Tamsin

Twenty-three

Actually, she showed up just around dawn, when I was about to throw her pink beast into one of the sheds for safekeeping and try to salvage a couple of hours’ sleep. But I heard those army boots on the gravel before I even saw her, and I got up and went to meet her. The dog squirmed so much in my arms as she got nearer that I had to let go, and the thing hurled itself through the air—a lot farther than it should have been able to—to plop into the pocket of her duffel coat like a slam dunk. Mrs. Fallowfield bent her neck and said something sharp to him, but I didn’t catch the words.

“I can’t figure why he comes over here,” I said. “I mean, he doesn’t know anybody.” The moment it was out I realized how dumb it sounded, but Mrs. Fallowfield made that funny, painful looking almost-smile again.

“Happen he might,” she grunted. “A chicken, mebbe, a sheep. Nivver know with that one—he’s got some strange friends, he has.” She was looking at me when she said that, and you could have cut yourself on those blue eyes. She said, “Second time you’ve delivered him.”

It seemed a strange word to use. I hadn’t told her about snatching her pet practically out of Mister Cat’s claws, but I was too tired to wonder how she knew. Probably happened all the time with that creature. I mumbled, “No trouble,” and started back toward the Manor. Mrs. Fallowfield walked along beside me.

“Evan’s up, if you want to see him,” I said. “I heard him moving around a while back.” She hardly ever said a word to Sally, but she seemed to like talking to Evan about drainage and manure. Mrs. Fallowfield shook her head. She didn’t say anything more until we reached the door and I said good-bye and started to go in.

Abruptly she said, “Coom over to my house sometime. Scones.” She didn’t wait for me to answer—just turned around and tramped off. I watched her all the way out of sight. She never looked back, but that dog stuck its head out of her coat pocket and snarled at me.

I didn’t tell Tamsin that I’d seen Judge Jeffreys. I didn’t have to. She felt him, the way Mister Cat had sensed the pink dog’s presence on his premises. But where Mister Cat’s natural feline response was to remove every trace of the intruder from the planet, Tamsin fled. She was less and less to be found in her secret room, less and less in the house at all. When we first met, she’d told me that she could go anywhere within the boundaries of Stourhead Farm; now she caromed around the place like a pinball, or like a hamster on a very big wheel. Some days I tracked her down, and most of the time she knew me when I did, but not always. The black holes didn’t come back, or anyway I never saw them. Generally, she looked like the Tamsin she remembered, only a bit more… tentative. I can’t think of another word.

But she was frightened almost literally out of her mind, and she couldn’t tell me why. You have to try to understand what that might be like for a ghost, the way I had to. That’s all she was, after all, as I’ve been saying—memory, recollection, mind—and here she was, so terrified of another ghost, or of the person he’d been, that she couldn’t even remember the cause of her fear. I kept pushing and pushing her, whenever I had the chance. “It’s nothing he did to you—it’s Edric, something about Edric.” Tamsin would shake her head vaguely, wearily. “Something he said, then. Whatever he said to you when you were sick, when you stopped. The last thing you heard him say—it’ll come back, think about it.”

But she couldn’t think about it, that was exactly it. I learned even to avoid speaking that man’s name, because each time it would blow straight through her, scattering her like clouds before a Dorset gale, and then I wouldn’t see her for days at a time. I think it took her that long to gather Tamsin again, and each time was harder.

I told Meena what there was to tell about my seeing Judge Jeffreys, including what he’d said about having come for Tamsin. She didn’t agree with me that Edric had to be at the center of the trouble. “Jenny, have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? My father always talks about Occam’s Razor—he can drive you crazy with it. It’s a philosophical idea that says, look first for the simplest solution—don’t make anything more complicated than it has to be. I think you are doing that with Tamsin. It’s that horrible man she is frightened of, and well she should be. He is the one you saw, not Edric. This is nothing to do with Edric.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. I keep wondering—how come he’s back, anyway? The Pooka says ghosts don’t return, once they’re really gone—how did he manage it? It’s important, Meena, some way. I know it is.”

Meena put her hands on my arms. “Either way, you are to stay out of it. Understand me, Jenny.”

She sounded so totally unlike herself—so much older, so tense and bleak—that I gaped at her for a moment. “I have to help her. Nobody else can help her but me.”

Meena gripped my arms tighter. “How will you help her? What plans do you have? You don’t have any plans.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I can’t be with her every minute—it’s all I can do to keep up with her, the way she’s zigging and zagging around the place. But if I can keep a watch on him, if there’s some way I can stay on his trail—”

“No!” Either Meena actually shook me a little or else she was trembling so hard that I felt it myself. “Jenny, this is like me and the Hundred-Acre Wood—I really will drag you away by the hair this time, if I have to. I don’t care about your Tamsin, whatever happens to her—I’m sorry, but I don’t. I care about you.”

For one really crazy minute I almost imagined Meena actually being jealous of Tamsin and me, the way I’d been so wildly jealous about Tamsin’s fascination with Tony. That notion passed in a hurry, and I was just me, flushed and clumsy as always, trying to say something that wouldn’t sound too stupid. “I know you do,” I said. “I mean, I really do know.” Not much, but that’s me, every time. “But he’s dead, and I’m alive—what can he do to me? I’ve never understood people being scared of ghosts. Poor Tamsin can’t even touch me.”

“Tamsin doesn’t wish you harm,” Meena said stubbornly. “You will not go near him, Jenny. You have to promise me.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

We looked at each other. Meena finally sighed, and laughed a very little bit, and stood back from me. “Well,” she said. “In that case.”

If it hadn’t been for Mister Cat, I don’t know what might have happened. He’d plainly been having the same sort of problem with Miss Sophia Brown that I was having with Tamsin. I’d see them together once in a while, and sometimes get a glimpse of her by herself, trotting off on one of those important cat errands that even ghost-cats have. But she didn’t sleep on my bed with Mister Cat anymore, or materialize to join us when we were hunting through the Manor for Tamsin. Mister Cat was distressed about it, too, and kept saying so, loudly and constantly. I told him I couldn’t do a damn thing about it, and he said he already knew that, but still.

Meena and I had started with some notion that the two of us could somehow keep track of Judge Jeffreys’s comings and goings, and stay close to Tamsin that way. Not a chance, not even with school out. Meena spent as much time at Stourhead Farm as she could get away with, but her family had Cotswold-vacation plans, no way out of it; and anyway, she wouldn’t have been able to see Judge Jeffreys—she was just determined to be there when I did. When I look back at us, all I can do is laugh. Now that I can.

One thing that helped was the fact that Judge Jeffreys wasn’t nearly as easy moving around the farm as I’d expected he would be. Tamsin had lived her whole short life there: three centuries dead or not, there wasn’t anything she didn’t remember about Stourhead—at least, when she wasn’t panicky. But Judge Jeffreys stuck pretty close to the Manor when he appeared—maybe because he was afraid of getting lost, maybe just because he knew she’d have to return sooner or later. I still don’t know how it really works with ghosts.

Mister Cat knew. He began to come looking for me, day or night—not even bothering to stay cool, but bursting in with a fullthroated, full-tilt, red-alert Siamese yowl—and I learned to drop whatever I was doing, make whatever excuse I could get away with, and follow him down to the cellar, up to the Arctic Circle, out to one of the barns—the North Barn, usually—or even to Sally’s garden. For his own personal reasons, Mister Cat had taken the case.

And he was always there, wherever Mister Cat led me: tall and still, looking much more like a living person than Tamsin did. Maybe that was because of the robes and the wig (wigs, really—he remembered three or four styles); or maybe it was that he knew what he wanted, dead or alive, so being dead didn’t make any difference to him, the way it did to Tamsin. Meena thought he didn’t know he was dead. She said there were a lot of ghosts like that in India. “They come marching in to dinner and expect to sit down with everyone. Or they get into bed with their wives or husbands, because that’s where they always slept. It’s very sad.”

Nothing sad about Judge Jeffreys, not in his own time and not now. He hung around, pacing a bit now and then, murmuring to himself sometimes, but never the least bit impatient, never anything but waiting. I don’t think he knew for a minute whether he was standing in Albert’s water dish or Sally’s tomato patch, and I know he didn’t see the farm workers as they passed him by, or Evan, Sally, Tony, or Julian, even if he was in the kitchen when we sat down to dinner. Nobody else ever saw him, of course—although Julian kept looking right at him and shaking his head a little, as though there were some insect buzzing around him. But of everyone and everything on the whole damn farm, Judge Jeffreys only saw me.

Even after everything that happened, I still think those were the worst moments of all, those times when he’d stand behind my chair, or beside me while I was washing dishes and talk to me in that rustly voice of his. It wasn’t that he said anything that creepy or terrifying; mostly he just repeated over and over, “I have come for her. Tell her.” But what he felt like, there at my shoulder, whether he spoke or not… I don’t know how to write about that. The best way I can put it is that the presence of him rustled like his voice, like an attic full of old dead bugs: the empty husks of flies in ragged spiderwebs, still bobbing against the window—the beetles and grasshoppers that froze to death winters ago—the dusty rinds of little nameless things stirring on the floor in a draft, crunching underfoot wherever you step. Judge Jeffreys didn’t just sound like that. He was that.

I couldn’t speak to him, not with people there—besides, most of the time I couldn’t have gotten a word out if I’d wanted to. But once, when I was by myself, waiting outside the South Barn to meet Julian for a cricket lesson—I saw him coming toward me over the young grass, the way I’d dreamed it and wakened to find Sally holding me. Now it was real, and everything in me wanted to run, but it was funny, too, because Mister Cat was stalking right beside him, looking as professional as Albert when he’s got his sheep all lined up. Judge Jeffreys ignored him.

I spoke first—I’m still proud of that. I said, “You won’t find her. And if you could, you couldn’t touch her. You can’t do anything to her.” I squeaked a little on the last bit, but otherwise it came out all right.

Judge Jeffreys smiled at me. He had a tired, thoughtful, attentive kind of smile, as though he really was considering the merits of what I’d said. Tony told me that a lot of Dorset folk who were tried at the Bloody Assizes honestly believed that he’d understood their innocence and was going to let them go. He said, “She will come to me.”

“Oh, no, she won’t,” I said. “Not ever.” My voice was still pretty wobbly, but the words were clear. I picked up Mister Cat and held him against my chest, because I was shaking.

Judge Jeffreys said, “She belongs to me. Since first I spoke her name and bowed over her hand—since first our eyes kissed across her father’s table.” I hadn’t imagined he could talk like that. He said, “From that moment, she was mine. She knew then—she knows now. She will come.”

Mister Cat snarled in my arms. I thought it was because I was holding him too tight, but when I eased up he kept glaring at Judge Jeffreys and making that jammed-garbage-disposal sound of his. Judge Jeffreys pursed his lips, made his own mocking puss-puss sound at Mister Cat, and smiled again. “Her cat disliked me also. I grieved that greatly once.”

“Grieved?” I said. “Grieved over anything? You? I don’t believe it.”

Judge Jeffreys’s chuckle was like the gasping hiss of our old steam radiator on West Eighty-third Street. “Aye, of a certainty, for the wretched creature held more sway with Tamsin Willoughby than any notions of her imbecile Monmouth-loving father. I entertained certain hopes that she might endear me to her mistress by fawning upon me, but she showed her detestation so plain that I took a cordial pleasure in teaching pretty Puss to swim, the day following the burial. She proved a poor pupil, but no matter. Tamsin Willoughby already belonged to me, as surely that beast belonged to her.”

I said, “She loved Edric Davies. She hated you with all her heart. You had to know that.”

That got him—only for a second, but it was something to see. The handsome dead face absolutely convulsed, like something hit by a car, flopping in the road. Out of control. “That damned Welsh villain! That canting, cozening, rebel-loving rogue! Jesus God, to see him—to sit watching, day on day, as he plied his vile sorcery against her susceptible innocence. A hundred times—a thousand!—oh, but I was hard put not to leap from my chair and strangle him where he sat, twangling at the jacks and looking sideways, looking, looking at her…”

Tony says that he used to foam at the mouth when he got properly up to speed in court. I didn’t think a ghost could do that, but I didn’t want to find out. I said, “They loved each other. They were going to be married.”

He stopped raving like that, on a dime, and he stared at me in a new way, really seeing me. His face smoothed itself out, getting back that gentle, patient, almost fragile look he’d had before. “Married, you say? Good God, the villain would have betrayed and abandoned her ere they’d gone ten miles. But she was the purest innocent ever drew breath, my Tamsin.” My stomach turned right into a bowling ball when he called her that, in that voice. “What could a shining angel know of the snares and ruses of so licentious a knave? I will bless the name of the Almighty for three centuries more, and three yet after those that I was in time to offer her an honorable love and a marriage such as no jumped-up tradesman’s family could have dared imagine. As to Master Davies, he fled before me as a demon flees the face of the risen Christ. I told her so, at the last. She died in my arms, at peace, knowing herself cleansed and free.”

And here comes another one of those moments that I wish I hadn’t promised myself to write down honestly when I got to it. Because it’s very embarrassing to say that just then, just for a bit, I believed him, even knowing what he was. Or maybe I believed that he really had loved Tamsin—or at least that he really believed he had. I’d never met anyone like him. He was completely out of my league, that’s all.

But then he blew it, even so. He’d been keeping a little distance between us—as though he didn’t want to get too close to Mister Cat—but when I said, “No, she’s not at peace, and she won’t ever be at peace until she finds out what happened to Edric,” he took two long, floating strides and he was there, towering and whispering, his face suddenly gone dim, almost featureless, and his eyes glaring white. I tried to back away, but I couldn’t move.

“I tell you again, Edric Davies is gone,” Judge Jeffreys said. “Rebel, seducer, false Welsh traitor to his anointed king, Tamsin Willoughby need concern herself no longer with fears of the scoundrel’s returning. I’ve seen to that, by God.”

He was standing so close to me that I could feel things like little static sparks crackling between us. I couldn’t see anything, but I’ve read since that that can happen with ghosts and people. It never did with Tamsin. Judge Jeffreys’s voice had gotten very quiet. “A great power was granted me when we met last, Edric Davies and I. I was the unworthy instrument of the Almighty, humbly privileged to speed him to such a doom as all the saints together could never lift from him. There will be no return from where Edric Davies is gone.”

People write and talk about their hair standing on end, their hearts standing still, their blood freezing in their veins. I never knew what that meant until then, when all of it happened to me at once. Between one word of his and the next I was too cold to breathe, too cold even to tremble—and my mouth dried up and tasted like pennies. Judge Jeffreys looked down at me from the gray afternoon moon. He said, “She knows.”

“No,” I said. “Oh, no. No way in the world does Tamsin Willoughby know anything about whatever happened to Edric Davies. No way in the world.”

I saw Julian trotting past the North Barn, loaded down with cricket bats and balls and stumps—he wanted us both to wear white flannels, but I threatened to back out of our lessons, and Julian just loves to be teaching someone something. I said again, really loudly, “She doesn’t know. You’re a liar.”

He didn’t like that. He leaned over me, with his face doing that floppy, melting thing it did before, and the sound that came out of him wasn’t words. My legs turned to string—I can’t think of another way to describe it. I’d have sat down right there, flat on my butt, except that suddenly I was seeing Julian through him, which I hadn’t been able to do a moment before. Then there was only Julian, staring at me out of those impossible gray eyes, saying, “Jenny, you look all funny. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m fine.” But I sounded funny even to me.

“Because if you’re not all right, we can practice later,” Julian said. “Jenny, what is it? What’s the matter?”

My baby brother. I didn’t even send away for him. I said, “Julian, knock it off, I’m fine—a goose just walked over my grave or something. Show me what a shooter is again.”

The weather got warmer, Evan’s no-till crops got taller and better looking than he expected. The new corn was taking hold, the new wells were pumping more water than the old ones ever had, and the Lovells seemed happy as clams. Oh—and the “malaria swamp” in the upper meadows finally got drained, probably for the first time ever. Evan’s got pear trees there now.

But there were other things happening, and only Mister Cat and I had the smallest clue about them. (Miss Sophia Brown, too—she must have known everything, for sure.) You can’t have two three-century-old ghosts in the same place without unsettling things, without swinging that door between now and whenever wide open. And what was beginning to come through wasn’t just Dorset night creatures, or more of Mister Cat’s scuttling sparring partners. We were getting an altogether different class of scary now.

The first ones weren’t ghosts—not unless whole scenes, whole landscapes, can be ghosts or have ghosts. I was washing dishes one morning with Sally, the two of us arguing lazily over who played who in some old movie, when Mister Cat was suddenly on my shoulder—digging in—and the kitchen was filling up with hills, for God’s sake. Sally didn’t notice a thing, which was just as well, since she was being crowded at the sink by shadowy oaks that made the Hundred-Acre Wood look like a Christmas-tree farm. Me, whichever way I turned—with Mister Cat permanently welded to the back of my neck—I came up against great chalky slopes and banks of downland, all tilted on their sides, running away into the ceiling. All transparent, of course, gauzy as Meena’s silk scarves, rippling gently when Sally or I walked through them, as though we’d moved in front of a slide projector. No plowed land, no animals, no people. Just the hills.

That was how it started, but it didn’t stay that harmless for very long. Some of the mirages were always ghostly, even flimsier than Tamsin, but others looked so real that I kept jumping aside to keep from tumbling down a slope that some Willoughby had leveled, or from bumping into huge old boulders looming up in the cornfield or the sheep pasture. As long as it happened in the house it was actually funny, especially with me being the only person aware of anything unusual. Once I forgot and warned Tony about the boggy, weedy pond right in the middle of his shiny studio floor; other times, I’d stand blinking in the doorway of the music room without coming in, until Sally got really annoyed at me. But I couldn’t see her because of the stony meadows between us, or the wild woods.

Outside, under an ordinary Dorset sky (generally a sort of windy gray-lilac, spring or no spring)… outside was something else. Outside, half the time I couldn’t be sure where or when I was. I’d come out of the house some mornings and every shed and outbuilding would be gone—everything but the Manor itself. Nothing left but hills this way, a deep green coombe off that way, and maybe a game trail between. Nothing for me to do but stay close to the house until the mirages cleared away, which they always did, sooner or later. It was almost like being Judge Jeffreys, from the other side, with both of us clinging to the Manor as the only truth in a world of fever dreams. Anyway, it’s the closest I ever came to understanding anything about him.

I keep calling them mirages, dreams, shadows, but they were more than that, and I knew it then. Meena knew, too, even though she couldn’t ever see them. “They are visitations,” she told me, “and I think they are perfectly real. Not real here, now, but real in their own time and place, which is still going on somewhere.” She asked me if I understood, and I said maybe you had to be a Hindu. Meena said no, you didn’t, but it would help if I’d read a book by someone named Dunne. I said I hadn’t, and Meena said in that case I’d have to take a Hindu’s word for what was going on. I said please.

“I think what you are seeing is Stourhead Farm before it was Stourhead Farm,” Meena said. “Long, long before Thomas Hardy and William Barnes—long before Roger Willoughby moved down from Bristol. Before the Saxons, before the Romans, before there were farms here, before there were any people at all. Somehow it is all unrolling for you, like running a movie in reverse—”

“Not for me,” I interrupted her. “It’s him, it’s not me, that’s the whole point. He’s the one making it happen, just by being here.” I told her what the Pooka had said about the wrongness of Tamsin’s lingering on at the Manor and speaking to me, and Meena listened and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “yes, like what most people think about reincarnation. They think, if you’re a bad person you have to return as a snake, a worm, a cockroach, but it doesn’t work like that, it can’t. You don’t go backwards, Hindu or not—the world could unravel. Yes, I see, Jenny.”

“More than I do,” I said. “All I know is that it can’t go on. What happens when people start showing up?” Meena didn’t know. I said, “And I’ll tell you something else—those visitations, or whatever, they’re getting more solid every time. I can still walk through them—but what about when I can’t? Meena, is the seventeenth century coming back for real, for good? And everywhere, or just here?”

“No,” Meena said. “Absolutely, positively not. Not possible.” She took my hands and held them tightly between hers, and that felt comforting, but what I saw in her face didn’t make me feel any better. She stayed over that night, but she didn’t want to hear anything about the stretch of heathland, ashy-purple with moor-grass and ling, that floated into my room like Mary Poppins while we were lying awake talking about boys. I don’t know whether she fell asleep, but after a while I couldn’t hear her voice anymore. I just lay holding Mister Cat and feeling my bed under me, but looking up at a thousand-year-old sky that couldn’t be there, and smelling rain that had fallen a thousand years ago.

There was a young Lovell, just about my age. I didn’t know about him until it was too late.

His name was Colin. He came down with a bunch of Lovells one afternoon to bug Evan about exporting or something. Colin looked like a string bag of yams, his skin was worse than mine, he whined like a gnat, and he homed in on me like a heat-seeking missile. Julian hacked him with a croquet mallet accidentally on purpose; even Tony came out of his studio to glower silently at him. Tony’s got a glower that blisters paint at fifty yards, but old Colin never noticed. His nose was wide open, as Marta would have said: He followed me wherever I went on the farm, and there wasn’t a thing I could do except be nice to him. It was fun, in a way, feeling like a siren for once, but I could have done without it right then, with the world of Stourhead Farm shifting around me so constantly that just crossing a barley field was like trying to find your seat in a pitch-dark movie theater, where the only light comes from the screen, and faces and scenery go flickering over you until you have to stand still and wait for your eyes to understand and adjust. And with Colin Lovell buzzing after me I never had one instant that whole day to stand still. Which was why we ran slap into Kirke’s Lambs.

No, to be fair, it wasn’t really Colin’s fault. I’d been getting glimpses of people—as opposed to landscapes—for a few days already, though I didn’t tell Meena about them. Mostly I saw them from a distance, either driving sheep and cattle along roads that weren’t there anymore, or plodding off somewhere through the rain in weary little groups of two and three. I hadn’t seen any real faces yet, or heard voices. I didn’t want to hear voices.

What happened was this: I was showing Colin through the new walnut orchard, and he was pretending to know a lot more about grafting than he did—he really was trying to impress me—and between one damn minute and the next, the entire orchard seemed to fly away, and we were standing on what felt like that path I’d walked with Tamsin and never found again, the one where she remembered waiting to see the visiting carriages come sweeping into view on the high road. It was foggy and cold, and there were huge, shapeless figures moving all around us, making me back up close against Colin. He liked that, because he thought I was being friendly, but I was too scared to tell him to piss off because I knew what those creatures were. They were big men riding big horses, and even through the mist I could tell that they were wearing scarlet coats and plumed silver helmets, and jackboots, like pirates. Like soldiers.

Colin was telling me how many different kinds of walnuts there are, and why English walnuts are the best, but I was hearing the soldiers talking to each other. They sounded very far away, but so did he; their voices were deep and thin at the same time, and distorted, as though the tape were dragging, but I could make out most of the words. They were talking about the rebels.

“… Sedgemoor, the week after Sedgemoor… ah, you should have seen the colonel then. Hanged a hundred of them in the market at Bridgewater—practically with his own hands, he did…”

“… Codso, do you tell me that? You weren’t with him in Tangiers—”

“… Aye, Tangiers, and no bloody Bishop Mews there to prate of innocence and force him to spare the lives of such filth…”

“… A gallows every three miles—every three miles, a gallows and a chopper and a cauldron of pitch, you’d see this country quiet fast enough…”

“Jenny? Jenny, did you know that your American pecans are from the same family as walnuts?”

I snapped. I forgot where I was. I hissed at him, “Colin, shut up! Don’t you know who these guys are?”

It’s amazing, when you think about it, but I’ve never yet had anyone look at me as though I were genuinely crazy. I mean, when you really think about it, there should have been dozens by now. But all I’ve got is the memory of Colin, gaping at me and starting to back away, honestly expecting me to start drooling and foaming and jump at his throat. I guess he’ll have to do. He said, “Jenny, what are you talking about? They’re just walnut trees.”

They were, too, and I knew that. I knew that, that’s what I’m trying to explain. But I knew those soldiers, too, just as surely as I knew what was ripening on those trees. Tony had told me all about Colonel Kirke’s dragoons—“Kirke’s Lambs,” they called themselves—and it wasn’t something you forget once the history test is over. Kirke’s Lambs were the military equivalent of Judge Jeffreys, a lynch mob in uniform. Judge, jury, and executioners, the whole crew, and they didn’t even need to wear wigs. When I imagined people like them being turned loose in the Colonies, a century later… I don’t think I’ve ever been that proud again of being an American.

Colin kept backing off. “What are you looking at, Jenny? What guys—what do you mean? Jenny, there’s nobody there.”

“Oh, yes, there is,” I said. “And they can hear us, too, so for Christ’s sake put a sock in it.” I was just saying that to keep him quiet—I didn’t think Kirke’s gang actually could hear us, away off in 1685—but three of the dragoons reined in their horses and looked straight at us, right on the money. One of them had one blue eye and one brown eye; a second man had a scar running from the left corner of his mouth to his left ear. A third was the handsomest man I’ve ever yet seen, except for his mouth, which was like another scar, thin and white, a bloodless welt. I’d know every one of those faces if I saw them again.

“Voices,” the scarred dragoon said. “I heard them.”

The handsome one said, “Cornet Simmons, you’re drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.” His mouth hardly moved.

Colin called, “Jenny, I’m going back to the house. I think my father’s leaving, anyway.”

“There!” Cornet Simmons said. “There, by the stump. I heard a bloody voice, I tell you.”

There wasn’t any stump where I stood, but he was staring right into my eyes. His were a streaky blue—he was drunk, back there in the seventeenth century, hunting rebels on the Yeovil road—and he kept blinking and shaking his head… but he saw me. I know he saw me.

The dragoon with the mismatched eyes laughed suddenly: one short machine-gun burst. He sounded closer and clearer than the other two, I don’t know why. He said, “Ghosts, it’s ghosts you’re hearing, Simmons—and why not? Country’s full up, as many of them as the Colonel’s made around here.”

“Aye, that’ll be it,” the handsome one said. “Ghosts. Close ranks, Cornet Simmons. Business in Yeovil tonight, and Taunton after. Close ranks.”

He didn’t raise his voice, but the last two words cracked out across three centuries like bones breaking. The scarred dragoon hesitated for a little—then he wheeled his horse and followed the others, who were already trotting on into the fog. But at the last moment he spun the horse on its hind legs—practically popping a wheelie— and rode at me, grabbing for his sword hilt. I can still hear the soft whir the thing made coming out of its sheath. Behind him, the handsome one shouted something, sounding really pissed.

I couldn’t move. I stood still and watched him coming for me. God, when I write this I remember so much I’ve never told even Meena—the crusted blood in his mustache, the slobber flying from his horse’s mouth, the glint of somebody’s sunlight along the sword blade, the funny deep, humming sound he was making in his throat right up to the moment when the sabre swept through my throat. No, I didn’t feel a thing—though the berry bushes just behind me hissed and rustled—but maybe the people he killed like that in 1685 or whenever didn’t feel anything either. Anyway, he swung his horse around, stared right at me one more time, made one last sort of half-pass with his sword before he put it away, and then he cantered off after the rest of the Lambs, whistling loudly through his teeth. I heard someone yelling back at him, but I couldn’t see the others anymore.

I stood where I was, with the walnut orchard drifting slowly into place around me again while I just shook. Colin was long gone, probably already telling every Lovell within range that I was a serious double-barrelled loony, and I saw his point myself. Seeing Tamsin, talking to her, having feelings about her… well, you could call that a special case, and you could even say that about Judge Jeffreys—at least I could. But meeting Kirke’s Dragoons on a road that only a ghost remembered, and believing that one of them was aware enough of me to try to kill me—no, I never told Meena about that. I never told anyone until now.

Mister Cat came flowing out of a bush, one of those same berry bushes that Cornet Simmons’s sabre had set swaying. He did his stiff-legged Frankenstein walk over to where the dragoons’ horses had been standing. Would have been standing, if they and the old road had really been there. He sniffed the ground very carefully, and then he scratched it hard with his back feet, as though he’d just taken a major dump. Then I knew that I’d seen what I’d seen, and I picked him up when he sauntered back to me and said, “Thanks. I was having a bad ten minutes or so there.”

I put him on my shoulder, and we started back through the walnut orchard, me trying to think of something nice and sane to say to the Lovells in case they hadn’t left yet. Suddenly Mister Cat stiffened, spat, got a grip (my right shoulder looked like a dart board for two days), and made an entirely new sound, like a bandsaw seizing up in wet wood. I had no idea he could make a sound like that.

I turned to see where he was swearing, and got a quick glimpse of Mrs. Fallowfield’s little pink dog-thing scuttling away from us among the trees. Mister Cat wanted down in the worst way, to rend and devour, but I wouldn’t let him. I said, “Forget it, leave him alone, we’ve got enough troubles.” But Mister Cat bitched about it all the way home.