Free The Catlady by Dick King-Smith Page A

out.
    “How fortunate we are, my dear,” the Colonel said to his wife,“to be looked after by Muriel in our old age.”
    “Old age?” said Florence. “I think you tend to forget, Percival, that we have been reincarnated into new bodies and that ours are now comparatively young.”

    “You are right, of course, Florence dear,” Percival replied. “Why, we have our new lives ahead of us.”
    “And possibly other lives,” said Florence.
    “What do you mean?”
    Florence rubbed her face against her husband's luxuriant whiskers. “We might have babies,” she said.
    Of course, not all the kittens born in Ponsonby Place were reincarnations of human beings. Most were simply ordinary kittens born to ordinary cats and were given names like Tibbles or Fluff. The Catlady could tell the difference merely by looking into their eyes once they were opened, and until this happened she did not attempt to name them.
    So it was not for ten days that she examined the four kittens born on January 22, 1901, the very day upon which Queen Victoria had died. Three of the kittens were tabbies, the fourth a ginger.
    The Catlady picked up the tabbies first, looking to see what sex each was and then peering into its newly opened eyes.

    “You're a tom,” she said three times, and, again three times,“Sorry, dear, you're only a cat.”
    But when she came to the fourth kitten, a small and dumpy one, expecting it to be another tom—for ginger kittens usually were—she found it to be a queen, as female cats are called. Then she looked into its eyes and caught her breath.
    “Not just a queen,” said the Catlady in a hoarse whisper,“but
the
Queen!”
    Reverently, she placed the ginger kitten back in its nest.“Oh, Your Majesty!” she said. “Reborn on the day you died! To think that you have come to grace my house!” And awkwardly, for she was not as young as she had been, she dropped a curtsy.
    “Your humble servant, ma'am,” said the Catlady, and retired from the room, backward.

Chapter Two
    Hastily, the Catlady made her way from the room in the East Wing where this latest litter of kittens had been born to the principal bedroom of Ponsonby Place. It was a spacious chamber where her parents had slept in their lifetime—their previous lifetime, that is—and that they, in their reborn shapes, still naturally occupied. Once the Colonel had been a fiery old soldier and his wife a bit of a battle-ax, and now no other cat ever dared cross this threshold.
    The Catlady found them lying side by side in the middle of the great four-poster bed. Percival had been reincarnated as a whitekitten that had grown into a very large and fat cat. His sweeping whiskers aped the military mustache of the human Percival. Florence was a tortoiseshell with just the same small, dark eyes that had once glinted behind Lady Ponsonby's pincenez.

    “Papa! Mama!” cried the Catlady excitedly (she could never bring herself to address them by their first names). At the sound of her voice, they yawned and stretched themselves upon the fine silken bedspread with its pattern of damask roses,which was now much torn by sharp claws and dirtied by muddy feet.
    “What do you think!” went on the Catlady.“Our dear departed Queen is come to stay! Edward VII may now be King of England, but here at Ponsonby Place Victoria still reigns!”
    “Mu,” said Percival in a bored voice, and Florence echoed,“Mu.”And they climbed off the four-poster and made their way down the curving staircase toward the dining room, for it was time for tea.
    How I wish Mama and Papa were still able to speak the Queen's English—the King's English, I should say, mused the Catlady as, in the huge stone-flagged kitchen, she set about the task of filling a large number of bowls with a mixture of fish heads and boiled rabbit and ox liver. For that matter, I wish that those others that have been reborn could speak too. How nice it would be to talk over old times with Uncle Walter and Aunt