It’s not a big farm, maybe seven hundred acres. In the States, that’s like a playpen, a backyard, you can’t even make it pay for itself. But it was big enough for this part of Dorset in Roger Willoughby’s time. It used to be bigger—I don’t know how much—but the Willoughbys sold off some corners and slices over the years. Especially in the nineteenth century, when there was a long run of terrible weather, and a bad slump in farm prices. Stourhead just went straight downhill from about 1900 and never really recovered. The last of the Willoughbys sold out after World War II—I think there were four or five owners after them, each one more clueless than the one before. When the Lovells took over, the place was probably the exact same wilderness it was when old Roger Willoughby moved in.
The Lovells were always business people, just like the Willoughbys were farmers. (In England, people always know what your family’s always been.) The ones who own Stourhead actually live near Oxford—Evan mostly goes there to meet with them these days, because they don’t come down here nearly as often as they used to when we were first at Stourhead. Back then they practically lived with us, showing up in red-faced coveys to hold big conferences with Evan about their plans to have Stourhead at least breaking even in a couple of years, and maybe making a profit after that. Evan thought they were as prodigiously romantic as old Roger Willoughby, and I used to hear him telling them so, over and over.
“You can’t turn a farm as exhausted as Stourhead all the way around that fast,” he kept saying. “I’m not talking only about the physical aspect—the barns and the outbuildings and that—I mean the land itself. Your topsoil’s a disaster area—it’s starved for nitrogen, it’s been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet.” One Lovell or another usually started spluttering right about this point, but Evan would just go straight on over him. “You need a fourth well, and very likely a fifth—that’s simply not negotiable. Three wells were just fine in good King Charles’s golden days, but nothing’s what it was back then, including your water table. That’s why the corn’s not growing—that, and the fact that it’s the wrong strain for this acid soil and this climate. And where you do have enough water, in the upper meadows, you’ve got yourselves a proper little marsh bubbling along. The only malaria swamp in England, I shouldn’t wonder.”
The Lovells would always wind up asking Evan if he thought it was possible to salvage the farm at all. And he’d tell them what he always told them: “Yes, but you can’t do it overnight, and you can’t do it on the cheap. It’s going to cost you money and a great deal of time, and if you’re not willing to invest both of those, you might just as well chuck it in and sell the place for a Christmas-tree farm.” Those are really big in Dorset, by the way. I don’t have any idea why.
Watching him with those people day after day was like seeing a whole different Evan, in a way. I mean, he still talked quietly, and his hair was always still messy, and he sometimes actually wouldn’t remember to come in when it rained, because he’d be thinking about something. But he knew what he was talking about—that was the big difference—and all those Lovells knew he knew, and that he didn’t care what they thought, this was the way it was. You can’t fake being like that. I’ve tried.
The Lovells had to be impressed, but I didn’t, not if I put my mind to it. I didn’t see a whole lot of Evan during those early months at Stourhead, except at dinner in the Arctic Circle, because he’d be out all day every day, and I’d mostly be with Sally, trying to deal with the Manor, which kept being torn up and put back together and torn up again—more or less how I was feeling then. I wasn’t a lot of fun for Sally, but I was some use anyway, I’ll say that for myself. I helped clean up after the wiring and plumbing finally got done, and Tony and I swept and dusted and scoured out all the rooms on the first floor and most of the ones on the second. We didn’t say ten words to each other all that time, but we worked well together. I even thought for a hot minute about telling him about the voices in my bathroom, but I didn’t. Today I would, Tony, if you ever read this far.
And if I wasn’t working, I was being dragged all over the farm by Julian—half the time I’d wake up with him tugging at my foot, going, “Oh, come on, Jenny, do, let’s go exploring!” Only exploring, to Julian, could mean climbing around on some old rusty hulk of farm machinery, trying to figure out how it must have worked, or it could just as easily mean getting me to chase him through this dark little hillside oak forest that he started right away calling the Hundred-Acre Wood, like the one in Winnie-the-Pooh. We all call it that now. And sometimes he’d want to search for the room with that dark third-floor window. He bugged Evan so much about it that Evan finally dug out the oldest plans of the house—they have to be kept vacuum-sealed behind plastic, because they’ll crumble right away if they’re exposed to air. Julian and I counted the windows in those drawings over and over again, but there was always one missing. Evan said it happened.
Sometimes we’d hike up and down across the fields—Dorset is all up and down—to the stretch of heathland that I guess was always too bumpy for even Roger Willoughby to plough up. I’m glad nobody ever farmed it, because it feels good to look at, rolling away softly toward the skinny two-lane road that’s the north boundary of Stourhead Farm. Julian would run off to check out the flock of sheep that the Lovells still kept on the downs, and try to play with Albert, the collie, and I’d flop onto the turf and stare up at fluffy clouds like glops of whipped butter, and not think about anything. Except maybe the butterflies. I never in my life saw so many different kinds of butterflies as they have on the downs. They’ll land on your face if you lie very quiet.
I still don’t know why Julian took to me from the beginning, at Heathrow. He’s the only person in my life who’s ever walked right up to me like that. I mean, even Jake and Marta took awhile, and Meena wasn’t sure she’d ever like me, that first term. But that ten-year-old English kid in his school uniform coat… Day One. There was one time, exploring, when he just had to jump from rock to rock across a stream we found running through a sort of little hollow—what they call a coombe here—because that’s in Winnie-the-Pooh, too, and of course he fell in and I had to get him out. Not that it was so deep—he could have waded across—but he caught his foot under something, and he twisted it trying to get loose, and I got soaked through hauling him to the bank. He went around for days telling everyone how I’d saved him from a watery grave. First I thought he was doing it to get up Tony’s nose, but then I realized he meant it. He was so proud of me, and so proud of himself for being saved. Julian.
He did something for me once, something he’ll forget way before I do. It was the day Sally and I went to Goshawk Farm Cattery to see Mister Cat for the first time. I’d been agitating about it from the moment we hit Stourhead, but there was too much to do right away, and Evan needed the car every day. Finally Sally and the wheels were free at the same time, and she drove me to Dorchester, which is where Goshawk Farm is, right on the outskirts. It was a really nasty, windy day, raining on and off, the beginning of Dorset autumn.
Mister Cat wouldn’t speak to me. He knew me, all right, but he wouldn’t look at me. I’d expected him to be in a wire cage, like the one he’d traveled in, only bigger, but it was more like a cat motel room, with things to scratch and climb on, and dangling things to jump at for exercise, with its own outdoor run for good weather. And he wasn’t going hungry—his coat was the glossiest I’d ever seen it, and he’d put on a little weight. But he couldn’t even be bothered to make that evil warning noise at me again. He just turned his back and curled around himself, and closed his eyes.