I worked until we’d saved what we could from the rains, and then I had to catch up with my schoolwork, which took until practically Christmas. Either way, it was weeks before I went back to that secret room that Roger Willoughby had built to hide his chaplains in.

I saw the Pooka twice. He was different each time: Once he was a little red fox in the shadow of a tree, watching as Tony and I were trying to salvage a few scrawny ears of corn from the muck; and the second time he was a deer stepping as elegantly as Mister Cat along a row of soggy cabbages, nibbling here, noshing there. Tamsin was right—you couldn’t mistake the eyes, even at a distance. And when he looked straight at me he knew me, just as Tamsin had said he would. He didn’t speak, or come toward me, or do anything that a fox or a deer wouldn’t have done, but it was him. I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t thrilled either. I was too damn tired.

Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown went on being an item, though nobody knew that except me. Nobody else ever saw them together. Some nights I’d have no cat in my room, because he was out somewhere in the wind and rain, carrying on with her; some nights I’d have them both piled together on the quilt, and I’d just lie there watching them sleep, the live cat and the ghost, and Julian’s gorilla. At least Miss Sophia Brown looked asleep, but of course I’ll never know. Tamsin never exactly slept, I know that, but she did doze now and then, in a sort of way. She tried to explain it to me once.

“Jenny, have you known it ever, that zone between aware and asleep when dreams float through you—or you through them—as though you and they were of the same substance? Beyond control, beyond words to name them, yet there’s an exchange, a penetration, for all one knows them to be baseless phantoms. So with me, often, as I wait by my window. And is what I see truly what is? or are these visions of what has been? what might be? I can never tell.”

She was sitting on the edge of my bed when she said that. I’d felt her there, as deeply as I was sleeping—the way I always felt Miss Sophia Brown—and I opened my eyes to see her petting the cats. They purred and stretched under her hands the way cats do when anybody, an ordinary person, strokes them. Everything’s different with cats.

Tamsin gave a sort of half-embarrassed laugh, nothing like the way she usually laughed. She said, “In fair truth, Jenny, you and your Mister Cat are my touchstone, my Pole Star, my ground bass of existence. But for you two, I’d have no notion at all of which way lay reality, happed round as I am in my dreams and my neardreams. This is why I came seeking you tonight.”

I didn’t know how to tell her that I’d been afraid of opening her door and finding the Other One waiting in her chair. I muttered, “We’ve been helping to get the harvest in.”

Tamsin nodded. “Aye, we did just so, even when I was small. It rained the same then, if that’s any comfort.”

“And I’m trying not to rouse you,” I said. Tamsin looked at me as blankly as any living, breathing human could have done. I said, “That’s what the billy-blind warned me about. He told me I was waking you up, the way we talk and visit and go for walks, and that rousing you meant rousing something else, other things, I don’t know what he meant. Maybe you do. I don’t know anything—I just want to keep you safe. From whatever.”

Tamsin went on petting Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown, and she didn’t answer me. It was too hard to keep my eyes open, so I let them float shut. Tamsin began to sing her sister’s nursery song:

I opened my eyes again when she sang my name. She was smiling, and there was never one damn thing I could do when Tamsin smiled. It’s hard to say why, especially when you figure that we’re talking about a guess of a memory of a smile—how does a ghost recall teeth, or what happens to the eyes when the mouth corners turn up? But maybe that was exactly it; maybe Tamsin’s smile got me the way it always did because three hundred years of Tamsin went into that smile. Anyway, all I could manage was to say, “I’ve missed you. I miss you more than I miss anybody—people back in New York, anybody. But you’re supposed to sit still, the billy-blind kept saying it. I just don’t want to get you into trouble.”

Tamsin patted my leg through the blankets. I didn’t feel it—I wanted to, but I didn’t—but she did, some way, I could tell. I could. She said, “Jenny, I have never missed but four folk, if by that you mean being more aware of their absence than of my own presence. Now of those four, three are as long stopped as I—my father and my mother and and she actually mumbled the next name—Edric—on purpose, like me when I don’t want to be understood. For just that moment, just that moment, Tamsin Elspeth Catherine Maria Dubois Willoughby was exactly my age.

She went on, really quietly, “But that fourth—that fourth is a child from the colonies, a living girl whose world can only be one of my dreams, but whose soul somehow takes my soul by the hand. Dear Jenny, it is too late for the billy-blind. I am wakened, and I am already in trouble, and there’s naught for it but to see it through, come wind, come weather. Yet I am glad—is that not strange?”

I was wide awake myself now. I sat up in bed, joggling Mister Cat, who didn’t like it. “Well, it’s my fault, so I have to see it through with you. And even if it weren’t and I didn’t, I would, you know that.” Tamsin smiled at me again. I said, “But you have to tell me some things. You know that, too.”

“Yes, Jenny,” Tamsin said, but she didn’t say anything else for what seemed like a long time. Outside, one of the cocks crowed, but not because the day was dawing, like in the old song—cocks go off like car alarms, at all hours. It was raining again, so maybe that did it. I couldn’t hear any other night sounds through the rain, but for a moment I thought I heard what might have been the click of unshod hoofs across the new driveway, and I wondered if the Pooka was watching the house. I hoped he was, though I couldn’t have said why.

Tamsin said, “Edric Davies is a musician?” That happened a lot—her meaning to state a fact and having it come out a sad little question. I actually said, “No!” before I could stop myself— that’s how totally I’d fixed my face for Edric being a Welsh fisherman. I said, “You mean, like my mother?”

“Indeed, just so.” Tamsin was really delighted by the idea, you could see. “A music master, like your mother, teaching his art and playing for grand balls and brawls alike, all through the county. My father would have my portrait done when I turned nineteen, and Edric was thus engaged for my entertainment while I must sit for the painter. So it was.”

Another musician. Up to here in musicians my entire life, and here comes another one—keyboards, yet. A fisherman, a sailor, a gypsy tinker would have been more romantic than one more damn piano player. “Shall I say what he sang, Jenny? I tell his songs over to myself, like a nun with her beads, and could name you every one, when I cannot always recall the hue of my own hair. ‘Lawn as white as driven snow,’ ‘Ombre de mon amant,’ ‘Vous ne sauriez, mes yeux,’ ‘Still I’m wishing,’ ‘What can we poor females do?’—you see, you see how I remember?”

I’d never seen her looking the way she looked now. It wasn’t just that she was absolutely clear, perfectly distinct, as solid and real and alive for that moment as Mister Cat snoring between us. What it was was a light, that faint, faint ghost-light all around her, growing bright enough to throw my shadow on the bed. I don’t believe in angels and halos, and I’ve never seen anyone’s aura, but Tamsin looked like all that stuff when she talked about Edric Davies.