“No, I don’t know,” I said. “What’s an Assizes, and why were these so bloody?”

Tony sighed. “They really don’t teach you anything in those American schools, do they? I thought it was just British chauvinism. You wouldn’t know about Monmouth’s Rebellion, then?” I just shook my head. “Okay. Charles Stuart—that’s King Charles II—had an illegitimate son named James. No big deal, as you’d say—quite common with kings, especially Charles. He acknowledges him, brings him to court, makes him the Duke of Monmouth, all very civil. Not that he’s got a chance of succeeding to the throne—that’s for Charles’s brother, the Duke of York, also named James. You are following this so far?”

“James II,” I said. “The Glorious Revolution, 1688. They teach us a few things.”

“Oh, very good,” Tony said. I couldn’t tell whether he meant it, or was being sarcastic. I can now, usually. “Right. James II becomes king in 1685, over any number of objections—mainly because of his being a Roman Catholic, but also because he was always a nasty, treacherous piece of work. Charming, though, when he wanted, like all the Stuarts—they lived on charm. Anyway, Monmouth— that’s James’s half-brother, the other James—has been hiding out in Holland, because of maybe being involved in the Rye House Plot, but we can skip that part. Well, James II hasn’t been James II for ten minutes before Monmouth’s landed in Lyme Regis and starts raising an army to overthrow him.”

I said, “Wait a minute. Lyme Regis? The tourist place, where we went for Easter?” We spent a weekend, and it rained, and Sally caught cold showing me where they’d filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

“They hadn’t invented tourists then,” Tony said impatiently. “It was a port, they built ships, and Monmouth was big in the West Country, don’t ask me why. He went up to Taunton, in Somerset, and declared himself king, but his real following was right here, the Dorset people who met him on the beach. Farmers, miners, fishermen, a bunch of Dorchester artisans and shopkeepers—they were all mad about Monmouth. That old Stuart charm.”

Most people get flushed and red when they’re telling you something they’re really excited about. Tony always gets very pale, even sort of shaky sometimes. He said, “They really did start a rebellion, Jenny, right here. They were sure the upper classes hated James as much as they did, and they thought the gentry would join them, you see, with their horses and guns and their money and their private armies, and they’d all sweep on to London together. But it didn’t happen.”

He got up again and began moving—turning, stooping, swinging around, not quite dancing, but almost. “It didn’t happen. Most of the noble types just never showed up, and Monmouth scarpered, did a bunk, headed for the border, the way the Stuarts always did. Left his little low-class believers out there, high and dry, and the king’s soldiers came down and crushed them, ate them alive. But James II wasn’t finished with Dorset. He was going to show Dorset, once and for all, why you do not ever, ever mess with a king. He sent them Judge Jeffreys. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys.” A fast spin, not a pirouette, but close to the floor, like a top, pointing at me as he came up out of it. “And that’s your Bloody Assizes.”

When you grow up in New York, and your mother’s absolutely crazy about old movies… Something clicked, and I said, “Captain Blood. Errol Flynn’s a doctor, and he helps someone who’s been hurt—”

“In Monmouth’s Rebellion—”

“And there’s a Judge Jeffreys in a wig, who sends him off to be a slave on a plantation. That Judge Jeffreys?”

“The very same. He set up shop in Dorchester, at the Antelope Hotel, and he had hundreds of people hanged, drawn and quartered—” He stopped, and he looked even paler than before. “You know what that was?”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. I didn’t know, not then, but from his face I knew I didn’t want to.

“No. All right. But he had their bodies boiled and tarred, and their heads stuck up on poles, and there were hundreds more whipped and transported to the West Indies. Oh, he had a grand time in Dorset, Judge Jeffreys did.” Tony leaned against the wall and started putting his shoes on.

“What happened? Afterwards, I mean.” I remember I felt dazed, giddy—maybe from what he’d been telling me, maybe more from the way he told it, the way he looked and sounded. He grinned at me, and this time he definitely was being sarcastic.

“Right, I forgot, you’re an American—there has to be a happy ending around here somewhere. Well, in another three years, here came the old Glorious Revolution, and James II left town hastily, and went into business as a public nuisance, which was the family trade, you might say. Judge Jeffreys suffered agonies from kidney stones, and died in the Tower.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s a happy ending, anyway.”

Tony shrugged. “Didn’t stick any heads back on any necks.” He picked up a towel, mopped his face with it, and turned the light out. As we walked to the door, he said, “But I’d think it left a deal of angry ghosts around this part of Dorset. Noises would be the least of it.”

Locking the studio—he did that to keep Julian out, and me, too, probably—he said, “Thank you for working with me,” which was nice, as if we actually had been dancing together. I thought he might ask me again, but he never did.

Mister Cat didn’t bring his Persian lady around to my room again. We sort of didn’t talk to each other for a while—just came and went on our own business, me as much as him. We’ve had secrets together since I was little, but this wasn’t like that. It’s lonely when you know something nobody else knows, but it’s exciting, too. That’s the other side of the ground turning to water under you. Stourhead Farm felt like a completely new place, where every sound might mean something different than I’d thought—where suddenly every thing, not just cats or people, might be some kind of ghost from three hundred years ago. I really did want to tell people about it, and I really didn’t. If that makes any sense at all.

One thing was certain—whatever it was that was playing games with us, wasn’t likely to get bored any time soon. During the winter it had been an on-and-off kind of thing—stuff in the kitchen spilled and slopped or just vanished, a few mornings running, then nothing for a whole week or two. But come the warmer weather— about the time Mister Cat got sprung from quarantine—the boggart started expanding its horizons. Fuel lines breaking in the tractors and balers all the time, irrigation pipes coming apart, just where they were the hardest to get to, whole sections of Evan’s fences collapsing for no good reason, Sally having apples drop on her head when she wasn’t anywhere near the apple trees, something terrorizing Albert, the sheepdog, so on some days he wouldn’t come out of his kennel, let alone go back to the pasture. As for the marshy upper meadow that Evan kept trying to drain… well, never mind, you get the idea. Julian said to me once, “I’m glad we know it’s just a boggart. Otherwise I’d start worrying.”

What’s funny is that we really did know. Evan and Sally made a pass at sounding like rational, realistic parents, talking about coincidences and logical possibilities, but nobody paid any attention, including them. This wasn’t West Eighty-third Street, this was old, old Dorset, and what we had had to be a boggart; and the only chance you have with boggarts is catch them in the act. All the tales say they’re night creatures, so Sally set up a kitchen-watch rotation, making sure that she and Evan had the graveyard shift, and not even scheduling Julian at first. But he threw such a fit about being left out she finally penciled him in with me, from eight to eleven. I told him to bring his Snakes and Ladders game, because he’s such a bad loser and a worse winner that I figured we’d stay awake, one way and another.