“I wasn’t much older than you. I came from a village, further up the river, but I was too young to remember much about the place. Only that there was a barn and a tabby cat who was my mother.” He sighed. “White cats are often deaf, you know. Oh, don’t worry, Bianca. I know quite well thatyou can hear chicken hitting a dish at two hundred tail-lengths. But I think that’s why they did it.”
“Did what?” Peter nestled closer to the old cat. His creaky voice sounded so sad, the black kitten wanted to comfort him.
“They wanted rid of me, you see. The people there. They must have thought I would be deaf and no good at earning my keep. So…” He glanced down at the four small kittens and hesitated, as though he wasn’t sure he should go on with his tale.
“Tell us, Grandpa,” Bianca whispered. She sounded quite different – small and scared, not the proud kitten she usually was. She crept closer to her grandfather too, and Ivan lay down, curling himself around the four kittens and licking Bianca’s nose.
“They threw me in the river, tied up in a sack.”
“No!” Peter squeaked, and the other three kittens mewed in distress.
“I was supposed to drown, but for some reason I didn’t. I floated instead and a child playing on the bank of the river fished me out. Since she wasn’t far from the museum, she brought me here. And I became a museum cat. So you see –” he leaned down to touch noses with Peter again – “anyone can belong to the museum, like I said.” He purred a little chortle. “Especially if they’re good with bones. Now, I promised your ma I’d find you and bring you back home, since it’s so far past your bedtime that it’s almost time to get up. The Old Man will be back here on his roundsin a minute or two. Off you go. Promise me you’ll go straight to sleep.”
“What are you going to do, Grandpa?” Tasha asked as the four kittens padded through the dinosaurs to the doorway.
“Ah, just going for a little wander…” her grandfather purred. “My own rounds, you know. Make sure all’s safe. A museum cat never really retires, you’ll see…” He sniffed thoughtfully and his eyes glittered, and a large brown rat darted back behind the stegosaurus skeleton, looking worried.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_20]
“I’m going to be like your grandpa,” Peter said as he followed Tasha down the tunnel to the cellar. His tail was high and proud and he felt like prancing. “A great museum cat, even if no one knows where I came from.”
“Poor Grandpa was shut up in a sack,” Bianca muttered, shaking her ears and shuddering. “A horrible wet sack. I should be braver, instead of fussing so much about my fur.”
“If you didn’t have beautiful white fur, you couldn’t have saved us earlier on,” Peter told her.
“Mmm. Maybe.” But Bianca wrapped her white tail around his thin black one, just for a moment.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_60]
“Do you think we’ll have adventures like Grandpa Ivan, one day?” Tasha sighed. “He’s so brave.”
Peter nudged noses with her gently.“We just did, Tasha. We mended a priceless dinosaur skeleton. And we did it all without anybody noticing.”
“I suppose we did,” Tasha agreed. “And we caught a sandwich thief.” She glanced over at Boris, who looked a little ashamed of himself. Although not nearly ashamed enough, Tasha thought. “Do you think we’ll havemore adventures?” she asked.
“Of course we will!” Boris told her, brightening up a bit.
“But no more pretending to be bones, please,” Bianca said sternly as she sprang up on to their tapestry bed. “It’s undignified, even if I did save the day. Besides, Ma said to me this morning that it’s time we had more rat-hunting lessons. We’ll be far too busy for mending skeletons if we’re learning to hunt.”
“Night then,” Peter yawned, twitching his paws ready to jump into the jewellery box.
“Aren’t you sleeping up here?” Boris asked gruffly, looking down at Peter from the battered old tapestries.
Bianca nodded.“It’s chilly tonight. You’ll be cold in that box.”
“And you’re too big to fit in it,” Boris added. “Not as big as me, of course. But not far off.”
“Oh…” Peter’s eyes brightened. “Well, if there’s room.”
He jumped up after the other three, and burrowed in between Bianca and Tasha. The four kittens wriggled comfortably for a while, padding at each other, so that Bianca’s fluffy white tail covered Peter’s nose, and Tasha’s paws were wrapped round his neck. Boris was on top of him, like a furry ginger quilt, and every time Peter breathed, all four kittens went up and down.
When Grandpa Ivan padded back down the staircase, they were fast asleep, dreaming of dinosaur bones and rats and the adventures yet to come…
2. THE PHARAOH’S CURSE
“What are they all so excited about?” Boris whispered to Peter and his sisters. He was peering round the huge, painted mummy case that hid the tunnel down to the cellars, where the museum cats lived.
The Egyptian Gallery was full of museum staff, talking in whispers as they opened up a large packing case and started to unwrap something that had been inside. The elderly professor who ran the Egyptology department was actually squeaking with delight.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_6]
“Is it jewels?” Bianca asked hopefully, pushing the large ginger kitten out of the way so she could see.
“It could be one of those golden masks that the pharaohs had in their tombs,” the small tabby Tasha suggested, slinking further round the mummy case to look. “It must be something very special.”
“Gold…” Bianca purred. “Diamonds too? Maybe pearls?”
“I don’t think so,” said Tasha. “The masks are mostly gold and lapis lazuli – that lovely blue stone. The ancient Egyptians used it a lot.”
“Hmf! Blue stone.” Bianca looked disappointed and her white tail drooped. “Not as nice as diamonds. But I do like gold.”
“That doesn’t look like a jewelled goldenanything,” Peter pointed out. The black kitten had given up trying to see round Boris and crawled underneath him instead. “It’s just … a bit of paper.”
“Huh? That’s not a treasure!” Bianca said crossly.
“What are you lot looking at?”
All four kittens skittered sideways in surprise as Grandpa Ivan appeared behind them. He was the oldest of the cats, white and long-haired with a great drooping moustache of whiskers, his ears looked chewed and he only had one eye. But he knew everything that was going on in the museum and he was very good at sneaking up on the kittens.“Ah, it’s arrived then!”
“Do you know what it is?” Boris asked. “It doesn’t look very exciting but the museum people are making a lot of fuss about it. They’re putting it in an enormous glass case, look!”
“It’s a temporary loan from a museum on the other side of the country,” Grandpa Ivan explained. “They’re rebuilding their Egyptian Galleries so they’re lending out their precious exhibits. It’s part of theBook of the Dead.”
“The what?” Tasha squeaked.
“TheBook of the Dead.” Grandpa Ivan chuckled. “It’s a set of ancient magic spells for how to get safely to the afterlife, written out on great long strips of papyrus. That’s paper made of reeds, you know.”
[Êàðòèíêà: img_7]
Tasha nodded intelligently and the other kittens tried to look as though they knew what he meant too. All four of them were gazing at the strange piece of paper in fascination. Ancient magic spells!
“The Egyptians used to put copies of it into people’s tombs so the spirits would know what to do. The scrolls were expensive, though, so they were mostly made for royalty and important officials. This one came from the tomb of a pharaoh, Thutmose I, so it’s very grand, with beautiful pictures. This isn’t the whole thing, of course. Only a little bit of the scroll is left. All the tombs were raided by thieves many times – and you can imagine that a long roll of papyrus is quite delicate.”