Sally handled it pretty neatly, considering she was just learning how to be a stepmother. She leaned into the backseat and caught both of Julian’s hands, very gently, but really quickly. Sally’s got big hands for a woman—she can reach tenths on the piano, and she can do card tricks and shuffle a deck like Maverick or somebody. She asked him, “Tell me about boggarts. What’s a boggart?”

Tony answered her. “It’s a sort of brownie. Lives in your house and plays stupid tricks.” Julian lunged for him again, but Sally had him. “Julian,” she said. “I’m a Yank, I don’t know anything, you tell me. Why is it so terrible if someone calls you a boggart?”

Julian wasn’t exactly crying, but his nose was running and he had to swallow a couple of times before he could talk. He said, “Boggarts are ugly—that’s why he’s always calling me that. They’re small, and they’ve got warts and bumples and all, and they like to live in the cupboards and under the floor. But they’re not always mean—you can make friends with a boggart if you’re really nice to him. You leave milk out for them, and things. I just thought it would be funny if we had one.”

Tony started to say something, but Evan caught his eye, and he shut right up. Evan said, “Well, if it’s not a boggart, it’ll be something else, likely enough. Dorset’s full of ghosts and hobs and bogles, and things that go boomp i’ the nicht. And Stourhead Farm’s been around long enough that we’ve probably got a grand mob of them already settled in. Some of them probably knew Thomas Hardy and William Barnes.”

(This is probably going to come up again, so I have to put in that I didn’t know who he was talking about then. I do now, because Meena’s made me read all her Thomas Hardy books. He’s all right. I can’t stand William Barnes.)

Evan told us stories the rest of the way down, as the land got steeper and greener and the poor little Escort kept overheating. I can’t remember all of them, but he talked about bullbeggars and Jack-in-Irons, and the Wild Hunt, which was scary, and about the Black Dog, and a weird thing called the Hedley Kow. With a k. He was good, better than Norris even—he did the different accents, depending on where the stories came from, so Julian kept sniffling and giggling all the time, and Tony forgot to be superior and just sat there glued, I could tell. That’s the thing about Tony. He really thinks nobody can read what he’s feeling—he really works on it—but everyone always knows.

I dozed off a third time in the middle of a story about someone called The Old Lady of the Elder Tree. I was actually trying to stay awake, because it was interesting, but I fell asleep and dreamed about Mister Cat. In the dream the quarantine was over, and I was coming to get him out of his cage, and he stood up and put his paws on my face, the way he does. It was so real and sweet that I woke up, but it was just Julian asleep on my shoulder with his hair brushing my cheek, and we were at Stourhead Farm.

So far, the hard part about writing a book isn’t telling what happened, even if it happened a long time ago—it’s trying to call back, not just the way you felt about the thing that happened, but the entire person who felt that way. Writing about the early days at Stourhead Farm is like that.

After six years, Stourhead’s just ordinary, I guess that’s the only word. When I’m here I can wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window, and if there’s an old floppy cow named Lady Caroline Lamb looking back in at me, that’s as ordinary as the sound of Evan’s old floppy Jeep on the far side of Spaniards Hill, or the way the air around the kitchen well sort of trembles, because of the electricity from the pump. As usual as Tony dancing between the cabbage rows, when he’s not off touring somewhere, practicing his entrechats or whatever in the South Barn with Mister Cat and a bunch of chickens for an audience. Natural as hearing Julian, who’s the only one of us home now, bugging Eflie John or William or Seth to let him drive the baler. Ordinary as not feeling Tamsin anywhere in the house, ever again, when I wake.

But I can’t get to Tamsin yet, although that’s really all I want to write about. Meena says I absolutely have to describe what Stourhead Farm was like when Evan and Sally took it over, and the trouble they had bringing it back to being a working farm, the way it is now, and especially how everything was for me back then, being snatched right out of New York and plopped down on this raggedy ruin of a Dorset estate. And she’s right, I know that—that’s what you do when you’re writing a book. But it’s hard.

First off, it was a ruin, Stourhead—even a West Eighty-third Street child could see that. Not that I knew what a real farm was supposed to look like, except you had to have cows. But I didn’t need to notice that half the fences were caved in like old people’s mouths, or that the two barns and all the little sheds and coops and pens were dark and soft looking, as though they’d been rained on for years, and that what wasn’t rotting was rusting, from the plows and harrows and stuff like that to the well casings and even the wheelbarrows. All I had to do was watch Evan’s face, seeing his eyes going back and forth between Sally and those crumbly barns, between the boys and the scrawny chickens scratching around their feet, between me—still sitting in the car when everyone else had gotten out—and the house, “the Manor,” people around here still call it. I just looked at his face, and I knew he was feeling like pure pounded shit, and I was glad.

You see, he hadn’t really thought about anything but the soil. Evan’s like that. He can scoop up a handful of earth and sniff at it, even taste it, and tell you what it’ll grow and what it won’t, and what it just might grow if you add this or that or something else to it. And he’s always right, always—the same way some people can tell you where to dig for water or what the weather’s going to be tomorrow, that’s how Evan is with dirt. But it hadn’t ever occurred to him how it would be for his boys, for Sally and me, to be living right on that dirt, in a falling-down house at the end of the world. All that planning and dreaming with Sally, and it just hadn’t come up.

Sally was good. I didn’t know to be proud of her then, but I am now, when I think of her standing and staring across a rutty dirt road and a stretch of baby-barf-colored dead grass at the house that had looked so great in the Polaroids. I couldn’t see her face, but she said in this perfectly daily voice, “Come on, Jenny, let’s go. We’re home.”

Everybody carried a couple of suitcases or boxes, because you couldn’t drive right up to the house back then. You can now, of course—it took Evan a year to find the original carriageway about two feet down, under three centuries’ worth of guck—but I’ll always remember the lot of us, heads down, nobody saying a word, just schlepping our stuff across that dirt road toward that old, old house that didn’t want us. I remember Sally shifting a duffel bag to carry it under her right arm, so that she could reach out with her left hand to take hold of Evan’s arm. The way he looked down at her I’m really not a total idiot. I knew damn well, even then, that Norris hadn’t ever looked at her like that.

And I remember the windows. There were so many of them—round and long and square and pointy—and because the sun was slanting down behind us, all those windows were blazing up as though the house was full of fire, you couldn’t look straight at it. There was one small, sharp window on the third floor that didn’t reflect the sun at all. It looked absolutely black, surrounded by all those others, like a hole in the sky, with the darkness of space showing through.