“Soot?” Temperance stood up, wanting to move on from the topic.
The cat had a habit of appearing in unexpected places but the back door, Temperance now noticed, was standing open a crack.
Not unusual, in a house where they had long since surrendered to three dogs communicating their desires by the simple methodof standing in front of whichever door they wanted until someone gave in. Soot had slipped out in their wake before.
She found her shawl, pulled it around her shoulders, and went out into the garden.
The night was cool and very still and he garden at Wilmington Manor was not, it had to be said, in the condition it had been in when her father was alive but Temperance preferred it this way. The lavender had spread across the path and there was a climbing thing along the back wall that no one had been able to identify for two seasons running but that produced very fine purple flowers in August and had therefore been granted indefinite residency.
“Soot,” Temperance called.
Nothing.
She moved further in, past the lavender and roses, toward the older part of the garden where the apple trees grew and the wall separating the property from the lane was thick with ivy. Soot liked it back here.
“Soot.”
“If you have caught something and are attempting to bring it inside again, I would strongly encourage you to reconsider.”
There was a rustling from the direction of the apple trees and Temperance stopped.
The rustling continued and then, from beneath the sprawling canopy of the largest tree, a shape detached itself from the shadows and resolved into a boy.
He was perhaps nine or ten, she judged, though the light was not generous enough to be certain. What she could see clearly enough was the state of him.
Whatever he had been wearing at the start of the evening had presumably been respectable but it was not respectable now. There was mud on his jacket, mud on his shirt, mud across one cheek in a wide brown streak, and what appeared to be a small leafy twig lodged above his left ear that he seemed entirely unaware of. His hair was disordered in every possible direction.
And cradled in his arms was Soot.
The boy looked up and saw her and went very still.
“That,” Temperance said, when she had recovered herself, “is my cat.”
The boy looked down at Soot and then looked back up at Temperance.
“I found her,” he said.
“I am sure you did,” Temperance studied him more carefully.
A street boy, he was not. But he was equally not any boy she recognized, and she knew most of the children in the surrounding streets well enough by sight.
“Are you lost?” she asked.
Something flickered in his expression, a quick flash of something that was almost indignation, immediately suppressed.
“No,” he said. “I am not lost.”
“You are in my garden at half past nine in the evening covered in mud.”
“I got dirty following the cat,” he said,. “She went under the hedge and I was trying to catch her.”
Temperance looked at Soot, who blinked her yellow eyes and purred.
“She does that,” Temperance said. “Where did you come from?”
The boy hesitated.
“Over there,” he said, with a vague gesture toward the house.
