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Winner: Castle Cat Couture
By Katherine Laarzen
Puss had indigestion.
Sitting by a window and looking out at the castle grounds, she reflected that even as a mouse, the ogre had not been a pleasant thing to swallow. It came as no surprise to her that she had suffered with indigestion ever since.
From her place by the window, she could see her Master, the "Marquis of Carabas", strolling about the castle gardens with his new wife, the Princess. The sound of their laughter floated gently up to her through the warm, calm summer air.
Puss purred quietly with satisfaction and glanced about at her surroundings. "Oh well," she thought, "a little bit of indigestion is a small price to pay for a castle and a happy, successful Master!" She stretched out a paw, to feel the warmth of the sun pouring in through the window, and thought that her Master had been lucky to inherit such a clever cat.
She mulled over the months that had passed since she had secured her Master his fortune and wondered whether he really appreciated her cunning and contribution to his good fortune. Oh certainly, he had declared his gratitude to her in private: "Oh Puss, you were the greatest inheritance of all. I shall see to it that you never want for anything and when you die (may that day be a very long time in coming), I shall place your body in a golden coffin, lined with the softest velvet, so that you may spend your eternal rest in comfort, safely interred in my very own family tomb."
Puss chuckled at how relieved she had been that her Master had changed his mind about popping her into a cooking pot!
The first weeks had passed by in a blur – she was provided with a luxurious suite of castle rooms, given her very own maidservant, had her meals delivered on a silver tray (on the occasions that she was not invited to dine with the Marquis) and had made the most of every opportunity to work with the kingdom's best couture designers to fill her wardrobe with sumptuous outfits, boots and delicate shoes.
In fact, she had come to an arrangement with the designers. The designs that she had created with them were now available to a very select number of distinguished, discerning clients across the kingdom, in a catalogue that was aptly titled "Castle Cat Couture".
"Why then," she mused as she idly batted a paw at a fly dancing on the window, "with such success, comfort and all my needs so well catered for, do I feel that I am caught fast in a gilded cage?"
The truth was that Puss was a cat. She had always enjoyed the freedom of living on her wits – from the immediate excitement of hunting prey, to pulling off the most audacious plan a feline had ever dared to conceive. She knew that she thrived on the things that challenged her skills and reminded her that she was alive!
To keep her hand in, Puss had orchestrated the occasional scheme around the castle, but these were simply little parcels of harmless mischief to keep her wits sharp. They had been entertaining, but they were no real challenge for a feline of her great intellect.
Puss sighed and felt a wave of nostalgia for the days when her Master depended wholly on her wits in order to survive. She returned her gaze to the window and looked out past the castle, to the hazy green of the hills beyond.
As the comfortable monotony of the days passed, Puss started to notice that the invitations to dinner with her Master had dwindled away, that he no longer sought out either her company or her counsel, preferring instead the courtly graces and advice supplied by his wife. Then one day, she found that wherever she went, she was obliged to be accompanied by a castle guard, on the orders of the Marquis.
Puss thought this odd. She sought out her Master to find out how she had displeased him and what she could do to make things right.
"Puss, oh Puss, you are my most honoured and trusted servant. You have done nothing wrong. You are so precious, what would I do if you were lost? What if you were stolen and tortured – forced to reveal the truth about my past? Not only would you and I suffer, so would my wife and her father, the King. Their reputations would be ruined the moment it became known that the ‘Marquis of Carabas’ is a fraud and that I am simply the youngest son of a humble miller. The kingdom would fall into chaos."
Puss returned to her rooms, with alarm tingling in her whiskers. She thought that it might be time for a new plan. These concepts were not ones that her Master had the wits to formulate on his own. She suspected that the Princess had been made aware of the true origins of her husband. Puss concluded that her life expectancy had just been cut short.
Just days after this incident, Puss found a guard at her door who informed her that she was no longer allowed to leave her rooms, again by the order of the Marquis. She paced the floor of her sitting room, bereft of inspiration. She could feel the walls starting to press in on her – she could not survive this unnatural imprisonment for long! Yet she was her Master's property. What was she to do? It was clear that he would never agree to let her go with the secret she possessed. Even if she found an opportunity to flee, he would hunt her down in order to safeguard the reputation of his family.
As Puss paced, her maidservant Anna watched, marking her mistress's steps with each calm click of her needles. She was knitting herself a fitted bodice in the style of one that she had spotted in her mistress's wardrobe. Puss's flair for couture was well known, so Anna felt that she could not go wrong if she made something in her mistress's latest choice of style.
Now, it was not Anna's place to ask Puss what she had done to offend the Marquis, but she felt puzzled by it. She had always found her mistress clever, fun and flamboyant. As a cat, she could be a little distant at times, but she always made up for it with moments of great affection and generosity. Anna did not believe that Puss would do anything to upset the Marquis on purpose. However, she did know of her mistress's penchant for schemes and speculated that one had backfired, earning her the temporary displeasure of the Marquis and the Princess.
Above the regular click of her needles, Anna became aware that Puss had stopped pacing. She looked up and found her mistress watching her intently. It was a little disconcerting.
"Anna, do you think that you might be able to teach me how to knit and sew?"
Anna stared at Puss for a moment and then nodded. "Anything would be better than the pacing," she thought to herself as she pulled her mistress up a chair and handed her a pair of needles and some wool.
Anna should have known better. It is well known that cats cannot knit or sew. Puss was no exception. Despite her best attempts to teach and Puss's enthusiasm to learn, the only results were frustration, a hideous tangle of threads and mauled pieces of material.
Yet Puss did not give up. Over the following days, the bodice and the mangled pile of wool grew at an almost equal rate. While Anna did not have the heart to tell Puss that her knitting was terrible, she quietly admired the fact that once her mistress decided to do something, she set her mind to it wholeheartedly.
On her part, Puss started to see her maidservant in a new light. She had not realised that there was so much to knitting or the scope of Anna's skills. She looked at the bodice that Anna was knitting with new eyes and, with a wry smile, suggested that they look through the Castle Cat Couture catalogue together to see whether it would be possible to convert any of her designs into knitting patterns.
Anna blushed faintly, feeling caught out.
In the days that passed, Anna enjoyed the companionship that grew out of the time they spent together and above all, she relished sharing all that she knew about knitting, sewing and the wares available in the market beyond the castle walls.
As a result, Puss petitioned the Marquis constantly for permission to visit the market. He would not give it for fear that she would use it as an opportunity to flee. However, on Puss's birthday, he relented and invited the market sellers into the castle to show their wares. He told Puss that she and Anna could select whatever they liked for their projects.
Puss was delighted to be let out of her rooms. She and Anna were dazzled by the fine array of yarns and fabrics on offer! They fell upon them like warriors at a feast, each drawn magnetically to the colours, textures and patterns that attracted them the most.
Before long Puss's arms were overflowing with a chaotic, eclectic mix of bright silks, cashmere, angora, fluffy moderns, wools, alpacas and cottons, while Anna was more conservative and thinking ahead to winter, chose some durable tweeds for warmth and silks in muted colours to create soft linings. Discreetly, Anna compared her choices with the items picked out by her mistress, and could not fathom how Puss would begin to put her selection together.
After this brief highlight, the days passed in an increasingly familiar pattern. Every day, Puss would spend a little bit of time making notes in her Castle Cat Couture catalogue and occasionally, she would ask Anna to knit a sample and they would work on her design, contributing notes together.
Once that was done, she would set about her knitting with a determined yet hopeless enthusiasm. As she worked, the piles of loopy knitting grew around her feet in a rainbow of random colours and yarns. Puss refused to let Anna tidy any of it away, so the knitting started to spread out around her, covering both the floor and the living room furniture.
Anna sat amongst the chaos, knitting a design sample. She glanced at the mess around her and looked over at Puss. Her mistress was engrossed in her knitting, joining two bright and clashing colours together. Anna sighed. She didn't understand how someone with such a good eye for couture design could make such awful errors of colour and yarn in their own knitting. Neither could she understand how someone who took such care with their designs could let this chaos evolve around them. Puss used to be fastidiously tidy.
Anna put it down to unhappiness and the stress of her imprisonment. She hoped that the Marquis would forgive Puss soon. Her mistress had stopped taking good care of herself and was unkempt, thin and Anna knew that she no longer slept at night. Whenever Anna came by to check on Puss in the night, she could see light streaming out from under her bedroom door and could hear her muttering quietly to herself. Anna feared for her mistress's health and, when she cast her eyes around the sitting room at the piles of mangled knitting, she feared for her sanity.
The next morning Anna came in to light the fire and noticed that Puss was not in her usual place, sitting by the window and gazing out at the hills. She knocked at her bedroom door.
No answer. Timidly, she opened the door and slipped through it to check on Puss. She was stretched out asleep on her bed. Anna approached and reached out nervously to touch her mistress's paw, for she knew that Puss was not fond of being woken unexpectedly.
She recoiled sharply. Puss was stiff and unmoving. Anna realised that she was not asleep at all; she was dead.
Anna looked at Puss's face. She looked so sad, worn out and thin. Anna reached out and touched her paw again. It can only just have happened, as Puss was still warm.
Anna felt sick at heart. She opened her mouth to call for help, but the only sound that she emitted was a very loud and anguished scream.
The commotion brought the Marquis at a fast run. He feared that Puss had escaped the castle. He should have listened to his wife, put aside his affection for his cat and disposed of her much sooner. The Princess was right: now that his position in life was secure, the secret of his past could only serve to damage his future.
He reached the entrance to Puss's suite of rooms and the meaning of Anna's cries became clear. He sank to the floor with relief as he realised that Anna was screaming that her mistress had gone because she was dead, not because she had fled. He also felt relieved that she had died without it being necessary for him to have a direct hand in her demise.
He glanced into Puss's sitting room, taking in its haphazard state, all covered with mangled piles of badly co-ordinated yarn. He listened to Anna, pouring out her distress, and thought that she might be right. After all, Puss was a miller's cat. She was used to her freedom. Perhaps her imprisonment in these rooms had driven her to both madness and death. "Oh well," he thought guiltily, "it really is better this way."
He got to his feet and called for his servants. "Take Puss's body away and..." he considered his promise and decided that he did not really want a dead cat in his family tomb, not even in a golden coffin, "...dispose of it discreetly."
"Well," thought Puss as she continued to play dead, wrapped up her bedsheets, "it is just as well that I didn't count on melting down that golden coffin to help me make my new way in the world."
Later that day, there was confusion at the tanners. They had collected the bundle that the castle servants had directed them to pick up from a shed in the castle's orchard. However, when they opened it, expecting to see a dead cat, they found a good number of apples and a perfectly finished fur muff, lined with richly coloured silk.
The tanners were perplexed. However, they did not want to jeopardise their new contract with the castle, so they decided that the less said about it, the better. The tanners held onto the muff for a little while and then returned it to the castle, presenting it in person to the Marquis and the Princess.
"Your honour, we took it upon ourselves to have the best craftsman in the kingdom make up your cat skin into a fur muff, for winter is almost here and we wanted to be certain that the Princess received it before the weather turned cold."
The Marquis, pleased with their ingenuity and the quality of their work, paid them handsomely and sent them on their way.
The Princess was delighted. She wore the muff as often as she could. In part, she wore it to remind her husband that she was the person who now held the secret to his past, while she was also his present and his future. However, she also wore it because the plush softness of her new fur muff was unrivalled by any other fur muffs that she owned. She decided that this must be because it was made from the fur of a most unique feline.
The Marquis, not the brains behind his partnership with either Puss or his wife, was content and allowed himself to be kept on a very tight leash by his wife until the end of his days.
Puss had made sure that she "died" with her favourite boots on. They also happened to have very useful compartments for tucking away useful things. Like her knitting needles, her design notebook and a few skeins of precious, jewelled yarns.
As she cheerfully made her way across the hills that she used to watch from her windows, she smugly reflected that she had left nothing behind that gave away what she had done or how she had pulled it off.
From the moment that she had realised that her days were numbered, she knew that the only way for her to escape successfully was to fake her own death. She had the feeling that either the Princess or the Marquis would want definite, physical evidence of her demise. She chuckled that the answer to her quandary of how to provide it was sitting right under her very nose – Anna's constant knitting and sewing provided the perfect answer.
It had been hard work, knitting badly by day to throw Anna off the scent and create the illusion of madness, while doing her real knitting and sewing by night. She had created the plushest of fur muffs, in the fluffiest of yarns that matched her pelt and lined it with a glorious, richly coloured silk. Not only was this a luxury fit for a Marquis or Princess, it also disguised the fact that it was not a real fur muff.
Puss did feel sorry about leaving Anna behind. She simply hoped that she'd done enough "knitting" for Anna to make a new start of her own. As she strode along the road to her new life, she smiled in the sunshine, thanking Anna from the very bottom of her heart for teaching her how to knit and sew so well.
Anna missed her mistress. She was given the task of clearing Puss's personal effects from her rooms. This was overseen by the Princess, who told Anna that she wanted to make sure that she retrieved anything of use to the castle, but who really wanted to check that Puss had left nothing that would give away her husband's past.
As she worked to pack Puss's things away, Anna wished that the Princess would not wear her new fur muff in her presence. Anna found it both distasteful and upsetting; she could not even bear to look at it.
Just as Puss had anticipated, the Princess took Puss's stash of perfect, unused skeins and gave them to her own maidservants. However, she wrinkled her nose at the yarn that Puss had mangled, and put aside her wardrobe when she realised that none of Puss's clothing would fit her own overfed cats. As a result, she allowed Anna to have both the mangled yarn and the contents of Puss's wardrobe, in memory of her dearly departed mistress.
When the Princess was not looking, Anna slipped Puss's copy of Castle Cat Couture into a bundle. It was her mistress's favourite catalogue, and Anna could not bear to think of another cat getting their paws on her designs or parading about the castle in her designs when they were not invited to be part of its very select distribution.
As soon as Puss's rooms were cleared, the Princess promptly ended Anna's employment. Anna went home. As she sat, wondering what to do next, she opened a bundle and absentmindedly started to unpick Puss's knitting to see if she could salvage any of the yarn.
As she worked, she started to realise that:
– the knitting was very easy to unpick. The yarn was not damaged at all. It was almost as though Puss had knitted it this way on purpose;
– it looked like there was enough of every yarn for her to knit up a good number of complete garments;
– she had Puss's copy of Castle Cat Couture, containing all of their joint design notes, as well as the contents of her wardrobe to use as inspiration for patterns; and
– although she remembered her mistress selecting a lot of very fluffy yarn, there was none in the bundle to be unpicked.
She stopped and thought long and hard. Anna could not remember any being handed over to the Princess's maidservants either. Suddenly, she thought of the Princess and her new trophy fur muff.
She glanced out of the window and caught sight of the hills in the distance, aglow with late autumnal colours.
Anna smiled. She wished her mistress well...
...wherever she was.
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