The Big Meow

Helen Walks Softly stood in the middle of that open double door from the front hallway, wearing more than any other woman in the place…and somehow less. Her dress was sleeveless, off-the-shoulder, nipped in at the waist, full-length, and a shade darker than the wine she’d been drinking at lunch. The fabric seemed unornamented, except for a subtle shimmer toward darker shades when it swung away from the light. But a half-inch or so above where the cleavage became truly interesting, the fabric simply seemed to start fading away like fog. By the time it reached Helen’s collarbones, it was completely gone. The effect seemed calculated to distract even the most singleminded viewer from the single blood-red cabochon garnet hanging by a chain in the hollow of Helen’s throat… and to instead leave one wondering whether the boundary between fabric “being there” and “not being there” might possibly shift without warning, and in which direction.

Possibly the focus of even more attention, though, was Helen’s hair. In a time when all the other queen-ehhif seemed to be wearing it put up or fairly short, in rolls or curls, and some in structures that looked more like architecture than hair, Helen had simply pinned the sides of her long hair back and let the rest flow untrammeled in raven waves down her back. Numerous of the tom-ehhif watching her were doing so with expressions suggesting that they only saw queens with their hair down so in far more private circumstances. Some of them had plainly begun wondering how such circumstances, involving Helen, might be organized.

Miss Harte simply dropped Rhiow. Rhiow was ready for this, indeed grateful for it, and landed on her feet in a state of wicked amusement as the toms, trying not to look like they were hurrying too much, went around Rhiow on either side and headed for Helen. Elwin Dagenham, meanwhile, materialized from out of the middle of the crowd and went hurriedly to greet her. Helen strolled over to him, put out a gracious hand and began complimenting him on the beauty of his house. Toms from elsewhere in the room started to gather around the first group, beauty rather obviously on their minds as well.

“Helen,” Urruah said, having come unsidled again and strolling back in and around her, “is that a little of your head-fur sticking up back there…?”

Whack! “Oww!”

“So perverse,” Siffha’h said, wandering back past Urruah and off through the center of the room, where approximately three-quarters of the guests had abruptly lost interest in the People, the buffet and the bar, the males apparently out of admiration and many of the females out of sheer pique.

“I was kidding!”

“Yeah, sure,” Arhu said, going after his siste, who was heading through a door opposite to the ballroom entrance. “If he’s not careful, somebody’s going to get born an ehhif in his next life, and is it ever going to be messy!”

“Never mind them, Helen,” Urruah said, after shaking his ears back into kilter again: Siffha’h’s southpaw clout was one of Arhu’s chief complaints about life. “Which designer did you trade a wizardry to for that?”

Helen smiled as a glass of wine was put into her hands by one of the crowd of toms she’d suddenly acquired. It’s an Elie Saab from a few years ago, my time, she said silently as she toasted her admirer and had a sip, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.

Prêt-a-porter?

Oh, come on, ‘Ruah, like I can afford couture on my salary! But I did have a word with the material.

“The right one, I’d say,” Rhiow said: the toms were third-day-of-heat thick around Helen. If there are any secrets worth hearing in this place, I suspect she’ll be the one who gets told them…She glanced around. “Now where’s Miss Harte gone?”

“Wouldn’t think you cared, fishy-breath ‘boy,’” Urruah said, putting his whiskers forward. “Or would have thought you would have been ready with some suggestions.”

“Please,” Rhiow said. “The Queen would have words with me if I’d done what I was thinking of doing.” She glanced around. “It’s too much to hope for that she’d have left. No, there she is, back with the Silent Man and his friends again.”

“Or trying to be,” Urruah said, for no one at the table of senior toms was giving Miss Harte so much as a glance, though she hung over them and chatted about what she saw on the Silent Man’s writing pad and otherwise tried to look as if she was welcome with them. “Never mind her: she’s just salving her wounded ego by ‘playing’ with the old toms instead of the young ones. They’ll soon see her off if they get tired of her eavesdropping.” He stood up, glanced over his shoulder at Helen, who had drifted off toward the buffet with her sudden entourage, and looked to be as much in danger of being fed by hand as Rhiow and the other People had been. “She’s got their tails under her paw; let’s leave her to get on with business. I’ll go see what the youngsters are up to.”