The Unseen(70)

‘I can’t help it. As soon as I move in this heat, I swelter. And somebody about this place had better keep moving,’ she mutters, but with little feeling. Sophie Bell’s face is puce, her cheeks mottled with cracked red blood vessels; and when she moves about too much her top lip turns white, and her eyes slip out of focus. Cat does not want the woman to faint. Lord knows, nobody would be able to pick her up, and they’d be forced to step over her carcass all day until the temperature dropped and she roused herself.

‘Over there,’ Mrs Bell sighs. ‘I kept some of the iced tea back for us. And pour me a glass while you’re at it.’ Cat whisks the linen cloth from a jug on the sideboard, scattering a handful of parched flies that had been waiting in vain to drink. The chunks of ice in it, collected that morning in a block from Thatcham, have melted clean away, but the drink is still cool and tangy with fresh mint and lemons. Cat gulps hers down like a child, shutting her eyes at the chill shiver it gives her. ‘At least with the men out all day there’ll be a bit less work,’ Sophie Bell says. ‘Where’s the fairy man gone off to, did you hear?’

‘Reading, he said,’ Cat says, wiping her mouth on the hem of her apron. ‘Some “things I must to attend to” was all he said.’

‘Huh. Well, I bumped into Dolores Mickel in the week, whose sister works at a big house in Reading, and she says the family her sister works for knows the Durrant family of old. Mr Robin wasn’t always a theosophist, she told me,’ says Sophie Bell, her eyes glinting slyly as they always do when she gossips.

‘No?’ Cat asks. She finds herself keen to know more about the man. Know thy enemy – the words jump into her head. My enemy?

‘No indeed. He was off at his studies for a long time, and then for a while once he was back, there was a different story from his parents each time they came to dinner. First he was a poet; then he was writing for the papers. Then he was going into the clergy – a Methodist minister, if you please. He went to Greece and was there for quite some months, though nobody seemed to know what he did there. Then when he came back he ran for parliament, just like that! The Liberal Party, but he didn’t get hisself elected. Next thing you know, he’s a theosopher, or whatever he is now, and insisting that it was his true course all along.’ Mrs Bell dismisses the man with a small flap of her hand that sets the meat of her arm swinging.

‘Theosophist. Well. Sounds like he doesn’t know who he is or what to believe in, doesn’t it?’ Cat smiles, unkindly. ‘Interesting.’

Mrs Bell glances up at her, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. ‘Now, don’t you go bandying it about – least of all to him. I’ve heard you talking to him, out in the courtyard. Don’t be getting careless with yourself, will you, Cat?’

‘No, Sophie Bell. There’s no danger of that.’


In the afternoon, when she has an hour to rest, Cat keeps to her room, and holds her breath when she thinks she hears a footstep out in the corridor. But it’s only the house, groaning in the heat as its beams and boards expand. Outside her open window the sky is simmering blue. She can hear the vicar’s wife and her sister, talking in low voices that spiral, on and on; the children complaining breathlessly to one another, their voices drawing near and then receding, like a small flock of birds on the wing. She cannot wipe from her mind that Robin Durrant came to her room in the night; that he knows about her sleepless life. It’s like a nagging itch, or a buzzing insect that she can’t shake off. And that he means to use the knowledge against her somehow. If it’s for him to take out his lust, she thinks grimly, he is in for a disappointment. She will claw his eyes out before she lets him touch her. But she will meet him, as he told her to. If for no other reason than that, beneath her anger, she is curious. Dwelling on such thoughts, precious time slips away. Cat shakes her head, grips the pencil tighter and writes. Another letter to Tess, this time addressed to Frosham House. Guilt makes her stomach churn, washes through her like acid, makes it hard to think. I can’t bear to think of you there. I will find some scheme to get you out, I swear it, she writes. But what scheme? What can she do? She bites her lower lip hard between her teeth, writes I swear it again, so that she will have to think of something. Please be strong, Tessy. Hold on until I can think of a way.


Tess grew weary of the suffragette cause as time passed, even as Cat grew more and more committed to it. Tess had only been interested in it as a way to get out of the house where they spent so much of their lives, as a way to escape; never really for the politics themselves. She joked, giggling in hushed tones, that she wouldn’t know who to vote for even if she were enfranchised. It was an exciting diversion from work, which stopped being exciting after several weeks of handing out leaflets and selling ribbons, hawking copies of Votes for Women and shouting slogans and being scowled at by respectable men and women.