More Cats In The Belfry

  The professor had asked to see anything that transpired, however, so I put it in a box addressed to him personally, added 'from Saphra' by way of identification and took it over to Langford on Monday morning. Only afterwards did I wonder what his staff had thought, opening what must have appeared to be a present from a grateful cat. Probably by that time both Saphra and I had been written off as odd, I decided. Certainly there wasn't a modicum of surprise in the professor's voice when he spoke to me later on the phone, to tell me he didn't think that could have caused the trouble. They didn't know what had, but he was sure there was nothing wrong with him now. I needn't bring him back again, but would I contact them immediately if I was worried.

  I watched like a hawk, but all was well. The only thing I learned from my observation was that Saphra had invented something. Was it, I wondered, the result of having been, if only for a short while, at such an august seat of learning?

  It was the following day and it was raining. The cats were in their garden house with their infra-red heater on while I got on with some work. I went up to the garage to get some papers from the car and as I passed their run the flap in the cat-house door lifted smartly and Saphra's face appeared out of the opening. He didn't come out. Just watched me go past with the flap resting flat on his head, keeping off the rain. It wasn't an accident. He did it again when I came back from the garage, peering out with the complacent expression of being perfectly protected from the elements. Saphra had invented a cat umbrella.

  I was astounded by his cleverness, and equally bemused by something else that had happened around then. Readers of Waiting in the Wings may have remembered that after Charles's death I'd gone into the legend, told me years before by my father-in-law, that his family was descended from Tovi Pruda, standard-bearer to Canute. I'd found out a great deal about Tovi, including the fact that Waltham Abbey, in Essex, is on the site of a church originally built by him alongside one of his hunting lodges.

  I also learned that in 1042 he'd married Githa, daughter of another Danish nobleman called Osgod Clapa, at Lambeth – and that Canute's successor, Harthacanute, had died suddenly while drinking a toast to the bride at the wedding feast. Harthacanute was only twenty-three years old, wasn't very popular, and one wonders what dark deed lay behind the happening. Tovi doesn't seem to have been implicated, however. He and his descendants continued as standard-bearers to the kings of England down to the time of the Norman Conquest, when Tovi's grandson Esegar was Marshal and Staller (the equivalent of High Constable of England) to Harold, fought with him at the Battle of Hastings, and was the only one of the king's retinue to survive it, dying in London three months later.

  After the Conquest all the Tovi lands were given to William's henchman, Geoffrey de Mandeville, and the family faded into obscurity, but it was a story that completely fascinated me. My own family goes back a long way, but we have nothing on Charles's history, and when Gemma, one of my cousins-twice-removed, came, with her husband, to stay with my cousin Dee that summer, and Louisa and I went to supper with them and the talk turned to family history, I couldn't resist telling them about Tovi.

  I hadn't met Gemma before. It was Dee's side of the family that had kept in touch with hers, and Dee had told me that Gemma wasn't terribly bright. Apparently it was taken for granted in Gemma's own highly intelligent family. Once, Dee told me, when she was staying with Gemma as a child, Gemma had rushed to her mother complaining that Dee had called her a fool, and her mother had replied tartly 'If Dee says you're a fool then you must be.' Even I, though, was at a loss for words when, after I'd conjured up for them a picture of the wedding at Lambeth – Tovi looking, I imagined, rather like Charles: tall, nordic-featured, green-eyed; Githa blonde and slender as a lily in girdled, sweeping white silk; Harthacanute and his nobles carousing lustily (No doubt wearing, in Gemma's imagination, helmets with whacking great horns on them, though actually Viking helmets didn't have horns at all) – Gemma leaned towards me and asked eagerly 'Have you got any photographs?' I was completely stunned. It was quite some while before I could close my mouth and point out faintly that photography had not been invented then. 'Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer,' said Gemma, serenely. I still haven't worked out that one.

NINE

That was the summer I decided to sell our sailing canoe and started another local rumour. The canoe had hung, unused, from its pulleys in the garage roof ever since Charles's death, and though I hated the thought of parting with it I was also afraid that one day the ropes would give way and it would fall down and damage the car.