The kittens stayed huddled together on the tapestry, feeling the warmth of their mother’s body die away.
Tasha’s tail was swishing anxiously from side to side. “I want to see what’s happening…”
“Ma said to stay,” Bianca mewed.
“We could just look round the door,” suggested Boris, standing up. “That wouldn’t do any harm, would it?”
Tasha jumped up with an eager nod.
Bianca shuffled her paws worriedly, and then sprang down from the tapestry after Tasha and Boris. She didn’t want to be left behind. All three kittens peered round the doorframe, trying to see further up the passage. In the dim light of the lamps they could just make out the spiral staircase, with shadowy cats standing sentinel all the way up the steps. They were as still as statues, but Tasha could hear the soft hiss of their breathing.
They couldn’t see the door at the top.
“I want to know what it was!” Tasha’s tail was flicking back and forth now, and her ears were flattened. “It’s important, I know it is.”
“No…” Bianca moaned, but the other two were already creeping along the passage.
Tasha started to weave her way up the staircase, between the cats. There were a few hisses of annoyance as her brother and sister followed, but no one stopped the three kittens as they pattered towards their mother and grandfather, who were standing together a few steps from the top.
“I thought you told them to stay in the den?” Old Ivan murmured to Smoke, his one eye narrowing, and she sighed.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_11]
“I did. I should have known you naughty kittens wouldn’t listen. Now stay by me, you three, anddon’t move!” Then Smoke turned back to watching the heavy wooden door at the top of the stairs. The two cats on guard duty were pulling back the heavy bolts with their teeth.
Tasha shivered and pressed tight against her mother as the door opened a crack and the wind battered and shrieked against the dark timbers. All the cats on the stairs hissed, lowering their heads into the wind, feeling it lick their fur on end and tie their tails in knots.
The door swung fully open and a haze of damp air rushed in. Outside, the cats could see the rain lashing the flagstones on the terrace, each heavy drop striking up a little fountain as it landed. It was midnight-black out there, even the cats’ night eyes were blind. The two cat guards took a cautious step forward and one of them bellowed, “Who goes there?”
“Identify yourself!” the other guard roared, not to be outdone.
There was a faint thickening of the darkness outside the door and then another cat appeared, a skinny old cat who looked even skinnier with the rain flattening his coat over his bones. His mackerel-tabby stripes seemed to melt into the shadows around the doorway. Something about him made the two guards fall back, pressing themselves respectfully against the doorframe to let him pass.
The cats on the stairs peered forward, staring at the skinny old tabby and waiting for him to speak.
But he didn’t. He couldn’t, Tasha and the others realized, because there was something in his mouth. A little saggy something, all black and bedraggled.
The old cat padded carefully down the steps until he reached Smoke and her kittens, and stood in front of her. Then he leaned down and laid the soggy ball of fur at her feet. He nodded slowly then turned round, pacing away up the stairs, and disappeared out into the rain-soaked night, still silent.
On the stairs, the wet ball of dark fur wriggled and sneezed and sat up, staring at Smoke and the kittens with emerald eyes.
“I’m Peter,” squeaked the small black kitten, gazing nervously around at the rows and rows of cats. “Hello.”
[Êàðòèíêà: img_12]
[Êàðòèíêà: img_13]
“Who was that?” The whisper ran round the stairs, and the two guard cats hurried out on to the terrace to call the mackerel tabby back. But they returned looking downcast.
“No sign of him.”
The little black kitten laid his ears flat and shuffled his paws.“He – er – he said he was taking me to my new home…”
A disapproving chorus echoed around the stairs at once.
“Here?”
“The little tadpole wants to stay!”
“Well, I’m not sure about that!”
“Quiet!” Old Ivan let out a loud, growly meow. “The museum is a home for all cats in need, you know that quite well. Besides, I’ve seen that mackerel-tabby fellow before. Around and about. He’s a sensible creature. If he brought the kitten here, then here he stays.”
Smoke came up beside Ivan and gently licked the black kitten’s ears. “You must be so tired,” she said to him gently. “Come back down to the cellars with us and sleep. The warmth from the hot-water pipes will dry your fur. You can tell us where you came from in the morning.”
The rows of cats parted like a wave rolling back as she nudged the little black kitten down the stairs towards the cellars. She half lifted him on to the pile of old tapestries where Tasha and Bianca and Boris slept with her every night, and the three kittens followed. They lay down next to him, but it felt so odd curling up with their mother and a stranger.
Tasha lay there, her eyes half open, peering at the newcomer. She felt sorry for him, of course, being so cold and wet and lonely. But he didn’t smell like a museum kitten.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_14]
When they woke up the next morning, the three kittens were snuggled up in Smoke’s long grey fur, just like always. The black kitten was curled in a tiny ball at the very edge of the tapestries, all alone.
After breakfast and washing, Smoke tried to coax him to tell his story. Tasha sat beside her mother, watching eagerly. The most interesting part of living in a museum was all the stories that came with the treasures in the galleries, but a story she hadn’t heard before was the very best kind. She was sure that the black kitten’s adventures would be exciting. After all, he’d come from Out There.
But when the black kitten had licked breakfast off his whiskers at last and settled down to be questioned, he didn’t seem to have a story to tell at all. He didn’t know anything, except that he was called Peter, and that Herring, the old mackerel tabby, hadn’t been his father or his grandfather. Just someone who had looked after him for as long he could remember and had brought him to the museum.
He sat in the middle of a circle of curious cats, his whiskers drooping as he failed to answer question after question.
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Were you born here in the city?”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
In the end, they gave up. There was no question of sending Peter away, of course. He would be a museum cat, like all the others. But he was a strange one. He didn’t seem to fit, and the black kitten knew it.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_15]
“Leave the poor creature alone,” Old Ivan ordered. “If he doesn’t know, then he doesn’t know. Perhaps he’ll remember in time.” He fixed Tasha, Boris and Bianca with a stern glare. “You young ones must show him around.” Tasha was never sure how her grandfather could look so much more fiercely with one eye than everyone else did with two, but he managed it. “Make him feel at home. Show him the ropes!”
“What ropes?” Boris muttered in Tasha’s ear. “Does he mean the sailors’ knot collection in the Maritime Gallery? Why do we have to show this scrawny kit those?”
“Shh!” Tasha hissed back. Even though both of Old Ivan’s ears looked chewed and he was deaf in one ear, she was almost sure he’d heard Boris being rude. His whiskers were bristling.
Maybe Peter would like to see around the museum, she thought hopefully. Perhaps he’d like the same rooms she did. They could show him the fossilized fish, and the lion statues, and the shudderingly scary cat mummies in the Egyptian Gallery.