Young Fredle - Louise Yates [63]
“I know it’s you. Didn’t you hear me?”
Before he could answer, Missus had called Sadie away. “That stuff under the sink will make you sick, you know that, you silly girl.” Then the door shut tight, leaving Fredle once again in darkness.
Then he could only hear the muffled sounds of the baby and a rushing sound in the pipes, as if a stream were running through them.
He waited.
The watery sound ceased and then he could no longer hear the baby. It would still be day, out there in the kitchen, he thought. He knew he should wait where he was, in safety, until night. But he had waited so long, he had been waiting since the long-ago day Missus carried him outside, and he could wait no longer.
The cupboard door was now firmly closed, so Fredle returned to the wall. This was a path he knew, following the pipes under the sink to get inside the wall behind the stove and from there over to the pantry. From the pipes, Fredle could travel within the closeness of the walls without any fear of predators—safe, inside, making the long, slow journey home. Or he could enter the kitchen through the hole behind the stove, from which it was only a short dash across to the pantry door and the quickest way home.
When he came out behind the stove, Fredle turned that way, and when he came to the end of the narrow passage between stove and wall, he stuck a wary nose out to be sure the kitchen was empty.
With a soft thud, the cat landed just in front of him.
Fredle didn’t even stop to think. He ran. Ran back into the passage, out of reach of that long, clawed leg. Then he froze.
“Well, well,” Patches purred.
“It’s Sadie’s little friend.”
Fredle was relieved to hear that. “Yes,” he said. “Fredle.”
The cat’s paw groped into the narrow space, long nails scraping on the wall and floor. Fredle protested, “I’m Sadie’s friend, remember?”
“That will be useful to you the next time we meet outside,” Patches said. He didn’t sound at all unfriendly. “But at present you are inside. Although you do seem to have caught that bad outside habit of running away.”
Fredle didn’t bother answering. He was considering his situation. Cats, he knew, were patient. Mice, on the other hand, are by nature panicky. But Fredle had more sense than to run straight into a cat’s claws just because that was the straightest way home. He knew there was the other route. He would rather have entered the pantry through the hole at the bottom of the door and gone from there into the walls for a quick climb home, but that was no longer a choice.
Patches settled his body down into the crouch position, his tail waving back and forth along the floor.
Fredle squeezed himself around to go back into the wall and begin the difficult ascending pathway along beams and insulation.
There was the usual lightlessness within the walls, but he had so often followed Axle up and down this path that his feet remembered the way, and he still remembered exactly where it was necessary to go very carefully and where he could move without paying such close attention.
Taking this path reminded him of Axle, and he hoped she had made it safely to the attic. He already knew, although he hadn’t realized it until just then, that she hadn’t gone to the cellar. If she had, the cellar mice would have welcomed her, and fed her, and made her one of them, unless she had chosen, as he had, to return home. But even in that case, the cellar mice would still be talking about her. Axle would have been—just as Fredle was sure he himself was now—one of their best stories, to tell and retell in the gatherings by the water heater.
Fredle climbed and wondered and wished Axle well, wherever she had ended up. As long as she didn’t went, he could be happy for her.
Arriving at last at the wide familiar board, Fredle stopped, to breathe everything in, the dimness, the sound of snoring and rustling and an occasional cough or whimper, the dusty, mousey smell of the air and the sight of two pale nests lying between tall wood-and-plaster walls. Then all of his attention turned to that corner nest, the one he was at