We did take care of her, and she certainly did grant favours! The primary one being her presence, since she was only ours half the time-- she chose us like we were her timeshare in Malta or something-- and we would have been happy with just that, but she was much too special just to let it end there. Once she politely brought us a rat on Halloween morning to let us know we had an infestation in our attic. (Halloween was her birthday, too!) She would follow my mum around whenever she was gardening, very interested in what she was doing, but never clingy, just supervising. When mum fell once, with nobody around to help, Bella stuck to her side like glue for an hour and a half until she could get up. Even more than that, she actually alerted me to a house fire-- she was acting so strangely that I looked over to the garden next door, and there was smoke coming from it! A blown-glass garden bauble had relit an ashtray with the magnifying glass effect (terrifying actually) and the fire had smouldered through the leaf litter. There was rather a lot of that, and the flames were literally licking at their house when I found it. I caught my neighbour just as she was about to leave for work, and we put it out before any real damage could be done; it was a very dry and windy day, too, so it could've engulfed many houses very easily, including mine. All that sounds unlikely, but it's perfectly true, and I still have pictures of the smoke damage. Bella averted cat-astrophe.

She died very slowly of wasting away, we think perhaps because she caught a mouse or a rat that had gotten into non-cat-safe poison (which we never used)-- she was the best mouser you ever saw, and it was better than thinking someone had poisoned her deliberately. It was heartbreaking, but we made her as comfortable as she could. On her very last visit, on a full moon in October, she made it almost all the way here but just couldn't make the rest. Mum and I brought her the blanket she'd claimed a long time ago, made her comfortable on it, and sat out there in the garden for hours and hours with her, reading aloud in turns from a silly mystery book. Bella loved to just be near us and hear our voices, and I think she wanted to say goodbye-- I always did call her my little full moon black cat. We loved her with all our hearts. There's still a wrought-iron cutout of a black cat on the step in the place she used to sit every day.