Tamsin stopped before we reached the trees, putting her arm out in front of me. For a moment I thought the Black Dog was with us again; but he never made a sound, and there are too many dead leaves under the beeches for a big animal to move quietly. Tamsin whispered, “Stay” to me; and then, louder, “Will you have forgotten me so soon, old friend? Not you, surely?”
There was a sudden raspy grunt up ahead, and one loud crash in the undergrowth, and something darker than the night hoped away beyond the line of trees. It looked as big as the Black Dog—bigger—but I couldn’t make out whether it was running on two legs or four. It turned once to look back at us, and its eyes were yellow as gold. Tamsin said softly, “A pity.”
“What’s a pity?” I asked her. “What was that?” Tamsin pretended not to hear me. She did that a lot when she didn’t want to answer a question, just as I did with Sally. She said, “And yet, one turn around Stourhead Farm in your fair company, and here are folk I’ve not seen since my father died, waiting to welcome me. Not only those two, but others, others… I think you must be my good fortune come to find me, and calling yourself Mistress Jenny.” She made to ruffle my hair, and I will swear to this day that I felt the one little breeze of the night cooling my sweaty neck. I know it had to be a coincidence. I’m not saying it wasn’t.
“What others?” No chance. Tamsin said, “Child, we will part here, an it please you. Your mother will be waiting, and I… I have affairs left too long untended. Stay on the path, and it will have you home before you can say my name entire, which is Tamsin Elspeth Catherine Maria Dubois Willoughby. I will come for you again.”
Even this close to the Manor, I wasn’t crazy about being left alone in a night that was turning out to be practically as inhabited as West Eighty-third Street. But I didn’t have a vote—Tamsin blinked out with her last word, and I made my way home, looking over my shoulder a hot. Sally tried to be angry with me for being gone so long, but it was too hot. Julian was still up, fussy and miserable, so I read him one of his William books until he fell asleep. I took the book to bed with me, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to sleep either, but I was, and I dreamed all night of the Black Dog.
Fourteen
Night’s never been the same for me again.
I’ll never know exactly how wandering over Stourhead Farm with me at night became a habit of Tamsin’s—if ghosts even have habits. She’d be there, waiting by the South Barn or under the chestnut tree behind the dairy, every two or three evenings; and sometimes it felt as though we were two old ladies out for their regular constitutional stroll, the same way they’d been doing for years. But for me, each time had to be the first—I couldn’t ever afford to take our meetings for granted, even if she could. Tamsin might forget me any time at all, just forget forever to come and find me, and that would be that. So whenever I smelled vanilla and caught sight of her, glowing so gently in the twilight, smiling to see me (she was always careful never to pop out of nowhere, like a ghost in a movie), all my insides would jump right up from a standing start, the way crickets leap up out of the grass. I suppose I’ll be that way about a man someday, but it hasn’t happened yet.
The thing is, we were the only people who knew what moved around the Manor and the farm after nightfall, Tamsin and me. I mean, Julian did see the boggart, and Sally’s always had her suspicions, but nobody knows, not even after everything that happened. Right now it’s about ten o’clock, and I’m writing this in Sally’s music room, which she’s very sneakily turned into the most comfortable place in the whole house. Tony’s dancing in Edinburgh, Julian’s off somewhere with his newest girlfriend, and Sally and Evan are in the North Barn with Lady Caroline Lamb, who’s due to drop a calf tonight, and always needs company. Your typical rural Dorset evening. Nothing much going on that Thomas Hardy wouldn’t recognize.
And if I just stand up and walk to the front door, and open it, and look outside, past the courtyard, past both barns and the dairy and the cowpen and the workshop… out there in the dark there are creatures moving around who have been out there since before the Manor was ever built—since before there were people in Dorset, for all I can say. And I’ve seen them. I’ve spoken to them, I’ve run from them, and two of them maybe saved my life, and maybe more than my life. You can pave Dorset over from Cranborne to Charmouth, Gillingham to Portland Isle—they’ll still be there, come nightfall. I really know this.
The funny part is that before we got here Stourhead Farm came that close to being declared an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), because of one particular species of vole that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere but in this part of West Dorset. Which would have meant the end of Stourhead—you can’t farm an SSSI—but there isn’t a country in the world that has a Strangeness Preserve, so we were all right. Nothing that lives on our land counts as an endangered species.
Since I couldn’t ever know for certain when Tamsin would show up, I always had to go by feeling, and whether I had it right or wrong, it made for some bad moments. Once we were all in the car, bound for a movie in Yeovil, and I backed out at the last minute— literally jumped out on the driveway—because I suddenly just knew that Tamsin was waiting for me. She was, too, that time, but it took a ton of explaining when everybody got home. And when I went out at night—“to stretch my legs,” “to clear my head,” whatever excuse I used—I’d have to deal with Julian at one end, wanting to come with me, and Sally at the other, because she never fell asleep until she knew I was in the house. One time I was on the phone to Meena, and I saw a pale shiver at the window that I was sure had to be Tamsin, and I just cut Meena off—just hung up and ran outside to be with her. But it was some sort of bird, a nightjar, whatever, and I had to call Meena back and apologize. I never did that again, hang up on Meena, even when it was Tamsin.
We covered Stourhead Farm on those walks, Tamsin and I, and sometimes the cats, chasing each other practically under our feet and vanishing again. Tamsin just wafted along beside me like dandelion fluff, like a toy balloon that got away. The truly amazing thing was that she absolutely remembered every field, every crop: She’d say things like, “Ah, you’ve let this meadow go back to rye-grass; my father was forever making trial of the French grasses— lucerne, sainfoin and those.” Or, again, “I vow, Jenny, how wonderful well they do drain in these times of yours. We’d no such pipes and culverts, no such siphon engines—only spades, only ditches filled with stones and bramble. Oh, could my father have seen those pipes!” And she’d actually sigh, and we’d move on. She was a country girl, all right, Tamsin Willoughby, dead or alive.
The sheep weren’t ever aware of her when we’d cross their downland pasture (sheep are barely aware they’re sheep), but she used to scare the hell out of the collie, Albert. Nothing short of foxes threatening a new lamb ever roused that dog; but whenever I passed by with Tamsin, he’d race to head us off, plant his feet and go into an unbelievable frenzy of barking until he actually lost his voice. And that did scare the sheep, so we stopped walking there.