Touch Not The Cat Read Online Free PDF Page B

and if he could throw any light on the jumble of words on Walther's paper.
    No one had come to the cremation. Emory had telephoned from England, not to me but to Walther, to say that Cousin Howard was still very ill, and that since Francis was away on leave, James was tied to the Jerez office. Emory himself could not be free on Friday, but would come to Ashley as soon as possible. He had no idea where Francis was; walking somewhere, he thought, in the Peak District. Presumably the news had not got to him yet. No doubt he would call me as soon as he came back. Meanwhile, said Emory, love to Bryony . . .
    So much for Bryony's cousin who would tell me what Daddy had meant, and take me home. And so much for Bryony's lover, who said nothing, either by day or night.
    When I arrived in London I took the train straight to Worcester and booked in at a small hotel where no one knew me. Next morning I telephoned Mr. Emerson, and went to see him.
    He was a youngish man, somewhere (I guessed) in his upper thirties, of medium height and running a bit to flesh, with a round, good-tempered face and hair cut fashionably long. He had a small shrewd mouth, and small shrewd brown eyes camouflaged behind modishly huge, tinted spectacles, like a television spy's. Otherwise he was correctly dressed and almost over-conventionally mannered; but I had seen him fishing the Wye in stained old tweeds and a snagged sweater, up to the crotch in the river and swearing in the far-from-legal sense of the word as he slipped and splashed over the boulders, trying to land a big salmon single-handed. I liked him, and Daddy, I knew, had trusted him completely.
    It was almost a week now since my father's death, but Mr. Emerson did not make the mistake of being too kind. We got the first civilities over, then he cleared his throat, shifted a paper or two, and said: "Well now, Miss Ashley, you do know that you may call on me to help you in any way.
    . . . It will take a fair amount of time to sort out your father's affairs, as you know. None of that need trouble you, as long as you find yourself quite clear about the way the house and property are left."
    I nodded. I had practically been brought up with the terms of the Ashley Trust, as it was called, which had been designed by an ancestor of mine, one James Christian Ashley, who had inherited the property in 1850. He was a farsighted man, who had seen, even in the spacious days of Victoria, that there might come a time when the incumbent of a place like Ashley might find it hard to protect what he, James Christian, thought of as a national treasure, and might even seek to disperse it.
    This, James Christian was determined to prevent. He created a trust whereby, though the Court itself must go outright to the nearest male heir, no part of the "said messuages" might be sold or disposed of unless with the consent in writing of all adult Ashley descendants existing at the time of the proposed disposal. My grandfather James Emory had managed, with the connivance of his brothers and one distant cousin, to sell a couple of outlying farms which edged the main road, and to make a tidy sum out of some meadowland earnestly desired by the Midland Railway, and the proceeds had kept the place in good heart until the cold winds sharpened to the killing frosts of the Second World War. Since then, apart from the family silver, which had been sold with his cousin's consent, all the articles my father had sold had been things bought since 1850 or brought in by marriage, and consequently uncontrolled by the trust. If my cousins had been in need of funds they would, I knew, have found themselves fairly well down to the scrapings.
    Mr. Emerson was going on. "There's no immediate hurry over that. We can perhaps have another meeting when you are less, er, pressed." I knew that Walther had told him what my first business was at the Court. He shied delicately away from that, and went on: "Then there is your father's Will. He told me you have