Death comes to stalk her room, to offer cold company. Cat slides into an exhausted trance, and returns to her mother’s deathbed: gloomy and dark behind drawn curtains, the iron smell of blood in every corner and the lurking reek of death behind that, not improved or hidden by the flowers she bought and set about the bed, or the herbs she threw on the fire. Her mother’s pillow was encrusted with crimson. Each time she coughed, more bright red sputum came up. She turned her head weakly to the side, let it soak into the cotton sham. They had given up trying to blot it with handkerchiefs. They did not own enough of them. She could no longer lift her head to spit into a bowl, and Cat could not lift her to do so, not every time. So many times. Consumption, the doctors pronounced, months before, with no hope or promise or hint of comfort in their voices. And it did consume her – she was a wraith by the end, sunken in on herself, robbed of speech, of strength. Her eyes dulled to grey, like her hair and her skin. One more shadow in the room. So unlike herself, so lifeless already that Cat only knew she had died because the scraping of her lungs quietened, and then stopped. There was no change in her appearance. Cat stood and watched her for a while, and was not sure what to do. That ragged wet rattle of air, as regular as her own heartbeat, had been her company for so long that the silence unnerved her. She stood, and she trembled, and she listened until the silence hurt her head. She had been twelve years old at the time.
At the first lightening of the sky, Cat is up, shaking off the impression insomnia gives of years having passed, of ages of man dawning and dying whilst the night has ticked slowly by. There are kinks in her spine, knots in her muscles from working all day and then lying too long in one position. When she stretches, joints pop. She arches her back like a dancer, feels the sinews burning back to life. Cat washes her face, the trickle of water into the basin as loud as thunder cracks; combs the raven feathers of her hair; dresses in silence and slips down the back stairs on the softest feet. The house is silent now, no movement of person or structure, of trapped moth or sleepless child. The air is as still and smooth as a silk blanket, softly grey. Cat lifts the latch on the back door as carefully as she can, skirts the edge of the garden until she can escape through the side gate, into the lane. The sky glows palely, a non-colour somewhere between grey and yellow and blue; the sun is not yet near the eastern horizon. With her stomach hot and empty, Cat thinks back, tries to remember when she last ate. She picks a handful of wild strawberries from the hedge, and bites each one deliberately, liking the sharp burst of juice between her teeth.
Robin Durrant has beaten her to the stile that crosses into the meadows. Cat pauses when she sees him, surprised. She had half thought he would not come, half thought nobody but she existed at this hour. But of course this is an illusion, brought on by loneliness. From the far side of the village a cow bellows, its plaintive cry echoing through the still air from where milking has already begun. Robin Durrant looks up when he hears her coming, his face indistinct in the near dark. Cat pauses, keeping her distance, and she sees the pale flash of his teeth.
‘You can come closer, I won’t bite you,’ he says, softly.
‘I have scant idea what you will or won’t do. And I’ll stay right here until you tell me what this is about,’ Cat replies.
‘Come on. Let’s get away from the road a bit. I don’t want anybody seeing you.’
‘What does that mean? Where are we going?’
‘Into the meadows. I’ve found the perfect spot.’ He holds up his hand to help her over the stile, but Cat does not move. She sets her jaw, stares hard at him. Robin shakes his head, lowers his hand. ‘Look, I swear to you that I have no intention of laying a finger on you. I give you my word.’ Cat considers this a moment longer and then relents, vaulting over the stile and still ignoring his proffered hand.
‘What use is the word of a charlatan?’ she mutters, walking to one side where she can keep her eye upon him. He has a broad leather bag over one shoulder and his Frena camera in the other hand; he swings it nonchalantly as they go.
‘A charlatan, am I? That’s a strong word, Cat Morley, and not a fair one at that. What makes you call me it?’
‘I know what I see. Who but a charlatan would charm the vicar, befuddle his wife, and blackmail the maid all in the same day? You’re like a snake that dazzles with its beauty and grace, before it strikes,’ Cat tells him.
‘A snake, now, am I?’ He laughs quietly.
‘I know what I see,’ Cat says again.
They make their way through the tall, tussocky grass, soaking their shoes with the fresh dew and kicking up insects which bumble away groggily. The dawn chorus grows louder as each second passes, flooding out across the grassland like a rising tide. In spite of everything, Cat feels herself grow calm. Impossible not to be calm, when the world seems so still, so at peace.
‘I love this time of day,’ Robin Durrant says, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. At once, Cat is on edge again.
‘Where are we going?’ she demands. It is cool, more so than she had expected. Goose pimples stand out on her skin, and she folds her arms tightly.
‘It’s not much further. There’s a wonderful old willow tree by a kink in the river…’
‘Yes, I know it. What of it?’
‘You know it? How do you know it?’
‘Can’t a person go for a walk, and use their eyes? Even a servant?’ Cat asks, tightly.
‘Why do you fight your status so? The Cannings are an easy pair. Why aren’t you happy with your lot?’ Robin seems genuinely curious. Cat glares at him suspiciously.
‘I hear you were a poet, for a while. A minister, a politician?’ she says. Robin looks at her, frowning, and Cat smiles. ‘As you told me, Mr Durrant, word gets about in a small place like this.’
‘Well, what of it?’
‘Would you have been content if you had been told, when you were still a child: you shan’t be a poet, or a minister, or a politician. You shall be a clerk in a bank. Would you have been content, never to have been allowed to try other things? Never allowed to find out what you wanted to do, what you wanted to be?’
‘A clerk in a bank? Why-’
‘For the sake of argument!’ Cat snaps.
‘But you are working class, Cat. Such things are immutable…’
‘Oh?’ She pounces. ‘And what makes them so? What makes me working class?’
‘Your… lack of breeding and education… your birth, Cat. Surely you can see that?’
‘Ah, there we have it. My birth. Something in my blood. A servant is born, as Mrs Bell says. You agree?’ she asks. Robin looks at her, puzzled, and thinks before nodding.
‘I suppose so, yes.’
Cat smiles bleakly. ‘Well, there is your answer, then,’ she says.
They reach the willow tree after walking for ten minutes, with the village entirely out of sight behind them apart from the church spire, pointing up grey and fragile into the marbled sky. The land falls gently into a bowl, sloping down to the edge of the river, where the old tree hangs its branches, motionless; its supple twigs trail forlornly in the water, carving furrows in the glassy surface.