Flour and Whiskers
673 words
The bakery on Candlewick Street was never quiet, not even at half past five in the morning. Mr Tobias Grubb, who had owned the shop for thirty years, liked to say that bread did not wait for sleeping men, and so he and his assistant, a cheerful girl named Polly Finch, were always at work long before the rest of the street had troubled itself to wake. The ovens roared, the dough was turned and slapped upon the long wooden table, and clouds of white flour rose and fell like small, warm snowstorms.
It was on a Tuesday in November that the kitten arrived. Nobody had opened the back door — or so everyone afterwards insisted — and yet there it was, sitting in the flour bin, blinking its enormous amber eyes at the world as though it had always lived there and found everything quite satisfactory. It was a tiny thing, grey and white, with one black ear and a pink nose powdered entirely with flour, so that it looked rather like a ghost of a kitten.
Polly was the first to notice it. She let out a small shriek, which sent Mr Grubb spinning round from his bread tins. When he saw what had alarmed her, he put his hands on his hips and stared for a long moment.
'Well,' he said at last, 'it cannot stay in the flour.'
'No indeed,' said Polly. 'But where has it come from?'
Neither of them could answer that. The kitten, for its part, showed not the slightest anxiety about the matter. It yawned hugely, revealing a pink tongue and a great many very white teeth, then stepped out of the flour bin and picked its way daintily along the edge of the shelf as though it were a tightrope walker performing for an appreciative audience.
Mr Grubb disapproved of cats, or so he had always told himself. He called them unhygienic. He said they shed hair. But when the kitten paused and placed one small floury paw upon his wrist, he found, to his own considerable surprise, that he did not at all wish to put it outside. Instead, he cleared a corner behind the bread tins, folded a piece of old sacking into a rough bed, and said gruffly that the creature could remain until a proper owner was found.
'Shall we put a notice in the window?' Polly asked.
'Certainly,' said Mr Grubb, in the tone of a man who hoped very much that nobody would reply to it.
By seven o'clock, when the first customers began to arrive, the kitten had already taken charge of the bakery. It sat upon the counter and supervised the weighing of loaves with an expression of solemn authority. It inspected the currant buns and approved of them. When a small boy pressed his nose against the glass of the display case and made a face at it, the kitten made a face back, which caused the small boy to dissolve into helpless laughter and his mother to buy three extra buns she had not intended to purchase.
All morning, customers who came in for a plain loaf stayed to admire the kitten, and several who had never set foot in the shop before pushed open the door simply because they had seen it from the street. Mr Grubb sold more bread that Tuesday than he had sold in a fortnight, and he noted this fact in his ledger with an air of deep satisfaction, though he was careful not to mention it to anyone.
By noon, Polly had named the kitten Captain Flour, on account of its powdery appearance and commanding manner. No notice was ever put in the window. Mr Grubb maintained to his dying day that he had simply never found the time to write one, and if anyone pressed him further on the subject, he changed the topic to the proper method of making a good, honest cottage loaf, which was a subject he could discuss at considerable length without the slightest difficulty.