Content warning - post traumatic stress.
You were meant to have this on Monday, but then the world over here ground to a spectacular halt, so here it is a bit early. Thanks always to all of you reading and/or reviewing.
Crow Lake, 1925
Nan could picture how it began. Mandy lying flat on her stomach, chin pillowed on her hands staring out over one of Crow Lake's many ponds. She would be lying there watching as the exhalation of her breath ruffled the water, breaking the surface tension and sending ripple after ripple radiating outward. And opposite her, padding delicate among the long grasses, the cat on her outsized, kittenish paws. Perhaps she swatted at a dragonfly with glittering wings. Mandy would watch her, perhaps explaining the variety of wingspans the victimised dragonfly might have, perhaps not.
Or maybe the cat too was perfectly still, and they would be kindred spirits; two perfectly still creatures in a gently ruffled world. Mandy flat on her stomach scrutinising the pond, and the cat opposite, magnificent and tawny, attempting a camouflage there in the long grasses on the far side of the water.
The ending was always the same; Mandy straggling upright trying ineffectually to brush grass from her knees, not realising there were more blades on her hands. Her fingers black with the wet soil of the pond. And the cat loping towards her on paws it had not yet grown into, pink nose nuzzling the exposed flesh of her ankle, snuffling at the clay on a slipped ankle sock. Mandy crouching on the balls of her toes, and offering her fingers in greeting.
When Nan found Mandy and the cat, it was sitting perfectly still atop Mandy's head, and Mandy, beneath her, ramrod-straight as she sat ankles folded under knees folded under torso.
'Usually,' Nan opened her mouth to say, 'people balance a book on their head to refine their posture.' She did not say it, because Mandy, sensing her footfall, pressed a finger to her lips. Then, shifting, but carefully because of the cat, stretched her finger outward so that she was pointing at a fractious tableau of fawn and doe, the one nuzzling the other. So Nan stood statuesque, too, but even so the cat on Mandy's head sensed her presence and stretched so that she set a long tawny paw gingerly on Mandy's shoulder. Then another one, and another until she was sitting on Mandy's shoulder. Mandy never flinched. The cat walked down her extended arm as a balancing beam, bunting over it at the last and sticking her landing in Mandy's lap, where she thrust a wet, pink nose under Mandy's slender armpit.
Nan could picture that beginning now too, could picture how the cat had got atop Mandy's head in the first place. She mentally reconstructed the sequence backwards as the fawn and its mother ambled off into the middle distance. Saw in her mind's eye the cat leaping from lap to arm to shoulder to head.
'Can we keep her, Mums?' asked Mandy, and scratched diligently at the tawny ears.
Miri did not like the cat. Probably because they had never been an animal household. They never stayed anywhere long enough. Animals were, Nan had reflected once, boxing up their home in the Kippewa, more awkward to move even than books. Just try getting a dog into a canoe, never mind a cat. Other households had them, Nan knew; there was Dog Tuesday at Larkrise, Pilgrim the cat still at Fox Corner, loyal even now to an ostensibly reluctant Mara. Una and Carl wrote of a veritable menagerie, and, of course, Rilla had always had her cats growing up, Jem his dogs.
But Nan had no way of knowing this that afternoon when she watched the cat sitting on Mandy's head as Mandy sat by the edge of the pond. She could not have anticipated that Miri would not like the cat.
Nan said, 'Of course we can, Dryad.' Said it softly amidst the springtime verdure of Crow Lake. Nan thought that but for the cat, Mandy might have leapt up and hugged her. Instead she tilted her head backwards and smiled. Thanks Mums, mute on the wing in the quiet of the day.
The cat sang. Well, Mandy said the cat sang. Mandy had never actually heard it, because she waited until Mandy was asleep before beginning. This also might have accounted for Miri's dislike of their new houseguest. It sat at the foot of Mandy's bed, there on the apple leaf quilt and let it be known to the world that it's love had abandoned it and the world was woe. This was how Nan came to find Jerry in the kitchen, hands over his ears in the dark hour before dawn.
'It's only the cat,' she said. 'Proudfoot, Mandy calls her, because she's got extra claws.' Nan had not seen them, but thought Mandy would know. Nan imagined they were pink, the pads of Proudfoot's paws, like her nose.
Jerry sat at the kitchen table, his hands over his ears and grimaced. Tentatively, Nan put out a hand towards him.
'May I?' she said and when he nodded, fractionally, infinitesimally, she rubbed his back as if he were one of their babies after a nightmare. Sketched slow circles with the pads of her fingers, until he leaned against her, closed his eyes, and ceased to moan.
'She'll grow out of it,' said Nan. She did not know if she meant Mandy or the cat. Possibly both.
Poppy came to visit now the snow was gone and the days were long. Jerry went off with his paints, and Miri set up at the kitchen table armed with a stiff ream of paper and a pen for writing with. Wanted, Nan imagined Miri writing in childish script; One home for singing cat. Nan and Poppy sat in the garden, which smelled of wet earth and blossom, taking their tea in the borrowed china of the Crow Lake house and watched Mandy and her familiar – because this was really what it was, Nan thought – slipping away through the long grass. At what it judged a safe distance away, the cat leapt up onto her bony shoulder and sat there vigilant.
Poppy laughed. 'She's bewitched,' she said.
'Mandy or the cat?' Nan asked. Poppy didn't know.
'But,' she said, 'it's Pilgrim and Ariel all over again, only with tabby stripes.'
'I thought that too,' said Nan, and smiled. It hurt a bit, because she missed Swallowgate, the days when their most pressing grievance was Mara's griping over Pilgrim the interloping feline whose presence Mouse had sanctioned. At Swallowgate no one had woken up sobbing because of the cat. Not even after he was a permanent feature and Mara's second shadow.
'I wonder sometimes,' Nan said now, in the rustling green afternoon, 'if Ariel got to Mandy that year we were at Kingsport and so worried about Miri. You know, put a hand on her forehead and passed on whatever peculiarity of hers it was that put Mara feet so firmly half in elsewhere.' The afternoon still smelled of wet earth and blossom. A bird – a sparrow? – began to sing. Then again, it might only have been Mandy whistling.
'In a list of all the world's most unlikely things,' said Poppy, 'I rate that fairly high for probability. Above another epic war, for instance, or Doomsday arriving tomorrow.'
'Aren't those the same thing?' said Nan, thinking of Jerry and how he woke up stricken, nights, because of the cat singing to a sleeping Mandy. Because of some peculiar feline lullaby. Poppy reached across the borrowed tea service and pressed her hand.
'Probably, Catkin,' she said.
Summer came to Crow Lake. The cat did not stop singing. The sun climbed high, the cicadas buzzed with heat, and the little girls risked paddling in the ponds. Afterwards, Mandy lay flat on her back watching for water-life and the cat lay on Mandy's back. Badgers dug nearby; Jerry painted them onto cards Nan sent to Ingleside. All well – thinking of you. Little girls thriving.There was more, but she wrote the rest into longer letters to her own Mums, about Mandy, the cat, and how it was beginning to tell on Jerry. I don't know what to do, Mums.
The moon was high and the kitchen flooded with its bright, white light. The air rippled with unshed moisture. Heat notwithstanding Nan put a pot of milk on the hob and listened to it bubbling. She plucked the skin off force of habit before offering the mug to a clammy Jerry. His eyes were bright and white as the moonlight.
'If it doesn't stop,' he said, 'I will kill that cat.'
'I know,' said Nan, and dug her fingers gently into his shoulders, feeling the tension bubbling under the surface. He had not said it the way Susan would have done, exasperated but inexpensively. He didn't even say it as Mara would have done in the early days of Pilgrim, careless and arch. He said it perfectly flatly, without heat or ire. Said it with sincerity, so that Nan knew that if the cat did not stop singing, Jerry would indeed kill the cat.
He meant it about Proudfoot with her unusual multiplicity of claws. An owl screeched nearby, and Jerry winced, milk slopping out of his mug and over his hands.
'Never mind,' said Nan. She sat down beside him and blotted up the overflow with the sleeve of her nightdress.
'If it doesn't stop,' said Jerry again, 'I will kill that cat.'
Nan smoothed his forehead and felt a pang for him, another for her sleeping daughter. She felt impossibly poised between them, because Mandy loved the cat and the cat was unravelling Jerry. 'I know,' she said. He fell asleep with his head pillowed against her shoulder, still shaking, there at the kitchen table. Nan sat there, immobilised and listened to the cat singing to Mandy. Mentally she began to draft another letter to Mums. I do not know what to do…But she did not say that Jerry would kill the cat. Some things were not for popular consumption.
The crickets warbled up the scale to the F above High C. They did not actually hum, to hear Mandy tell it, but rubbed their wings together. She said this over a dinner of fried fish prepared over a birch-fire. The fish tasted of smoke and made Nan think of Swallowgate, and also of Rainbow Valley. Poppy was visiting, and Peter with her. He and Jerry had gone sloping off into the woods 'to mine quiet' as Peter had put it, with apology to the little girls. Peter adored the little girls, never mind the cat that might have bewitched Mandy, or perhaps the other way around.
Presently they scarpered to, the girls and the cat, the fire burning low. Nan fed it stray scraps of birchbark, and watched Poppy's fingers trailing purposefully through the grass. She supposed Poppy too was mining for elfwort to throw on the fire. What had Mara said its real name was, all those years ago? Helen's Tears?
'That's it,' said Poppy. She had not found any elfwort. Nan threw sugar on the flames instead and they leapt, green and crackling to the delight of the nearby children. Poppy said, 'Peter can't believe how much she knows about nature, you know. He says Mandy picked out the wood her fishing rod was made from this afternoon just from looking at it. From the grain.'
'Mandy would,' said Nan. 'I never can keep her indoors. What was it, anyway? The fishing rod?'
'Ash, apparently. I wouldn't have known.'
'Nor would I,' said Nan. 'But Mandy learns her loves – and she loves trees. I did too, of course. Climbed them, daydreamed beneath them, read in them and all sorts. I might even have made them courtiers, once, in long-ago years. But Mandy…'Nan trailed off. She shrugged. It was different with Mandy. Poppy nodded. They traded smiles across the fire and it was like those Swallowgate days come back to life; sometimes there was no need for words.
'Jerry,' said Nan, suddenly, not meaning to, 'is going to kill that cat.' She didn't say it with any particular heat. She said it exactly as he had done by the light of the moon, the spilled milk from his mug on his hands; flatly, without ire. A statement of fact.
Opposite her, Poppy's mouth worked. Nan watched her in the orangey-red play of the firelight. Watched her sort through and dismiss verbal rejoinders. He mustn't was too obvious. Mandy loves that cat was unhelpful.
'What will you do?' asked Poppy, the firelight coruscating across her face. And Nan, poised between people she loved, shook her head. Mandy adored the cat. Jerry could not live with the cat. The cat adored Mandy. Jerry would kill the cat.
'I haven't got that far,' said Nan.
'Give her to us,' said Poppy. Nan blinked. The crickets hummed nearby; they were only at the D above C tonight. It couldn't be that easy. She watched as a shadowy Proudfoot pounced on an unsuspecting frog. It broke off mid-croak, and Mandy dropped down next to her pet, fiery hair a meteor-bright in the late summer twilight.
'Peter loves her anyway,' said Poppy. 'The cat, I mean. Mandy too, but you knew that.'
Nan, who did know this, nodded.
'He probably partly loves the cat,' Poppy said, not letting up, 'because Mandy does. And it gives us an excuse to have her down to the camp some summer. There's not just the horses, you know, though everyone remembers the horses. It's canoeing and nature and all sorts. She'd be ten thousand leagues ahead of the others, probably.'
'Almost certainly,' said Nan, and smiled. Jerry would not kill the cat after all. He would not sit up late and stricken in the rented kitchen because of the cat's love for their resident dryad. The fire began to smoke. It had burned too low and now the air was pleasantly acrid, the smoke smell mixing with the heady summer blossoms; tiger lilies, hydrangeas, and other things that probably Mandy could name but Nan only knew as flowers.
'She's called Proudfoot, isn't she?' said Poppy.
'Yes,' said Nan. She tried to stoke the fire, but the log she fed it was green, and so the smoke redoubled, but smelled now of burning life, sharp and tart.
So the cat, Proudfoot, went to Lea Rigg with its stables, where Peter and Poppy could cosset it. They were, after all, an animal household as Nan's Wandering Merediths never had been. Jerry's plans to move onwards to the St Lawrence, to paint the river and its environs, began to be realised. Nan began to pack, and Miri to help her. Mandy wended her way to Lea Rigg, spending long hours there, the cat on her shoulder.
'We can't tell if you're visiting us, Queen Dryad, or Proudfoot,' said Peter. He affected to be hurt, Nan noticed, but it was a poor performance. Mandy tossed her red head loftily, eyes laughing. Her hair was loose and the cat made a bid for it as it swished within reach. Nan thought they would probably never play like this again, unless – or even if? – they came back to Crow Lake.
Mandy said, 'Both of you, Uncle Peter,' as if this were supremely obvious, and let him tickle her ribs, squealing and shrieking until Proudfoot pounced on Peter's defiant, errant hands. They came up slashed and spattered red.
'Serves me right,' Peter said.
Nan thought of the trunks she was packing, the possessions she was condensing, and wished there was a way to pack this too. This scene at Lea Rig, Mandy's russet hair streaming in the sunlight, Proudfoot poised delicately on her shoulder, and Peter with his gouged hands held up in supplication. And in the midst of it all, Poppy serene, with Miri against her side, Jerry across the garden sketching the tableau, adults, girls, cat and the house in the background. Nan offered Poppy a smile. This is good, it read.
Aloud she said, 'I wish we could go on like this, always.'
'I shouldn't worry,' said Poppy. 'There will always be a place here for your Elvin queens. No one quicker to pay fealty to them, either.' And Poppy smiled at her, at Peter, at the cat on Mandy's shoulder with its surplus of claws. Polydactylism that was called, as per Shirley's letter from Fox Corner.
Peter began to bribe the little girls with sweets. The cat climbed onto Mandy's head and sat there in imitation of the Egyptian God its far-off ancestor had surely been. Jerry went on sketching, almost smiling. The cat did not sing; there was no need.
'Haste ye back,' said Poppy, with a kiss for Nan's cheek over the crescendo of the children's exuberance. It was an impossible promise to make, but Nan made it anyway, meaning it. Surely, some far off tomorrow would take them back to this place. Until then, Jerry was healthy, the girls were happy, and the cat was not dead.
