Page 3

The black cat had come into my life a year after Banshee had. Despite having essentially wandered into the shelter—I’d opened the back door one morning and found him perched coolly on the step as if waiting for an appointment—he was not even slightly tame, but seemed to have adopted the appearance of being so out of self-interest. An enormous beast with a single white boot, His Majesty ruled the shelter with an iron paw. He disdained the fellowship of other felines but delighted in the role of tyrant, stalking about the shelter cats as if they were little more than furniture and stealing food with impunity, except on the occasions when he decided to make an example of some foolish upstart. He had never been challenged twice.

Naturally, I had never dared attempt to adopt out His Majesty, and as he showed no signs of wishing to move on, I had officially declared him my responsibility, although his entrance into my life had been more akin to a hostile takeover. He was not an affectionate cat, demonstrating a cunning tolerance of petting but little enjoyment, though he had a great fondness for laps, and would stake his claim to mine whenever I took some time for myself with a book, growling low in his throat when I considered putting the book aside. More than once had I been forced to stay up past midnight before the beast deemed his considerable square footage adequately warmed.

Banshee, a nearly round tabby, was perhaps the only cat able to dwell alongside the likes of His Majesty without being terrorized, for Banshee was unterrorizable, not from strength of character but from a complete lack of sense. I doubted Banshee would survive a day if left to her own devices, for she would routinely get herself into impossible danger, clambering up to the rafters or into claustrophobic crawl spaces, whereupon she would become stuck. She demonstrated no awareness that fire was hot, and had made multiple attempts at getting inside the woodstove while it was alight, until Robin had finally built a screen around it. Banshee’s most habitual occupation was sitting in the middle of a room and staring fixedly at a single point for no discernible reason. His Majesty, having made a few attempts to frighten her after he moved in—on one occasion pinning her to the floor with his jaws around her neck—seemed to have decided such efforts were beneath him when it came to creatures as pathetic and inexplicable as Banshee. I’d occasionally had the impression that he even pitied her, for he would sometimes deign to allow her to curl up against him, which was not a liberty he allowed any of the shelter cats.

Banshee’s name came from her curious voicelessness; never had I heard her make a sound, purring excepted, though she often seemed to be trying, sometimes even wandering about the place opening and closing her mouth in my direction, as if desperate to warn me of some impending doom. Robin and I used to joke that she was, in fact, creating an appalling racket, but that it was a sound that could be heard only by the inhabitants of some unhallowed supernatural realm.

I fed the shelter cats next—we had forty-eight, which was an all-time high and a great strain on our budget, but what could I do? Turn them out, with winter on the horizon?

I paused at Thoreau’s cage to give him extra attention. I knew I shouldn’t play favourites, but Thoreau, a genteel senior whom Élise had found shivering in a box behind the central train station, had been at the shelter six months, the longest of our charges.

The cat leaned into my hand. Thoreau was a beautiful, gothic grey, and the least demanding of the brood. Given the pitiable state in which we’d found him, from mites to broken ribs to an infected eye, I often had the sense he was still attempting to comprehend how dramatically his existence had been altered.

Clowder was pawing at the bars of her cage with increasing desperation, so I opened the door for her to hop down to the floor. Her four kittens—only about a month old—followed, which I could tell Clowder did not appreciate. She gave me a harried look.

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” I told her. “You deserve a little holiday, don’t you?” I checked that each of the kittens was well, then lifted the lot—two orange tabbies, a tuxedo, and a small calico, like her mother—into the cage and closed the door.

I spent a few moments tidying, shadowed by Clowder and Banshee. Clowder kept a nervous eye on His Majesty, but he was not in the mood to exercise his authority, and was sleeping off his dinner in his favourite chair, tail twitching.

The shelter layout was simple; it had been a tailor’s before, which had proven ideal for my purposes—the large back room where the coats and dresses had been worked on was big enough for the cat cages, while the smaller space at the front was all we needed for interviewing prospective adopters. Off the back room was a tiny kitchen. It was as dilapidated as the rest of the shelter, and one could only get it so clean before one’s efforts were thwarted by ancient and immovable stains.

The wind picked up, whistling through the hole in the front room. I endeavoured to ignore it.

I had been planning on a meager repast of cheese and tinned soup—between us, Robin had been the chef—but I found that Élise had been to the café on the next street and left me a mushroom pie wrapped in paper. It was still slightly warm.

I stared at it with a mixture of annoyance and despair—how many times had I told Élise I didn’t need her to mother me? It wasn’t as if she and her husband could support a third person on his meagre city councillor’s salary. Élise and I had only what little remained of our parents’ inheritance to our names, and I wanted her to keep every penny of her half, not feel the need to support her widowed sister.

My annoyance lasted no more than a moment, though; my stomach was rumbling too insistently. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and devoured the entire pie standing up. It was buttery and filled with porcini in a warm, spiced cream sauce. Heaven, in other words.

Somewhat rejuvenated, I finished up the evening chores, consulting the clipboard to see what Élise had already taken care of—she made fun of my checklists at every opportunity, but didn’t go so far as ignoring them. I freshened the blankets and litter boxes, then added wood to the stove, trying to be as sparing as I could.

Mme. Richard had told me I could take as long as I liked to move out, but we’d both known this to be a hollow kindness with winter on the horizon. Not only was the shelter essentially open to the elements, but our oil heater had been damaged beyond repair, and wood was expensive. My landlady had said she could not afford the substantial—and necessary—repairs any more than Hamad could. So this would become another silent space within the noise and movement of the city, an architectural ellipsis.

I drew a slow breath, trying to push against another wave of anger. Naturally, the police hadn’t caught the magicians who’d thought it reasonable to duel in the middle of a city street. Magicians rarely were caught when they broke the law, which was not an infrequent occurrence. My impression was that the only thing preventing them from tearing the world apart by the seams was their rarity. Scholars of magic estimated that fewer than one in a million were born with any degree of magical gift, and within this was a great deal of variation. Most could manage only the simplest of charms.

And thank God for that.

“Come, Banshee,” I said once the shelter cats were all attended to and shut away again. The tabby, who had been staring at an empty bit of wall in consternation, gave one of her silent yowls and followed me upstairs.

Here there was only one small room below the sloped roof; it had been used as storage before Robin and I moved in five years ago. We’d scavenged two narrow beds from a thrift store, hauling them awkwardly up the old stairs and then pushing them together, giggling all the while. We’d not been married long in those days—not newlyweds anymore, yet often it felt that way.

I’d considered removing the second bed after Robin died, but in the end could not bring myself to part with it. Now the bed was, essentially, the property of His Majesty.

Perhaps I should not have implied that His Majesty disliked all human company. For in truth, he had made an exception for one person in his life, and that was Robin.

I’d never been able to work out what it was about Robin. He loved the cats, but so did I, and he was a noisier person than me, for Robin liked to talk, turning almost every anecdote into a story, and often growing so animated he waved his hands about. Maybe it was his unfailing politeness and good humour, which he extended to the cats, asking Banshee if he could please trim her claws and excusing himself whenever he had to step over someone.

The night after Robin died, His Majesty had refused to sleep, wandering about the shelter and frequently parking himself by the front door, scratching obsessively at it and yowling at me, as if he thought Robin were on the other side, waiting to be let in. Towards dawn, he’d finally curled up on Robin’s pillow.

The cat glanced up at me when I entered the bedroom, and I wondered, as I often did, if he had been hoping to see Robin. I sensed a disappointment in his inscrutable feline gaze as he put his head back down, but I may have been imagining it. Perhaps I simply wanted company of sorts.

Now Robin had been gone two years, and even with my penchant for tears I no longer wept over him every night. But it had been a long and lonesome day, and so I allowed myself a bit of a cry. His Majesty stayed curled up on the pillow, by all appearances ignoring me—nevertheless, he was there. Banshee was sympathetic, though this was more distracting than anything else. She kept trying to bat the tears from my face no matter how often I pushed her away, seeming to assume, as she generally did, that the tears were the cause of my distress rather than a product of it, and thus an enemy to be vanquished.

Eventually, I dried my face, wound the alarm on the little brass clock by my bed, and turned out the light. Banshee settled herself between me and His Majesty, and together we slept.

“What sort of shop is it again?” Mathieu asked. “I’m sorry to forget—I have five showings this morning.”

“Typing,” Élise answered with a breezy smile. “We average around two dozen customers per day. Most come in for letters, but we had an author in last week, didn’t we, Agnes? The poor dear—I’ve never seen handwriting that bad. We’re also hoping to start a rental service as soon as we can find a good wholesale price on ink ribbons. There’s been such a shortage recently—surely you’ve heard?”