Cat in Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

hates black. You can’t make me wear it!”
    Henrietta had a gift for the deep stab and twist. She narrowed her eyes and said, “You had better come to terms with this, child. Your mother doesn’t want anything. Neitherdoes she hate anything. She is dead and beyond caring about you or anybody else.”
    At which point I threw myself on the floor and kicked and screamed until Aunt Henrietta finally got a shoehorn and raised welts on my bare backside with it. No one had ever actually beaten me before, and the whole experience left me so frightened and bewildered that I climbed into the black dress without another word. I tried to tell Father about it, but he had commenced drinking heavily on the day of Mother’s death and didn’t seem very concerned about my problems.
    That night, after we had been put to bed, Harry crept into my room. I lay on the wide casement bench, unable to sit without great discomfort, and Harry huddled beside me. The moon was a bright crescent. Its faint light frosted the hills and whispered through the window onto our hands and faces.
    “Shall we run away?” said Harry.
    “How silly. We’d starve to death.”
    “But we can’t stay here. She’ll kill us.”
    I stared gloomily out at the night, wondering if perhaps Harry had a point. What happened next I would have been inclined to pass off as a dream, only Harry saw it, too. Far-off, above a distant wood, something large, round, and shiny appeared in the chilly sky, as if from nowhere. It took me a moment to recognize it as a balloon. I strained to make out what color it was, or to discern a familiar pattern of stars around its middle, but in that light I could be sure of nothing. We watched it drift for a minute or two, like a greatsteel ball somehow set free of gravity. Then it vanished. A prickle of fear and excitement ran through me. Harry and I exchanged one of those looks that signals a complex, shared thought—in this case, the memory of a summer fire guttering from an impossible, cold wind.
I owe you a great debt. If there is ever any way in which I can repay it, you must tell me
.
    “Clotaire!” we whispered in unison.
    We spent the night beside the open window, dozing by turns so that we would not miss Clotaire’s balloon if it reappeared. After a time, the moon set, and the night grew dark and close, with only a sprinkling of stars to light it. Though I fought sleep, I must have drifted off anyway sometime in the small hours after midnight, for I awakened at dawn to Harry’s urgent whispers and his tugging at my shoulder.
    “It’s him! It’s him! Look, there’s the balloon.”
    I rubbed my eyes and looked out across a windless autumn morning. The half-light robbed everything of color. The hills, the woods, the field lay cold and gray. A few birds twittered their morning songs. The sweet reek of neglected pomace in someone’s cider press drifted up to us, mingled with leaf smoke. And there, splendid in the faded sky, hung the silver balloon. Blinking, I climbed up on the window ledge and waved wildly, shouting, “Clotaire! Wait, Clotaire.”
    When I felt certain he had seen me, I turned and bolted out the door and down the stairs. Harry ran after me, his bare feet slapping the polished wooden floors. We stood on the lawn in our nightgowns, waving and calling until the wicker basket touched ground and Clotaire stood before us.
    “Hello, my friends,” he said softly.
    I looked into his face as steadily as I could, straightened my back, and said, “Sir, you made us a promise once.”
    He nodded and smiled a smile so faint that I could hardly be sure it was there.
    “We want you to take someone …”
    I was cut off by a shout from one of the upstairs windows. “Catherine! Harry! You shall be thrashed within an inch of your lives for this.”
    “I don’t give a hoot!” shouted Harry, turning toward the house with his jaw thrust out and his hands on his little boy hips.
    I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars.