‘You know that cat that you fetched from Esher in your pocket, in the cardinal’s time? Master Gregory took against him, and called him Marlinspike? Well, I think I saw him on the wall the other day, with a piece of a rabbit under his paw. But I said to myself, can any cat live that long?’ He says, ‘The cardinal’s cat would be a prodigy of nature, I suppose. How did he look?’ ‘Torn up a bit,’ Thurston says. ‘But aren’t we all?’
