I’d kept my promise about that, even though I was so much in the habit of not saying a word about Tamsin to anyone that it was really work. But it was worth it, too: Not just for the plain relief of dropping all my fears and confusions in someone else’s lap, but because of who that someone was. I said, “It’s the Other One, Judge Jeffreys. The billy-blind kept warning me. Meena, he’s not gone, the way she told me—he’s somewhere close by, and the more restless she gets, the more active, so does he. And she knows it, or she halfway knows it, and she’s so frightened she can barely hold herself together. That’s what I think, anyway.”
We were in the Charis’ kitchen, and Meena was showing me how to make a pillau. Over her shoulder she said, “You think he might still be here, still waiting on earth, because of his obsession with her? Is that how it is with ghosts?”
“Is it? You’re the one who grew up with them—you tell me. I’m just starting to wonder if maybe she’s held here because of some obsession of her own. Something to do with Edric, with what happened to him. I don’t know, Meena.”
“In the south they put coconut milk in with the stock,” Meena said. “My mother doesn’t do that, but I like it. Do you know what I wish?” I didn’t say anything. Meena said, “I’d like to see that painting of her.”
“I asked her about it once,” I said. “She didn’t have any idea where it might be, after so long. I’ve looked for it a few times, but if it’s in the house I’m not seeing it. Anyway, I don’t know what help it’d be. She says the guy was a rotten painter.”
“This isn’t an art class. Watch now—when you put the rice in for frying, you have to do it with your fingers, so the grains fall separately. Watch, Jenny! I still think it might tell us something the painting.
So we went looking. Whenever Meena was over for an afternoon or a weekend, we slipped off and went through the Manor—east wing, west wing, all three floors, and every damn room we could get into, including my lady’s chamber, just in case Roger Willoughby’d been into hiding more than chaplains. Nothing. Meena was all for scraping off some of the older portraits, on the chance that the one of Tamsin might have been painted over, but I was afraid to try that. We did pry a lot of them out of their frames, though; and we spent a whole miserable day in the cellar, digging blindly around under incredibly dirty drapes and sheets, and layers of rotting cloth that crumbled away to black powder the moment you touched it. Nothing. Wherever that portrait of Tamsin was, if it was still in the house, we’d never find it.
It wasn’t in the house. It was hanging on the wall in the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant.
I’d never gone in, out of pure snobbery, so I wouldn’t have known. Meena had, and she’d actually noticed the picture, but of course she didn’t recognize it. The only reason I ever saw the thing was that Sally dragged me into the Restaurant one afternoon when we’d been shopping for a long time, and I was suddenly hungry enough that I didn’t care where we ate. Even under the sign with that man’s dreadful gentle face on it was all right with me.
The portrait hangs in a dark corner at the rear of the Restaurant, so I didn’t see it until I was on my way to the john. Then I about wet myself right there, but the ironic thing is that I forgot I had to go. I just stood staring at the painting—not seeing it, you understand, just gaping, slowly realizing what it was. Because there couldn’t be two like that: Tamsin Willoughby, nineteen years old, but looking not much older than me—maybe because the loose white gown she wore was a bit too big for her—with her hair done up high in tumbly curls, the way she remembered it, and her eyes full of someone who wasn’t on the canvas. I don’t know how the painter got it, as awful as he was supposed to be, but somehow you could see Edric in the turn of her neck and the lift of her chin. Just across the room, playing for her, trying like mad not to turn his own head, and turning anyway.
It took forever for Meena and me to get into Dorchester together, until we managed to arrange to meet her father at the university for dinner. That gave us time to have tea by ourselves at the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant, and we stood in front of the portrait of Tamsin for a long time, neither of us saying a word.
“Is that really how she looks?” Meena’s voice was very quiet and young.
“Yes,” I said, “exactly. Except sometimes, when she forgets.”
We didn’t say anything more for some while after that, and then Meena said, “There’s somebody else.”
I said, “What? No, there isn’t. Where?”
Meena pointed. The painter had posed Tamsin in a chair with a tall, narrow back and no armrests. There was a small table to her right, with a book open on it, and to her left a bigger table with some kind of beaker made of copper, or even gold; the painting was too old and dirty to be sure. Meena said, “Look at that. Closely, Jenny.”
In the surface of the beaker—and you had to squint to be sure it wasn’t one more smudge on the canvas—I could just dimly make out a face. Only part of a face, really, but I didn’t need more than a part. I felt my hand at my mouth, though I couldn’t remember how it got there.
“He’s in the portrait,” Meena said. “The painter put him in.”
I didn’t waste time saying no, no, impossible, it couldn’t be. It was him, all right. Maybe the painter thought it helped the composition somehow; more likely he did it out of flattery; most likely Judge Jeffreys ordered him to do it, and who was going to refuse? But why did the Judge—the Other One—why did he want to be in Tamsin’s portrait? The man might have been completely loose in the flue, but when it came to Tamsin he didn’t do anything without a reason. So we just stood there, Meena and I, looking and wondering, while our tea got cold.
On our way out of the café to meet Mr. Chari, we ran into Mrs. Fallowfield. I was always running into Mrs. Fallowfield back then. She lived alone on a tiny farm not far from ours, mostly growing apples, pears, cherries, and I think walnuts. How she managed everything by herself, nobody could quite figure, but she never hired anyone to help with the harvest, or with the grafting and fertilizing either. A tall, skinny woman who could have been sixty or ninety-five, all knobby bones and bundles of gristly muscle, with no lips—just a down-curving slash, like a shark—and bright, hard blue eyes. She wore jeans, thick woolen shirts, and army boots, winter and summer, and she always had a kind of Russian fur cap crammed on her head, rain or shine, summer or winter. With earflaps.
I didn’t like her much, but Mrs. Fallowfield liked me, in her extremely weird way. The reason for that was that one time the yippy little dog she always carried in a pocket of her duffel coat—it looked like a kind of pink possum with mange—got lost and wound up at Stourhead Farm, with Albert the collie about to turn him into dog jerky. Albert’s very territorial. I scooped the nasty thing up—it bit the hell out of my finger—and took it home to Sally, who called Mrs. Fallowfield, and she came right over and got it. I still remember shivering to see it scuttle up her sleeve like a mouse and dive into her pocket. I’d never seen a dog do that before.
“Thank ’ee,” she said to me. “I wun’t forget.” And God knows she didn’t. She kept turning up, from then on, in the fields, or stumping along a back road or a Dorchester street—where she didn’t belong any more than a boggart would have—or crossing our land to check out Evan’s no-till technique. And somehow she’d always come by at just the right time to stop me and ask how I was doing in school, or how a city girl was getting along on a Dorset farm these days. Her voice went with the rest of her: It sounded like chunks of coal rattling down a chute. But I’d stand and answer her questions as politely as I could. I was always polite to Mrs. Fallowfield.