They went silent for a minute when I spoke, and then they started up again, both of them, sounding excited now. I could have screamed—I felt a scream working its way up through my chest—but that would have brought everybody in, and I didn’t want Sally to know I’d been digging at zits. Probably sounds incredibly dumb, but there you are, that was me. I took another couple of steps, and I stamped my foot down really hard, so my toothbrush rattled in the glass. “I can see you,” I said. “You might as well come out of there. Come on, I’m not going to hurt you.” I threw that in because my voice was shaky, and I didn’t want them to think I was scared.
What that got me was a flood of giggles. Not squeaks, not talk, and not real giggles, either. Nasty little titters, the kind you’re supposed to hear off to one side when you’re walking down the hall. I know those. In school I never let it get me, but then—in that old bathroom, in that strange, smelly old house, with them, whoever they were, spying on me picking my face, and snickering about it, I just lost it, that’s all. I ran at the tub, stamping and kicking out like Julian when Tony’d been teasing him one time too many. It’s a good thing there wasn’t anybody there, or I’d have trampled them flat, I didn’t care if they were Santa’s elves. But they were gone. I heard feet skittering off somewhere in a corner, but no voices, except for Sally in the hall, calling to know if I was all right. I said I was.
That night I lay awake for hours, wishing more than ever that Mister Cat was with me, snoring on my stomach, and I tried to stay cool and decide whether I was going crazy, which I’d always almost expected, or whether there really were boggarts running around in my bathroom. Crazy was comforting, in a way—if you’re crazy, then nothing’s your fault, which was just how I wanted to feel right then. Boggarts were scary, because if they were possible, and possible right here in this house, then all kinds of other stuff was possible, and most of it I didn’t much want to think about. But it was interesting, at least, and crazy isn’t interesting. Handy, I could see that, but not interesting.
When I did fall asleep, I didn’t dream about boggarts exactly. I dreamed that Julian and I had shrunk down to the size of boggarts, and that big people were chasing us with sticks. I don’t know why sticks, but that’s not important, that wasn’t the frightening part. There was something else in the dream, too, something or someone with big yellow eyes, such a raw, wild yellow they were practically golden. Big, big eyes, with a slitty sideways pupil, filling up the dream. We couldn’t get away from them until I woke, all tangled in my sweaty sheets and listening for voices. But I never did hear them again, not those.
Seven
Meena keeps saying this is where I should put in all the stuff about Stourhead Farm, but it’s hard to know where to start. First off, it’s in the country—not that country means much when you’re twenty miles from Julian’s Taco Bell pretty much wherever you are. But when you’ve lived your entire life in downtown Manhattan, waking up to hear cows wondering when they’re going to be milked instead of police sirens, and hearing wild geese yelling overhead instead of jackhammers tearing up West Eighty-third and Columbus, and hearing the plumbing burping like mad because there’s some kind of air pocket in the well instead of drunks puking and crying right under your window… well, that’s it, that’s country. Maybe not to Willie Nelson or Thomas Hardy, but to West Eighty-third and Columbus, it’s country.
Okay, Meena. You can trace Stourhead Farm back to 1671, when Roger Willoughby bought a big piece of a rundown manor—freehold, that’s outright, not like being a tenant farmer. He wasn’t a farmer, he made his money selling supplies to the Royal Navy, but he had all kinds of ideas about farming in his head, and he couldn’t wait to try them out. He wrote letters to the newspapers, he wrote pamphlets on how you could get double yields by rotating the crops just so, and how to breed bigger Dorset sheep, and why everybody in west Dorset should quit growing wheat and raise millet instead. Evan says everybody in west Dorset sat back and waited to see him go under. That’s when they took to calling his big new house “the Manor,” to make fun of him. Roger Willoughby was from Bristol, and in those days he might just as well have been from Madras, like Meena. It’s different now, like everywhere, but not that different. Dorset doesn’t change as fast as some other places.
Well, he didn’t go under, Roger Willoughby. He couldn’t do anything about the sheep—they’re still pretty small—but he must have had some sense about farming, because Stourhead stayed in his family for almost three hundred years. They weren’t gentry, and they weren’t absentee landlords, buying up farms they never saw. They lived on the land, and they always seemed to have their fingers in it, messing around with some new notion. Roger Willoughby planted barley and oats at first, and then peas—and he did try to plant millet, but when it just wouldn’t take, he went back to wheat, like everybody else. Because he might have been a Prodigious Romantic—that’s what Tamsin called him—but he wasn’t crazy.
It’s not a big farm, maybe seven hundred acres. In the States, that’s like a playpen, a backyard, you can’t even make it pay for itself. But it was big enough for this part of Dorset in Roger Willoughby’s time. It used to be bigger—I don’t know how much—but the Willoughbys sold off some corners and slices over the years. Especially in the nineteenth century, when there was a long run of terrible weather, and a bad slump in farm prices. Stourhead just went straight downhill from about 1900 and never really recovered. The last of the Willoughbys sold out after World War II—I think there were four or five owners after them, each one more clueless than the one before. When the Lovells took over, the place was probably the exact same wilderness it was when old Roger Willoughby moved in.
The Lovells were always business people, just like the Willoughbys were farmers. (In England, people always know what your family’s always been.) The ones who own Stourhead actually live near Oxford—Evan mostly goes there to meet with them these days, because they don’t come down here nearly as often as they used to when we were first at Stourhead. Back then they practically lived with us, showing up in red-faced coveys to hold big conferences with Evan about their plans to have Stourhead at least breaking even in a couple of years, and maybe making a profit after that. Evan thought they were as prodigiously romantic as old Roger Willoughby, and I used to hear him telling them so, over and over.
“You can’t turn a farm as exhausted as Stourhead all the way around that fast,” he kept saying. “I’m not talking only about the physical aspect—the barns and the outbuildings and that—I mean the land itself. Your topsoil’s a disaster area—it’s starved for nitrogen, it’s been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet.” One Lovell or another usually started spluttering right about this point, but Evan would just go straight on over him. “You need a fourth well, and very likely a fifth—that’s simply not negotiable. Three wells were just fine in good King Charles’s golden days, but nothing’s what it was back then, including your water table. That’s why the corn’s not growing—that, and the fact that it’s the wrong strain for this acid soil and this climate. And where you do have enough water, in the upper meadows, you’ve got yourselves a proper little marsh bubbling along. The only malaria swamp in England, I shouldn’t wonder.”