Free Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand Page B

out at her, standing hiding while she went by, motionless but for the over and over washing movement of the dreadful thick brown hands. She thought suddenly of the voices she had heard in the house before she fell asleep: men’s voices rumbling in the room below, while Mrs. Love spoke to Dai Trouble on the stairs. Whose had those voices been? Who—if the two servants were halfway up the stairs—was Carlyon speaking to in the room below? She stared ahead of her at the close-drawn curtains. Why, after all, had those curtains been pulled? To ease her non-existent headache? Or to discourage her from looking out of the window, to prevent her seeing who was arriving at the house? But she had looked out; and what, after all, had she seen? No rainbow—the rainbow that had been “like love at first sight” had faded from the sky; only the thin sunshine and the silver river and the two little toiling figures coming up the path to the house. Dai Jones Trouble and Miss Evans, the little woman who brought the milk.
    But Miss Evans had brought the milk to Penderyn earlier in the morning. Why should she come again? Would she not simply have rowed Dai across the river and rowed back again, her job done? Who then had come up the mountain path with Dai? Katinka recollected suddenly that it had not been until Mrs. Love had seen Dai Jones Trouble “on the way over with your things” that she had developed this sudden solicitude, had forced a headache upon her, had hustled her off to the carefully curtained room. Carlyon had started off on his walk up the mountainside and had seen the boat—the boat bringing not only Dai Jones and the milk-woman, but a third figure as well.
    The white man with the brown hands.
    She scrambled out of bed and began feverishly to dress. This is the end. I’m going, I’m getting out. I’ll run down the path and try to attract attention from the other side of the river; or if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll just have to hide on the mountain till Miss Evans comes over in the morning, I’ll hide in those caves that Chucky told me about. It was terrifying, horrible to think of leaving even the uncertain fortress of her room, creeping out through the chocolate hall, into the dank evening air; but go she must. She left the things that had been sent from the hotel, her nightie, dressing-gown, slippers, washing gear; better lose them all and get a new lot than be impeded by brown paper parcels in her flight from the house.
    There was nobody in the corridor; the door at which the piebald man had stood, was closed. She began with infinite caution to creep down the stairs.
    A voice was lifted up in song, ringing forth suddenly from the kitchen; was as suddenly hushed, as though Dai Trouble had abruptly remembered that gentlemen’s gentlemen do not break forth into loud song while they go about their duties. From the sitting-room came a subdued murmur of voices. She crept on.
    The kitchen door opened and Dai Trouble came out into the hall. She flattened herself against the wall and kept very still. He went to a cupboard in the hall, took something from it and returned to the kitchen. For a moment, the shock of so near a discovery almost drove her back to her room, but she forced herself on, creeping softly, silently down the stairs, her gloved hand sliding along the shoddy rail. She must get out and away; must get across the river and to the village and there find the first policeman and tell him everything. The thought of a village policeman was solid and comforting.
    And besides, she had friends in the village of Pentre Trist! Miss Evans the Milk was quite a friend of hers already, and there were the men she had talked to the day before, Dai Ych-y-fi and the rest. It was true that Miss Evans had denied Amista, but Dai Ych-y-fi had seen her, had spoken to her. She recalled now the description in one of Amista’s rambling letters, the excitement because a man had come to do the drains, Dai Ych-y-fi who had “a