I’d usually have tuned out by then—I really don’t like eavesdropping. Besides, I wanted to go on knowing as little as I could get away with about Stourhead Farm, even if I had to live there. So I had no idea what was bothering Evan, and I managed to keep Sally from telling me, which she’d have done in a second. I’d lived through an English winter and an entire year of English school. I had my cat, I’d picked up a best friend and—face it—a kid brother; I’d met a boggart, and I knew a ghost. Dorset or no Dorset, I had a summer coming to me.
And we actually had a genuinely hot summer night, somewhere around the middle of June. Dorset does not have a whole lot of hot nights, no matter what the day was like. Come sundown the temperature drops off fast, and the air always feels moist, even when it hasn’t been raining. That’s because of the Bristol Channel—you can’t ever get away from the Channel in Dorset, even inland. It’s not unpleasant, itjust never feels to me like real summer.
But that evening was pure funky, sticky, breathless asphalt New York. My clothes felt as though they’d been ironed right onto me. Everybody wilted, even Sally, who can look like crisp lettuce in the worst weather. Julian got some kind of prickly rash all over him, and fussed until he had to go to bed. Evan and Tony kept making more lemonade, drinking so much of it that you could almost see it evaporating out of their pores, like a mist. Mister Cat flopped down on his side with his legs out behind him, the way a dog does, looking small and damp. When I sat by him and petted him, he rolled over, away from me, so I stopped. Too damn hot even for that.
Finally I got up and walked a little away from the Manor by myself. I felt like Mister Cat: too hot to be around people. The moon hadn’t risen yet. I stood still under a tree whose leaves weren’t stirring an inch, and listened to utterly nothing, which was the strangest thing of all. I’ve already said that it’s noisy in the country, once you know how to listen, and a completely silent country night is scary in a special way. No insects, no frogs, no owls, not so much as a creak or a clunk, or a faraway scurry—none of those nameless nightsounds you get used to, living on a farm. And the silence builds and builds, until it becomes a sound by itself, until it’s just like one of those West Eighty-third Street jackhammers, and all you want is for it to stop. As though something were going to fly apart, burst, split wide open, any minute now, but you can’t tell what it’s going to be. Like that.
Tamsin came toward me through the trees. I hadn’t noticed it up in the hidden room, but outdoors in the darkness there was the faintest sort of glow about her, greeny-violet, the way seawater gets at night sometimes. You can see it a surprising way off, and at first you think it’s fireflies. Miss Sophia Brown didn’t have it—I can’t say if even all human ghosts have it. The three I ever knew did.
“Good evening to you, Mistress Jenny,” she said. “You see, your name remains.” She was wearing a different gown to come out in, this one puffy at the sides, with something almost like a bustle in back. I didn’t like it as much as the first one, but she’d remembered bunches of ribbons over her ears, and those looked lovely. She dipped me a curtsy, and I actually made her one back, which is tricky in shorts.
“I didn’t know you ever left the house,” I said. “Your room.” It was different talking to her outside: She seemed more alive, if that makes any sense—dangerous, even, in a way.
When she smiled at me, I felt her remembering me, just like those ribbons in her hair. “Oh, I may go where I choose, so I remain within the bounds of Stourhead.” Close to, glimmering under those old trees, she looked like a beautiful moth. “But what odds the freedom of a prison?”
There was a soft bitterness in her voice that I couldn’t have imagined. I said, “I didn’t know you felt that way about… I mean, it’s your home.” I sounded like Julian.
“Aye, so it is. And will be while it stands—and after.” Tamsin put her hand on my arm, the first time she’d ever touched me. I didn’t feel anything, but I stared at her fingers against my skin the way people stare at newborn babies. “Oh, look at the perfect little nails, the darling little toes!” Tamsin said, “But Jenny, do we not every one leave home when it comes time to find another? A father’s home for a husband’s—is that not so? And that in turn for a third, for the long home where all will meet again at last. All, all… except such as are bound, ensnared, barred away forever from such joy.” The moon was just beginning to rise, and I could see her hand tightening on my forearm, but there was absolutely no sensation.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I was sorry, because she’d been speaking to me as though we were the same age, even out of the same century, with the same experience, the same understanding. And all I could do was remind her that I was thirteen, from New York, and didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, and I hated myself for it. I really expected her to vanish right there—just forget me completely, like one of the pretty girls back at Gaynor—and I wouldn’t have blamed her for a minute.
But Tamsin… Tamsin only looked at me with such pity in her imaginary eyes as I never saw in my life, before or since. She said, “Child, no, sure I am the blind buzzard here—it’s you must forgive my foolishness. Indeed, how should you know? How should you comprehend what I myself cannot?” She clapped her hands soundlessly. “It’s all mystery anyroad, live or die, leave or stay. Let be—did I not promise to show you the true Stourhead night? Come, so.” And she put her arm through mine.
No, I didn’t feel that either—I couldn’t have, I know I didn’t—but I thought I did, and I can’t explain it any better than that. She looked so solid, not transparent at all, and her eyes were as bright as Julian’s when he’s got a surprise for you. At the time I’d have sworn up and down that I felt the pull and bump of another human body in the bend of my arm, and when I think back on it now, I remember. Like Tamsin remembering the world.
I yelled back to the house that I was going for a walk. Sally called that she might want to come with me, but I pretended I hadn’t heard. Tamsin led me down the rutted tractor path that runs to the south fields, but she turned away from it before we got there, toward a row of huge beech trees that the Lovells kept after Evan to cut down because most of them were half-dead. Evan wouldn’t do it. He said they were as old as the Manor, and belonged there as much as we did. By day they looked a mess—all bald and twisted and shedding bark, putting out leaves on one branch in ten—but now they stood up over us like fierce, proud, horrible old men. No, I don’t mean horrible; more like people who’ve suffered so much that it’s made them mean. But Tamsin was so happy to see them she let go of me and ran ahead, floating through the moonlight, not quite touching the ground. When she reached the first tree she swung around it to face me, and if the trees looked like men, she looked as young as Julian.
“Still here—oh, still here!” she called—halfway singing, really. “Oh, still holding to Stourhead earth, they and I.” She hooked her arm around the tree and swung again, as though she was dancing with it. I knew she couldn’t have touched it, felt the bark or the dry leaves, any more than I could have felt her arm against mine— but nobody looks as beautiful, as joyous, as Tamsin looked right then when they’re feeling nothing. Nobody, ghost or not, I don’t believe it.