The Catlady Read Online Free Page A

Percival and Lady Ponsonby warm on winter nights. When Coco was alone in the room, he began to nose around it. Looking up, he saw the sky through the chimney stack. He also saw that there were little stone steps on the walls of the chimney, steps up which, long ago, children had been sent to sweep down the soot with bags full of goose feathers. Coco began to climb. As he did so, the soot began to fall and he becamecovered in the stuff. It got in his eyes and his nose and his mouth, and he became very frightened. He did not know whether to go on up or to come back down or what to do. He sat on one of the steps, mewing pitifully for his mother.
    He was there, of course, when the Catlady was searching for him, but her hearing was too poor to catch his muffled cries and her eyesight not sharp enough to notice the fallen soot in the fireplace.
    But Mary, when she began to search, both heard the kitten and saw the sootfall. Cautiously she peered up the chimney and saw the crouching figure of the tiny adventurer.
    “Oh, Coco!” she called. “However are you going to get out of there?” The answer was immediate.

    Perhaps it was the sight of her face, perhaps the sound of her voice, perhaps he simply lost his footing, but the next minute Coco came tumbling down into the fireplace.
    Mary, by now very sooty herself, carried him down to the kitchen, where the Catlady still sat over her cup of tea.

    “Here he is!” she said.
    “But, Mary,” the Catlady cried, peering through her spectacles, “my brother Coco is a white kitten, like Papa, and that one is coal-black.”
    “
Coal-
black's about right,” Mary said, and she set about cleaning the unhappy Coco while on the floor below the sink, his parents watched and waited.
    “Whatever has the boy been doing?” Percival asked his wife.
    “Went up the chimney, by the look of it,” replied Florence.
    “Why?”
    “I've no idea, Percival. Boys will be boys.”
    The Colonel looked smug. “Chip off the old block,” he said rather proudly. “I was always an adventurous lad.”
    But Coco was not the only adventurous one. A few days later it was Hazel who went missing. Coco had gone up. She went down.
    Below the ground floor of Ponsonby Place was the cellar, though the door to it was nowadays seldom opened. The flight of steps that led down to the racks where Colonel Sir Percival Ponsonby had kept his wine (when he was a man) was very steep, and the Catlady hadn't been down there for years.
    But recently, Mary had taken to using the racks for storing things, and on this particular day she had gone down to fetch some cloths and some shoe polish. Unbeknownst to her, someone else slipped down too.
    Mary came back up the steep steps and shut the cellar door. She got out Miss Ponsonby's bicycle and set off to do the shopping.
    When she returned, she found, once again, the Catlady standing at the front door, leaning on her walking stick. This time, however, she looked delighted, her old face wreathed in smiles.
    “Oh, Mary!” she cried.“It's my sister!”
    “Your sister?”
    “Yes, Hazel. I lost her. I couldn't find her anywhere. But someone else did find her!”
    “Who?”

    The Catlady pointed down at Vicky, who was sitting at her feet, looking extremely smug. “Her Most Gracious Majesty found her,” said the Catlady. “How Hazel got there I do not know, but she was in the cellar. Somehow she'd been shut in there.”
    “Oh,” said Mary.

    “I was getting so worried,” the Catlady said. “I looked everywhere, I listened everywhere, but as I think you know, these days neither my sight nor my hearing is what it used to be. I asked Papa and Mama but they didn't seem to understand. And then something extraordinary happened, Mary. Vicky came up to me and put a paw on my stocking—something she has never done before—and then turned and walked away, stopping and looking back every so often. Clearly, she wanted me to follow her, so I did. She led me to the cellar door, and