The first nights, nothing, not on anybody’s watch. Evan said that figured. “He knows we’re on guard, so he’s going to sit tight for a while, considering. But he’ll make his move soon, because he has to. Boggarts can’t resist a challenge from humans, that’s how they are.”
I remember Sally asked, “What’s with this he all the time? What if it’s a lady boggart?” Evan said they were always male in the stories, and Meena—her parents let her sit up with Julian and me one night—said that in the little town where her father was born there was a lady boggart, or brownie, whatever, that swept out the temple at night. “Nobody ever saw her, but the priests would leave a bowl of milk out for her, and in the morning the milk would be gone and the temple would be clean. All the years my father lived there, every night, the same.”
Tony wanted to know how the priests could tell the Indian boggart was a female, if they never saw her, and Sally said because she cleaned up after herself, which you couldn’t get a man to do at gunpoint, never mind a male boggart. Evan said, “Right, then, we’ll just call him it, let it go at that.” Julian said he wanted to play Snakes and Ladders, so he and I and Meena played until Sally relieved us, and we didn’t see a thing. That whole first week, it must have been.
But maybe ten nights into the boggart patrol, the weather suddenly turned bad. We’d had a week or so of pure summer, which is about the way you get summer in England—a week at a time, scattered around through the other seasons. That night we got rain like horses galloping on the roof, and we got thunder that felt as though someone were pounding the Manor with a huge baseball bat. Evan and Sally were actually out in the storm, trying to protect the new sapling fruit trees, and Julian was scared for them, and I kept telling him they’d be okay, just play already—and in the middle of all that racket, we heard someone laughing. Not a nasty, tittering kind of laugh, like the ones I’d heard in my bathroom— this one was deep and loud enough that Julian and I both heard it through the thunder. We turned around so fast that we knocked over Julian’s Snakes and Ladders board, and we saw him.
It was a him, all right—I’d have known that much even if he hadn’t had a beard, just from the way he stood there with his thumbs in his belt and his head back, looking around our kitchen as though everything in it was his. I’ve seen three-year-old boys stand like that on playgrounds—you can’t miss it. He wasn’t any bigger than a three-year-old, either: He came about up to Julian’s chest, not counting his silly Seven Dwarfs hat with the green feather. He was dressed like a cross between the Seven Dwarfs and Robin Hood, in a kind of loose red smock, but with the belt, and brown leggings underneath, and heavy little boots, ankle-high— I’d have taken them for Doc Martens, except I don’t think they make them in boggart sizes. And there wasn’t a thing else in the world he could have been.
Julian had grabbed my hand, and I could feel him trembling right down my arm and into my stomach. He whispered, “Jenny, he came out from under the stove! How could he do that?”
I didn’t answer. I just held his hand with both of mine, trying to stop his shaking. Julian said, in this small, sad voice, “I don’t like this, Jenny.”
The boggart looked at us for the first time. You could tell he was really, really old, but I can’t say exactly how I knew, because he didn’t have any gray hair, and no wrinkles at all, just a few lines on his skin, which was red-brown, the same color as the new lettuce fields closest to the Manor. He had a face like a goat’s face—long and high-boned, with the little curly beard, and with big dark-red eyes, wicked eyes. I don’t mean evil, I mean wicked. I know the difference now.
“Dun’t ye goo a-ztaring,” he said. “There’s rude. Yer ma’d noo like it.”
That’s the way he sounded to me the first time I heard him speak. He had a deep voice for someone so small, but it didn’t seem out of place coming out of that face, that big chest like my father’s. He said again, “Dun’t goo a-ztaring at me. Else I’ll turn the pair of ye into crabapples and toss ye to the piggies. I will zo.”
Julian gave a tiny whimper and burrowed against me with his eyes shut tight, like Mister Cat. It took me a couple of tries to make my voice work, but I said, “We don’t have any pigs, and you’re nothing but a dorky boggart, and you can’t turn us into anything,” all in one croaky rush. I don’t know how I got it all out—I was just mad because he was scaring Julian, and enjoying it. Boggart or no boggart, I know that look when I see it.
The boggart’s eyes twinkled. I’ve heard people say that all my life, but until then I’d never seen anyone actually do it. Like a birthday-cake candle flickering far down a tunnel. He said, “Maight be I can, maight be I can’t. Dun’t be in such a fluster to chance en.” He pointed at me with a thick, stubby forefinger. “Mind yerse’n, or what boggart’s doone’s naught to what boggart will do.” And he grinned at me like a horse with a mouthful of gray and black teeth.
“Oh, please,” I said. “Trashing the kitchen every night, breaking down fences, throwing apples at people—that’s about your speed. You’d be hot stuff at Gaynor Junior High.” Julian was starting to get interested: He sat up, still huddling close against me, and gaped at the boggart. The boggart made a face at him—Julian yelped and dived into my lap again—and the boggart laughed.
“Noo, noo, tha’s naught but what boggarts is zet to do on this earth”—only it came out thik yearth—“no harm in it, ner zpite.” He was waving that finger at me, dead serious as Mrs. Wolfe at Gaynor used to get when she thought we weren’t paying enough attention to the Congress of Vienna. “But ye—tak shame to yerself, ye ought, grieving yer ma zo wi’ yer zulks and yer pelts and yer mopen to be off back wheer ye do coom vrom. And her a-worken and a-werreten hersen to plain boone vor to mak thikky farm be home vor ye, be home vor ye all. Tak shame, ye Jenny Glookstein!”
That’s the best I can get it down, and that’s all of that I’m about to do. I’d never heard old-time Dorset talk before, except in little scraps, like when Ellie John says a shriveled-up apple’s all quaddled, or says she doesn’t ho about something, meaning she doesn’t give a damn. Or when William says the weather’s turning lippy, which means it’s going to rain. But nobody talks like Thomas Hardy people, they haven’t for ages. Evan says it’s because of radio and TV and movies. He’ll go on forever about how regional dialects ought to be treated like endangered species before everybody winds up sounding just like everybody else. But that’s what people want, most of them. I knew that in grade school.
Anyway, I was so startled by his coming on like Jimmy Cricket, the voice of my conscience, that I forgot to be scared. I yelled at him, “I don’t believe this. You’re the one who makes my mother’s life hell, and it’s all my fault? Okay, that is chutzpah.” Let him chew on my native dialect, see how he likes it.
The boggart wasn’t fazed a bit. “Noo, I do like yer ma, I do like her fine—she’s a rare goodhussy, for an outlander, and pretty wi’ it. There’s bottom to en.” It took me the longest time to figure out that hussy just means a housewife in Dorset talk, and bottom’s like honor, integrity. “But she’s noo raised her darter right, there’s her zorrow. Proper darter, she’d a-zet hersen first thing to riddle out what in t’world might please a boggart. For us can be pleased, aye, us can be sweetened, na great trickses to it—any ninnyhammer’d a-figgured en out by naow. Any ninnyhammer as cared, that’s to say.” And he gave me that horse grin again.
I was catching on slowly, more to the rhythm than the words. I said, “There’s a way to make you leave us alone? What is it, what do you want? Tell me, I’ll be on it—five minutes, tops. What?”