Me, I was flat out hoping for a dozen boggarts, and fifty pookas, and a whole herd of Hedley Kows, and all those other creatures Evan had told us about on the drive down. Anything that would make it absolutely impossible for us to stay on at Stourhead, anything that would force us at least back to London, even if we couldn’t go home to New York—was for it all the way, no matter how messy or how scary. Anyway, I was for it until the thing that happened in my bathroom.
Sally used to tell me that the English air would do wonders for my skin and, besides, my skin wasn’t nearly as horrible as I thought it was. All I knew was I’d been sprouting torrid new English zits from Heathrow on, and I was developing a hunchy slouch, the way tall girls get, from sneaking past mirrors. Except one, the mirror in my bathroom, where every night and every morning I’d face off with my face one more time. I try any damn thing anybody said might work—all kinds of ointments and soaps and masks, stuff that made my skin tight and flaky, stuff that smelled like rotten eggs, other stuff that was supposed to soothe your skin, only when it dried on you it hurt… I don’t like talking about that time. It was years ago, but it comes right back.
Anyway. I was leaning in close to the mirror, doing exactly what Sally always said not to do, which was squeezing a thing on my forehead which was forever boiling up in the exact same place. (Meena says that it was probably my third eye trying to get me to pay attention, but what it looked like was a zit about the size of an M&M. A bright red one.) Once I got it open, I was going to clean it out with alcohol, and I didn’t care if it burned. I hoped it would burn—then maybe the damn thing would get the idea and leave me alone. And then I heard the voices.
Not words, mind you. I didn’t hear real words, just two voices, one of them squeaky as a Munchkin, the other one a bit deeper, definitely slower—still shrill, mind you, but with an explaining sort of tone, like Tony whispering to Julian about what was happening in a movie. He was really patient with Julian that way, even in those days when he was calling him a boggart.
I swung around, but I couldn’t see anything. It was a small bathroom, no shower even, and no hiding place except in the shadows behind the old lion-foot tub. That’s where the voices were coming from.
I took just a step toward the tub, and I said, “Who are you?” And if that sounds brave or anything, you can hang that notion up right now. I wasn’t afraid of anyone who spoke in tiny squeaks and could hide behind a bathtub. What I was afraid of was that if I wasn’t really careful I was going to start understanding them, because I was almost making words out already. And that was the last thing I wanted, to understand squeaky voices behind the tub.
They went silent for a minute when I spoke, and then they started up again, both of them, sounding excited now. I could have screamed—I felt a scream working its way up through my chest—but that would have brought everybody in, and I didn’t want Sally to know I’d been digging at zits. Probably sounds incredibly dumb, but there you are, that was me. I took another couple of steps, and I stamped my foot down really hard, so my toothbrush rattled in the glass. “I can see you,” I said. “You might as well come out of there. Come on, I’m not going to hurt you.” I threw that in because my voice was shaky, and I didn’t want them to think I was scared.
What that got me was a flood of giggles. Not squeaks, not talk, and not real giggles, either. Nasty little titters, the kind you’re supposed to hear off to one side when you’re walking down the hall. I know those. In school I never let it get me, but then—in that old bathroom, in that strange, smelly old house, with them, whoever they were, spying on me picking my face, and snickering about it, I just lost it, that’s all. I ran at the tub, stamping and kicking out like Julian when Tony’d been teasing him one time too many. It’s a good thing there wasn’t anybody there, or I’d have trampled them flat, I didn’t care if they were Santa’s elves. But they were gone. I heard feet skittering off somewhere in a corner, but no voices, except for Sally in the hall, calling to know if I was all right. I said I was.
That night I lay awake for hours, wishing more than ever that Mister Cat was with me, snoring on my stomach, and I tried to stay cool and decide whether I was going crazy, which I’d always almost expected, or whether there really were boggarts running around in my bathroom. Crazy was comforting, in a way—if you’re crazy, then nothing’s your fault, which was just how I wanted to feel right then. Boggarts were scary, because if they were possible, and possible right here in this house, then all kinds of other stuff was possible, and most of it I didn’t much want to think about. But it was interesting, at least, and crazy isn’t interesting. Handy, I could see that, but not interesting.
When I did fall asleep, I didn’t dream about boggarts exactly. I dreamed that Julian and I had shrunk down to the size of boggarts, and that big people were chasing us with sticks. I don’t know why sticks, but that’s not important, that wasn’t the frightening part. There was something else in the dream, too, something or someone with big yellow eyes, such a raw, wild yellow they were practically golden. Big, big eyes, with a slitty sideways pupil, filling up the dream. We couldn’t get away from them until I woke, all tangled in my sweaty sheets and listening for voices. But I never did hear them again, not those.
Seven
Meena keeps saying this is where I should put in all the stuff about Stourhead Farm, but it’s hard to know where to start. First off, it’s in the country—not that country means much when you’re twenty miles from Julian’s Taco Bell pretty much wherever you are. But when you’ve lived your entire life in downtown Manhattan, waking up to hear cows wondering when they’re going to be milked instead of police sirens, and hearing wild geese yelling overhead instead of jackhammers tearing up West Eighty-third and Columbus, and hearing the plumbing burping like mad because there’s some kind of air pocket in the well instead of drunks puking and crying right under your window… well, that’s it, that’s country. Maybe not to Willie Nelson or Thomas Hardy, but to West Eighty-third and Columbus, it’s country.
Okay, Meena. You can trace Stourhead Farm back to 1671, when Roger Willoughby bought a big piece of a rundown manor—freehold, that’s outright, not like being a tenant farmer. He wasn’t a farmer, he made his money selling supplies to the Royal Navy, but he had all kinds of ideas about farming in his head, and he couldn’t wait to try them out. He wrote letters to the newspapers, he wrote pamphlets on how you could get double yields by rotating the crops just so, and how to breed bigger Dorset sheep, and why everybody in west Dorset should quit growing wheat and raise millet instead. Evan says everybody in west Dorset sat back and waited to see him go under. That’s when they took to calling his big new house “the Manor,” to make fun of him. Roger Willoughby was from Bristol, and in those days he might just as well have been from Madras, like Meena. It’s different now, like everywhere, but not that different. Dorset doesn’t change as fast as some other places.
Well, he didn’t go under, Roger Willoughby. He couldn’t do anything about the sheep—they’re still pretty small—but he must have had some sense about farming, because Stourhead stayed in his family for almost three hundred years. They weren’t gentry, and they weren’t absentee landlords, buying up farms they never saw. They lived on the land, and they always seemed to have their fingers in it, messing around with some new notion. Roger Willoughby planted barley and oats at first, and then peas—and he did try to plant millet, but when it just wouldn’t take, he went back to wheat, like everybody else. Because he might have been a Prodigious Romantic—that’s what Tamsin called him—but he wasn’t crazy.