The blasted creature had not left three months later.
Nottie had followed the letter of her father’s instructions, Harold had to give her that, but the spirit of them had definitely been disobeyed. And worse than that, even when Harold took the cat to Marjory’s, handing it over while Marjory cooed and the creature squirmed and whined, it had still reappeared the next morning from Nottie’s room, sheepish, skittish, and somehow more agile than it had been the day before. Or maybe just less trusting. Harold had felt oddly guilty about the incident later.
Worse still was his growing acclimation to the situation. He could sleep through the creature’s crying for food most mornings now, and had learned to keep a spare handkerchief in every room for when his allergies unexpectedly caught up to him. And he had to admit that Nottie was happier than he’d seen her in years. The cat gave her company when he was at work, and something to do with the time that Olivia would have likely had her devote to some form of schooling or other. Some days Harold wished that he had done more to encourage his daughter to pursue lessons in Portown. The company classes provided might have done her good. There was still time, perhaps. In the meanwhile, there was Trixie.
Most of the time, Harold tried not to think of the cat by the name Nottie had been calling it. Referring to it by a name, any name at all, made it somehow a more permanent fixture in their life, and letting Nottie name it had been a small, accidental concession that he wasn’t quite ready to admit he had made. He thought at first that she was just calling it names, “silly cat” and “tricksy thing” were common enough endearments, and maybe that was how it had started, but the creature had a name now, and even Harold found himself using it. The cat did not seem fond of it, but it hardly liked anything other than food as far as Harold could tell. Food, and apparently his daughter.
So early each morning, Harold trudged out of his bedroom, handkerchief in hand, prepared for the barrage of mewling that was surely coming from the room next door. But today, for the first time in weeks, there was no sound. Harold stopped dead in his tracks, his heart sinking. This had only happened once before, and then it was because the cat had not come inside the previous evening – as cats sometimes do. Harold wouldn’t have minded if it had found a new home, but Nottie had been devastated. She had sniffed all through breakfast, and kept close watch on the little tuna dish by the kitchen door until Harold had to leave for the docks. The whole episode had been heartbreaking to watch. He had spent his entire walk home after work preparing a speech on how sometimes people and pets leave us, and we do our best to move on, but it hadn’t been necessary. When he had come home, the cat was curled on the floor beside Nottie, who was sketching it happily. Harold had almost been relieved to see the blasted thing. He did not want to go through that again. Peeking down the hall to Nottie’s door, he sighed in relief when he saw it was open already. The cat was in the kitchen, licking its lips clumsily over a spotless dish on the floor. The washroom door was shut, too, with gentle splashes just audible beyond.
“Thank goodness,” Harold sighed to himself. The cat looked up at him, its head tilted to the left. “Guess you can’t wake me anymore. Well done getting her out of bed. That’s troublesome for me on a good day. You can stay if you make a good child-sitter,” he mumbled. The cat turned away from him to clean its face. Harold walked past it to the front door to retrieve the weekly paper. He didn’t much care for the Kingston news, but the local section printed store coupons and weekly specials for the in-town markets, which were helpful for a family on a single person’s wage. He brought the paper back to the kitchen table and laid it flat there, ready for reading, before turning to the counter to fix himself breakfast. He poured juice from the cooling box (Marjory helpfully replenished the spell every six months now that Olivia was no longer around to do so), then gathered oats from the cabinet and put the kettle on the heating rune, since Nottie had apparently filled it but forgotten that she needed to heat it for it to be useful. There was light thunk behind him, like someone bumping into the chair. Harold gave a quiet groan and turned around.
He started to shout, “Hey! Get down from there!”, but bit down on the words before he had made more than a small grunting noise. The cat was standing on Harold’s chair with two paws up on the table, resting on the paper there. This was plenty of cause to shout, of course – no creature, no matter how much Nottie adored it – was allowed on the kitchen table. But something about the cat’s demeanor made Harold choke on the words. It wasn’t sniffing at the paper, nor was it trying to get up any further. It just stared intently at the front article, its ears twitching slightly and its head bowed a little, as though it had poor eyesight. As Harold watched, it lifted its right paw and attempted to grab at the top corner of the page. It was slightly out of the cat’s reach, and there wasn’t quite enough friction for the cat to turn the page over without catching the paper’s edge. Harold watched it struggle a moment, until he realized that his jaw was hanging open. He shut it quickly, Then he made a decision based on curiosity.
Quietly as he could, Harold leaned over the cat to take the paper from underneath it. The cat did not notice what was happening until Harold was nearly on top of it, and it gave a great startled mroaw and a twitch big enough to make it lose its balance. It toppled off the chair sideways. Harold winced a bit as three paws hit the ground correctly and the fourth slid too far right. The cat fell over, but was on its feet again in a flash and streaked unhappily to the living room. Harold considered letting it go, but now he was very curious. For the moment, the cat was in a place with a large, flat surface, and Nottie was still in the tub. He wasn’t certain he’d get a better chance. Harold opened the paper, took out the local section, and separated all the pages of Kingston news. If nothing else, this could prevent more fur from getting all over the floor, and Nottie would clean it up when she was ready to sketch. He followed the cat.
It was crouched beside his armchair. It retreated slightly when it saw him come in, lowering its head to the floor, but Harold paid it no mind yet. He looked only at the pages as he laid them, one by one, beside each other flat on the floor. It still hid several articles – it couldn’t be helped on double-sided pages – but he made certain to turn the front page over. The cat was already finished with that. If that’s what was going on, that is. Once the pages were all spread out, he risked a look at the cat. It had stood back up and was leaning interestedly towards the arrangement before it, looking cautiously between Harold’s face, and the tempting page two a few feet away.
“Come on, then,” Harold chuckled. “I only want the local section. Someone ought to get some use out of the rest of it. Nottie won’t, you believe me.”
Very cautiously, the cat took one step forward. It looked at Harold. He nodded. It stepped forward again, then again, then trotted over to the page by his hands and stood over it. Again, it kept its face very close to the paper. Watching it, Harold couldn’t imagine what it might be doing other than reading. He would have to ask Marjory about this. Surely that wasn’t normal cat behavior, but magic might have had some affect on this one. He wasn’t certain exactly what spells could do. He’d never heard of one for increasing intelligence, but it might exist. As far as he knew, magic could make anything possible. Nottie had once suggested to Marjory that the cat might have once been a person, but Marjory had insisted that no such spell existed, and that if one did it would be highly illegal in any case. Watching the cat’s ears twitch as its head moved back and forth over the paper, Harold thought perhaps that Marjory might not know what she was talking about. But if anyone knew, it would be Marjory, and the cat, if it did have human reasoning, should really have been better at taking care of itself. Harold shook his head, and reached absently to scratch the cat behind its ears. It ducked, skittered away, and gave him a very hurt look accompanied by a quiet mrew.
“I’m not trying to trap you, I promise. You hurry up with that before Nottie gets out, you hear? Don’t give her any ideas, or she’ll take you to Marjory again.”
Still crouched down against the floor and eyeing Harold’s hand warily, the cat walked back to the paper and leaned over it. Harold looked to the paper too, in mild curiosity. Some palace guards had been promoted in the past week. A list of names and a short paragraph followed a sketch of the ceremony, which showed Advisor Smedley, recognizable more by the fact that the artist had nearly blacked him completely in than any defining features, holding a scepter to another dark-colored man’s shoulder. The cat stared at this page for a long time. Harold stumbled back to his feet.
“Alright, be good, and pick that up when you’re done,” he chuckled to himself. The cat did not move. Harold found himself watching it a moment longer from the doorway. But the sound of rushing water broke into his thoughts, and with a final shake of his head, he went back to his breakfast so he could be eating by the time Nottie emerged from the washroom.