Horror

That is what I felt when I staggered downstairs this morning to make the tea and found, lying in the usual place where the cats leave their little "offerings" (in the hall, just outside the kitchen door) not the usual mouse, rat or bird but... a guinea-pig. Quite dead. Not mangled at all, looking almost peaceful, but... OMG!

I scooped it up into the dustpan (which acts as the temporary mortuary in such cases) and put it safely at the back door where the cats couldn't get at it again, although, to be honest, once dead they tend to lose interest in such things. And I made the tea and crept back upstairs to Husband and told him. We agreed it was best to say nothing to our Children, on the grounds that the fewer people knew the truth the better and we didn't want to risk them blurting something out where they might be overheard. They do have voices like foghorns.

Chances were that the guinea pig came from two doors down, where the nice people live who gave us the greenhouse, who have two young children and where we know there is a hutch in the garden. They are often away at the weekends. We didn't want to think what the children would say when they came home to find the hutch ransacked and their little darling gone. Of course, we reasoned, just because the corpse was in our house didn't mean that it was one of our cats that did the dirty deed - after all, they have two cats of their own - one of ours might just have brought it back for a decent burial. But it would take good criminal lawyer to make the defence stick.

So we did with it what they did with Sir John Moore at Corunna -

We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning,

By the struggling moonbeam's misty light

And the lanthorn dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast,

Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest

With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow;

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,

And we bitterly thought of the morrow.

(Well, not exactly the dead of night, but certainly surreptiously). If anyone knocks on the door tonight, we're out. And if anyone asks, we know nothing.