Tamsin said, “Jenny, then. You must remind me when I forget— and I will forget, because that is what I do, that is all I am. You would think—would you not?—that after so many, many years, surely there would be naught left me to forget, who’d seen but twenty summers when I… when I stopped.” She always used that word. “Yet the voices under the window do tell me names, speak of changes and wonders—teach me songs, even—and I learn these things for a little, then, swiftly forget them, too. As I forget why I must be here at all.”
Writing the words down the way she spoke them, it looks pitiable somehow, as though she were asking for sympathy. But that wasn’t the way they sounded, not for a minute, and it wasn’t in the way she carried herself, nor the way she looked at me. The Persian cat was rubbing against her foot, and that was weird: one see-through impossibility comforting itself by making contact with another. I asked, “Who’s she? My cat’s practically left home because of her.”
Tamsin really laughed then, and it sounded like rainwater plinking off leaves and flowers after the storm’s gone by. “Her name is Miss Sophia Brown. I could never forget that, as long as we have been together. She’s all grand hogen-mogen one minute and a flirting flibbergib the next, but we fadge along pretty smartly—at least until your fine black gentleman presented himself. I’ve never known her gloat so upon a lover.”
“Me neither,” I said. “Mister Cat’s got a girlfriend back home, but I think she was just using him. The thing is, he’s alive, and your Sophia Brown… I don’t know. I wouldn’t exactly say they had much of a future.”
“La, what odds makes that to a cat?” Miss Sophia Brown and Mister Cat were standing nose to nose, both of them purring in complete satisfaction with their own taste in pussycats. As we watched, Mister Cat began washing Miss Sophia Brown’s face, and if there wasn’t anything actually there to be washed, or held still with a paw behind her right ear, he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if ghost-cats got hairballs. I decided I wouldn’t wonder about that.
Tamsin said, very quietly, “Cats have no cares for who’s quick, who’s… stopped. Shall we be like them?”
We looked at each other. I said, “You smell like vanilla.”
Tamsin’s eyebrows went up, but one corner of her mouth twitched just a bit. It seemed to me that she was looking maybe a bit less transparent—I could even see something like color in her face, and in the long, close-waisted gown she was wearing, or dreaming she was wearing. “I smelled you,” I said. “When I was with Julian.”
She’d forgotten. She stared at me for a long moment: flickering, halfway fading, then pulsing stronger as it came back to her. “Candles and singing—a strange tongue, but a sweet air. Aye, I do recall me.”
“That electrician kept saying he smelled vanilla in the Arctic Circle—in the kitchen, I mean. Was that you? Were you bugging the workmen, too, like the boggart and the rest of them?”
“Bugging.” Tamsin said the word a couple of times, as if she were nibbling it, turning it over with her tongue. “Bugging—ah, as t’were a harassment, a plaguing, a botheration. Nay, child, that was never me—I but spied betimes upon your hirelings as they hammered and tore at my house, vaporing endlessly the while. By and by I’d no heart to watch further, so I came away and left them to it. Are you contented with their work, Mistress Jennifer . . Jenny?”
I couldn’t tell if she was angry or not about what we’d all been doing to the Manor. I said, “Evan—he’s my mother’s husband—Evan got hired to get this place going again as a real farm. To bring it back to life. It needed a lot of upgrading.”
Tamsin didn’t bother exploring upgrading. She said, “To bring it back to life. As though my home, my land, had stopped along with me. It is not so—you and yours know nothing of Stourhead Farm. I warrant you, there’s more true life within these walls, between the fences that your stepfather spends his days butting together—aye, and walking your bean rows and apple orchards a’ nights—than you’ve encountered in all the days of your own little life. Gorge me that, Mistress Jenny!”
Right then she looked practically solid, which is what happens to Tamsin when she gets excited or worked up about something. Her eyes were wide and bright—they were blue-green, I could even see that now—and her voice made the cats look up, just as they were settling into some serious necking. All I could think to mumble was, “Well, the plumbing really did need some work, it was pretty old. And the soil’s old, too. Evan says the crops weren’t growing because the soil was so tired. We had to do something.”
Tamsin stared at me. After a moment, her eyes quieted down, and she smiled just a bit. “Truth enough, Jenny Gluckstein. I ask your pardon. The land is wearied indeed, and my fine house is a ruin, a daggy relic of antique times—as am I.” She was starting to go filmy gray again, still pulsing slowly between this room and somewhere else. She said, “Truth for truth, I am greatly glad of you and all your family—of your stepbrothers’ tumult and your mother’s music. I am the better for commotion, the better for aught that rouses me, fetches me away out of this cloister of mine. Othergates, I sit as you found me, Miss Sophia Brown dozy on my lap—moonrise on moonrise, year on year, age on age—until the forgetting shall have me altogether. But that must not happen, must not…”
Her voice was floating away, dissolving, and I was afraid that she would, too. I asked, “What is this room, anyway? It doesn’t have a real door, and you can’t see in the window, just out.” There was hardly any furniture: just the chair, and a contraption in the corner like a trunk, but with a bedframe for the lid. The painting I’d seen from the doorway was a portrait of a big, ruddy man in a wig and a long sort of waistcoat, standing next to a shy-looking woman wearing a black gown and a frilly white linen cap on the back of her head. I asked Tamsin again, “What kind of a room is this?”
Tamsin looked a little surprised. “This? This is Roger Willoughby’s priest-closet. Nay, we were no Papists, but my father—though he was always good Charles’s man—saw Rome bound to come in with James, and persecutions with it, and nothing would do but we must build our own hidey-hole for our own chaplain, should we ever have one. My father was a prodigious romantic, you must know, Jenny, with a headpiece full of notions my poor mother never fathomed. But we loved him dearly, she and I, and it grieves me still to think how he suffered when …”
She didn’t finish, and I didn’t know if I ought to prompt her to go on. I didn’t have any idea what the rules were with a ghost. Did they only have so much juice at a time, like a car battery? Would they just fade and go out if you pushed them too much? When she sat alone with her Persian cat in this room, years at a time, the way she said—was she visible then? I said, “When you died—stopped, I mean. That must have been really awful, watching him mourning for you.” Tamsin didn’t say anything. I thought I should probably change the subject, so I asked, “Who’s the Other One?”
Tamsin looked at me as though I were the ghost and she’d just seen me for the first time. I said, “We had some boggart trouble a while back. The cats took care of him”—Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown were chasing each other around the room, playing tag like kittens—“but he told me to beware of the servant and the mistress—I guess that’s you and your cat—and the Other One. Who’s that, when he’s at home and properly labelled?” I picked up that last bit from Julian.
A ghost can’t really turn pale, but Tamsin came close. She put her hands out toward me, and I think she’d have grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me if she could. She said, “Child, Jenny, never ask me that again. Never ask again, not of me nor of any—not of yourself, do you understand me? Promise me that, as we stand here. Jenny, you must promise, if we are to be friends.”
Her fear—and she was terrified, ghost or no ghost—had brought her back to being untransparent enough so that I could smell that odd whisk of vanilla, and even see a bit of a dimple under her left cheekbone. Her hair was a kind of darkish blond, and her eyes had gone deep turquoise, but the exact shade kept cha
nging as I looked into them, as though she couldn’t ever quite remember the color they’d been. Something about that twisted my insides, and I’d have promised her anything to comfort her. I said, “Okay, I won’t. Cross my heart, spit twice, hope to die—I won’t ask about the Other One anymore.”
I knew I’d break that promise when I gave it. Sometimes I think Tamsin knew, too. But she cheered up right away, and after that we just talked, watching Miss Sophia Brown and Mister Cat taking turns ambushing each other, until I really did feel that we were like that, totally unconcerned with who was alive and who wasn’t. I told her about New York and my friends there, and Norris, and how I’d felt about Sally marrying Evan and dragging me off to Dorset—I was pretty honest, anyway—and about the boys, and Meena, and the Sherborne School, and even about grubby old Wilf and his goat. And Tamsin listened, and laughed, and grew more and more visible—more present—until her hair and the flows of her gown swayed with her laughter, and I couldn’t see through her at all, although maybe that was because the room was getting darker. And I actually forgot what she was, just for that little time. I did.
For her part, Tamsin talked mostly about Stourhead Farm, and about Roger Willoughby. “City man, merchant, son and grandson of merchants, why he should have so fancied the life of the soil, who can say? Yet my father believed with all his heart that anyone, man or woman, may learn anything he truly wishes to learn, if only his enterprise be a match for his desire. And if that were never so for any other, yet it was true for my father. For he was no farmer, but he made himself over into one, and never was poet or painter gladder in his trade. Indeed, I never knew a happier man.”
I thought she might turn sad again, the way she had the first time she spoke of her father, but instead she giggled suddenly, sounding just like Meena when she tries to tell a joke and always cracks up before she gets to the punchline. “Jenny, he labored like any hero to cozen his neighbors into draining their grasslands— into daring, even for a season, to fertilize their fields some other road than letting their cattle do it for ’em. Nay, but surely you know farmers by now”—and she dropped into an old-Dorset voice, like the boggart’s—“Nah, nah, zir, mook’s your man, there’s nothing beats your good ripe mook for not overztimulating the zoil, d ’ye zee?” We were both laughing into each other’s eyes, and the cats turned around to hear us.
“They heeded not one word of his advice,” Tamsin said. “They went on farming as they were used, and my father farmed as he would, and time proved him the wiser, though I was not there to see.” She looked away then, out the window. I could hear Tony and Julian calling to each other somewhere.
I asked, “How did it happen? I mean, you dying—stopping—when you were only twenty?” I didn’t know if that was something else I shouldn’t ask her, but you can’t be always changing the subject, even with a ghost. Tamsin’s face did change when she turned back to me—I saw her mouth thin out and her eyes lost some of their color—but she answered clearly, “A flux of the lungs, it was, a catarrh that grew to a pleurisy, then to a pulmonary phthisis. And no one to blame for it but my own bufflehead self, for lacking the wit to come inside on a wild night. Not a soul else to blame, and well-deserved.”
That was all she said about it. Julian was yelling for me now, and when I looked at my watch I was surprised to see that it was coming up on dinnertime. I picked up Mister Cat, who wasn’t pleased about it, and looked at Tamsin over his black head. She said, “We will meet again, Mistress Jenny.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s good. Can I just come and see you here, like Mister Cat?”
Tamsin smiled. “Indeed you may. Or I might become Miss Sophia Brown and seek you in your own chamber. You’ll not be afeard?”
I shook my head. Tamsin reached to stroke Mister Cat’s throat, and he closed his eyes and purred as though he felt it. I said, “Could I ask you one thing? When you talked about all the life in this house, and running around at night all over Stourhead Farm, I was wondering… what kind of life did you exactly mean?”
Tamsin looked at me long enough without answering for Julian to bellow twice more. Finally she said, “I will show you. When I come to you, I will show you.”
Thirteen
Nobody. Not even Meena. All the way down the stairs—all the time I was putting the barriers back in place—all during dinner— as soon as I had a minute to myself I was going to call Meena and tell her everything about Tamsin Willoughby, my own ghost on the third floor. I almost did it the next time I saw her at school, and I almost did it when I spent a whole weekend in London with Meena and her parents. But it was like Julian and me with the boggart, only more so. Keeping secrets, knowing something that no one else in the world knows, no matter how powerful or smart or beautiful they are—it’s deadly addictive. At least it is for me, and it’s something I’m going to have to watch out for all my life. Not that a secret like Tamsin is likely to come along ever again. I know that, too.
I wanted to go right back up there the next day, after I got home from school, but I didn’t. It wasn’t so much that I thought she’d mind; it was more me needing time to believe, to take in what I’d seen, who I’d been talking to—where I’d been, in a way. Because, up in that little hidden room her father had built to hide Church of England ministers… up in that room, there were moments when Stourhead Farm was practically just built, and the first crops just in the ground, and Roger Willoughby was out front roaring at his neighbors about overgrazing, and Tamsin and I were giggling together about whom we’d like to be hiding up here, never mind any chaplains. That’s the way it felt, anyway; and for days—three or four weeks, anyway—even after I came down, I was sort of seasick in time, not completely sure of when I was. Julian noticed it, but he didn’t know what he was seeing. Like me.
Meanwhile there were finals coming up, and Julian forever after me about helping out on the farm, and Meena having a kind of long-distance love affair with Christopher Herridge, who sang in the mixed choir Sherborne Girls shares with the boys’ school. What I mean by long distance is that they mostly just gazed at each other across a lot of heads and pews and violins, singing their hearts out. It was very romantic and doomed, because however large a fit Chris’s family might have had about him dating an Indian girl, it would have been a sneeze, a hiccup, a burp, compared to what Mr. and Mrs. Chari would have done if their daughter brought an English boy home to dinner. So Meena cried a lot— Chris was as cute as they come, no question—and we hung on the phone for hours, me doing my best to console her. Really trying, too, because I was wildly jealous of Chris, and I knew it, and wanted to make up to Meena for that, some way. I’d have days at a time, back then, when it was just impossible to be human, whichever way I turned. I still have them, once in a while.
I kept Tamsin to myself—even from myself, in a way, because I’d make a point of not thinking about her at all until I was in bed at night. Then I’d lie there and wonder what she was thinking about right at that moment, sitting in her chair watching the moon coming up, not knowing or caring whether it was tonight’s moon or tomorrow’s, or a moon from a hundred years ago. Most nights Mister Cat would be on my bed, but sometimes he wasn’t, and I’d be sure he was out with Miss Sophia Brown, being shown around all the old secret places of Stourhead Farm. And I’d decide one more time that Tamsin never meant to come find me and show me things—she’d just been being polite, the way ladies were raised to be in sixteen-whatever. She was probably off with the cats herself, none of them wasting a single minute on me. Around then I’d indulge in one quick sorrowful sniffle and go to sleep.
I’d been braced for disaster when the exam results were posted, so they didn’t look too bad the way they came out. Thanks to Julian, I sneaked through maths, just barely; thanks to Meena, I did better than that in my science classes. I was dead in Spanish, never mind that I had the best accent of anybody—I don’t understand pluperfects and past imperfects in English. But I ate up Literature and World History, and British History, too—I
did almost as well as Meena, who’d been raised on that stuff. I was terrible in Games. Could have been worse.
As for Stourhead, I still wasn’t paying a lot of attention, for all the grunt work Julian had me putting in, but crops were coming up thick and fast everywhere you looked, so I figured the farm had to be back in business by now. But Evan wasn’t a bit happy. I’d hear him talking to Sally at night, always saying the same thing. “I knew it was wrong, from the beginning. I was trying to impress the Lovells—showing off, just bloody showing off, after all that talk about not expecting miracles. I should have gone ahead and done what I was meaning to do in the first place. But the Lovells would have backed off, and I was afraid of losing the situation before I even got started. But I knew, Sally.”
I’d usually have tuned out by then—I really don’t like eavesdropping. Besides, I wanted to go on knowing as little as I could get away with about Stourhead Farm, even if I had to live there. So I had no idea what was bothering Evan, and I managed to keep Sally from telling me, which she’d have done in a second. I’d lived through an English winter and an entire year of English school. I had my cat, I’d picked up a best friend and—face it—a kid brother; I’d met a boggart, and I knew a ghost. Dorset or no Dorset, I had a summer coming to me.
And we actually had a genuinely hot summer night, somewhere around the middle of June. Dorset does not have a whole lot of hot nights, no matter what the day was like. Come sundown the temperature drops off fast, and the air always feels moist, even when it hasn’t been raining. That’s because of the Bristol Channel—you can’t ever get away from the Channel in Dorset, even inland. It’s not unpleasant, itjust never feels to me like real summer.
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