Tamsin laughed a third time, and this one came out dry and small and rueful. “Oh, aye—nor was I the only one. For of a sudden, between this fond word and that, Judge Jeffreys’s hands were gripping my arms like fetters, and his face was kissing-close to mine so I could only see his eyes—his great, gentle, terrible eyes. His lips did hardly move when he spoke to me again, saying, ‘And as for that twangling fool in the cowshed, you need have no dismay on his score. He never purposed to wait your coming, but was gone from there ere you had set out. And I know this, Mistress Willoughby, because I passed that way coming here.’ His hands on me, Jenny. I cannot feel, and yet I feel them now.”

I felt them myself. I said, “He knew? About Edric and Francis Gollop and everything?”

“He knew,” Tamsin said. “He held me there, and he told me what he knew, and told me further what fate Edric and my father merited, who had knowingly harbored a damned rebel against His Majesty James II—aye, and even dared remove the body for the Christian burial it had forfeited, in direct violation of the King’s own command. Oh, Jenny, Jenny, it comes back.”

How can I write what she looked like—my Tamsin—made so bright by her own memory, and cringing away from it at the same time? She said, “He went on, on, half raving, half singing—now swearing eternal adoration, now threatening horror to my entire family if I were denied him. After a time I but half heard him, Jenny, so hard was I listening for my father’s returning—and for Edric as well, come at last to carry me safe away. But there was no one, and the rain fell harder.”

I couldn’t just sit still. I dumped Mister Cat, stood up and went to her, standing as close—kissing-close, she’d called it—as maybe the Judge had been that day; so close that the ghost-glimmer seemed to fall right on me, like moonlight. Tamsin touched my hair, but I couldn’t feel it.

“I ran,” she said. “The moment those hands loosened on me in the slightest, I was up and out, splashing and sliding toward the cow byre once again, for I would never credit that Edric had abandoned me. Behind me I hear him calling furiously, but I dare not look back, hard as it was to keep my balance on the wet stones. I fall, I fell—the ankle turns grievously under me a second time— and I was near crawling when at last I reached the byre.” She turned away, back toward the window. There hadn’t been any rain that day, but the buildings and fences and bits of machinery I could see were all glinting in the moon like new grass.

Tamsin said, “Edric was not there. My portmanteau was there still—and his traveling bag beside it—but not he. I stand in the rain, holding to the byre door, staring and staring within—and then I truly run, Jenny, lame ankle and all. I cannot say where I ran, for my wits were as gone from me as Edric, whose name I shrieked into the storm until I fell. This time—or perhaps the next, or the next—I lay where I’d fallen.”

I couldn’t say anything, and she didn’t speak again for a long while. “ ‘Twas the Pooka found me, else I’d have stopped there. He’d taken the guise of my brother Hugh, but I remember yet those yellow eyes looking down at me as he carried me home. My mother put me to bed.”

Saying that, she suddenly realized that I was standing barefoot beside her, and she got really upset, almost angry with me. “Get into bed yourself, child, at once! Am I to have you catching a chill and dying of it”—and that was the one time she used the word— “as I did? That I’ll not have.” Just the way she’d said it to the Pooka when she came flying to rescue me. In the middle of everything, I was absolutely thrilled.

“That’s how it happened,” I said. “It really is like my story, sort of.”

Tamsin blinked in puzzlement at that, but she went on talking. “I lingered some days—just how long, I cannot say, for they swam all around me, the days, in and out, like fish. My parents and brothers were always at my bedside, whenever I should open my eyes; and he came every day, his labors at the Assizes done, to clasp my hand and gaze tenderly upon me by the hour. But my mother made sure never to leave me alone with him, dread him as she might, for she guessed something of what had passed between us. Indeed, it was he who was nearest when I drew my last breath in this world.”

I’d gotten into bed by then, and she meant to sit on the edge, but she couldn’t do it. It was as though she’d suddenly forgotten sitting, forgotten what bodies have to do so they can sit down on a bed, or in her own chair in her little secret room. She looked frightened—anyway, I think she did, because she was beginning to fade, and it was hard to be sure. I said, “Tell me. Tell me what you remember.” Because I knew it was important, though I couldn’t have said why, not then.

She tried to tell me. “He spoke,” she said. “He leaned close—for a moment he was Edric, but the eyes… the eyes betrayed him…” Like the Pooka again, I thought weirdly. Tamsin said, “He whispered to me. He took both my hands in one of his, and he leaned over me, and he whispered…”

And she was gone.

I couldn’t even call after her, for fear of waking someone. But I couldn’t just fluff my pillow and crash, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, because I knew what I’d dream. So I sat up and hugged my knees—and Julian’s gorilla—and I thought about things until morning came.

Twenty-one

Spring came the way it does in Dorset, like a really small child hiding behind a curtain to pounce out at the grown-up world for a moment, and then dash right back into cover. Tony’s mustache actually took hold, and Julian quit sleeping with the stuffed turtle that was Elvis’ successor. The first no-till crops looked promising—although Evan kept warning us and the Lovells that there’d probably be a yield hit this year, until the soil got used to the new regime. But when he spaded up a chunk of black dirt, it crumbled pretty easily in his hand, and there were a lot of earthworms, which even I know is a good sign. Evan said it was too stiff by half, wouldn’t be proper for a couple of years yet, but he looked happy.

The April nights were way too cold to go walking with Tamsin, so I mostly went to her room (which was cold enough—we didn’t have any heating in the east wing then), or in Tony’s studio, where she used to watch him practicing and sigh now and then: a long, liquid, three-hundred-year-old adolescent sigh that used to embarrass me even more than it made me jealous. Tony never heard it, never noticed it at all, and tried really hard not to notice me. I envied him his gift and his devotion, and I envied him Tamsin’s worship; but for once that seemed to be happening far away, in some other region of myself. I had bigger, scarier fish to fry.

She didn’t remember a single word that Judge Jeffreys had said to her on her deathbed. She didn’t even remember a lot of the things she’d already told me; that’s how hard she shrank away from thinking about that man, three centuries later. I made things worse because I kept asking her if it could have had anything to do with Edric Davies. Because I couldn’t get rid of the idea that Judge Jeffreys might have met him at the cow byre on his way to the Manor to make his awful proposal to Tamsin. And Edric might have been younger, and maybe even stronger, but he wouldn’t have stood a chance. I knew that much.

It took me a while to understand that what she did remember was her desperate anger at Edric for not being there when she scrambled up that rainsoaked path, not coming to protect her when those hands were pinning her arms. She felt it still, that anger, but by now it was all mixed up with three hundred years’ worth of regret and confusion and fear—three hundred years of never knowing. Guy Guthrie says that there are ghosts who go mad after their deaths. I don’t know why Tamsin didn’t.