Chapter 1: The Cat in the Velvet Townhouse
Velvet Townhouse
The Randall townhouse stood on a Cambridge Street where the lamps glowed gold at dusk and the cobblestones held the scent of rain long after the clouds had gone away. From the outside, it looked like a painting that never changed, the brass on the door was always polished. The white curtains hung straight and measured to the inch, pots of lavender filled the window boxes, trimmed, watered, and aligned like sentries at the window.
Inside, the house carried the same care for detail and orderliness. The air carried the constant trace of Earl Grey, wax, and old books. The oak floors were polished daily to a high shine. With the reflection off the oak floors the crystal chandelier seemed to make the entire dining room glow. Bookshelves climbed the walls from floor to crown molding, packed with leather-bound volumes and old atlases pressed together so tightly they looked like a single structure rather than separate spines. If something was left crooked, somebody fixed it before the day was over. Everything had its place. It always had.
Mister Eric grew up there as the only kitten in a house built around order, intellect, and restraint. His father, Professor Edmund Randall, believed chaos was a failure of preparation and that a great deal of trouble could be traced back to a beast not thinking far enough ahead. Breakfasts were quiet affairs, broken only by the soft rustle of a newspaper page being turned and the clink of porcelain. Then, without looking up, the professor would speak.
“Mister Eric,” he would say in his even voice, “what flaw brought down the Roman Empire?” Sometimes Mister Eric answered while chewing. Sometimes he answered wrong. Sometimes he sat there thinking while his father waited and the tea would cool only slightly. Wrong answers didn’t trouble Edmund much. Careless ones did.
His mother, Lucinda Randall, handled evenings in her own fashion. She had a softer voice than Edmund and a warmer way of teaching, though she expected just as much. She sat by Mister Eric’s bed with pawwritten cards in neat stacks, each card carrying a word or phrase from another language. “Bonsoir, mon petit.” “Bonsoir, maman.”
If he stumbled, she corrected him with patience and made him try again. If he got it right, she gave a small nod and moved on. She never drowned him in praise. She wanted the work to matter more than the compliment.
By ten, he could greet a guest in French, Spanish, and a careful amount of Russian that still needed work. Lucinda taught him more than sound. She explained where words came from, how meaning changed when power changed paws, how trade, conquest, faith, and hunger all left their mark on speech.