“No,” Meena said. “Absolutely, positively not. Not possible.” She took my hands and held them tightly between hers, and that felt comforting, but what I saw in her face didn’t make me feel any better. She stayed over that night, but she didn’t want to hear anything about the stretch of heathland, ashy-purple with moor-grass and ling, that floated into my room like Mary Poppins while we were lying awake talking about boys. I don’t know whether she fell asleep, but after a while I couldn’t hear her voice anymore. I just lay holding Mister Cat and feeling my bed under me, but looking up at a thousand-year-old sky that couldn’t be there, and smelling rain that had fallen a thousand years ago.
There was a young Lovell, just about my age. I didn’t know about him until it was too late.
His name was Colin. He came down with a bunch of Lovells one afternoon to bug Evan about exporting or something. Colin looked like a string bag of yams, his skin was worse than mine, he whined like a gnat, and he homed in on me like a heat-seeking missile. Julian hacked him with a croquet mallet accidentally on purpose; even Tony came out of his studio to glower silently at him. Tony’s got a glower that blisters paint at fifty yards, but old Colin never noticed. His nose was wide open, as Marta would have said: He followed me wherever I went on the farm, and there wasn’t a thing I could do except be nice to him. It was fun, in a way, feeling like a siren for once, but I could have done without it right then, with the world of Stourhead Farm shifting around me so constantly that just crossing a barley field was like trying to find your seat in a pitch-dark movie theater, where the only light comes from the screen, and faces and scenery go flickering over you until you have to stand still and wait for your eyes to understand and adjust. And with Colin Lovell buzzing after me I never had one instant that whole day to stand still. Which was why we ran slap into Kirke’s Lambs.
No, to be fair, it wasn’t really Colin’s fault. I’d been getting glimpses of people—as opposed to landscapes—for a few days already, though I didn’t tell Meena about them. Mostly I saw them from a distance, either driving sheep and cattle along roads that weren’t there anymore, or plodding off somewhere through the rain in weary little groups of two and three. I hadn’t seen any real faces yet, or heard voices. I didn’t want to hear voices.
What happened was this: I was showing Colin through the new walnut orchard, and he was pretending to know a lot more about grafting than he did—he really was trying to impress me—and between one damn minute and the next, the entire orchard seemed to fly away, and we were standing on what felt like that path I’d walked with Tamsin and never found again, the one where she remembered waiting to see the visiting carriages come sweeping into view on the high road. It was foggy and cold, and there were huge, shapeless figures moving all around us, making me back up close against Colin. He liked that, because he thought I was being friendly, but I was too scared to tell him to piss off because I knew what those creatures were. They were big men riding big horses, and even through the mist I could tell that they were wearing scarlet coats and plumed silver helmets, and jackboots, like pirates. Like soldiers.
Colin was telling me how many different kinds of walnuts there are, and why English walnuts are the best, but I was hearing the soldiers talking to each other. They sounded very far away, but so did he; their voices were deep and thin at the same time, and distorted, as though the tape were dragging, but I could make out most of the words. They were talking about the rebels.
“… Sedgemoor, the week after Sedgemoor… ah, you should have seen the colonel then. Hanged a hundred of them in the market at Bridgewater—practically with his own hands, he did…”
“… Codso, do you tell me that? You weren’t with him in Tangiers—”
“… Aye, Tangiers, and no bloody Bishop Mews there to prate of innocence and force him to spare the lives of such filth…”
“… A gallows every three miles—every three miles, a gallows and a chopper and a cauldron of pitch, you’d see this country quiet fast enough…”
“Jenny? Jenny, did you know that your American pecans are from the same family as walnuts?”
I snapped. I forgot where I was. I hissed at him, “Colin, shut up! Don’t you know who these guys are?”
It’s amazing, when you think about it, but I’ve never yet had anyone look at me as though I were genuinely crazy. I mean, when you really think about it, there should have been dozens by now. But all I’ve got is the memory of Colin, gaping at me and starting to back away, honestly expecting me to start drooling and foaming and jump at his throat. I guess he’ll have to do. He said, “Jenny, what are you talking about? They’re just walnut trees.”
They were, too, and I knew that. I knew that, that’s what I’m trying to explain. But I knew those soldiers, too, just as surely as I knew what was ripening on those trees. Tony had told me all about Colonel Kirke’s dragoons—“Kirke’s Lambs,” they called themselves—and it wasn’t something you forget once the history test is over. Kirke’s Lambs were the military equivalent of Judge Jeffreys, a lynch mob in uniform. Judge, jury, and executioners, the whole crew, and they didn’t even need to wear wigs. When I imagined people like them being turned loose in the Colonies, a century later… I don’t think I’ve ever been that proud again of being an American.
Colin kept backing off. “What are you looking at, Jenny? What guys—what do you mean? Jenny, there’s nobody there.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” I said. “And they can hear us, too, so for Christ’s sake put a sock in it.” I was just saying that to keep him quiet—I didn’t think Kirke’s gang actually could hear us, away off in 1685—but three of the dragoons reined in their horses and looked straight at us, right on the money. One of them had one blue eye and one brown eye; a second man had a scar running from the left corner of his mouth to his left ear. A third was the handsomest man I’ve ever yet seen, except for his mouth, which was like another scar, thin and white, a bloodless welt. I’d know every one of those faces if I saw them again.
“Voices,” the scarred dragoon said. “I heard them.”
The handsome one said, “Cornet Simmons, you’re drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.” His mouth hardly moved.
Colin called, “Jenny, I’m going back to the house. I think my father’s leaving, anyway.”
“There!” Cornet Simmons said. “There, by the stump. I heard a bloody voice, I tell you.”
There wasn’t any stump where I stood, but he was staring right into my eyes. His were a streaky blue—he was drunk, back there in the seventeenth century, hunting rebels on the Yeovil road—and he kept blinking and shaking his head… but he saw me. I know he saw me.
The dragoon with the mismatched eyes laughed suddenly: one short machine-gun burst. He sounded closer and clearer than the other two, I don’t know why. He said, “Ghosts, it’s ghosts you’re hearing, Simmons—and why not? Country’s full up, as many of them as the Colonel’s made around here.”
“Aye, that’ll be it,” the handsome one said. “Ghosts. Close ranks, Cornet Simmons. Business in Yeovil tonight, and Taunton after. Close ranks.”