more than a little late. And his mother had strictly forbidden it.

On the other hand, the monastery gates would be open for noon recess. Friar Gregory would probably excuse Duncan this once, after his score on the national test. And he hadn't actually promised his mother to stay away from the wharf.

*   *   *

The wharf was a cat's paradise, as far as Duncan could see. Fishing folk were cleaning their catch, and fish heads and entrails lay free for any cat to take. Seagulls screamed for their share, and as Duncan watched, one snatched a morsel of fish out from under a wharf cat's nose and flew, triumphant, to perch on a piling.

He took a deep, satisfied breath. The wharf smelled like no other place on the island. There was clean salt air gusting in from the ocean, intermingled with tar and hemp and the sweat of workingmen, and over all was the pervasive stink of seaweed and fish. The wharf cats were meowing about the usual things—how to litter-train kittens, the best way to hack up a furball, and the latest gossip about the stupid beagle at the corner. Duncan rarely found cat conversations interesting.

But the schooner fascinated him. He could see the rigging perfectly now. There were the usual triangular sails, easy to raise and quick to shift, good for fast sailing among the islands of Arvidia. Atop the mainmast, though, were two square sails in a bunt. Square sails were for long voyages, when the trade winds blew steady—so this must be a top-rigged schooner, good for both kinds of sailing. Duncan had only seen such a ship in books, and he gazed at it with hungry eyes. Ships meant for long voyages hardly ever stopped at the insignificant island of Dulle, but this schooner might even sail to distant kingdoms beyond their own.

The ship loomed above the scurrying people on the docks, its side like a wall. Duncan looked with longing at the gangplank, a slanting ramp that led from the dock to the ship. Someday he would walk up a gangplank just like that. He would stand at the railing as they sailed and watch Capital City grow closer, and at night he would not need to squint to see its lights.