Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand Page B

the face, but he said at once, “Or a rainbow!” and gave her an infinitesimal bow, as though to say, “Your point, Madame, and I wish you joy of it.”
    “So you brought back Olga Powhatsaname the beautiful spy into your house and she all unsuspectingly allowed you to administer a sleeping draught. …”
    He looked a little ashamed. “Mrs. Love has lots of those things—for Angela, of course. We thought it would keep you from rambling round the house. …”
    “And made doubly sure by hobbling me up like a goat. Tying my ankle to the bedpost with bandages.”
    “That’s nonsense. You got your foot caught, I suppose, threshing about.”
    “And of course you did look through my things.”
    “I think that was justified,” he said.
    “And found nothing incriminating.”
    “Well, we didn’t find a press card or anything. I confess that that shook me a little. But anyway, by that time you’d seen my wife.”
    “I only saw—well, a face bending over me. Next morning I thought I must have imagined it, I thought the—the lines and things must have been just shadows. I thought it was Mrs. Love.” She added: “But what I don’t understand is—why did she come into my room? What was she looking for?”
    “She was looking for what you eventually led her to,” said Carlyon. “She was looking for a mirror. All that she’d been craving for was to look into a mirror and see how far they’d got in rebuilding her face. We couldn’t let her know how bad it still was; she thought it was better, we persuaded her to wait till they’d finished. God knows what we thought we were going to do in the end, because there’s a very, very long way more to go. And she got impatient, sometimes she tried to dodge us and find a glass. We locked the upstairs rooms and hung a shawl—as you know—across the mirror in the hall. There’d always be someone with her when she came downstairs; her legs are injured too and she has a job to manage steps. But we had to tell her there was someone here, we had to explain to her that she must keep to her rooms. To her, your being here meant that there would be a room unlocked with a mirror on the dressing-table. She came to look into your mirror. She didn’t think you’d be in bed so early. Mrs. Love came in and found her bending over you.”
    “And today?”
    “Today,” said Carlyon, “the surgeon came. I misunderstood his letter, we weren’t expecting him yet. He took out some stitches and—I don’t know, something’s gone a little wrong and he had to do more than he’d intended—in other words, it was all about as ghastly as usual. And he was a long time over it, he had to hurry back. Mrs. Love and I went down to the boat with him, to get last-minute instructions on the way—and in the meantime, Miss Jones puts in her oar. Dai finds you hanging round under her windows, and you lead him a wild goose chase over the mountains. We came back and found her standing in the hall looking into the mirror—which, thanks again to you, was no longer covered
    “You know that she did see herself?”
    “Oh, she saw herself all right,” said Carlyon, tossing aside the half-hope with angry scorn. “Those animal gruntings, my dear—that’s Angela crying. She doesn’t cry like other girls, you know, pretty little sobs and snivellings, she can’t open her mouth to take a deep breath. She was set upon seeing herself in a mirror—and after all this time, after all the care and anxiety and planning to keep it from happening—thanks to you, she has. She was crying, whether you recognized it or not, because she had seen in a mirror, thanks to you, Miss Jones, what was left of the beauty and the charm and the pretty little ways.”
    Katinka saw in her mind’s eyes, the fluttering movements of the hand behind the window glass, the appearance of the little hand, thrusting itself through like a chicken breaking out of the egg. The left hand, the uninjured hand, tracing out the tall letters