Reserved for the Cat

It had all the characteristics of a dream. She got off the train in a new city, one that, she quickly realized from the scent of the ocean and the chill, damp wind, was a seaside city. The cat eeled out of the bag and looked up at her. It’s not far now, she heard him say. Just stay with me. Trust me.

Well, why not? She had trusted him this far. She followed the cat into a shabby-genteel neighborhood of small shops and tiny boarding houses. The cat led her to one that displayed a French flag in the window.

The woman here is from Lyon. She is a widow and takes in holiday guests. Tell her you are here to visit your sister who married an Englishman, the cat said, brusquely. Give her one of the small gold coins. She will take you to a room, and there you can sleep. I will tell you what to do when you awaken.

Numbly, she did as the cat said. At this point, the dream had gone far beyond madness into something else. The woman who answered her knock was thin, worn, tired-looking, but at least she spoke tolerable French. She asked few questions when Ninette timidly handed her the coin. Instead, she merely led Ninette up a set of very narrow stairs to an equally narrow—but clean—room.

“I serve breakfast at six, which you are too late for,” the woman said, “Luncheon is served at noon, and from the look of you, you will probably sleep through that. So I will make an exception for you, and serve you a good tea, which I normally do not serve—unless you also sleep through tea-time, in which case you may join us for supper at seven.”

Ninette nodded, and set her bag down. The woman took this as the signal to leave, and did.

Ninette managed to get her dress off and climb under the blankets. For a moment she was very cold, and thought that this surely was a sign that she was about to wake up.

But then a warm, soft body slipped into the bed with her, sliding his way up to nestle against her stomach where he began purring. A moment later she was warm.

I cannot be falling asleep if I am already asleep. Or does this mean when I fall asleep I am going to wake up? Or am I never going to wake up, and that is why I am dreaming of falling asleep . . . The questions circled around and around until she couldn’t sort them out anymore. A moment after that, she truly was asleep.

3

NINETTE woke to the sounds of voices and footsteps running up the stairs. Normally that would not have woken her, but somewhere in the back of her dreams, she realized that they were speaking a foreign tongue—

Except, somehow, she could understand them. Imperfectly, but . . . she could understand them.

She came a little more awake, clutched the bedclothes with her eyes still closed, and listened to the young women trudge up the stairs to their rooms and chatter about their shop-jobs, the horrid customers. By the voices, there were five, two of whom had French accents, and who seemed to be working for a perfumer and a milliner. How can I understand them? she thought, baffled.

And then she truly woke up. She was in a strange room, in a strange bed—a room and a bed much, much nicer than any she had ever had before. The smells were all wrong; pleasant, but wrong. There was the faint scent of lavender, the fainter scent of the sea, and just a hint of baking bread. The sounds were all wrong also; the staircase was solid, not creaky, the voices in the street outside were nothing like as loud as in Montmartre, and were neither raised in argument nor song. And it was raining. This was not France.

It had not been a fever dream. She was, truly was, in England. And how was it she could understand those young women?

Because I gave you the language.

The warm place at the small of her back moved, and the cat insinuated himself out from under the bedclothes and sat on the pillow, looking down at her.

“How?” she whispered haltingly.

I put it into your head by magic.

But she didn’t believe in—

You are speaking to a cat. If you do not believe this is magic, what do you think it is?

She blinked. And blinked again. She was awake, in England, possessed of two purses of money, and speaking to a cat. There really was no explanation other than madness, and if she was mad . . . then she wasn’t here at all, and it all certainly felt real.

But the whole situation was so . . . impossible. . . .