Read Online The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson - Free Book Online

so much as a meaningful hesitation; but numbly, as though in shock. He did not hold the door open but turned and walked away.
    Into the doorway, with a rustle of bombazine and a flash of gold, stepped Mrs Cooke, a small black monkey in a sequined waistcoat perched on one arm.
    ‘I’m ringing off now, Alec,’ I said into the telephone, ‘but I imagine we’ll be speaking again very soon.’
    ‘You’ll excuse me bringing the little one, my beauty,’ she said as she plumped down on to a sofa, ‘only he gets so bored in the winter there and then what mischief like you wouldn’t believe.’ The monkey, closely watched by a very puzzled Bunty, was looking around my sitting room with bright interest and twitching fingers and I followed its gaze, taking in the Dresden clock and candlesticks on which there were porcelain petals and cherubs’ wings so thin one could see the sunlight through them, and the Rockingham pottery Dalmatians, which were admittedly rather vulgar but had been presents from my sister and had terribly spindly legs. On the other hand, no one had ever called me her beauty, and as a sweetening tactic it was hard to beat.
    ‘Would you like some coffee, Mrs Cooke?’
    ‘Cup of tea would go down a treat there,’ she answered and I pulled the bell-rope.
    Pallister had clearly recovered himself enough to spread the news because the parlour maid was in the room almost before the rope had stilled again, her eyes like soup plates.
    ‘I’ll have my coffee now, Becky,’ I said. ‘A pot of tea too.’ I glanced at the monkey. ‘And some cocoa? Milk?’
    ‘Bobbo would take a few raisins,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘But he’s not a lover of milk.’
    I dismissed Becky with a nod and a smile and turned to business.
    ‘Now then, Mrs Cooke,’ I said, ‘what can I do for you?’
    ‘My father,’ she said, apparently in reply, ‘wurr a lion tamer. Now, you might not think that’s strange there.’ She stopped and regarded me for a minute.
    ‘It’s certainly less surprising than if my father had been a lion tamer,’ I said.
    ‘Well, my beauty,’ said Mrs Cooke, ‘that’s where you’re wrong. For although there’s families of balancing slangers and tumbling slangers stretching right back, for wurn’t the first Tam Cooke a horse man just like Pa, the big cats is quite different, see. It’s like lightning, strikes anywhere, and dun’t come back.’ At this moment, she unclasped a little knitted bag she had hanging from her wrist and drew out a piece of card. ‘That’s me,’ she said, passing it to me. It was, I saw, a very old and rather yellowed photograph – a daguerreotype, probably – showing a fat baby dressed in the heavily beribboned style of the previous century, lolling amongst a set of cushions. I took a closer look and could feel my eyes widen. They were not cushions at all, but lion cubs, four of them, one of them with a big soft paw on the baby’s leg.
    ‘I loved the cats,’ Mrs Cooke said. ‘Watched them for hours, lions, tigers and leopards the same, watched my old pa in the cage every day, watched him break in the new stock, watched him clean their teeth and trim their claws. One time he tripped and fell over and got a bit of a biff for his trouble, because it dun’t do to show a cat your belly, and that day I just watched and din’t even leave off licking my lolly.
    ‘Until this one day.’ Mrs Cooke had a new note in her voice. ‘It wurr a tigress. Princess Zanzi was her name and Pa had bought her from the Rosaires to make three for his second spot. Well, as soon as I saw my daddy step into that cage with Zanzi I started to scream and holler and drum my heels, just like a little flatty rakly instead of a circus girl. I got tooken out, leathered hard by my ma and put in the wagon with no dinner, tea nor supper that day. And what do you think happened, there?’
    The door opened and Becky entered with the coffee tray, followed by Annie with a tray of tea and one of the housemaids