Carbonel: The King Of Cats

18

Where is She?

On the way home from the Copper Kettle, John and Rosemary had discussed their next move. They had got together the broom and the cauldron, and the hat, they felt, was theirs for the asking. The next thing to do was to find Mrs Cantrip and persuade her to tell them what was the Silent Magic which would free Carbonel finally and completely. It was not until three days later that they felt they could ask to go off on their own again; three days spent pleasantly enough playing in the garden at Tussocks. It was Carbonel who urged them to hurry. He grew daily more restless and, truth to tell, more cantankerous. Rosemary would sit at her window in the evenings and watch with renewed interest the cat world that trotted so purposefully along the garden walls and over the leads and slates beyond. She would stare at the chimneys and roofs, some sloping steeply, some with a gradual incline, with here and there a tower or steeple standing above them, until in the half light the harsh lines of slate and brick seemed to soften and undulate, like living hills and valleys. The evening smoke from the chimney-pots wreathed itself mysteriously round them. Carbonel would sit beside her on the window-ledge making strange cat noises in his throat until Rosemary went to bed, when he would slip silently away into the twilight on his own affairs.

On the fourth day after the adventure with the Wishing Magic, John came to fetch Rosemary and they set off with their sandwiches.

‘You know,’ said Rosemary as they made their way to the bus stop, ‘I have not bothered very much about the cat side of all this before. I have only been thinking of freeing Carbonel because he is such a darling.’

‘A pretty crotchety darling, if you ask me!’ said John.

‘But don’t you see, that is because he is so worried about everything? It must be dreadful for him to see his poor subjects being so badly treated. I shouldn’t be surprised if all great exiles were pretty snappy, people like Napoleon and Charles II, I mean; only that is not the sort of thing that gets into history books.’

Carbonel looked round. He had been stalking on ahead. Rosemary had thought him too far away to hear the conversation, but she was mistaken. However, he seemed not displeased at being compared to Napoleon and Charles II.

‘I suppose we are wise to go to the market again?’ asked Rosemary.

‘Well, it does seem to be the sort of place where things happen, doesn’t it?’ said John.

‘I believe we shall find HER there,’ said Garbonel. They had brought the broom with them so that he could talk to them. ‘As like as not she didn’t sell her broom until she had found the place where she wanted to settle. It stands to reason. Besides, catch her wasting money on shoe leather, when the broom would take her for nothing.’

They were later in setting off than before, and the streets were full of busy people. The expedition began badly. The sky was cold and grey so that they had had some difficulty in persuading Mrs Pendlebury Parker to let them go off for the day. There was a queue at the bus stop, and the conductor had a headache. Not that he told anyone about it, but it made him cross, so that when he saw Carbonel slipping up the stairs after the children, he called out:

‘Now then, no cats upstairs! What do you think this is, a blinking Noah’s Ark?’ and to the children’s indignation he picked up the outraged Carbonel by the scruff of his neck and dumped him on the pavement. There was no time for John and Rosemary to get off too, and as the bus gathered speed they saw the cat, looking the soul of indignation, left standing on the pavement.

There seemed nothing to do about it, but go on as they had arranged.

‘But without Carbonel I almost hope we don’t find Mrs Cantrip,’ said Rosemary uneasily.

‘Well, it doesn’t seem very likely that we shall, anyway, so I shouldn’t worry’ said John cheerfully. ‘We have absolutely no clue to go on. Besides, she is only an ordinary old woman now. You said she’d retired from being a witch.’

Rosemary said nothing. John was a matter-of-fact person and it was hard to describe anything so intangible as feelings to him.

‘I tell you what,’ said John when they had got off the bus, ‘why not say the Summoning Words? After all, it was Carbonel who wanted us to get on with things, so he couldn’t mind.’

‘I suppose I could. It is serious this time, not showing off.’

‘Of course it is serious. Besides, you are his mistress, after all.’

They found a quiet corner between two cars in the parking places beside the market, and Rosemary shut her eyes and said the Summoning Words:

By squeak of bat

And brown owl’s hoot,

By hellebore,

And mandrake root,

Come swift and silent

As the tomb,

Dark minion

Of the twiggy broom.

When Rosemary opened her eyes again she said, ‘I forgot to ask you. Have you any sandwiches that he will like? Mine are only ham and hard boiled egg, and I know he won’t like those.’

They tore a corner of John’s packet and found that his were potted meat and jam.

‘Look here,’ said Rosemary. ‘We shall have to put in some time before Carbonel can possibly get here. Let’s go and buy him a tin of sardines. He will be frightfully hungry after walking all the way here. I think we can get a little tin for sevenpence. Let’s go to the grocery stalls.’

They set off walking slowly up and down the market. They meant quite honestly to be looking for sardines, but it was all so interesting that it was some time before they reached the aisle where most of the grocery stalls were to be found. They bought a little tin of sardines from a stall which was a jumble of all kinds of tinned foods which had a large placard over it which said SMASHING REDUCTIONS!A PENNY OFF THE SHILLING! So instead of paying sevenpence they got it for sixpence halfpenny. It was not till they had wandered to the end of the market that they realized that there was no key with it with which to open the tin.

‘What a swizzle!’ said John. ‘Let’s go back and ask for one.’

They went back, but the fat man in charge of the stall merely said:

‘Well, what do you expect for sixpence halfpenny? P’r’aps you’d like a knife and fork?’ and everybody laughed.

‘How cross people are today!’ sighed Rosemary.

‘A fat lot of use a tin is without an opener,’ said John. ‘The sight of a tin we can’t open will make Carbonel cross as well, and I shouldn’t blame him!’

‘I tell you what,’ said Rosemary. ‘Perhaps the second-hand man will have one he would let us borrow.’ So they went to see.

The old man saw them coming over the heads of several people. As soon as he caught sight of Rosemary he waved an imaginary fairy wand, pointed the toe of a battered boot, and did what he meant to be a fairy pirouette. Then he wheezed in a way that Rosemary recognized as a laugh and she laughed too, more because he was such a nice, friendly litde man, than because she thought it funny. The fairy wand business was becoming a regular joke.

‘They still ‘aven’t come in yet!’ he said between wheezes.

‘It isn’t a fairy wand we want today, it’s a sardine tin opener,’ said Rosemary gravely.

‘A sardine tin opener?’ he said, going off into a paroxysm of wheezes. ‘You’ll be the death of me!’ he said at last, wiping his eyes. But he rummaged about in an old box and brought out a key, very old and rusty, but nevertheless a key.

‘I don’t fancy sardines myself, but it takes all sorts to make a world. If it was sweets, now, it would be different. A regular sweet tooth I’ve got.’

Rosemary took the opener from him. ‘Thank you very much indeed! How much is it?’

‘I’ll make you a present of it!’ said the old man gallantly, and turned away to attend to a customer.

It was precisely this minute that the two children became aware of Carbonel licking his dusty paws a few feet away. Far from being cross at having been summoned, he was most gracious.

‘I wondered if you would have enough sense to say the Words,’ he said. ‘Of course I was coming anyway, but the Words give one’s paws the power of coming the shortest way possible. I was following the bus route when they whipped me round and down an alley I had never noticed before. Got me here in half the time. Not a whole tin of sardines specially for me? Really, I feel quite touched! Believe me, I shall never forget it!’

And Carbonel rubbed himself against the children’s bare legs, winding in and out between them and purring, as John said, ‘Like a space ship.’

They found a couple of packing cases at the edge of the stalls and settled down to eat their sandwiches, while Carbonel, still purring, licked the sardine tin until even the smell of sardine had gone.

‘I tell you what I bags we do,’ said Rosemary, as she wiped the crumbs from her lap. ‘Let’s go and buy the old man a present. He has been so jolly kind and helpful. We shouldn’t have found either the hat or the cauldron without him, and now there is the opener.’

‘That’s a good idea. But whatever could we give him?’

‘He said he’d got a terribly sweet tooth,’ said Rosemary. ‘There is a sweet shop over there I went to once. Let’s go there and see what we can afford.’

She led the way to the little shop where she had weighed the merits of toffee apples and liquorice bootlaces on the day that she had first met Carbonel. What a long time ago it seemed now! When they reached the shop they were in deep discussion as to what happened to a sweet tooth if you had to have false ones, so that Rosemary did not notice anything different about the shop at first.

‘I don’t expect they can replace a sweet tooth,’ she was saying. ‘That is why old people don’t seem to like toffee. Besides…’

John interrupted, ‘Is this the shop you mean? What a miserable place!’

It was indeed. There was no longer a cheerful display of jars of sweets, of pink coconut ice, and sticks of peppermint rock. Except for one or two jars of pallid toffee and some dusty odds and ends of stationery the window was empty. Rosemary looked with distaste at two dead blue-bottles which lay on their backs near some yellowing envelopes. ‘I think this is it,’ she said doubtfully.

‘Well, p’r’aps that explains it,’ said John. And he pointed to a hand-printed notice which was stuck rather crookedly on to the window with stamp paper:

UNDER NEW MANGEMENT

it said in wobbly capital letters.

‘Well, I shouldn’t think the “new mangement” gets many customers!’

But as he spoke a young woman with a whimpering small boy opened the door with an angry jangle of the bell and went in. ‘I say, look at that!’

Rosemary looked where he pointed excitedly.

Over the door was another notice which said KATIE CANTRIP. LICENSED TO SELL TOBACCO.

John whistled. ‘Gome on!’ he said.

Rosemary began to say, ‘Don’t go in till we’ve decided what to do…’ but it was too late. John had opened the door with a jangle of the bell that could not be ignored, and Carbonel had slipped in after him. There was nothing for Rosemary to do but follow down the two steps into the shop.