She’d had an older sister who died of the Black Plague—the same Black Plague we’d had to study in British History—“and how I failed of catching it, I am sure I do not know, Jenny, for we slept together always. Her name was Maria, so I put it straight into my own name, thinking to make my mother less forlorn. But she grew terrible wroth with me and beat me, which she never did, and bid me not ever use my sister’s name so again. But I kept it anyway.” That one time I thought she remembered tears.

She was looking for someone, I knew that; someone she really especially wanted me to meet. I thought it must be that old friend of hers who’d hopped away through the beech trees, on two legs or four, that first night—the one with the golden eyes. I asked her about it, but she wouldn’t ever say.

Whenever we passed an oak grove—especially Julian’s Hundred Acre Wood—she’d warn me again about oak trees. “It is a thricecut coppice, Jenny, for all these seem virgin. Twice was it cut before my time, and once since, and each time saplings sprang from the stumps with speed uncanny. The old of these parts, they’ve a saying, ‘Fairy folk are in old oak,’ and a thrice-cut wood harbors Oakmen, always. Never, Jenny, never step foot under oak after sundown.” She made me promise that one over and over.

Which is why when I first saw the billy-blind I went probably six feet straight up. He wasn’t in any oak grove, but standing on a barrel in the North Barn. He was about the same size as the boggart, but slighter, not as burly. He wore a sort of old-style suit, with an eggplant-colored cravat fluffed around his neck, and a waistcoat to match. No hat, thank God. I don’t think I could have handled a hat. Ankles crossed, one hand in his pocket, bracing the other against the wall—a mini-Jimmy Cagney, Sally’s all-time favorite. Only in the moonlight slanting through the window behind him, he looked more like that English actor who played LongJohn Silver in the old Disney movie. Robert Newton, that’s it.

Tamsin introduced us, very formally, like people meeting at a party or a fancy dinner. “Jenny, this is the billy-blind. The billyblind, I have the honor to present to you Mistress Jennifer Gluckstein.” I almost didn’t mind the Jennifer when she said it.

I’d had a lot of practice with curtsies by now, so I made him a really deep one and he put his right hand flat on his belly and bowed. Then he straightened up fast and said, “Oughtn’t wear your hair all strained back like that, child—doesn’t suit, doesn’t suit. Take my advice, you’ll comb it forward.”

He had a Dorset accent, but not old Dorset, not like the boggart. You could hear the Z’s buzzing around in there, and the I’s wanting to come out like oi, but I didn’t have any trouble understanding him. What I did have trouble with was the whole notion that a two-foot-high Robert Newton was telling me what I ought to do with my hair. I said, “Look, Mr. billy-blind, I really appreciate your interest—”

Well, he turned absolutely pink at that. Fuchsia. He pulled himself up as tall as he could, and he actually stamped his foot as he shouted at me, “I’m noo Measter billy-blind! You call me the billy-blind, same’s her does, that’s what you call me! I am the billy-blind!”

I took a step back, he was so angry, but Tamsin moved in in a hurry. “The billy-blind, she’s but young and meant no harm. I was just so myself when first we met, you’ll remember.”

That calmed him down a bit, and he tidied his cravat and smoothed out his vest. “I do that, I remember. No bigger than the billy-blind, you were, and no more manners than a hedge-pig.” Now he was all mush, that fast, with real tears in his eyes. He bowed to me again and said, “Your pardon, Mistress Jennifer—”

“Jenny—”

“Mistress Jenny, then. You’ve all my apologies, but you’d do better to take my advice about your hair. And now I’m at it, yellow’s noo your color. Green’s what you want, mind me, greens and blues. The billy-blind knows.”

And he just went on like that, nonstop. He told me my sinuses would clear up if I ate red clover, and that I wouldn’t keep waking up with headaches if I moved my bed to the other side of the room. “And there’s noo use in your friend, the dark girl, greeting her eyes out for that boy in choir. W’ole family be gone away come fall, moved off to Afriky somewhere. You tell her the billy-blind said so.”

I said I would. The billy-blind gave me a really long stare, studying me all up and down. His eyes weren’t Disney eyes at all, but they weren’t wicked either, like the boggart’s. They were more like jewelled passages leading a long way backward or a long way forward, I couldn’t tell which. He nodded suddenly.

“Aye, you’d be needing the billy-blind’s counsel, the pair on ye.” He was looking at Tamsin now. “You want to sit still, that’s what you want. Sit still, don’t be running about so.” Giving a ghost lessons in deportment sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of, but Tamsin nodded. The billy-blind turned back to me. “You,” he said. “You’ll do best to stay away from that place. And stop eating them grapes.”

I couldn’t take it in. I gaped at him like a baby bird. I said, “What place? And what’s wrong with me eating grapes?”

“You’ll be eating them all,” the billy-blind said calmly. He went back to talking with Tamsin, and I was too busy blushing to hear what they were saying. Because it’s perfectly true about me and grapes. I always mean to leave some, but I’m just not reliable.

I was going to ask him again about whatever place I was supposed to stay away from, but right at that moment I heard Evan’s voice saying, “Jenny? Is that you?”

Tamsin went out the way a match goes out, and the billy-blind was through the window and gone in a blur of eggplant. I turned and saw Evan standing in the doorway, absently rumpling his hair the way he was always doing. He said, “We were getting a bit anxious.”

“I lost track of time,” I said. “Sorry.” I’d gotten a lot better with Evan by then. I didn’t blame him anymore for wrecking my life— I even had long stretches when I thought maybe he hadn’t wrecked it at all. But I didn’t like him knowing that, and I had an uneasy feeling he did. I’d invested a lot of time and thought and energy in hating Evan. I wasn’t ready to call it a waste and let it go. That’s how I was then.

“I was looking for something,” I said as I came out. Evan gave me a funny look. Back then the North Barn was more of a glorified storage shed, all farm machinery and things under tarpaulins, and mysterious old barrels like the one the billy-blind had been standing on. But Evan didn’t push it, and we started back toward the Manor together.

Even in the darkness I could see he was looking tired. He said, “Your mother worries about these night walks of yours. I do myself. It’s easy to step into something, a furrow, and break an ankle, if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m careful,” I said. “I really do know this place pretty well by now.” Of course the moment I said that, I tripped—not in a hole, but over Mister Cat, flopped right down in my path, the way he does sometimes. He yowled at me, and I yowled back at him to watch it, stupid cat, and he scatted away into the brush with his feelings hurt. I figured we’d make it up at bedtime.

Evan started to say, “I think it’d be a good idea if you had someone—Julian or Tony—” but I headed him off by asking if he knew what a billy-blind was. You can almost always sidetrack Evan with a question like that, about legends or folklore. The boys do it all the time.

“Billy-blinds?” He shook his head and smiled a little. “Lord, I haven’t heard that word in years. Who told you about billyblinds?”

“Just a friend,” I said. “Someone at school. She said they’re supposed to give advice?”