The Unseen(15)

The canal is a wide, lazy channel of murky water, crowded in by weeping willows. Boughs of young elder lean out over the far bank, flowering with acrid enthusiasm. Clouds of midges careen across the surface, and they soon come to crowd infuriatingly around Cat’s face; to nip at the backs of her hands. Cat reaches the towpath, and looks right. All the way to London, this path leads. She could follow it; walk until her feet were ragged and bloody. How long would it take? She has no idea. And what would she do when she got there? Nowhere is home any more. But she could look for Tess. She could make sure Tess was all right, she could bring her here. To this alien place, so green and quiet and different. But Cat turns left and starts walking, more slowly now, swatting at the midges and dodging the piles of muck left by the barge horses.

Soon, buildings come into view. Warehouses, small boatyards. She passes two locks, watches a boat pass through one of them, fascinated by the workings of it. As water foams through the sodden beams, it sends up clouds of scent: moist, rank, somehow alive. The breeze ripples the water’s surface, makes it appear to flow. Experimentally, Cat picks up a stick to test whether this is so. She throws it into the water, but the purse string comes loose from her wrist and flies in after it.

‘Damn and blast it!’ she mutters, looking around her. The canal banks are steep and the water looks deep. There’s a long, wide boat moored nearby, and even though it looks empty she daren’t trespass on it. She casts her eyes around, picks up a fallen sycamore branch and reaches out to the purse, which, mercifully, is floating. She struggles to balance, to hold the branch steady, hook a twig around the purse string and begin to tow it towards her. It works for a moment but then she over-balances, has to drop the branch to steady herself. The purse swirls gently in a circle. Cat edges down the bank, crouches precariously, reaches her fingers for it. It is two inches beyond her fingertips. Two inches, no more, but no matter how she stretches she cannot reach it. ‘Why, you stinking, cursed sprog of a pox-addled whore!’ she shouts at it, standing up in a fury.

A laugh startles her, makes her step back and stumble.

‘Whoa, steady there, miss. You don’t want to follow it in now, do you?’ a man says. He is half emerged from a hatch in the deck of the barge moored beside her. Cat gets an instant impression of tawny brown, of warmth. Weathered skin the colour of the scrubbed boards of the boat; rough hair, undyed clothes.

‘Who are you?’ she demands, suspiciously.

‘George Hobson. And more importantly, I’m in possession of a grappling hook, should you have need of one.’

‘What’s a grappling hook and why should I need one?’ Cat snaps, feeling that she is being laughed at.

‘This is the item, and I’ll fetch that bag out for you if you’ll give me your name,’ the man offers, picking up an evil-looking metal claw attached to a long pole from the deck of the boat.

Cat frowns at him and thinks for a moment, then says: ‘I’m Cat Morley, then. Do fetch it, will you, before the letter inside is soaked completely.’

The brown man comes all the way out of the hatch, crouches on the edge of the deck and sweeps the purse, drizzling water, out of the canal. He shakes it a little, folds the string into a neat bundle in his palm and squeezes it. His hands are like shovels, wide and square, the knuckles lividly bruised, ridged with scars. He jumps onto the bank and approaches her, and Cat squares her shoulders, stands up to him although she does not meet his shoulder height. He has more than twice her width; the solid look of a tree trunk.

‘I’d thought you a lad in a long shirt, until you spoke up,’ he says.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Cat says, sarcastically.

‘Now, I meant no offence by that. Only the lasses round here, and I can hear you’re not one of them, they all wear their hair long,’ he explains. Cat says nothing. She holds out a hand for the purse, but when he keeps hold of it she folds her arms, eyes him calmly. ‘And I never heard a lass round here curse like you just did, miss. No, I never heard that,’ he laughs.

‘May I have that back, please?’ Cat asks at last.

‘You may.’ George nods, passing it to her.

Cat scrabbles it open, tips out water, weed, coins and the letter, which she blots hurriedly against the front of her skirt. ‘Oh, blast it. You can scarce read the address it’s to go to. The ink is quite washed away,’ she murmurs, half to herself. ‘Perhaps there’s hope – I could write over it, perhaps, if somebody would lend me a pen. Here – do you think it’s readable, still? Can you make out the name?’ she asks, holding out the letter to George Hobson. The big man flushes, looks at the letter with a frown of bafflement.