"Sound the bells." Oona slid down off her stool. "My turn."
She rolled past Maeve and disappeared down the corridor. The door clicked again. Maeve sat in Oona's seat and pulledPepper hard against her chest. She did not look at anyone. Pepper had begun to purr, a small uncertain purr; his nerves had not yet caught up with the rest of him.
The kitchen quieted. Conversation flickered. Rhoda asked Honey if she had eaten. Honey said yes, even though she had not. Edgar said something low to Roam about a cat on the side lawn.
Bramble, under Oona's empty chair, lifted his head. "Last winter," he announced to the kitchen at large, in his forty-years-of-tobacco-he-had-never-smoked voice, "Oona pinched the choir robes off the Methodist line and dyed the lot of them in beet juice. She has been wearin' the spare one to bed for warmth on the cold nights."
A small noise came out of Maeve. It might have been a laugh. It might not.
"Bramble." Maeve looked down at the cat. "Bramble, my love. We are going to be very fine friends."
Bramble looked up at her with great satisfaction. At the far end of the table, Lazlo's thumb worked the inside of his coat pocket in slow patient circles. The corridor door clicked. Oona came back through with the air of a woman who had just told a slightly off-color joke at a small dinner party and gotten away with it. "Cleared."
"'Course ye were," Maeve said back.
Two pairs of eyes met across the kitchen. Maeve set Pepper down. Oona scooped Bramble up. Without quite knowing they were doing it, they linked elbows.
"Murph's," Oona said.
"Murph's," Maeve agreed.
"Mrs. Hadwin, my pearl," Oona called, "we'll be at Murphy's if ye need us."
"Of course, my dears," Rhoda said.
They went out the back door footloose and fancy free, Pepper trotting at Maeve's ankle and Bramble high in Oona's arms with his one ear forward like a flag.
Sean came back through the corridor with his notebook closed. "I'll need to see you now Mr. Varga."
Lazlo's eyes shot up. "Me. Whatever for?"
"Is that really necessary," Rhoda chimed in. "He's been through so much already."
"Well, we have to speak to everyone, ma'am." Sean motioned for him to follow him to the study.
"Certainly." She nodded.
Lazlo hesitated, sat Duchess at his feet, then rose with the clearing of his throat. "Yes. Of course."
He nodded once to Rhoda, and left to follow Sean.
"Sweetheart," Rhoda said when Honey began to gather the plates. "Take the small pot of plum preserves from the storage. The cellar tin's near empty."
"Yes, Mama."
Honey crossed the kitchen and went into the back hall. The back hall was dim. It had not yet had its morning light. She passed the first door. She passed the second door. She opened the third door, the small storage room with its preserves on the shelves and its low chest under the small window and the wooden chair beside it.
She did not see the preserves first. She saw, on the canvas dust sheet draped across the chair, the small dark shape of an old black tom curled the way a cat curls when he is asleep. His head was tucked. His paws were under him. There was nothing wrong with the way he was lying.
There was only the way he was not moving.
"Oh," Honey said. She closed the door behind her.
She crossed to the chair and knelt. His coat was dust-dark and patchy. His ribs were too much against his skin. His throatwas dark with a different mark now. Small. Bruise-blue. The shape of one careful bite. His copper eyes were open, but they did not see. The tears came before she could stop them. She did not try.
"I am so sorry I did not find you sooner, friend," she said, very quietly. "I'll find who did this to you."
She opened her hand. The pink glitter came up out of her palm in a soft slow fountain, and rose into the air above the old tom, and curved itself into the arc of a rainbow she had heard about as a little girl from women older than her mother, and that she had never, in all her life, had cause to make. The colors held. The rainbow waited.
