Mister Cat knew. He began to come looking for me, day or night—not even bothering to stay cool, but bursting in with a fullthroated, full-tilt, red-alert Siamese yowl—and I learned to drop whatever I was doing, make whatever excuse I could get away with, and follow him down to the cellar, up to the Arctic Circle, out to one of the barns—the North Barn, usually—or even to Sally’s garden. For his own personal reasons, Mister Cat had taken the case.
And he was always there, wherever Mister Cat led me: tall and still, looking much more like a living person than Tamsin did. Maybe that was because of the robes and the wig (wigs, really—he remembered three or four styles); or maybe it was that he knew what he wanted, dead or alive, so being dead didn’t make any difference to him, the way it did to Tamsin. Meena thought he didn’t know he was dead. She said there were a lot of ghosts like that in India. “They come marching in to dinner and expect to sit down with everyone. Or they get into bed with their wives or husbands, because that’s where they always slept. It’s very sad.”
Nothing sad about Judge Jeffreys, not in his own time and not now. He hung around, pacing a bit now and then, murmuring to himself sometimes, but never the least bit impatient, never anything but waiting. I don’t think he knew for a minute whether he was standing in Albert’s water dish or Sally’s tomato patch, and I know he didn’t see the farm workers as they passed him by, or Evan, Sally, Tony, or Julian, even if he was in the kitchen when we sat down to dinner. Nobody else ever saw him, of course—although Julian kept looking right at him and shaking his head a little, as though there were some insect buzzing around him. But of everyone and everything on the whole damn farm, Judge Jeffreys only saw me.
Even after everything that happened, I still think those were the worst moments of all, those times when he’d stand behind my chair, or beside me while I was washing dishes and talk to me in that rustly voice of his. It wasn’t that he said anything that creepy or terrifying; mostly he just repeated over and over, “I have come for her. Tell her.” But what he felt like, there at my shoulder, whether he spoke or not… I don’t know how to write about that. The best way I can put it is that the presence of him rustled like his voice, like an attic full of old dead bugs: the empty husks of flies in ragged spiderwebs, still bobbing against the window—the beetles and grasshoppers that froze to death winters ago—the dusty rinds of little nameless things stirring on the floor in a draft, crunching underfoot wherever you step. Judge Jeffreys didn’t just sound like that. He was that.
I couldn’t speak to him, not with people there—besides, most of the time I couldn’t have gotten a word out if I’d wanted to. But once, when I was by myself, waiting outside the South Barn to meet Julian for a cricket lesson—I saw him coming toward me over the young grass, the way I’d dreamed it and wakened to find Sally holding me. Now it was real, and everything in me wanted to run, but it was funny, too, because Mister Cat was stalking right beside him, looking as professional as Albert when he’s got his sheep all lined up. Judge Jeffreys ignored him.
I spoke first—I’m still proud of that. I said, “You won’t find her. And if you could, you couldn’t touch her. You can’t do anything to her.” I squeaked a little on the last bit, but otherwise it came out all right.
Judge Jeffreys smiled at me. He had a tired, thoughtful, attentive kind of smile, as though he really was considering the merits of what I’d said. Tony told me that a lot of Dorset folk who were tried at the Bloody Assizes honestly believed that he’d understood their innocence and was going to let them go. He said, “She will come to me.”
“Oh, no, she won’t,” I said. “Not ever.” My voice was still pretty wobbly, but the words were clear. I picked up Mister Cat and held him against my chest, because I was shaking.
Judge Jeffreys said, “She belongs to me. Since first I spoke her name and bowed over her hand—since first our eyes kissed across her father’s table.” I hadn’t imagined he could talk like that. He said, “From that moment, she was mine. She knew then—she knows now. She will come.”
Mister Cat snarled in my arms. I thought it was because I was holding him too tight, but when I eased up he kept glaring at Judge Jeffreys and making that jammed-garbage-disposal sound of his. Judge Jeffreys pursed his lips, made his own mocking puss-puss sound at Mister Cat, and smiled again. “Her cat disliked me also. I grieved that greatly once.”
“Grieved?” I said. “Grieved over anything? You? I don’t believe it.”
Judge Jeffreys’s chuckle was like the gasping hiss of our old steam radiator on West Eighty-third Street. “Aye, of a certainty, for the wretched creature held more sway with Tamsin Willoughby than any notions of her imbecile Monmouth-loving father. I entertained certain hopes that she might endear me to her mistress by fawning upon me, but she showed her detestation so plain that I took a cordial pleasure in teaching pretty Puss to swim, the day following the burial. She proved a poor pupil, but no matter. Tamsin Willoughby already belonged to me, as surely that beast belonged to her.”
I said, “She loved Edric Davies. She hated you with all her heart. You had to know that.”
That got him—only for a second, but it was something to see. The handsome dead face absolutely convulsed, like something hit by a car, flopping in the road. Out of control. “That damned Welsh villain! That canting, cozening, rebel-loving rogue! Jesus God, to see him—to sit watching, day on day, as he plied his vile sorcery against her susceptible innocence. A hundred times—a thousand!—oh, but I was hard put not to leap from my chair and strangle him where he sat, twangling at the jacks and looking sideways, looking, looking at her…”
Tony says that he used to foam at the mouth when he got properly up to speed in court. I didn’t think a ghost could do that, but I didn’t want to find out. I said, “They loved each other. They were going to be married.”
He stopped raving like that, on a dime, and he stared at me in a new way, really seeing me. His face smoothed itself out, getting back that gentle, patient, almost fragile look he’d had before. “Married, you say? Good God, the villain would have betrayed and abandoned her ere they’d gone ten miles. But she was the purest innocent ever drew breath, my Tamsin.” My stomach turned right into a bowling ball when he called her that, in that voice. “What could a shining angel know of the snares and ruses of so licentious a knave? I will bless the name of the Almighty for three centuries more, and three yet after those that I was in time to offer her an honorable love and a marriage such as no jumped-up tradesman’s family could have dared imagine. As to Master Davies, he fled before me as a demon flees the face of the risen Christ. I told her so, at the last. She died in my arms, at peace, knowing herself cleansed and free.”
And here comes another one of those moments that I wish I hadn’t promised myself to write down honestly when I got to it. Because it’s very embarrassing to say that just then, just for a bit, I believed him, even knowing what he was. Or maybe I believed that he really had loved Tamsin—or at least that he really believed he had. I’d never met anyone like him. He was completely out of my league, that’s all.
But then he blew it, even so. He’d been keeping a little distance between us—as though he didn’t want to get too close to Mister Cat—but when I said, “No, she’s not at peace, and she won’t ever be at peace until she finds out what happened to Edric,” he took two long, floating strides and he was there, towering and whispering, his face suddenly gone dim, almost featureless, and his eyes glaring white. I tried to back away, but I couldn’t move.