She’d forgotten. She stared at me for a long moment: flickering, halfway fading, then pulsing stronger as it came back to her. “Candles and singing—a strange tongue, but a sweet air. Aye, I do recall me.”
“That electrician kept saying he smelled vanilla in the Arctic Circle—in the kitchen, I mean. Was that you? Were you bugging the workmen, too, like the boggart and the rest of them?”
“Bugging.” Tamsin said the word a couple of times, as if she were nibbling it, turning it over with her tongue. “Bugging—ah, as t’were a harassment, a plaguing, a botheration. Nay, child, that was never me—I but spied betimes upon your hirelings as they hammered and tore at my house, vaporing endlessly the while. By and by I’d no heart to watch further, so I came away and left them to it. Are you contented with their work, Mistress Jennifer . . Jenny?”
I couldn’t tell if she was angry or not about what we’d all been doing to the Manor. I said, “Evan—he’s my mother’s husband—Evan got hired to get this place going again as a real farm. To bring it back to life. It needed a lot of upgrading.”
Tamsin didn’t bother exploring upgrading. She said, “To bring it back to life. As though my home, my land, had stopped along with me. It is not so—you and yours know nothing of Stourhead Farm. I warrant you, there’s more true life within these walls, between the fences that your stepfather spends his days butting together—aye, and walking your bean rows and apple orchards a’ nights—than you’ve encountered in all the days of your own little life. Gorge me that, Mistress Jenny!”
Right then she looked practically solid, which is what happens to Tamsin when she gets excited or worked up about something. Her eyes were wide and bright—they were blue-green, I could even see that now—and her voice made the cats look up, just as they were settling into some serious necking. All I could think to mumble was, “Well, the plumbing really did need some work, it was pretty old. And the soil’s old, too. Evan says the crops weren’t growing because the soil was so tired. We had to do something.”
Tamsin stared at me. After a moment, her eyes quieted down, and she smiled just a bit. “Truth enough, Jenny Gluckstein. I ask your pardon. The land is wearied indeed, and my fine house is a ruin, a daggy relic of antique times—as am I.” She was starting to go filmy gray again, still pulsing slowly between this room and somewhere else. She said, “Truth for truth, I am greatly glad of you and all your family—of your stepbrothers’ tumult and your mother’s music. I am the better for commotion, the better for aught that rouses me, fetches me away out of this cloister of mine. Othergates, I sit as you found me, Miss Sophia Brown dozy on my lap—moonrise on moonrise, year on year, age on age—until the forgetting shall have me altogether. But that must not happen, must not…”
Her voice was floating away, dissolving, and I was afraid that she would, too. I asked, “What is this room, anyway? It doesn’t have a real door, and you can’t see in the window, just out.” There was hardly any furniture: just the chair, and a contraption in the corner like a trunk, but with a bedframe for the lid. The painting I’d seen from the doorway was a portrait of a big, ruddy man in a wig and a long sort of waistcoat, standing next to a shy-looking woman wearing a black gown and a frilly white linen cap on the back of her head. I asked Tamsin again, “What kind of a room is this?”
Tamsin looked a little surprised. “This? This is Roger Willoughby’s priest-closet. Nay, we were no Papists, but my father—though he was always good Charles’s man—saw Rome bound to come in with James, and persecutions with it, and nothing would do but we must build our own hidey-hole for our own chaplain, should we ever have one. My father was a prodigious romantic, you must know, Jenny, with a headpiece full of notions my poor mother never fathomed. But we loved him dearly, she and I, and it grieves me still to think how he suffered when …”
She didn’t finish, and I didn’t know if I ought to prompt her to go on. I didn’t have any idea what the rules were with a ghost. Did they only have so much juice at a time, like a car battery? Would they just fade and go out if you pushed them too much? When she sat alone with her Persian cat in this room, years at a time, the way she said—was she visible then? I said, “When you died—stopped, I mean. That must have been really awful, watching him mourning for you.” Tamsin didn’t say anything. I thought I should probably change the subject, so I asked, “Who’s the Other One?”
Tamsin looked at me as though I were the ghost and she’d just seen me for the first time. I said, “We had some boggart trouble a while back. The cats took care of him”—Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown were chasing each other around the room, playing tag like kittens—“but he told me to beware of the servant and the mistress—I guess that’s you and your cat—and the Other One. Who’s that, when he’s at home and properly labelled?” I picked up that last bit from Julian.
A ghost can’t really turn pale, but Tamsin came close. She put her hands out toward me, and I think she’d have grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me if she could. She said, “Child, Jenny, never ask me that again. Never ask again, not of me nor of any—not of yourself, do you understand me? Promise me that, as we stand here. Jenny, you must promise, if we are to be friends.”
Her fear—and she was terrified, ghost or no ghost—had brought her back to being untransparent enough so that I could smell that odd whisk of vanilla, and even see a bit of a dimple under her left cheekbone. Her hair was a kind of darkish blond, and her eyes had gone deep turquoise, but the exact shade kept changing as I looked into them, as though she couldn’t ever quite remember the color they’d been. Something about that twisted my insides, and I’d have promised her anything to comfort her. I said, “Okay, I won’t. Cross my heart, spit twice, hope to die—I won’t ask about the Other One anymore.”
I knew I’d break that promise when I gave it. Sometimes I think Tamsin knew, too. But she cheered up right away, and after that we just talked, watching Miss Sophia Brown and Mister Cat taking turns ambushing each other, until I really did feel that we were like that, totally unconcerned with who was alive and who wasn’t. I told her about New York and my friends there, and Norris, and how I’d felt about Sally marrying Evan and dragging me off to Dorset—I was pretty honest, anyway—and about the boys, and Meena, and the Sherborne School, and even about grubby old Wilf and his goat. And Tamsin listened, and laughed, and grew more and more visible—more present—until her hair and the flows of her gown swayed with her laughter, and I couldn’t see through her at all, although maybe that was because the room was getting darker. And I actually forgot what she was, just for that little time. I did.
For her part, Tamsin talked mostly about Stourhead Farm, and about Roger Willoughby. “City man, merchant, son and grandson of merchants, why he should have so fancied the life of the soil, who can say? Yet my father believed with all his heart that anyone, man or woman, may learn anything he truly wishes to learn, if only his enterprise be a match for his desire. And if that were never so for any other, yet it was true for my father. For he was no farmer, but he made himself over into one, and never was poet or painter gladder in his trade. Indeed, I never knew a happier man.”
I thought she might turn sad again, the way she had the first time she spoke of her father, but instead she giggled suddenly, sounding just like Meena when she tries to tell a joke and always cracks up before she gets to the punchline. “Jenny, he labored like any hero to cozen his neighbors into draining their grasslands— into daring, even for a season, to fertilize their fields some other road than letting their cattle do it for ’em. Nay, but surely you know farmers by now”—and she dropped into an old-Dorset voice, like the boggart’s—“Nah, nah, zir, mook’s your man, there’s nothing beats your good ripe mook for not overztimulating the zoil, d ’ye zee?” We were both laughing into each other’s eyes, and the cats turned around to hear us.