“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.
“I tell you again, Edric Davies is gone,” Judge Jeffreys said. “Rebel, seducer, false Welsh traitor to his anointed king, Tamsin Willoughby need concern herself no longer with fears of the scoundrel’s returning. I’ve seen to that, by God.”
He was standing so close to me that I could feel things like little static sparks crackling between us. I couldn’t see anything, but I’ve read since that that can happen with ghosts and people. It never did with Tamsin. Judge Jeffreys’s voice had gotten very quiet. “A great power was granted me when we met last, Edric Davies and I. I was the unworthy instrument of the Almighty, humbly privileged to speed him to such a doom as all the saints together could never lift from him. There will be no return from where Edric Davies is gone.”
People write and talk about their hair standing on end, their hearts standing still, their blood freezing in their veins. I never knew what that meant until then, when all of it happened to me at once. Between one word of his and the next I was too cold to breathe, too cold even to tremble—and my mouth dried up and tasted like pennies. Judge Jeffreys looked down at me from the gray afternoon moon. He said, “She knows.”
“No,” I said. “Oh, no. No way in the world does Tamsin Willoughby know anything about whatever happened to Edric Davies. No way in the world.”
I saw Julian trotting past the North Barn, loaded down with cricket bats and balls and stumps—he wanted us both to wear white flannels, but I threatened to back out of our lessons, and Julian just loves to be teaching someone something. I said again, really loudly, “She doesn’t know. You’re a liar.”
He didn’t like that. He leaned over me, with his face doing that floppy, melting thing it did before, and the sound that came out of him wasn’t words. My legs turned to string—I can’t think of another way to describe it. I’d have sat down right there, flat on my butt, except that suddenly I was seeing Julian through him, which I hadn’t been able to do a moment before. Then there was only Julian, staring at me out of those impossible gray eyes, saying, “Jenny, you look all funny. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m fine.” But I sounded funny even to me.
“Because if you’re not all right, we can practice later,” Julian said. “Jenny, what is it? What’s the matter?”
My baby brother. I didn’t even send away for him. I said, “Julian, knock it off, I’m fine—a goose just walked over my grave or something. Show me what a shooter is again.”
The weather got warmer, Evan’s no-till crops got taller and better looking than he expected. The new corn was taking hold, the new wells were pumping more water than the old ones ever had, and the Lovells seemed happy as clams. Oh—and the “malaria swamp” in the upper meadows finally got drained, probably for the first time ever. Evan’s got pear trees there now.
But there were other things happening, and only Mister Cat and I had the smallest clue about them. (Miss Sophia Brown, too—she must have known everything, for sure.) You can’t have two three-century-old ghosts in the same place without unsettling things, without swinging that door between now and whenever wide open. And what was beginning to come through wasn’t just Dorset night creatures, or more of Mister Cat’s scuttling sparring partners. We were getting an altogether different class of scary now.
The first ones weren’t ghosts—not unless whole scenes, whole landscapes, can be ghosts or have ghosts. I was washing dishes one morning with Sally, the two of us arguing lazily over who played who in some old movie, when Mister Cat was suddenly on my shoulder—digging in—and the kitchen was filling up with hills, for God’s sake. Sally didn’t notice a thing, which was just as well, since she was being crowded at the sink by shadowy oaks that made the Hundred-Acre Wood look like a Christmas-tree farm. Me, whichever way I turned—with Mister Cat permanently welded to the back of my neck—I came up against great chalky slopes and banks of downland, all tilted on their sides, running away into the ceiling. All transparent, of course, gauzy as Meena’s silk scarves, rippling gently when Sally or I walked through them, as though we’d moved in front of a slide projector. No plowed land, no animals, no people. Just the hills.
That was how it started, but it didn’t stay that harmless for very long. Some of the mirages were always ghostly, even flimsier than Tamsin, but others looked so real that I kept jumping aside to keep from tumbling down a slope that some Willoughby had leveled, or from bumping into huge old boulders looming up in the cornfield or the sheep pasture. As long as it happened in the house it was actually funny, especially with me being the only person aware of anything unusual. Once I forgot and warned Tony about the boggy, weedy pond right in the middle of his shiny studio floor; other times, I’d stand blinking in the doorway of the music room without coming in, until Sally got really annoyed at me. But I couldn’t see her because of the stony meadows between us, or the wild woods.