They sat there in the kitchen, laughing and holding hands, looking flushed and scratched up, and really tired, looking like kids—looking the way Julian and I should have been looking, instead of sneaking glances at each other and agreeing without a word that we wouldn’t talk about our night for a bit. The Persian was as gone as the boggart, but Mister Cat was sitting between us, tail curled around his feet, looking utterly bored and sleepy. Julian picked him up and held him tight, practically strangling him, the way he used to hug that gorilla he gave me. Mister Cat usually hates that kind of thing, but hejust purred and purred, while Evan and Sally drank their tea and picked little twigs out of each other’s hair.
Eleven
The boggart kept his word. After everybody’d finally gone to bed, I sneaked back down and left an old pair of drugstore reading glasses Julian kept trying to start fires with out on the doormat. They were gone in the morning, and the kitchen was tidier than we’d left it.
The nighttime patrols dwindled away pretty fast, once it was obvious that the boggart had gone out of business. Julian and I never said anything—not even to each other, really. Julian more or less decided that he’d dreamed the whole thing, which was just as well. He did spend a lot of time hunting around the Manor for that Persian lady, though, and seriously asking Mister Cat where she was. I still feel guilty about that. I should have told Julian something.
I did tell Meena, one weekend when I was staying at her house and she was teaching me to put on a sari by myself. They’re all six yards long, and there’s a sort of blouse that goes underneath, and people from different parts of India wrap them around themselves differently, and throw the loose end over their shoulders in special ways. I was getting the hang of it pretty quickly, except for the damn pleats, which I still can’t get right, and which Meena can do on herself in two minutes flat. I look like a big pink horse in a sari, but I don’t care, I love them. And Meena always says I look nice.
When I told her what happened with the boggart and the cats, she got very quiet for a while. I said, “Don’t you believe me?” and she said, “Oh, yes, yes, I do, that’s the trouble. That’s what frightens me.”
“Come on,” I said. “What frightens? You’re the one who grew up with ghosts, poltergeists, all those stories you told me. Weretigers, for God’s sake. What’s so specially scary about a boggart?”
“Nothing much,” Meena said. “In India. India’s so old, Jenny. So many thousands of years, so many things happening to so many people, so much blood and birth—so much death that some things learned not to die, ever. The scary thing would be if India weren’t full of ghosts and spirits and old, old curses. But England’s not like that. I don’t want England to be like India.”
She was upset enough that she actually messed up her own pleats and had to do them over. I said, “Well, for a little baby country, England’s up to here in weirdness. Eight months here, and I’ve heard more ghost stories, more legends, folktales, whatever, than I heard in New York my whole life. I think England’s probably already like India, blood and all. You know about Monmouth’s Rebellion?”
Meena laughed. “Oh, yes. In India we know English history better than our own. It’s so much smaller and neater.” She took me by the arms then, and looked straight into my face. She said, “Jenny, I don’t know what that boggart meant about bewaring the servant, the mistress and the—that Other One. But you have to promise me that you’ll take it seriously, what he said. You have to promise, Jenny.”
With her deep-blue sari on and the blue dot on her forehead she could have been looking at me from any time at all. I’d never seen her like that. I said, “Yes, okay, I do, I promise, do the pleats look all right now?” But Meena kept at it, not just all that weekend, but in school, asking me almost every day if I was minding the boggart’s warning. If I was staying away from the third floor.
That’s what it came down to, after all. The third floor—still closed up, blocked off, and likely to stay that way for some while yet—was where Mister Cat’s Persian ghost hung out. Haunted, I might as well get used to saying it. She haunted the third floor, where he’d met her, and probably just came down on special occasions. And if she was the servant, the way the boggart had said, then those other two were probably up there, too. And so was my cat these days, most of the time—he showed up for meals, and he usually came rolling in past midnight to sleep it off on my bed, but for the rest of it he might as well have been back at Goshawk Farm Cattery. I’d known him to be gone for a whole day, two days, on West Eighty-third, when the Siamese Hussy was exploiting his body, but then I just had cars and trucks and manholes and crazies to worry about. Now he was spending every waking moment on that third floor with ghosts, monsters, something called the Other One. And sooner or later, I was going to have to deal with it. Like making him quit eating lizards, the summer Norris rented the house in Southampton. You can’t let your cat eat lizards, they’re really bad for cats, and they’re addictive, and you have to get the cat absolutely off them, cold turkey. Same way with ghosts. I can testify.
Because, of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about the third floor, and not just because of Mister Cat, either. And the more I walked around thinking about it, the heavier it weighed on me, literally. Norris took me scuba diving once, that Southampton summer—once, and never again, because I couldn’t handle it. The breathing-underwater part was fine; it was the weight, the mass, the whole bulge of the entire ocean, all of it, on my head—that was what I could not deal with. And the bulgy fact of the third floor was just like that, another ocean, except that this time I was going to have to cope. Sooner or later. I didn’t live in Long Island Sound. I lived at Stourhead Farm.
But there were all kinds of perfectly good reasons to put off dealing with anything. The boggart was minding his manners, and school was getting interesting (though I wasn’t about to admit it), and the weather was turning good for more than two days at a time, and Meena and Julian and I—and Tony, a couple of times— could have picnics on the downs. Once we picnicked in Julian’s Hundred-Acre Wood, but that wasn’t such a good idea, though nobody could ever say exactly why. It felt darker than it should have, even for an oak forest; maybe because it was so warm and bright just beyond the trees. Whatever, we packed up our picnic halfway through and moved out into the sunlight, and we never came back.
When I wasn’t in school, I helped out around the Manor, like everyone else, but I dodged fieldwork whenever I got the chance—and so did Tony, I noticed pretty quickly. The Lovells were putting up enough money that first year that Evan could hire as much help as he wanted, and not need to press Tony or Julian or me into service. The problem was Julian: He kept volunteering the two of us, every time, for everything, no matter how much I threatened his life. He’d give me the big gray eyes and say, “But it’s our home, Jenny!” That kid still has no idea how close he came, once or twice.
Mostly we weeded, whacking away with our hoes between the ridges of wheat and beans and peas and barley, sometimes even crawling to dig out stuff growing too close to the plants. We helped scatter fertilizer, too, either by hand or climbing on the back of the tractor to make sure the stuff was spreading evenly. Just as he’d told the Lovells, Evan was absolutely obsessed with getting nitrogen back into the soil—even Sally said there was only so much talking she could do about the nitrogen-fixing cycle. But he was finding out he was a farmer, which I don’t think he’d really known before. Maybe it happened like that with old Roger Willoughby.