Paying attention to Willow 's directions as Charlie had repeated them, moving past the kitchen and around the house among tangles of broken walls and overgrown bushes, they trotted under tall, dirty windows that had once sparkled with candlelight and with flickering flames from the hearth.
Rounding a jutting wall, they came to the small terrace sheltered between two wings of the house, a space just large enough for a bit of garden, a moss-covered stone bench, and, perhaps at one time, an outdoor tea table and chairs, furniture that would long since have rusted away or been destroyed by storms. The terrace bricks were dark with decades of dirt and overgrown with moss. On two sides of the sheltered terrace were raised planting beds but on the third, against the house, a sinkhole opened into a crumbled cellar.
Nearer them, flanking the terrace, a weedy garden plot had been freshly dug into, the disturbed earth crisscrossed with paw prints.
As Joe and Dulcie stood looking, and scenting the earth, at the side of the terrace Kit looked into the house through cracked French doors, pressing her nose to the grimy glass. Within lay an old-fashioned bedchamber that had once been elegant. She could see a smooth stone fireplace, a cream-colored Victorian bed, a toppled dresser, a matching dressing table and little chair, and a carved dressing screen that lay fallen against the rotting silk bedspread. The bed's silk canopy hung in shreds as delicate as spiderwebs. Kit imagined an elegant woman wrapped in a diaphanous dressing gown, coming out into the garden to sip tea among the ferns and flowers where, now, the planter beds held only weeds, dead leaves, and an overgrown jasmine that had tangled itself over dead bushes.
Dulcie joined her, and the lady cats were still a moment, filled with dreams of being human ladies, Dulcie dreaming of silk and velvet garments and cashmere wraps, as she had dreamed all her life. Not until Joe huffed softly did the two give up their fantasies, and the cats began to dig in the flower bed where the earth had already been dug, Joe and Dulcie carefully pawing away the rotted leaves and earth so as not to disturb the frail bones that surely lay beneath-but Kit, in her enthusiasm, kicked out earth like a dog.
Joe stopped her. "You're destroying evidence. You know better."
She hung her head.
It was Dulcie, going slowly, with gentle paws, who soon stroked something small and rigid. She stopped digging, and delicately brushed away the earth until, at their feet, lay little dark bones clean of flesh and stained brown by the earth, seeming as frail as the bones of a long-dead bird.
The sight of a human hand so diminished and helpless sickened Dulcie. She turned away and sat down, her head down, her ears down, her heart feeling empty.
This was not the first human grave they'd ever found, and the other graves had upset her even more, for they had held the bones of little children. That memory had stayed with her in nightmares, and now it returned again, to leave her shivering.
Why does this upset me so? The bones of animals don't bother me, the bones of rats and mice or of a dead deer in the forest, they are just natural bones.
But a dead human is nothing like a dead animal. The remains of a dead human should be treated with respect, should not be hidden and abandoned. A human body without proper burial, a proper marker, without ceremony and closure, is a tragedy of disrespect. As if that's all there is to a human, these moldering bones, and nothing more at all.
Seeing her distress, Joe pressed close to her and licked her ear, his silver coat gleaming in the slant of early morning sun. Dulcie's green eyes were filled with mystery. "Were cats meant to find this grave?" she whispered. "First the ferals found it. And then we came…Were we meant to come here?"
Joe just looked at her. He didn't like that kind of question. He began to dig again, carefully but steadily, until he had uncovered the side of the skull and then a line of spine defining the throat. He tried to work as carefully as he knew the coroner would; and soon his digging paw revealed the outer rim of the shoulder. Joe had begun to uncover the arm when suddenly he stopped.
Dulcie and Kit moved closer and the three cats stood transfixed, their eyes on the frail wrist-on the bracelet that circled the wrist, still half buried in earth. It was a wide gold band embossed with the image of a cat. A rearing cat, just as Willow had described, a cat holding out its front paw as if beseeching, or perhaps commanding.
"Where is the other cat?" Dulcie whispered. " Willow said-"
"On the lintel," Kit said. "There, over the French doors to the bedchamber. Same cat, with its paw out."
Who was this woman, so fond of cats that she wore a feline signet? That she had the same cat carved over her bedchamber? If that was her bedchamber, if this wasn't a stranger buried here.
But a stranger whose bracelet showed the same cat as on the lintel? Not likely.
At last they covered up the poor, vulnerable body, and with careful strokes they roughed up the loose earth until they had destroyed all the paw prints-their own, and those of the ferals.
"One thing for sure," Dulcie said, "we can't report the body-the department knows there are cats up here. Those guys are already too curious since seeing the ferals attack Charlie's kidnappers."
"Why do we have to report it?" Kit said. "Who knows how long that body's been here? What difference…?"
Joe and Dulcie turned to look at her. "Someone," Dulcie said sternly, "wants to know what happened to this woman."
"But what about the book?" Kit said. "The book Willow found? Maybe that will tell us." And the tattercoat leaped across the garden toward the dark fissure where the wall had caved into the cellar.
"Don't, Kit!" Dulcie cried. "Don't go down-" But Kit had already disappeared into the dark hole among the fallen stones-and before Joe could snatch Dulcie back she had leaped after her, disappearing in the blackness. Joe was poised at the brink, ready to go down, or haul them out, when with considerable thrashing they emerged again dragging a small, heavy-looking box between them.
It was made of dark wood, and when they had pawed open the lid to reveal a leather packet, then had clawed open the packet, they found inside a package wrapped in frail and yellowed cloth. They could see where Willow had unwrapped the thin linen and then rewrapped it, where the cloth was folded differently, revealing darker creases. Several white cat hairs were caught in the folds. There were no markings on the box, or on the leather packet.
Lifting out the wrapped book, they laid it on paper, which they had spread on the bricks. The leather cover was old and dry, and was embossed in gold: Folktales of Speaking Cats and a History of Certain Rare Encounters.
"No one," Dulcie hissed angrily, "no one should write about speaking cats." The author's name was Thomas Bewick. What cruel impulse had made this man reveal their secret? Why had he done such a thing?
But despite its content, the book was frail and beautiful, and Dulcie's touch was feather soft as she turned the dry, yellowed pages.
At the beginning of each chapter was the color etching of a cat, each with a motto or homily.
She speaks of a world beneath the meadow, where the sky is greener.
They prowl the night, listening. And to whom will they tell their secrets?
The cats read in silence, scanning the passages, and soon Dulcie's tension eased and she began to purr: These stories were only myths and folktales, all were innocent enough, folktales about magical cats written in a fairy-tale manner that no human would take for fact. That was all the book would be to the uninitiated, a collection of fairy tales, stories about cats who spoke to kings, cats who vanished into cavernous worlds beneath the earth, cats who led lost children from war-torn medieval cities. Indeed, their own ancient heritage lay between these pages, but so well disguised that few humans would dream there was truth to the stories.