It’s noisy in the country, in a strange way. You hear more sounds, just because of the stillness, especially at night. Instead of tuning out, the way you absolutely have to do in New York, you start tuning in, whether you want to or not. I don’t mean just the geese going over, and the frogs and crickets and so on, and the cocks just as likely to start crowing at two in the morning. I got so I could hear a well pump cutting off and on and off, out beyond the dairy. Some frosty nights I’d even hear twigs snapping in the thickets, and that would be the deer foraging, eating the tree bark. And when you hear a cold, clear, sharp sort of yelp, with almost a metallic shrill to it, that’s not a dog, that’s a fox. It’s always a little sudden and scary, that sound, even when you know what it is.
The Manor makes noises, too, the way all old houses do, settling in the ground—“working,” that’s what they say here. I’ve always thought it sounds like the little grunts and mumbles and sighs somebody makes getting comfortable in bed after a hard day. Even the West Eighty-third Street apartment made those, so that wasn’t anything to be edgy about, most nights.
But every now and then. Just every now and then, from the first night, I’d hear something that didn’t fit. Not so much the patter of little feet, or little snickery voices (you can always tell yourself it’s mice running and squeaking), and not ghosts wailing or dragging chains around—no Halloween stuff like that. A sound like rushing water, in the air right above my bed. A sound that might have been somebody sweeping a floor, back and forth, over and over, in the middle of the night. A whisper so low I couldn’t make out one word. But that was the one that always woke me up; that was the one I was scared of hearing when I went to bed. I’d have asked Julian if he ever heard anything, but I didn’t want him to get scared, so I didn’t.
There were smells, too—that cold vanilla the electrician smelled in the Arctic Circle, and a dark-toast one almost like Mister Cat. And just once in a real while I’d think I saw those same huge golden eyes from the dream outside my window. Only I couldn’t ever be sure whether I was awake or dreaming when I saw those. They didn’t frighten me, for some reason—I always wanted to go toward them—so maybe that was dreaming. I still don’t know, even today.
There was one sound that everybody knew about, not just me— a sound that used to bring Julian flying into my room whenever we heard it. It usually had to be a really fierce night, with thunder and lightning, rain smashing into you like hailstones, wind shaking the house, stripping and snapping the trees—I mean, the works. Then you’d hear them, high over the storm, the hounds baying and the horses screaming—and people laughing, too, these terrible, hungry yells of laughter. That’s what always got Julian, that laughter. He’d shut his eyes and cover his ears and burrow his head into me, hard, so it really hurt sometimes.
Evan would tell us it was just the wild geese calling to each other, the same as ever, only the wind was distorting their cries. He’d say, “Every country in Europe has that same legend—the Wild Hunt, the Wish-Hounds, the Chasse Gayere, the Sluagh— huntsmen and their dogs chasing after the souls of the dead. It’s the geese, all of it—nothing but the wild geese, the wild weather, and a little wild imagination.” And Julian would nod and be cool, but he’d spend the rest of the night in my room, and it was always nice to have the company. Because both of us knew what geese sounded like.
The Lovells gave Evan a totally free hand with the farm, as far as reconstruction went. They told him he could start from scratch—tear down everything except the Manor, if he wanted. He must have hired just about everybody in Sherborne and all the little nearby towns that he hadn’t already hired to work on the house—men, women, some who didn’t look much older than me or Tony. All the sheds and outhouses went first off, and all the tools and equipment got stored in one barn while they were demolishing the other. Then Evan started on the fences— he must have replaced every single post and every strand of wire on the whole seven hundred acres. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was walking the fields, making notes and mumbling to himself and scooping up dirt. Sally did the best she could with his hands every night, but all that fall and winter they looked like ground meat.
Anyway, it was all just like the way it was when we were packing up on West Eighty-third, with everything half done, and nothing the same from day to day, and everybody knowing what was going on except me. And in the middle of all that, we started school in Sherborne.
I’ve been putting off talking about that first year of English school. It’s not that it was so awful—I had way worse times at Gaynor when I started there. It’s more that now absolutely everything in the world was out of balance at the same time, completely unfamiliar, from the food and the talk and the way people drove, to the house I was living in and the sounds I heard at night. The Sherborne Boys’ school was new for Tony and Julian, too, but at least they knew the basics, they didn’t have to think about how to be every step they took. If I’d met Meena right off, it might have been a lot different. If I’d had Mister Cat—but I didn’t… worse than didn’t. Okay, it was pretty awful, at the beginning. But so was I.
They do wear uniforms at the Sherborne School for Girls. It’s not a bad uniform—navy-blue blazers, plaid kilt skirts, gray pullovers or white blouses—and there’s more leeway about what you can wear as you go up through the forms, until you get to the Sixth Form, where you’re practically God and you don’t wear uniforms at all. But I was in the Third Form, down in the miserable middle of the pack and stuck with that blue blazer for centuries to come. Putting it on every morning, I felt years younger—a whole life younger—than I had in Gaynor Junior High. It was bad enough being the age I was, but I’d been getting almost used to it; now it felt like I was back being a sticky, whiny, scabby-kneed little girl all over again, and I hated it. I used to practically undress on the bus going home.
That was another thing, the bus. I’ve already said I don’t make friends easily, and being a day girl didn’t help either. There are about four hundred students at Sherborne Girls, and all of them were boarding at the school, living in one or another of the eight houses there, except maybe twenty who went home every day, like me. So I missed out on that bonding experience, too: The thing that happens when people spend months living and eating and studying, and being together all the time. You don’t work up that kind of school spirit on a bus—anyway, I don’t. We were all assigned to the different houses, just like real boarders, but it wasn’t the same thing.
Meena Chari was a day girl, too, but I didn’t notice her much on the bus. She wasn’t one of the ones who came to sit next to me and ask me about life in the States, and did I ever see this or that band, this or that movie star. They tried me out one after another, for a while, but they all gave up pretty quickly. Which was too bad, because some of them were nice, and they never really spoke to me again, ever. My loss, I know that.
Sherborne Girls sits on forty acres of green hill at the western outskirts of town, and it looks like a real manor—just this side of a palace, even—with its two wings spreading out from a central tower. Evan calls places like those “stately piles,” but all I can say is that it impressed the hell out of me that first day, and I was not planning to be impressed. It still does.
The work was so much tougher than Gaynor, I don’t even want to go into it. I’d always gotten pretty good grades at Gaynor (which is different from being a good student, and I knew it then); but this was a different world, no comparison at all. Third form, and they had me taking stuff I wouldn’t have had to deal with until high school—and half of it would have been elective then. English literature, maths, world history, British history, three different science classes, a language (I took Spanish because of Marta) —and we’re not even talking about Games or Information Technology. I was over my head, out of my league, and practically paralyzed that whole first term. And it didn’t help a bit to know what my education was costing Evan and Sally. Tony and Julian both had partial scholarships at the boys’ school—not me. Nobody ever said a word about it.