“Crofts”—I must have spoken with asperity—“why the devil didn’t your family choose some holier badge than a damned cat’s head, with nothing funny or Cheshire-ish about it?”
“My family? Not my family.”
“Oh, not—”
“Lord, no. Dirty thing, isn’t it, that one? But not mine. Bought this place a couple of years ago. Look there, for a primitive genealogical sign.”
I thought at first he was pointing to the badge and I leaned to examine it at closer quarters. The spandrils of the fire-arch had the usual long crinkled leaves of the early Tudors; on one lay the royal rose, on the other the badge of the head.
“No, no, not that—the mantel-tree itself.”
Pendleton tapped the very old and thoroughly blackened beam of oak resting on the upraised hands and the heads of a pair of grotesque knee-bent dwarfs in lieu of corbels. And while I stared at it, somewhat at a loss to grasp his meaning, he passed his hand along its outer surface, saying, “If you can’t see, feel.”
This mantel-tree, obviously the original, though forming more than merely an incipient shelf, was unusually low for the period (if I knew anything of such) and I had to lean a bit to get my eyes flush to it. My fingers felt the slight roughness of lettering, and I deciphered, in French characters, the smoke-stained names “Arthur Kay” and “Biatryx Kay,” which Pendleton assured me I read correctly.
“None of your ilk, you say?”
“Oh, no! Quite the most ancient family in these parts. Here before the House itself, before the castle.”