Meena put her hands on my arms. “Either way, you are to stay out of it. Understand me, Jenny.”
She sounded so totally unlike herself—so much older, so tense and bleak—that I gaped at her for a moment. “I have to help her. Nobody else can help her but me.”
Meena gripped my arms tighter. “How will you help her? What plans do you have? You don’t have any plans.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I can’t be with her every minute—it’s all I can do to keep up with her, the way she’s zigging and zagging around the place. But if I can keep a watch on him, if there’s some way I can stay on his trail—”
“No!” Either Meena actually shook me a little or else she was trembling so hard that I felt it myself. “Jenny, this is like me and the Hundred-Acre Wood—I really will drag you away by the hair this time, if I have to. I don’t care about your Tamsin, whatever happens to her—I’m sorry, but I don’t. I care about you.”
For one really crazy minute I almost imagined Meena actually being jealous of Tamsin and me, the way I’d been so wildly jealous about Tamsin’s fascination with Tony. That notion passed in a hurry, and I was just me, flushed and clumsy as always, trying to say something that wouldn’t sound too stupid. “I know you do,” I said. “I mean, I really do know.” Not much, but that’s me, every time. “But he’s dead, and I’m alive—what can he do to me? I’ve never understood people being scared of ghosts. Poor Tamsin can’t even touch me.”
“Tamsin doesn’t wish you harm,” Meena said stubbornly. “You will not go near him, Jenny. You have to promise me.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
We looked at each other. Meena finally sighed, and laughed a very little bit, and stood back from me. “Well,” she said. “In that case.”
If it hadn’t been for Mister Cat, I don’t know what might have happened. He’d plainly been having the same sort of problem with Miss Sophia Brown that I was having with Tamsin. I’d see them together once in a while, and sometimes get a glimpse of her by herself, trotting off on one of those important cat errands that even ghost-cats have. But she didn’t sleep on my bed with Mister Cat anymore, or materialize to join us when we were hunting through the Manor for Tamsin. Mister Cat was distressed about it, too, and kept saying so, loudly and constantly. I told him I couldn’t do a damn thing about it, and he said he already knew that, but still.
Meena and I had started with some notion that the two of us could somehow keep track of Judge Jeffreys’s comings and goings, and stay close to Tamsin that way. Not a chance, not even with school out. Meena spent as much time at Stourhead Farm as she could get away with, but her family had Cotswold-vacation plans, no way out of it; and anyway, she wouldn’t have been able to see Judge Jeffreys—she was just determined to be there when I did. When I look back at us, all I can do is laugh. Now that I can.
One thing that helped was the fact that Judge Jeffreys wasn’t nearly as easy moving around the farm as I’d expected he would be. Tamsin had lived her whole short life there: three centuries dead or not, there wasn’t anything she didn’t remember about Stourhead—at least, when she wasn’t panicky. But Judge Jeffreys stuck pretty close to the Manor when he appeared—maybe because he was afraid of getting lost, maybe just because he knew she’d have to return sooner or later. I still don’t know how it really works with ghosts.
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.”