Chapter 2
I wandered for a time after that, my feet choosing the direction, paying little attention to my surroundings.
I believe it was the cold that shocked me out of my daze; the sun had set, and the sky was a wash of navy and violet, the street lanterns flickering to life.
I looked up, startled to find myself in the heart of the old city, standing outside a café just beginning to bustle with the evening crowds, men and women in their good hats and coats.
Somehow, I was approaching an intersection with Rue des Hirondelles, where there was the shop for rent that M.
Levasseur had unnecessarily warned me away from.
At the thought of M. Levasseur—not to mention impossibly out-of-reach rents—I felt my vision grey.
I gazed into the café window, which was lightly steamed, many of its confections arrayed in little baskets in easy view of passersby.
I must have stared at an egg tart for a solid minute, stomach rumbling, before I reminded myself of my budget—there would be no egg tarts until I found a place to live and work, and perhaps for some time after that, depending on the cost of my new accommodations.
I then spent another period of time staring at a chocolate brioche.
The bells of the basilica began to sound, though it wasn’t until the narrow street was filled with their ghostly echoes that I realized the time.
I turned from the café and hurried home, avoiding a knot of young people who seemed half drunk already, two of the girls clasping hands and spinning in a circle, laughing, their skirts and coats fanning about them.
It wasn’t a long walk from the bustle of the restaurant district, but it felt it.
The cobblestones grew more uneven, forcing me to mind my step, and the buildings leaned towards each other.
My neighbourhood was mostly working-class apartments made from the customary grey limestone, with the odd grocer or café thrown in; about half were out of business, partly because the tram lines didn’t come this far.
I stopped outside what should have been an unexceptional little place with dingy stonework and a rusty iron door, but was now quite an eye-catcher, given that two of the windows were shattered, their shutters blackened as if by fire.
Between them was what looked a little like a lunar crater, about ten feet wide and imperfectly boarded up—I’d had a terrible time of that because the hole was so jagged and uneven, the scorched stones peeling back on either side as if they’d melted and re-formed. On the door was a sign that read:
Les Amis des Chats—Refuge Animalier
Cat Friends—Animal Shelter
I had not been the worst affected—that honour went to the sandwich shop across the street, which had seen all its windows shattered, its foundation cracked, and its door blown backwards into the shop.
The owner—an elderly man named Hamad who, despite his gruff and unsmiling demeanour, had routinely brought leftover deli slices for the cats—had been unable to afford the repairs.
Now it sat abandoned, empty windows yawning like dark mouths.
I could hear His Majesty yowling at me before I even put my hand on the doorknob. How the beast sensed when I came within fifty feet of the building was a mystery I’d never solved; either he did it by smell or—more likely, knowing His Majesty—some unholy sixth sense.
I unlocked the door, locked it firmly behind me, then pushed through the wooden gate I’d installed beyond the antechamber.
His Majesty was coiled about my legs in an instant, loudly protesting the delay in his supper.
Banshee, somewhat less intemperate, stood and goggled at me from the middle of the room with her perpetually confounded expression.
The shelter cats, who occupied an array of cages in the next room, also began to register their protests, though I knew élise had been attending to them for most of the afternoon.
“I know,” I said, pausing to disentangle His Majesty from my ankles. “I’m sorry—I was distracted by pastry. You wouldn’t understand, of course. If it doesn’t bleed, it isn’t food.”
I wiped my feet on the welcome mat, which was embroidered with the shelter’s motto, A cat is the soul of a home, in French and English, which we also had on our stationery. Then I fed the two of them—His Majesty first, of course; he would accept nothing less.
The black cat had come into my life a year after Banshee had.
Despite having essentially wandered into the shelter—I’d opened the back door one morning and found him perched coolly on the step as if waiting for an appointment—he was not even slightly tame, but seemed to have adopted the appearance of being so out of self-interest. An enormous beast with a single white boot, His Majesty ruled the shelter with an iron paw.
He disdained the fellowship of other felines but delighted in the role of tyrant, stalking about the shelter cats as if they were little more than furniture and stealing food with impunity, except on the occasions when he decided to make an example of some foolish upstart. He had never been challenged twice.
Naturally, I had never dared attempt to adopt out His Majesty, and as he showed no signs of wishing to move on, I had officially declared him my responsibility, although his entrance into my life had been more akin to a hostile takeover.
He was not an affectionate cat, demonstrating a cunning tolerance of petting but little enjoyment, though he had a great fondness for laps, and would stake his claim to mine whenever I took some time for myself with a book, growling low in his throat when I considered putting the book aside.
More than once had I been forced to stay up past midnight before the beast deemed his considerable square footage adequately warmed.
Banshee, a nearly round tabby, was perhaps the only cat able to dwell alongside the likes of His Majesty without being terrorized, for Banshee was unterrorizable, not from strength of character but from a complete lack of sense.
I doubted Banshee would survive a day if left to her own devices, for she would routinely get herself into impossible danger, clambering up to the rafters or into claustrophobic crawl spaces, whereupon she would become stuck.
She demonstrated no awareness that fire was hot, and had made multiple attempts at getting inside the woodstove while it was alight, until Robin had finally built a screen around it.
Banshee’s most habitual occupation was sitting in the middle of a room and staring fixedly at a single point for no discernible reason.
His Majesty, having made a few attempts to frighten her after he moved in—on one occasion pinning her to the floor with his jaws around her neck—seemed to have decided such efforts were beneath him when it came to creatures as pathetic and inexplicable as Banshee.
I’d occasionally had the impression that he even pitied her, for he would sometimes deign to allow her to curl up against him, which was not a liberty he allowed any of the shelter cats.
Banshee’s name came from her curious voicelessness; never had I heard her make a sound, purring excepted, though she often seemed to be trying, sometimes even wandering about the place opening and closing her mouth in my direction, as if desperate to warn me of some impending doom.
Robin and I used to joke that she was, in fact, creating an appalling racket, but that it was a sound that could be heard only by the inhabitants of some unhallowed supernatural realm.
I fed the shelter cats next—we had forty-eight, which was an all-time high and a great strain on our budget, but what could I do? Turn them out, with winter on the horizon?
I paused at Thoreau’s cage to give him extra attention. I knew I shouldn’t play favourites, but Thoreau, a genteel senior whom élise had found shivering in a box behind the central train station, had been at the shelter six months, the longest of our charges.
The cat leaned into my hand. Thoreau was a beautiful, gothic grey, and the least demanding of the brood.
Given the pitiable state in which we’d found him, from mites to broken ribs to an infected eye, I often had the sense he was still attempting to comprehend how dramatically his existence had been altered.
Clowder was pawing at the bars of her cage with increasing desperation, so I opened the door for her to hop down to the floor. Her four kittens—only about a month old—followed, which I could tell Clowder did not appreciate. She gave me a harried look.
“You’re right, I’m sorry,” I told her. “You deserve a little holiday, don’t you?” I checked that each of the kittens was well, then lifted the lot—two orange tabbies, a tuxedo, and a small calico, like her mother—into the cage and closed the door.
I spent a few moments tidying, shadowed by Clowder and Banshee. Clowder kept a nervous eye on His Majesty, but he was not in the mood to exercise his authority, and was sleeping off his dinner in his favourite chair, tail twitching.
The shelter layout was simple; it had been a tailor’s before, which had proven ideal for my purposes—the large back room where the coats and dresses had been worked on was big enough for the cat cages, while the smaller space at the front was all we needed for interviewing prospective adopters.
Off the back room was a tiny kitchen. It was as dilapidated as the rest of the shelter, and one could only get it so clean before one’s efforts were thwarted by ancient and immovable stains.
The wind picked up, whistling through the hole in the front room. I endeavoured to ignore it.
I had been planning on a meager repast of cheese and tinned soup—between us, Robin had been the chef—but I found that élise had been to the café on the next street and left me a mushroom pie wrapped in paper. It was still slightly warm.