“Elizabeth. I’m looking for Elizabeth,” she said, rushing up the stairs into the lobby from the Riverside Restaurant. All her usual composure was gone. There was a wild and anxious look about her. “She’s run off again. Have you seen her? Have you seen her?”
Fortunately Mr Freddie was nearby. He was always good in these situations. “Don’t you worry, Mrs Stanton, we’ll find her for you. She hasn’t come through the front door, so she’s got to be in the hotel somewhere. Young Johnny here will look upstairs. Every floor, Johnny, make sure you search every floor thoroughly. And meanwhile, Mrs Stanton, I’ll have a good look around for her down here. We’ll have her back with you in a jiffy, lickedysplit. You’ll see.” He clapped his hands at me. “Off you go, Johnny lad. Jaldi, jaldi. Sharp about it now, there’s a good lad.”
An hour later I’d searched every floor of the hotel, high and low, and there was still no sign of her. I was about to check downstairs to see if Mr Freddie hadn’t already found her, when I wondered if I should check the servants’ corridor up in the attic.
I thought it very unlikely she’d be up there, but Mr Freddie had told me to search every floor. And besides, I remembered my own childhood well enough to know that children like to hide in the most unexpected places. So I climbed the stairs to have a look.
From the far end of the corridor I could already see that the door to my room was open, and I knew at once she must be in there. As I stole along the corridor I could hear her talking inside my room.
“Good cat,” she was saying, “nice cat, beautiful cat.” I found her kneeling at the foot of my bed. Beside her was Kaspar, eating ravenously from his bowl, wolfing down the liver I had left for him, and purring like a lion.
Elizabeth looked up at me and smiled. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Miss Elizabeth Stanton. What’s the cat called?”
“Kaspar,” I told her.
“Is he yours?”
“Yes,” I said. “And this is my room too.”
“I knocked and there was no one in,” she went on. “So I thought it would be a good place to hide. I like hiding. Then I saw this cat lying on the bed, and he looked so sad. He’s very beautiful, but he’s very thin, you know, and he doesn’t look at all well. Look at him. He’s starving hungry. You should feed Kaspar more often, that’s what I think.”
“Your mother’s been looking for you. She thought you’d got lost,” I told her, trying my best to hide my growing irritation. To be honest, I didn’t much like being told by some hoity-toity little rich girl that Kaspar needed to eat more. Hadn’t I been trying for weeks on end now to get him to do just that? And although I was relieved to see Kaspar eating again, I have to confess I was more than a little upset that this little girl seemed to have succeeded so easily where I had failed. So the truth is that at our first meeting I was not at all disposed to like Miss Elizabeth Stanton. She seemed far too full of herself for my liking.
“You just wait till I tell Mama and Papa about Kaspar,” she went on. “Can I take him downstairs to show them?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me until that moment that this little girl could blow the whole secret. I crouched down so that we were face to face and put my hands on her shoulders. She had to know just how serious I was about this. “You can’t. You can’t say a word,” I told her. “The thing is, you see, I’m not allowed to keep pets up here. Against the rules, see? No pets in the servants’ quarters. If anyone finds out, I’ll get the sack, lose my position. I’ll have nowhere to live, and neither will Kaspar. No one else knows he lives up here. So you won’t tell anyone, will you? It’ll be our little secret, right?”
She was looking at me very intently all the while. She thought for a moment or two. Then she said: “I don’t like rules, especially unfair rules like not being allowed to keep a cat. So I won’t tell anyone, cross my heart and hope to die.” Then she added, “But you will let me come up and feed Kaspar again sometime, won’t you?”
I hadn’t any choice.
“I suppose so,” I said. “If you want to.”
“I do, I do,” she cried. “I like him so much, and he likes me, I know he does.”
It was true. Kaspar was looking up at her adoringly. He could hardly take his eyes off her. She grabbed my hand and shook it. “Oh thank you, thank you. But I don’t know your name, do I?”
“Johnny Trott,” I told her. She let out a peal of laughter. “Johnny Rot. Johnny Rot. That’s such a funny name. Bye Kaspar, bye Johnny Rot.” And still giggling she skipped off down the corridor and was gone. As I watched her go I remembered the last person who had found my name so funny. I was already disliking Elizabeth a little less.
I had no idea then and I still have no idea now how she managed to get Kaspar to eat his liver that morning. I asked her later on, once I’d got to know her better, and she gave me one of her infuriating shrugs. “S’easy when you know how,” she told me. “Animals always do whatever I want, because they know I’d do anything for them, and that’s because they know I love them, and that’s why they love me.” She had this way, as some children do, of making everything sound so simple and straightforward.
After that first surprise visit, Miss Elizabeth Stanton, or Lizziebeth as I discovered she liked to be called, came up to my room to feed Kaspar at least twice a day without fail. Sometimes I was there, sometimes I wasn’t. Whenever she’d been I’d find a little scribbled note on my pillow. It would say something like this:
“Dear Jonny Rot, I came to feed Caspa again. I stoll some smoked samon from my breakfast. He likes it a lot which I don’t because it smells of fish wich is horrible. I made your bed too which you didn’t. And you should too. Don worry your secrets safe. Promise. I like secrits because its like hidding and I like hidding. from your friend Lizziebeth.”
There’s no doubt at all in my mind that it was the arrival of Lizziebeth that saved Kaspar’s life. Somehow she brought joy into his life where there had only been sorrow. With her there beside him he was eating and drinking everything that was put in front of him. Within a week he was beginning to sharpen his claws, mostly on the curtains, but sometimes on my trousers, and when I was wearing them too. That hurt a lot. I didn’t mind much, though, because I was just so happy to see him getting better. His coat shone, his tail swished, and when one day he smiled up at me I knew for sure that Prince Kaspar Kandinsky was himself again. Lizziebeth had lifted his spirits, and she’d lifted mine too. But I was worried that one day she might “let the cat out of the bag”, so to speak. I kept reminding her that secrecy was everything.
“Remember, Lizziebeth, you’ve got to keep schtum,” I told her one evening, tapping my nose conspiratorially. She liked that. So whenever she left my room after that, she’d tap her nose. “Schtum,” she’d whisper. “I’ve got to keep schtum.”
Lizziebeth became quite a little mascot on our corridor, and quite a hero too on account of everything she’d done for