The key turned in the lock with a sound like a small bone snapping, and Bramble Hockspur shouldered his way into his own front hall before remembering that he did not, technically, live alone anymore.
There was a cat on the counter.
Mulligrew sat precisely in the middle of the scarred oak surface, his tabby tail curled around his paws with the geometric precision of a man who had measured the distance with a ruler and found it acceptable. The kitchen smelled of cold tea and the faintly metallic tang of the curse-detection kit Bramble had forgotten to unpack. Afternoon light slanted through the window above the sink, catching dust motes and the green-gold of Mulligrew's eyes.
Those eyes were fixed upon Bramble with an expression that suggested Mulligrew had spent the last four hours composing a letter of resignation and was now waiting only for a decent pen.
"You're back," Bramble said, because he had never learned when silence was the wiser course.
Mulligrew blinked, slowly, the way a magistrate might blink at a particularly foolish plea. Then he opened his mouth, and what came out was not a meow.
"You will be pleased to learn," the cat said, in a voice like dry toast being buttered with a very small, very disappointed knife, "that I have not, in your absence, set fire to the davenport, swallowed any of the smaller curses from the secondary shelf, or allowed the kettle to achieve sentience. I mention this only because you appear to have forgotten that I am capable of all three."
Bramble set his satchel down by the door. The leather hit the floor with a soft thump that sounded louder in the quiet kitchen. His hands were still trembling from the walk back from the granary, or perhaps from the conversation with the mice, or perhaps from the thing the mice had said at the end, before he'd turned and left them standing among their ruined grain stores.
"That's, er, good," Bramble managed. "That's good to hear."
"It is not good," Mulligrew said. "It is adequate. There is a difference, and I wish you would learn it."
The cat rose, stretched, and hopped down from the counter with the particular grace of a creature who considered gravity a personal favor done to himself. He crossed the kitchen floor, paused at Bramble's ankles, and looked up.
"You smell of mouse distress and cheap liniment," Mulligrew observed. "Also of something that died in a granary, though I cannot be more specific without a sample. I trust the afternoon was everything your heroism demanded?"
Bramble opened his mouth, considered the question, and closed it again. The kitchen was small and warm, and the kettle on the hob had long since gone cold, and he had not eaten since breakfast, and the mice had looked at him with their large dark eyes and said, in their collective small voice, We are dying, Mr. Hockspur. We are dying and no one is coming.
"Sit down," Mulligrew said, more gently now. The meandering West Country burr had softened into something almost kind. "There is a saucer of cream in the larder. I have been saving it for a special occasion, and I have decided that the occasion is your return without any new holes burned through your coat."
"I didn't burn any holes," Bramble said, somewhat offended.
"You have a scorch mark on your left cuff the size of a half-crown," Mulligrew said, without looking. "Also, your hat is on backwards."
It was. Bramble removed it, turned it around, and put it on the hallstand.
Mulligrew crossed the kitchen floor with purpose. He had, Bramble noticed, the particular energy of a cat who had been keeping a secret and could no longer contain it. His tail was up. His whiskers twitched. He made a sound in his throat that was not quite a purr and not quite a word, but something in between, a sort of verbal clearance.
"Oh," Mulligrew said, and then, "Oh dear," and then, "Well."
"What?" Bramble said.
"Nothing," Mulligrew said. "Everything. Sit down."
"I was sitting down."
"Sit down again, then. More firmly." The cat hopped onto the table and sat before the cold kettle with the gravity of a magistrate. "I have done a thing."
Bramble, who had learned in his short and violent career as a Cursologist that any sentence beginning with those words was invariably followed by regret, lowered himself onto the nearest chair. "What sort of a thing?"
"An interview sort of a thing."
"With whom?"
Mulligrew blinked. "With the mice, of course. With whom else would one interview in a village the size of a thimble? The sparrows are useless, the toad in the Vicar's garden is a liar, and the magpies will only tell you things for a price, and the price is always something shiny, and I am fresh out of shiny. So: the mice."
Bramble stared. The kitchen, which had been warm and ordinary a moment ago, now seemed to tilt slightly on its axis. He had spent the afternoon being stared at by a granary full of dying mice, and now he was being told that the cat had been interviewing mice of his own acquaintance, and the world, which had seemed already as strange as a man could reasonably expect it to be, had evidently decided to become stranger still.
"You," Bramble said carefully, "have been interviewing the mice."
"I have," Mulligrew agreed, with the modest pride of a man who has done a thing and intends to be praised for it. "Several of them. Over a number of weeks. In my own time, you understand. I am retired. My time is my own. There is very little else to do with a Tuesday afternoon when one is a cat, except sleep, and I find I sleep quite enough."
"How," Bramble said, "did you interview the mice?"
"How does one interview anyone? One asks questions. One listens. One offers tea, in some cases. The mice around the granary do not care for tea. The mice around the cheese shop have developed quite a taste for it, though they are limited, by the size of their cups, to about a thimbleful each, which is, I am told, a perfectly adequate serving."
Bramble opened his mouth, closed it, and removed his hat from his head, though he had not put it back on. This was the gesture of a man whose hands needed occupation. "Mulligrew," he said, "I do not mean to criticize. I want that to be understood from the outset. I do not mean to criticize, and I am not criticizing, and yet I find myself in the position of a man who must, despite his better instincts, point out that you have been conducting what sounds very much like a private espionage operation against the local rodent population, and I am not certain whether to be impressed or alarmed."
"Both," Mulligrew said, "is acceptable."
"Both is not acceptable. Both is the precise emotion one feels upon discovering that one's cat has been running a parallel intelligence service out of the cheese shop, and it is not an emotion I was prepared to feel tonight."
Mulligrew's tail curled around his paws. He regarded Bramble with the steady golden gaze of a creature who had made his decision some time ago and saw no reason to revisit it. "They came to me," he said. "The mice. I did not seek them out. I was sitting in the window of the cheese shop, as is my custom on Wednesdays, and a small one, very thin, with a piece of paper clutched in her paws, climbed up onto the sill and looked at me and said, in that particular squeak of theirs, 'Sir, I cannot read this, and I am frightened.'"
"And you," Bramble said.
"I read it for her," Mulligrew said. "It was a shopping list. Someone in the cheese shop had written a shopping list on a piece of paper torn from a notebook, and crumpled it, and thrown it away, and she had found it in the bin, and she could not read it, and she was frightened because she did not know what writing was. I explained the concept of writing. She went away. I thought that was the end of it."
"It was not the end of it."
"It was not the end of it," Mulligrew agreed. "By Friday there were four of them. By the following Wednesday, eleven. They have been bringing me things ever since. Notes. Letters. The corner of a receipt. A page from a ledger, very small, that someone had torn out and burned but not quite thoroughly. They bring them to me, and I read them, and I tell them what they say, and they go away."
He paused. His tail uncurled. His ears, which had been pricked forward, now flattened, just slightly, against his skull.
"There is one thing," he said, "that they bring more than any other."
"What?"
"Notes from the cheese shop."
Bramble felt the small cold sensation at the base of his spine that he had learned, over the past weeks, to recognize as the herald of something that was not going to be pleasant. "What kind of notes?"
"Handwritten," Mulligrew said. "Very small. Crumpled. Hidden in the wainscoting, in the corners of the cheese drawers, under the rind of the Stilton, which is, I am told, a very secure hiding place, because no one eats the rind of the Stilton willingly, and so no one looks there. They are notes that no one in the shop admits to having written. They are notes that no one in the shop admits to having read. They are notes that the mice themselves cannot read, because they have only just learned, from me, that reading is a thing that exists, and they are not yet fluent."
He paused again. The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere in the garden, a thrush was singing the same three notes over and over, as if it had forgotten what came next.
"How many?" Bramble asked.
"Seventeen," Mulligrew said. "As of this morning. Seventeen separate notes, in seventeen separate hiding places, all in the cheese shop, all in a hand no one recognizes, all saying, in various ways, the same thing."
"What thing?"
Mulligrew looked at him. The cat's golden eyes were very steady.
"'He is coming,'" the cat said. "'He is coming, and he is not a mouse, and he is not a man, and the cheese will not save us.'"
Bramble sat very still. The kitchen ticked around him: the clock on the mantel, the fire in the grate, his own heart, which was not behaving in the calm and measured way he would have preferred. He thought of the granary, and of the mice who had looked at him with their large dark eyes, and of the words they had used, which had been different, and which had been, in their way, the same.
"'We are dying,'" he said slowly. "'That is what the granary mice said. We are dying, and no one is coming. They used almost those exact words.'"
"Yes," Mulligrew said.
"You think," Bramble said, and then stopped, and started again. "You think the cheese shop is connected to the granary."
"You think the cheese shop is connected to the granary."
Mulligrew was quiet for a long moment. The thrush outside had given up on its three notes and moved on to something more ambitious, a tumbling phrase that rose and fell like water over stones. Mulligrew's tail, which had been curled neatly around his paws, twitched once, twice.
"I think," he said at last, "that the cheese shop has been connected to everything in Lower Brackenmere for as long as Mr. Holyoake has stood behind his counter, which is forty-seven years and change. Mr. Holyoake knows who buys what, and when, and how much, and whether they paid cash or charged it to the miller's sister. Mr. Holyoake knows whose anniversary is coming up, and whose wife is expecting, and whose dog has been digging in the parsnip bed. Mr. Holyoake is the man who knows things."
"And someone has been leaving notes in his shop," Bramble said.
"Someone has been leaving notes," Mulligrew agreed, "in a hand that is not his own, in a place where seventeen different hiding spots have been chosen with care, and each note has been written separately, and sealed separately, and left at intervals that suggest the writer expected them to be found in a particular order."
Bramble thought about this. "That's a lot of effort," he said, "for someone who doesn't want to be found."
"Yes," Mulligrew said. "It is."
The fire cracked. A log settled in the grate, sending up a small fountain of sparks that rose and died against the soot-blackened stones. Bramble watched them go.
"The mice in the granary," he said slowly, "they couldn't read. You said they only just learned, from you, that reading existed. But the notes in the cheese shop are written. By someone. In a hand no one recognizes."
"Yes," Mulligrew said again.
"So either," Bramble said, and he could hear his own voice getting that thin, careful quality it got when he was trying to think through something that did not want to be thought through, "either the mice wrote the notes, which is impossible because they cannot write either, or someone else wrote them, and that someone else knows what the mice know, or wants us to think they do."
Mulligrew purred. It was a low, thoughtful sound, the purr of a cat who was listening more carefully than he was letting on.
"Or," the cat said, "a third thing."
"What third thing?"
"The third thing is the one I have not yet thought of," Mulligrew said. "And I have been thinking about it, on and off, for approximately seventy-three years, and I have not yet thought of it, which is a considerable personal disappointment, but there it is."
Bramble let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. The kitchen, despite the fire, felt a little cooler than it had a moment ago. He looked at his hands. They were the same hands he had always had: ink-stained, a little rough at the knuckles from the filing annex, steady enough when he was writing a receipt and less steady when he was writing anything else. They did not look like the hands of a man who was about to solve a mystery that had been left in seventeen separate notes in a cheese shop by someone who was not a mouse and not a man.
He felt, suddenly, very tired.
It was not the tiredness of a long day, though the day had been long. It was a different tiredness, a heavier one, the kind that sat in the bones and in the spaces behind the eyes and made everything feel as if it were being filtered through a slightly damp cloth. He had been feeling it, he realized, since he had stood in the doorway of the granary and looked at the dust where the grain had been. He had felt it when he had sat in the kitchen with the mice. He had felt it on the walk back to Mulligrew's cottage. He had felt it, in fact, for longer than that, but he had been telling himself it was the tea.
Mulligrew had an unfortunate habit of brewing very strong tea.
"I think," Bramble said, "I would like to do a diagnostic."
Mulligrew's ears went up. "On yourself?"
"Yes."
"On yourself."
"Yes," Bramble said. "I have been feeling. Strange. Tired. Since the granary. I thought it was the tea, but I have had three cups this evening and I do not feel better, which is the opposite of what the tea is supposed to do, and so I would like to know, before I make any further decisions, whether what I am feeling is a curse or simply an excess of your hospitality."
Mulligrew's whiskers twitched. "My hospitality is not excessive," he said, in the slightly wounded tone of a man whose hospitality had just been called excessive. "My hospitality is exactly the right amount. My hospitality is renowned throughout the southern counties. I had a duchess once, you know, who specifically came down for the tea."
"I did not know that," Bramble said.
"You do now," Mulligrew said. "And she did not feel tired afterwards. She felt uplifted. She wrote me a letter about it, which I have somewhere, in a drawer, in a box, under a number of other boxes, but it is there."
"I am very glad," Bramble said, "that the duchess was uplifted. May I do the diagnostic now?"
"You may," Mulligrew said. "You will need a clear surface, a steady hand, and a small piece of something that belongs to you. A hair will do. A thread from your cuff. The idea is to give the spell a piece of yourself to read."
Bramble nodded. He had done diagnostics before, in the course of his training, though he had done them on other people and on objects, never on himself. Self-diagnostics were considered slightly bad form, because they were uncomfortable and because the results were rarely as clear as one would wish. But they were also permitted, and useful, and he had been feeling, for some hours now, as if he would very much
Bramble set down his teacup with great care. The surface of Mulligrew's worktable was already clear, swept bare of the usual drifts of paper, and he was grateful for that, because he had the strong suspicion that his hands were about to require his full attention.
"A hair will do," he repeated.
"A hair," Mulligrew confirmed. "Or a thread. Anything that has had the decency to live on your person for some time. Freshly plucked items are too eager. They have not had the chance to settle in."
Bramble reached up and found, after some searching, a single grey hair at his temple. He tugged it free. It came away with a faint sting, and he held it between thumb and forefinger and looked at it as though it might, at any moment, begin to argue.
"There," Mulligrew said, leaning forward with the attentive air of a man who had been waiting some decades for someone to perform a diagnostic in his presence again. "Now you lay it on the table, and you put your hand over it, palm down, and you say the thing that you are trying to read."
"The thing I am trying to read," Bramble said.
"The condition," Mulligrew said. "You name it out loud. You ask the spell to show you what it is. You do not apologize for asking. Apologies confuse the reading."
Bramble placed the hair on the bare wood. It looked, if anything, smaller than it had in his fingers. He laid his palm flat over it and felt, with a small private embarrassment, the warmth of his own skin against the table.
"Show me," he said, "whether I am under a curse."
The room was quiet. The fire settled. Somewhere in the cottage, a kettle that had no business boiling began, very softly, to boil.
Bramble felt nothing at first. He had been bracing himself for something dramatic, for a jolt or a heat, and when none came he nearly pulled his hand away on the assumption that nothing was happening. But then there was a sensation, faint and strangely familiar, like the moment between falling asleep and waking when one is not quite certain which side of the threshold one is standing on. It was not unpleasant. It was simply strange.
The hair under his palm had not moved. But the table around it had warmed, and Bramble thought, with the particular clarity that sometimes arrives in moments of mild dread, that he understood what was happening. The diagnostic was reading him, not the other way around. It was taking inventory of his interior the way a customs officer takes inventory of a trunk, lifting each thing in turn and asking, with bureaucratic patience, whether it belonged there.
When the reading finished, Bramble sat back. He did not feel worse. He did not feel better. He felt, in a way he could not quite articulate, as though he had been tidied.
Mulligrew was watching him with the bright-eyed patience of a man who had spent his whole life waiting for results.
"Well," Mulligrew said.
"Well," Bramble said.
"And?"
Bramble looked at the hair on the table. It had gone white at the root. He was not certain that was significant, but it was the only thing that had changed, and so he said so.
"White at the root," Mulligrew repeated, and his eyebrows climbed his forehead in two unhurried stages. "White at the root means the diagnostic found something old. Not something you have just acquired. Something that has been there for some time."
"Something I have been carrying," Bramble said.
"Possibly," Mulligrew said. "Possibly something you were carrying before you came down here. Possibly something that has been here all along, tucked away in a drawer, like the duchess's letter. Difficult to say without a second reading, and I am afraid I have not the hands for a second reading at my age. The fingers," he added, holding one up and regarding it with mild betrayal, "have become unreliable."
Bramble looked at his own hands. They were steady. They had been steady throughout. He was not sure whether to be reassured by this or alarmed.
"Is it dangerous?" he asked.
Mulligrew considered the question with the gravity it deserved.
"It is not, on the face of it, immediately dangerous," he said. "It is the sort of thing that makes one tired. It is the sort of thing that makes one believe one is less capable than one is. It is the sort of thing that whispers."
"Whispers," Bramble said.
"Whispers," Mulligrew confirmed. "Not loudly. One has to listen for it. But once one has heard it, one cannot quite unhear it, and that is the difficulty."
Bramble thought of the tiredness. He thought of the way his hand had trembled over the receipts. He thought of the way he had felt, in the filing annex, that he was exactly the right size for the work, and had never questioned it.
"I see," he said, though he did not, quite, see yet.
"You will," Mulligrew said. "Or you will not. Either way, you will know that there is something to know, and that is more than most people ever manage." He reached for his own teacup, found it empty, and regarded this as a personal failing on the part of the cup. "In the meantime," he said, "you will want to eat something. And sleep. And possibly avoid making any large decisions for a day or two."
"I had been planning to solve the grain curse," Bramble said.
"Then you will want to solve it after you have eaten," Mulligrew said. "The grain curse has waited this long. It will wait for your dinner."
Bramble opened his mouth to object, and then closed it, because the cottage smelled of something warm and herby, and his stomach, which had been silent throughout the diagnostic, now made its presence known with a small and dignified rumble.
"Dinner," Mulligrew said, rising with the careful ceremony of a man who intended to treat the occasion appropriately, "and after dinner, we will see about the granary. But first," he added, with a glance back at Bramble that was, beneath its surface of cheerful indifference, rather kind, "first we will sit, and eat, and not whisper at all."
Bramble nodded. He stood up from the table, and the room did not tilt, and the tiredness was still there, but it had acquired, somewhere in the last quarter of an hour, the quality of a thing he had chosen to carry rather than a thing that was carrying him. He followed Mulligrew toward the kitchen, and the kettle, which had been boiling against all reason, now sounded like a small welcome.
Outside, the rain had slowed. The lane beyond the cottage window glistened, and a cat that had been sitting on the wall got down at last, stretched once in a long silver arc, and disappeared into the hedge as though it had never been there at all.
The kitchen was smaller than Bramble had expected, and warmer. A kettle sat on the hob like a small brass moon, and around it were arranged an unlikely population of teapots, each one of a different age and disposition, with spouts that ranged from the confident to the apologetic. Mulligrew selected one without looking, the way a man selects a familiar coat from a rack of strangers, and filled it from a tin that read, in faded letters, Not For Drinking.
"You must not ask about the tin," Mulligrew said.
"I wasn't going to," Bramble said.
"You were forming the question."
"Only a small one."
"It will keep." Mulligrew set the pot down on the table between them, and produced, from a cupboard that seemed to exhale when opened, two bowls of something thick and yellow, with steam rising from it in slow, earnest columns. "Barley and carrot," he said. "With a little of last week's cheese rind, which I will not apologize for."
"It smells," Bramble said, and then paused to consider whether honesty was the better policy. "It smells very good."
"It is very good. The rind is the secret. People throw away the best part of the cheese and keep the dull middle. I have never understood it." Mulligrew sat down across from him, and for a moment neither of them spoke. The cottage settled around them with the soft creak of old timbers adjusting to the evening. Rain tapped, gently now, on the window glass, and somewhere in the thatch above them a small creature moved and was still.
Bramble picked up his spoon. The first mouthful was hot and faintly sweet, with the surprising depth that comes from a thing made without ceremony by a person who has made it many times. He ate, and the tiredness in him did not leave, but it moved over a little, the way a heavy piece of furniture moves when you finally find the right place for it.
"Eat," Mulligrew said, which was unnecessary, because Bramble was already eating, but which he said anyway, because he was the sort of man who liked to say things that did not need to be said.
They ate in a silence that was, for the first time that day, entirely companionable. Bramble watched Mulligrew across the table and noticed, as one notices in lamplight, how much older the old man looked when he was not performing. The lines around his eyes were deep, and his hands, which had been so certain with the diagnostic tools, now shook slightly as he lifted his spoon.
"Tell me," Bramble said, when the bowls were nearly empty and the teapot had given up its first brave breath of steam, "tell me honestly. Do you think I am the right person for this?"
Mulligrew looked at him over the rim of the teacup he had poured for them both from the Not For Drinking tin.
"I think," he said, "that you asked the question, which is more than most do. They arrive at the granary, and they look at the curse, and they decide what they think before they have seen anything. You have eaten your soup and asked the question afterward. This is the correct order."
"That isn't really an answer."
"It is the only answer I have. You will make a better one by morning, or you won't, and we will go to the granary regardless, because the granary does not care whether we are ready for it." Mulligrew set down his cup. "There is one thing more, though. One thing I did not put in the diagnostic, because it is not a thing that fits in a diagnostic."
"What is it?"
"The cat."
Bramble blinked. "The cat on the wall?"
"There is always a cat on the wall in a place where something is wrong. I have never written this down, because no one would believe it, but it is true. When I worked the Pevensey infestation, there was a tortoiseshell on the churchyard gate. When I worked the Hollowfield rot, there was a black one in the dairy window. When I worked the Brockley murmur, a white one with one eye, sitting on a milestone." Mulligrew refilled his cup, and his hand shook only a little. "You will see a cat before you see the curse. You may rely upon it."
"Is this," Bramble said carefully, "a real piece of Cursology?"
"No," Mulligrew said. "It is a superstition of an old man who has been doing this too long. But I will tell you what is also true, which is that I have never been wrong about the cat."
Bramble thought about the silver cat on the wall, and about the way it had stretched and vanished into the hedge as though it had never been there at all. He thought about the granary, and the dust where the grain should have been, and the little parliament of mice who had elected a speaker from under a collapsed sack.
"I saw the cat," he said.
"Then we are in agreement," Mulligrew said, "which is a good start, and which is also where I would like to leave the matter until morning."
Bramble nodded. The lamp on the table had begun to gutter slightly, and outside the rain had stopped altogether, and the lane beyond the window was full of the small sounds that country lanes make when they think no one is listening. Somewhere in the hedge, a bird gave a single sharp note and then was quiet.
They sat together a little longer, and did not whisper at all, and did not solve anything, which was, Bramble was beginning to understand, sometimes the only honest thing a person could do at the end of a day like this one.
The lamp steadied itself, and the cottage waited with them.