Suddenly still, Cat is dizzy, and stands for a while on the path, catching her breath, finding her feet. The water of the canal lies still and silent, and in the faint light of the stars she sees water birds drift noiselessly past. Reaching from the bank, Cat knocks softly on the side of the boat. Flaking paint comes off on her knuckles. There is a thump from within, the scrape of boots on wood. George opens the cabin door and holds up a lantern, which stabs at Cat’s eyes, makes her clap her hands to her face.
‘You’ll blind me!’ she calls. Talking makes her chest tighten, and she coughs violently, bending over at the sudden pain behind her ribs. This cough still waits inside her, then. It has not left her yet.
‘Cat, is that you? Are you all right?’ George peers into the darkness, shutting the lamp halfway to dim it.
‘How many other girls call upon you in the night, George Hobson?’ she asks tartly, when the fit subsides.
‘Only you, Black Cat.’ He smiles.
‘Well then, it is me. Are you busy? Why aren’t you in town?’
‘I can’t go to town every night, Cat Morley. I’d drink myself impoverished before long. Indeed, before very long at all,’ he says, ruefully. ‘Why are you puffing? Did you run?’
‘I bicycled,’ Cat says. ‘I borrowed the vicar’s bicycle, and got here in a fraction of the time it takes walking! So I can be back again in a fraction of the time, and can stay longer with you instead.’
‘You borrowed his bicycle? That tends to mean you got permission…’
‘Don’t be daft. What he doesn’t know can’t harm him. What do you do in there of an evening, in such a small space?’
‘Come aboard and I’ll show you,’ George offers. In the muted lamplight, his face is thrown into contours. The creases around his eyes that the sun has carved, the furrow above his brows, the strong line of his jaw. The bruises of his last fight have faded now, leaving only vague brownish smears, like grubby thumb prints. His shirt is open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up. So much skin he shows. So much of his living flesh; so much evidence of vitality. Cat drinks in the sight of him, feeling herself stronger with each second that passes. Something inside her unfurls when he smiles, like the new green leaves of a fragile plant. She takes his hand and steps onto the deck, but hesitates at the cabin door. The space within is confined indeed.
‘I… I do not like small spaces,’ she says.
‘I shan’t shut us in, if you don’t want me to,’ George says, not at all troubled by her admission. Cat goes down a couple of the narrow wooden stairs and then sits, wrapping her arms around her knees. Behind her head the night sky still spreads, huge and reassuring.
The cabin is low and narrow. Nothing in it really but a bed along one side, some shelves and a stove along the other. The bed is made up with rag rugs for a mattress, and worn blankets as covers. A tin kettle sits on the stove, but the embers within it have long gone cold. George watches her eyes flit briefly around his living space. He frowns slightly, seems suddenly uncertain.
‘It’s not much, I’ll grant you. It must seem poor indeed, to one used to living in fine houses.’
‘I work in the fine house,’ Cat corrects him. ‘But I live in a cramped attic room that swelters in this heat,’ she says.
‘It’s hot indeed. I couldn’t bear to light the stove, so can’t even offer you tea, or cocoa.’
‘You keep cocoa about the place, as a rule?’ Cat asks, raising an eyebrow.
‘Truthfully, no,’ George admits. ‘But I do keep ginger beer.’
‘Ginger beer?’
‘I’ve been fond of it since childhood.’ George shrugs, bashfully. ‘Would you like some, then?’
‘All right then. I will. My throat’s bone dry from coughing.’
‘What is that cough? I hear it sometimes, when you talk. That there’s a snag in your breathing, waiting to catch you.’ He takes a brown bottle down from a shelf, pours the contents into two tin mugs. Cat thinks before answering. She does not like to hear this – that others can detect the taint on her.
‘I caught pneumonia, when I was in gaol,’ she says, shortly. ‘It lingers. The doctor said it would, though I admit I’d hoped it would go sooner.’
‘It must have been a damp and dreary place, to give you an infection like that,’ George says, carefully.
‘It was. But that’s not what gave me it. It was the handling I was given. The way we were… treated,’ she says, sipping her ginger beer, eyes focused on the darkness at the bottom of the cup.
George puts out one thick, rough thumb, crooks it under her chin and lifts her gaze to meet his. ‘I would have words with any person who gave you rough handling,’ he says, solemnly. ‘More than words, in fact. And you nothing but a slip of a thing. I’ve no time for those that box below their weight.’
‘That’s something I would dearly love to have seen. Pitting you against the villains in there that called themselves guardians.’ Cat smiles. ‘They could have done with a taste of their own medicine.’
‘The job is one of cruelty and brutality, as I understand it. Small wonder that cruel brutes find their way into it. My father was gaoled once – and it was no bad thing for us kids, nor for my mother. He set about the rozzers that were trying to escort him home from the pub, drunk half dead as was his habit. They frogmarched him face down right past all his chums – that made his blood boil! I was glad they kept him in for we’d have felt the brunt of that indignity if he’d been allowed home.’ He shakes his head at the memory.
‘What was his profession, your father?’
‘His profession? That’s not the word for it. He did labouring, farm work, odd jobs. Whatever he could get. If there was something needing doing that was too hard or too dirty for anybody else, they sent for my old man. He used to dock the puppies’ tails, each time there was a new litter. He would bite them off.’
‘He bit them off? That’s horrible!’
‘It’s considered the proper way – the crushing of teeth closes the skin around the wound. But only a savage could do it thus, and so my father was called,’ George explains. ‘I remember hearing their poor little cries, all those pups. It made my blood run cold, but my father never flinched.’
‘But I was no drunken brute. I only did what I was told to do, in gaol.’
‘What the wardens told you to do? Always?’
‘Well… perhaps not always,’ she admits, dropping her face again. In truth she’d sought countless little ways to flout the rules, to pretend rebellion. It was her behaviour that brought Tess to the warders’ attention, when she had been good and quiet enough to go unnoticed, until then. Cat swallows convulsively. ‘Can we talk about other things?’
‘We can talk about whatever you wish to talk about, Cat Morley,’ George says, softly.