‘Mee-yow!’ The call came from a boy on the other side of the road. Tess considered hurling a pie at him, but Pa’d go mad if he found out. Besides, there was a carriage in the way now, blocking her aim. As Tess stood at the roadside, her tray of pies heavy around her neck, the horse raised its tail and released a steaming pile onto the cobbles.
It wasn’t the first time she’d had cat noises made at her, which was how she knew who the meowing was meant for. When she was five, and Pa had decided that the shop would do better if Tess sold some of the pies on the street to passers-by, she’d assumed that the animal sounds – usually coming from other children, but occasionally from ruddy-cheeked men with ale on their breaths and smiles too big for their faces – had nothing to do with her. It was only when she’d mentioned all the meowing and bow-wow-wowing to Ma that it had been explained.
‘’Tis a joke told too often to still be funny, child,’ Ma had said. ‘There’s tales of piemen cooking up cats and dogs to save buying proper meat, and now everyone thinks we’re all at it.’
‘I sometimes wonder if folk’d notice if we did,’ Pa grumbled, hauling a tray out of the oven, releasing the familiar smells of mutton and gravy that always made Tess’s mouth water. ‘It’d save me a penny or two.’
Remembering that, when a little boy had crowed at Tess from behind his mother’s skirts that there were rats in her pies, she had gone home and asked Pa if he’d ever thought about buying rats off the ratcatchers.
‘You must be bloody joking,’ he’d said. ‘They go for threepence each to the pubs for the terrier pits – they’re more expensive than owt else.’ Tess shrugged. She’d only suggested it because Aunt Martha had given her a sugar mouse one Christmas, and she’d been hoping that rat pies might taste as sweet. When she heard the song about blackbirds baked in a pie, she thought of enormous pies with crusts that crumbled away to reveal hoardes of dogs, cats and rats, chasing each other in circles.
After selling pies on the street for eight years, Tess was well used to the sight of cats, slithering like furry snakes around carriage wheels and horses’ hooves. When she was tiny, she thought cats looked like streaks of black-and-brown fluff, because although they often sneaked through the open door into the bakehouse, they were never around long enough for her to get a better look. Pa would always emerge to chase them away, bawling and sometimes slinging a ham bone for good measure. Ma only upbraided Pa for two things as far as Tess could remember: throwing good bones away to be eaten by strays instead of making soup with them, and taking Our Lord’s name in vain, which he also did at the sight of cats. Aunt Martha had scolded him for that, too, saying that Tess would never turn out right if she were brought up to think hellfire was just something you shouted at animals.
Nowadays, Tess thought that perhaps Aunt Martha was referring to the two girls who sometimes came into the shop; the ones who had pink cheeks and lips no matter how cold the weather, and lots of layers of ruffled skirts and petticoats. Tess had seen them first when she’d popped back to get more pies for her tray, and now she looked for them whenever she went into the shop. One of them had dark hair and eyes, and never seemed to notice Tess. The other was blonde and cheery, with the lilting Irish accent that Pa usually responded so warmly to. Ma, Pa and Aunt Martha liked the Irish, and Tess liked the girl with the blonde curls, who had winked at Tess once as Pa pressed her change into her palm. Pa had been furious afterwards, telling Tess that she wasn’t to even think of turning out like that, and kicked up such a stink that Ma came out from the bakehouse to see what all the fuss was about. Pa muttered something about “damned cats”, and Tess wondered why he thought of the pretty girls as cats when he never chased them out of his shop, and was even quite nice to them when Ma wasn’t around, but he was so furious that nobody said anything else until late at night, when Ma came to tuck Tess into bed and check she’d said her prayers. Tess didn’t tell her that she’d prayed for the pretty girls, although she didn’t expect the baby Jesus would mind. In fact, she thought that He’d like the girls, especially the smiling one with the golden hair. They seemed like the kind of women He’d enjoy the company of. Instead, she asked why Pa had been so upset.
‘Oh, he just doesn’t want you getting any ideas about that sort of girl,’ Ma said. ‘They didn’t turn out right, and none of us want you ending up that way.’
‘If Pa doesn’t like them, why does he let them in the shop? He doesn’t let that man in who pokes his fingers through the pastry to see what’s in the pies.’
Ma sighed. ‘Don’t think I haven’t asked him that myself, dear. But at least they don’t ruin things they haven’t paid for, and they always have plenty of money to settle up.’
That night, there were cats making a racket in the street outside, growling and screeching into the darkness.
Tess liked to look in the windows of the good shops, where the Quality bought teapots with roses painted on them, thick sheets of creamy writing paper and beautiful dresses like those worn by the ladies who sent their maids to buy pies from Tess’s family. She particularly liked the taxidermist’s shop, because his window was filled with lots of different animals and birds that stayed still so that Tess could look at them properly. He had a big fish, too, mounted on a board, but Tess didn’t like that because she couldn’t understand why anyone would want such a smelly thing on their wall. She hated the smell of fish, especially on Fridays, when her tea seemed even less appetising after she’d been breathing in the aroma of gravy all day. Today, though, the taxidermist had something new in his window – a kitten wedding.
Peering through the glass, Tess studied it a little closer – a painted church scene on two boards nailed together at an angle, with pews of kittens in their Sunday best watching unblinkingly as a kitten priest (or a minister of some sort; not a proper priest) stood frozen in the act of pronouncing a kitten in a suit and a kitten in a white frock man and wife. The little congregation looked absurd among all the other animals in the window, like fairies at the bottom of a garden filled with sensible beasts like foxes and badgers and pine martens.
Perhaps this was where Aunt Martha got her ideas about witches’ cats, like the one that belonged to the women they’d hanged up at Pendle in the old days. When Tess was a small girl, Martha told her about the black cat, who was called Satan because that’s who he was, and he just pretended to be a cat so the people in Pendle wouldn’t notice.
‘Witches liked cats,’ Aunt Martha had assured her, ‘because cats smother babies in their cribs. The witches used to offer babies’ blood to the Devil, and make candles with their fat.’
‘Like when Ma dips the rushes in dripping when it goes dark at night?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, girl, it’s not like that at all.’
There had been a short silence, and then Tess had a thought. ‘But what about those drawings of Our Lady and the baby Jesus with a cat? Did Our Lady not worry about cats smothering the Christ child in his manger?’ Aunt Martha had said that Tess was not spending enough time in prayer, and that she would have words with Ma.
Tess didn’t like the kitten wedding, she decided. The kittens’ faces looked swollen and their glass eyes were too big, as though they too were saddened by their predicament and blamed Tess for their ridiculous clothing. Hoisting her tray, she turned to head home.
A short walk down the road, a woman stopped her and bought all but one of the pies she had left. With one hand clasping her small daughter’s, she pulled the coins from her purse to pay Tess, before holding out her basket for the pies. As they walked away, Tess realised she was stood outside the church where she went with her parents and Aunt Martha on Sundays, and so she bobbed a little curtsy as she passed the door, which stood ajar, revealing the familiar statue of the Madonna peering out into the street.
‘Papist!’ the woman’s little girl spat over her shoulder, before following her mother and disappearing into the crowd.
Back at the shop, Tess walked around to the back door with her solitary leftover pie. A tabby cat with ragged whiskers and half an ear missing was loitering outside the bakehouse, craning its neck to see if anyone was on guard inside. Tess regarded it for a moment, before glancing around to see if Pa was about. Breaking her last pie in half, she crammed a piece in her mouth, and threw what was left to the cat.
Faye's novel
Cover the Mirrors is published on 2nd November 2007.
For more info: http://www.fayelbooth.co.uk/
