The Cat's Eye Shell

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘You will have to stay hidden all day,’ Lady Mary went on. ‘Luckily most of the servants live in the village and will not come to work on Sunday, but we do not want anyone to see you on the terrace or in the garden, and wonder about you.’

  ‘Personally, I shall be glad of a chance to rest,’ the duke replied, though his frowning look did not lift. Emilia guessed he was anxious to be gone, and fretting at yet another delay, just like she and Luka were.

  ‘I wonder …’ Lady Mary murmured.

  ‘What, Mother?’ cried John.

  ‘It is market day in Hastings on Monday. Why do I not apply for permission to take a cartload of produce to the market? I could send Simon with a note for the colonel now. He’s at Glynde, the next village along, and will still be awake. Simon can pretend his horse cast a shoe, or something to explain why he’s so late. I think it will work well, Colonel Morley knows we have been hit hard by the Royalist fines.’

  ‘That’s an excellent idea,’ the duke said, smiling.

  ‘We have plenty of apple cider to sell, and there are some late cherries we could pick,’ Lady Mary continued. ‘I had been planning to make jam with them, but we could sell them at market instead. And people are always willing to buy our greengages, there are some ripe already, the weather has been so warm.’

  ‘Greengages?’ Luka asked in lively curiosity. ‘I’ve never heard of such a fruit.’

  ‘That is greengage jam you are eating there,’ Lady Mary said, twinkling at him. ‘It is our specialty. It is a little green plum, rather sour, that one of the Gages brought back from France some time ago, and managed to grow in our orchard. He lost the label, though, and so had no idea what it was called. His gardener called it a greengage, for want of anything better, and the name stuck. They’re too sour to eat off the tree, usually, but they make a tasty jam or pie, and my husband’s grandmother had a recipe for greengage wine that is utterly delicious and quite intoxicating.’

  ‘I eat them off the tree,’ John said.

  ‘Aye, and make yourself quite sick on them too,’ his mother replied, and tousled his hair affectionately.

  ‘But, Mary, if we ask for a licence to travel to Hastings, the garrison there are bound to check the cart to make sure we’re not trying to smuggle back any books or papers from the Continent,’ Father George said, frowning.

  ‘Aye, of course they will, but will the local militia check the cart before we leave? I doubt they’ll trouble themselves. I suggest the duke and his companions hide out in the copse of trees by the road, though, just in case Colonel Morley sends his men. Simon can stop the cart in the middle of the copse, so no one sees the duke climbing in, and then he can stop again somewhere outside Hastings, so the cart is clean when it actually gets to town.’

  ‘It sounds very risky,’ Father George said.

  ‘It sounds like an excellent idea,’ the duke said. ‘Anything which saves me from having to walk the twenty miles to Hastings! I don’t think I’ve ever walked so much in my life as I have these past two days.’

  ‘Nor I, my lord,’ said Tom in heartfelt tones.

  ‘It’s good for you,’ Father Plummer said cheerily. ‘Why, when I was a lad around here, we thought nothing of a twenty-mile tramp over the hills.’

  ‘I wish I could,’ John said enviously. ‘I’m not allowed anywhere!’ He turned to Lady Mary. ‘Please, Mother, please, can’t I go too? I could drive the cart! Please.’

  ‘You know you can’t,’ his mother replied, sounding troubled. ‘They would never allow it. You know the rules. No further than five miles.’

  ‘That’s not even to the edge of the village!’ John cried. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘I know, darling, and I’m sorry. I wish it was not so.’

  ‘I’m sick of being stuck here all the time,’ he burst out. ‘It’s so boring! Why can’t I go?’

  ‘You know why, John. Please do not argue with me any more.’

  He jumped to his feet. ‘It’s not fair!’ he cried passionately, and ran out of the room.

  Lady Mary looked at the duke apologetically. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘He is only young. He finds all the rules and restrictions on us very galling.’

  ‘Well, so do we all,’ said Agnes. ‘But what are we to do?’

  ‘Stay home and tend our land and try to preserve what we have,’ Lady Mary replied, her smile weary.

  ‘And hope for better days,’ Sir Thomas answered. He was a slim, grave young man who had spoken barely a word all evening, but listened closely to all that was said with a line of trouble between his brows.

  The duke obviously felt compassion for the young baronet, inheriting his land and his title so young, and with so many younger brothers and sisters to care for, for he smiled at him sympathetically and said, ‘May they come soon!’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sir Thomas answered and raised his glass. ‘To the return of the king!’ he cried.

  ‘To the king!’ everyone chorused, and drank deeply.

  Even Luka, who until recently had not cared one way or the other about the king, drank too. All this Royalist fervour was catching, he thought to himself rather sourly.

  The Laboratory

  FIRLE PLACE, EAST SUSSEX, ENGLAND

  22nd August 1658

  Luka and Zizi slept together that night in a four-poster bed with rich blue brocade curtains, and so many pillows and bolsters they threw most of them onto the floor. The bed was big enough for Emilia and Rollo and Tom and the duke and his servant Nat too, Luka observed, and so soft he thought he would never be able to go to sleep.

  But he was asleep almost before the thought was finished, and he slept for more than twelve hours, waking halfway through the next day with a sudden sinking of his heart and a conviction that he should be somewhere, doing something.

  But then he remembered where he was, and that today was Sunday, and he had nothing to do but eat and rest and wait for Monday to come. He and Emilia had had a low, hissed conversation about this last night, and both had thought they would much rather wait for the cart than set off once more on foot. It was thirty miles or more to Rye, and not only did the two children have no idea how to get to the seaside town, they had no idea how to contact the smugglers once they were there.

  Luka pulled on his breeches and tucked in his shirt; then, even though it was not cold, he put on the shabby old shooting jacket that had once belonged to Lord Harry’s brother-in-law. Everything about Firle Place was so rich and luxurious, he thought he should make the effort to look respectable. He even washed his face and hands and tried to get a comb through his curls, laughing at Zizi who was mimicking his every movement, solemnly splashing her little paws in the bowl of water and rubbing her face, and then pretending to comb her soft fur.

  ‘Darling girl,’ he said affectionately. ‘Come on. Do you think we dare risk going in search of food?’

  He opened the door cautiously, only to find John perched on a chair outside, reading a massive old book.

  ‘At last!’ John cried, jumping to his feet. ‘I thought you were going to sleep all day!’

  ‘We walked about a hundred miles yesterday,’ Luka said. ‘And sailed a boat and galloped some horses. We were tired!’

  ‘Lucky ducks,’ John said enviously. ‘I wish I’d been with you. I’d have shot those soldiers with my father’s pistol. I’d have dug a pit for them to ride into, or strung up a net to fall on their heads.’

  ‘Criminy, I wonder why I didn’t think of that!’ Luka said. ‘I guess I didn’t have a net to hand.’

  ‘Well, you can’t think of everything,’ John replied, grinning.

  ‘Any chance of some food?’ Luka asked. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, it’s practically dinner time,’ the other boy replied. ‘Mother says I have to keep you all out of sight, just in case, so I’ve smuggled some food up to my laboratory. We should be safe there, no one ever goes in there.’

  ‘I’ll just tell Milly,’ Luka said, and went to
the next door down and put his head inside the door. Emilia was still asleep, her black hair spread out on the pillow. Rollo lay curled in the crook of her knees, his nose on his paws. He opened one eye as Luka looked in, then closed it again. He was tired out too.

  ‘Come on, sleepyhead! You going to lie in bed all day? Come and get some grub.’

  Emilia yawned and rolled over. ‘Minute more,’ she mumbled.

  ‘There’s bacon,’ John said.

  At once Emilia sat up. ‘Bacon?’

  ‘Uh-huh. And still quite hot. I’ve got a chafing dish in my laboratory that I use for my experiments, and I put the bacon in there to keep warm. I can scramble some eggs for you too if you like.’

  ‘Eggs too?’

  ‘Fresh-laid.’

  ‘All right. I’m coming! Just give me a minute.’

  As she flung aside the bedclothes, burying a protesting Rollo, Luka shut the door.

  ‘What about that other boy?’ John said. ‘The one with all the blond hair. Better call him too.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Luka said unwillingly. John moved along to the next door and tapped lightly on it. After a minute or two, a sleepy voice called, ‘Coming!’ and then a very tousled fair head looked round the door. John explained about the bacon and eggs, and within minutes, a yawning, heavy-eyed Tom joined them. He was barefoot, being unable to squeeze his swollen, blistered feet back into his boots, and nearly as shabby as Luka with his torn, grubby shirt. Luka could not help liking him better that way.

  Emilia and Rollo came out, the big dog wagging his tail, one ear pricked forward, the other folded back.

  ‘He wants some bacon too,’ Emilia said. ‘He’s very hungry!’

  ‘Even after all that pie I saw you feeding him under the table last night?’ John teased.

  ‘He’s a big dog,’ Luka said. ‘He eats a lot.’

  ‘As much as you, almost,’ Emilia said.

  Luka grimaced at her, then forgot her teasing as John opened the door and led them into a messy room crowded with all sorts of fascinating things. There were glass jars full of shells and stones and seed pods and fossils, while books were crammed into the bookshelves and piled higgledy-piggledy on chairs, the table and the floor. There were some fragile bird skeletons, a snakeskin, what looked like a rat’s skull, and an enormous yellow tooth that could only have come from a dragon.

  When the children exclaimed over it, John looked pleased. ‘That’s one of the best things in my collection. Come on, I’ll show you what else I’ve got.’

  ‘I’d rather you showed me the bacon,’ Emilia said wistfully. ‘It smells scrumptious.’

  John laughed, and busied himself getting them some breakfast, talking virtually nonstop. By the time the children had eaten, they knew that his mother had given John the laboratory to try to keep him happy at Firle Place, since he was not permitted to travel overseas or go to school. He spent most of his time fossicking in the woods and on the Downs, and had a fine collection of old flint heads and some ancient coins that he had found in some Roman ruins. He was most interested in Emilia’s charms, particularly in the old coin, and showed her his collection, none of which was gold.

  John also had a prism hanging in the window, which sent rainbows spinning round the room when he moved it into the light, and a pendulum which he set to swinging, and showed Luka how to measure his pulse by its regular motion. In a tray on the windowsill, he had various pieces of bread growing mould, and another tray in which he was propagating a variety of different seeds. Luka thought he knew all about the fruits and seeds of the field and forest, but John told him all sorts of things he had not known – for instance, the seeds of the sycamore tree could be carried so far by the wind that they had been known to land on the deck of a ship hundreds of miles out to sea.

  ‘I want to make wings like the sycamore seed and see if they will carry me too,’ John said eagerly, ‘but Mother won’t let me, she says it’s too dangerous. I tried once, and jumped off the top of Firle Beacon, but all I did was crash down and sprain my ankle. Mother says I was lucky I didn’t break my neck! She’s forbidden me from trying any more, but I’m sure I could work out how to make a flying machine, if she would just let me. I haven’t got any money, though, to buy all the materials myself, and although I keep experimenting with different types of wings, so far nothing has flown that well.’

  He began to show Luka all the different types of flying machines he had built, and crashed, over the past few months, but Emilia grew restless and sat down to play with his collection of shells and stones, some of which were very beautiful. Zizi sat and played with her, raising them to her eye and peering inside, and then shaking them as if expecting something to fall out. Tom looked through the books on John’s shelf, and cried out in surprise. ‘Isn’t this book banned?’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of it, vaguely, but I’ve never seen one before.’

  John glanced over. ‘Lots of my books have been smuggled over from the Continent,’ he said. ‘Uncle George mainly tries to get books on religion, you know, lives of the saints, and things like that, but sometimes Mother lets me get books on science and medicine. I’d like to be a doctor, you know, if I can’t be an inventor.’

  Emilia thought she had never met a boy who could talk so much. He spoke very fast, with lots of dramatic stresses and flourishes, so that one could not help but be caught up in his enthusiasm.

  ‘This is the very best thing I’ve ever got, though,’ John said, showing them a long black tube mounted on a stand near the window. ‘It’s brand new. We only got it a few weeks ago. They smuggled it in with some books for Uncle George, and some French silk for mother and the girls, and Mother paid a fortune for it. Come and have a squint through it.’

  ‘Why? What’s it for?’ Luka bent and put his eye to the end of the tube. Then he gave an exclamation and jumped back again.

  Tom and Emilia crowded round. ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘I saw … no! Can’t have.’ Luka bent and put his eye to the tube again.

  ‘It’s a telescope,’ John said, pleased with the excitement he had caused. ‘You can see faraway things through it as if they were close. I have another one, not nearly so good, but I really wanted one of the new ones so I could see the stars up close, and so Mother arranged to get me one for my birthday …’

  ‘You can see stars up close?’ Luka looked up at him, utterly thrilled. ‘What do they look like?’

  Emilia took her chance and shoved him away, putting her eye to the telescope. All she could see was a green blur.

  ‘All different. Some are big and white, some are all in clusters, some are sort of whirly and pink …’ John answered.

  ‘Stars aren’t pink,’ Emilia protested, looking up from the telescope.

  ‘Some of them are,’ John argued. ‘The planet Mars is red as a ruby. And you should see the moon! You can see mountains and seas on it …’

  As Luka exclaimed in amazement, Emilia put her eye to the telescope again. She swung it around a bit, and fiddled with the knobs, and then caught her breath as she suddenly saw a bird perched in a tree, preening its feathers. She looked up and stared through the window, but the tree in which the bird sat was right across the garden and she could see nothing but a mass of waving green leaves. She looked through the telescope again, and she could see the bird as clearly as if it sat on the windowsill. She sighed. ‘It’s magic.’

  ‘It’s not magic, it’s science,’ John said scornfully. He began to rave on about how the new science was exploding all the old fears and superstitions, but Emilia had stopped listening. She played with the telescope a while longer, then reluctantly let Tom have a go, and went back to playing with the shells. Suddenly she caught her breath and was unable to take another. She felt as if someone had caught her from behind and was squeezing her so hard her ribs would crack.

  ‘Lu … Luka,’ she managed to say, and showed him what she held in her hand. It was a small, round shell, a shiny greenish colour, that looked uncannily like a cat’s eye.
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  ‘Oh, I’ve got a couple of those,’ John said, rummaging through the jar of shells. ‘It’s the shell of a sea snail. My uncle brought them back from overseas, he thought I’d like them for my collection. They’re quite rare, apparently.’

  Emilia turned it over in her hand, finally able to breathe again. Zizi tried to snatch it away from her, and she jerked her hand away, closing her fingers over the shell.

  ‘You can have it if you like,’ John said. ‘You can make it into jewellery, apparently. My uncle said some of the fishergirls in Spain wear them as charms, to avert the evil eye. Superstitious rubbish, of course, but they are quite pretty, I suppose.’

  Emilia nodded and very carefully stowed the snail shell away in her purse, which she wore hanging down inside her skirts. Her head was all in a whirl. Would this cat’s eye shell count, or did she have to get the one that belonged to the Wells tribe? Would they be prepared to swap one cat’s eye shell for another? Was it just coincidence that John should have the very shell she needed, or was this part of some greater plan, some providence that was guiding her and Luka’s steps?

  She did not say a word to the boys, who were busy examining John’s experiments. Luka looked as if he would have been happy to stay in the laboratory all day, but Emilia had had enough. Rollo, as if sensing her thoughts, got up and went to scratch at the door, whining.

  ‘I need to take Rollo out,’ she said. ‘He must be bursting! Is it all right if we go out into the garden?’

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you out the back way,’ John said. ‘We’ll go out onto the Downs, we’ll be out of sight there. Here, I’ll grab my old telescope. It’s only little. We’ll see if we can spot some hawks.’