Evan laughed. “That they do. Your billy-blind absolutely lives to give advice. Doesn’t matter what subject, never mind the time or the place or the person—the billy-blind will tell you what to do, whether you ask or not. It’s their nature, and there’s only the tiniest problem with it. They aren’t always right.”
I asked if there was only one billy-blind at any one time, like the phoenix. Evan said he’d never heard that, nor that you had to call each one the billy-blind. “But maybe it’s different in Dorset. There’s a lot of regional variation among British boghes. Like the way our boggart just vanished—I’ve never heard of that before. You maybe make a deal with boggarts, but you don’t get rid of them.”
He was glad we were talking, and it was easy to keep him from asking any more questions about me wandering the farm at night. I felt a bit guilty about that, and guilty all over again for not telling everyone what had really happened with the boggart. But Evan was telling me a story about a Yorkshire family who moved from their farm to get away from a boggart, only to find that they’d brought it along with them. And I was thinking of Tamsin, and wondering again who Edric was, and what the Black Dog and the billy-blind knew that we didn’t. And where Tamsin was supposed to be, instead of here, where I wanted her to be.
All the same, I was feeling guilty enough that I actually asked Evan a question about himself before we reached the Manor. “What is it that’s not going right with the farm? I hear you and Sally talking, but I don’t understand. It’s looking great, as far as I can see.”
Evan stopped in his tracks and blinked at me. I don’t think he could have been more amazed if Tamsin had walked up to him and tried to bum a cigarette. He messed his hair again, sighed, stared around vaguely, and finally said, “Jenny, people have been plowing up this land for over three hundred years, and the soil’s exhausted, played out. It’s losing topsoil, it’s starved for nutrients, and what it’s been given is bloody rivers of chemical fertilizers. I went along with that style of farming this whole last year, because the Lovells expected it—because the land’s literally addicted to it. Maybe it looks good to you now, but the yield’s half what it should be, and it’ll be less next year, less than that the next. It’s my fault, and I know what I have to do. And I’m scared to do it.”
We were at the house by then, and Evan walked in without saying another word to me. I waited around outside for a bit, hoping for a quick moment with Tamsin. But she didn’t show, so I went up to bed, waiting for Mister Cat instead. No luck there, either. I lay awake forever, holding Julian’s funky old gorilla, with my head too full of too many things to think straight about any one of them. I’d have settled for snickery little voices in my bathroom right then, just for the distraction.
But I must have fallen asleep sometime, because I was awakened by Mister Cat going round and round with something outside. I know that sound he makes when he’s in a fight: low and evil, like a saw cutting bone. I stuck my head out of the window and yelled for him to get up here, and he came scrambling in a moment later, while something I couldn’t see clearly scuttled out of sight under Evan’s Jeep. Mister Cat was panting hard, and his eyes were as red as the Black Dog’s. There was blood high on his chest. I wanted to look at it, but he backed away from me and settled down to licking the wound, still growling to himself. He was still doing it when I dozed off again.
He was fine in the morning, cool and sleek as ever, though he still wouldn’t let me inspect the slash on his chest. I went into my bathroom and started doing things with my hair, trying to see what bangs would look like. I got Julian to help me move the bed.
Fifteen
A couple of weeks later, Christopher Herridge told Meena his family would be moving to Africa in September. Meena cried more than ever, and I felt terrible, because I’d known, and maybe I could have found some way to warn Meena even a little, to soften the blow. But I hadn’t said anything, because Evan had warned me billy-blinds don’t always get things right. More secrets.
I didn’t see Tamsin for some while after that night. Every evening I’d find some reason to wander off to the places where we usually met, but she wasn’t ever there. Once I even went up to the third floor and spent maybe half an hour walking back and forth outside the secret door. I could have opened it and walked in, but I didn’t. It’s hard to explain why now. Most of me missed Tamsin in a way I’d never missed anybody—not Marta and Jake when I started school here, not even Mister Cat when he was in quarantine—but one small part of me was scared utterly out of its mind, because this was getting too big for me, and I knew it. One night I had a dream about that big golden-eyed creature Tamsin called “old friend,” and another night I dreamed about the Other One. She’d told me he was gone, vanished, but the dream didn’t think so. I was back at her door, and this time I pushed it open, and he was waiting, sitting in her chair. I didn’t see his face, but it was him.
To keep from thinking about her so much, I started being helpful around the Manor. I cleaned up my room without anyone’s having to ask me, and then I went ahead and cleaned the boys’ rooms, which got them both mad at me—Julian especially, because his spiders got loose. After that I hung around Sally, volunteering for every damn thing she needed done—washing, cooking, weeding her little kitchen garden and stirring up the compost pile—even refinishing musty old furniture or running errands to Evan out in the fields, when she couldn’t stand it and had to get rid of me. I made everybody really nervous during that stretch, including Mister Cat. He’d either disappear for the whole day—probably with Miss Sophia Brown, whom I didn’t see either—or else he’d follow me around, saying sarcastic things in Siamese, which he only ever speaks when he’s really mad, or when I’ve surprised him. Mister Cat hates surprises.
Tony was the one who called me on it. He just came straight up to me one afternoon when I was out hanging laundry and asked, “All right, what have you done?”
I had a mouthful of clothespins, so I had to mumble, “Drying your damn legwarmers, you really want to know. And your sweaty old Fabrizios.” Tony goes through tights like Julian through crawly things.
“You’re being good,” Tony said. “You’re being unbelievably, unnaturally, abnormally good. Julian’s the same way when he’s done something really awful nobody knows about yet. Let’s have it, Jenny.”
I got furious, of course. Tony can still do that to me once in a while, sniffing out something absolutely true and getting it totally wrong. I said I wasn’t up to anything, and hadn’t been up to anything, and what the hell did he know about anything, and about Monmouth’s Rebellion—did he think old Roger Willoughby might have been involved in it? Tony’s harder to sidetrack than Evan, but you can do it.
“Roger Willoughby? Possible, but I doubt it, rather. He wasn’t gentry-born, but he wasn’t a little Dorset yeoman, either. He’d have known what the Stuarts were like, and he’d probably have waited to see how things fell out.” He rumpled his hair, exactly like Evan, and added after a moment, “But I’d bet at least some of his farmhands took off with Monmouth, poor sods. Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious,” I said. “Just wondering about stuff.” Tony gave me the kind of look Mister Cat gives me when there’s only dry kibble in his dish, but he left it alone. I went on hanging laundry and thinking about Tamsin. As much as she’d told me about herself—family, childhood, the farm, the Black Plague, even the name of her horse—there were pieces missing. I could feel their shapes sometimes, when we were together, actually feel the empty outlines of things she wasn’t telling me. I didn’t know if she’d been around for the Rebellion, or what she’d thought about it when it was happening. Or why the billy-blind had warned her twice to sit still—or why she hadn’t come inside on a wild night, and died of it, for that matter. I didn’t know what questions I ought to ask her, and I didn’t know what questions I didn’t want to hear the answers to. Only that I wanted to be with her.