“It’s not fair,” I said. “It should be you.”

That snapped Meena out of it fast. “What? Why? Because I look right?—because you think I look like someone who should be able to see ghosts? You have to stop that, Jenny, right now. It’s degrading to you, and it makes me feel really bad. She chose you to talk to, when she’s never spoken to anyone else, and if that doesn’t tell you something about yourself, then I don’t know what will. I think that’s my father coming.”

It was. Meena stood up and turned toward where she thought Tamsin was sitting—I had to move her just a little. She said clearly, “Good-bye. I’m happy that you speak to my friend Jenny. She’s the best person you could have on your side, you can take my word for that.” She stopped for a moment, touching her cheek, and then she said, “If you can hear me—I’m on your side, too.” Then she ran to meet Mr. Chari, and I stood with Tamsin, watching her go.

Twenty-two

Tamsin scolded me about the Oakmen. I’d thought Meena had really worked me over, but after Tamsin got through, there wasn’t enough left to recycle. “Witling, gommeril, logger-head, are you mad then? After all my cautions, to walk in that accursed wood of your own choice, knowing? Mistress Jenny Gluckstein, what can have possessed you? What cloud came over your brain-pan, tell me?” There was a lot more. She was so furious that she lost all her usual transparency—she looked as solid as Sally while she was laying into me. I was so fascinated to see her like that, I know I missed some great seventeenth-century words.

It didn’t help at all when I pointed out that I’d only gone in a little way, and only after Meena—that I couldn’t let her go alone just because she wouldn’t pay any attention to my warning. Tamsin ran right over that one. “Never gainsay me, child— it was for you to keep her out of danger in the first place. There’s where you should have laid hold of her hair, the very moment she spoke of entering the wood.” Oh, she was sizzling, she was wonderful!

In time she cooled down (though she remembered how angry she’d been—and why—well after I expected she’d have forgotten). She stood in front of me and touched my cheek, the way she’d done with Meena.

“Jenny,” she whispered. “My dear Mistress Jenny, do you not yet know that I fear losing you even as I fear…” She didn’t finish, but started over. “Dear Jenny, you well know the perils of your own world, but now you walk somewhat in mine as well, and you must heed what little I can tell you of it. There are worse than Oakmen abroad in what you call night.”

“I love it,” I said. “I don’t care what’s running loose in your world, I love it a lot more than mine. I love walking around at night, even when I’m not with you, just knowing. Even in the daytime, everything’s different, because I know.”

“No,” Tamsin said sharply, “no, you do not know,” and we were right back at why I shouldn’t have let Meena set one foot into the Hundred-Acre Wood. But her heart wasn’t nearly as much in it: She kept fading, reappearing, fading out again, as though she were being pulled back and forth between her own time and this one, memories grabbing at her this way, things she wanted to tell me yanking her back the other way. Finally she just gave up and vanished, but even that wasn’t quite right—she didn’t blink out instantly, but lingered for a moment, a soap-bubble Tamsin, with dust motes falling through her sad eyes. I didn’t see her for days after that.

I saw the Pooka a lot that spring, though: never again face-to-face in a room, but always from a distance, in the shape of a bird, a hare, a badger rolling along on its toes, a young red deer with the velvet still on its antlers. He might not be able to be any help to Tamsin, but he was definitely keeping watch on the farm—or on her and me. Meena said from what I told her about him, the Pooka reminded her a little of Hanuman, the Monkey King: wise and strong, and very mischievous, but always on the side of good. I wouldn’t have gone that far—I still wouldn’t, even after what he did for us—but I was glad to see him. More glad than not, anyway.

Because something was moving around Stourhead Farm that spring, just as the billy-blind had warned me, and finally even I could feel it. It wasn’t only my on-and-off dreams about Judge Jeffreys, and it wasn’t Mister Cat’s occasional nighttime go-rounds with things that always seemed to have too many legs and weren’t ever there when I went down in the morning to check out his body count. It wasn’t even the Wild Hunt baying across the sky time and time—once I even halfway slept through it, I was getting so used to them. It was Tamsin.

She was increasingly restless, in a way I’d never seen before. By now I knew her as well, I guess, as you can know someone who died three hundred years before you were born. I usually knew where she was likely to be if I couldn’t find her in her room or Tony’s studio—out talking to those beech trees of hers, or curled in Evan’s swing with Miss Sophia Brown, and probably Mister Cat as well. Once in a while she liked to be in the kitchen when Sally or Evan was cooking. She couldn’t explain exactly why to me; one time she said, “I have no sense of smell, but an imagination of smell—can you comprehend such a thing, Jenny?” I couldn’t. Tamsin said, “Besides, there’s comfort in a kitchen, always, for me as much as any other.” That one I did understand.

But lately I couldn’t tell, not only where to find her, but just how she’d be when I did. I’d see her sometimes in places where I’d never come across her before: walking the fields among Evan’s workers, or sitting at Sally’s piano with her poor transparent hands stretched out over the keys, as though she could make them move up and down by plain will. Most often, when I spoke to her, she’d wheel around, looking absolutely terrified, and vanish. It would take me forever to get her to come back, and then generally she wouldn’t know me, sometimes for a couple of days. Once she didn’t even know Miss Sophia Brown.

The worst thing was, I had a terrible feeling that I knew why it was happening to her. She certainly didn’t, and there wasn’t any point asking the Pooka or the billy-blind—neither one of them was worth a damn at saying anything useful straight out, anyway. So I talked to Meena.

I’d kept my promise about that, even though I was so much in the habit of not saying a word about Tamsin to anyone that it was really work. But it was worth it, too: Not just for the plain relief of dropping all my fears and confusions in someone else’s lap, but because of who that someone was. I said, “It’s the Other One, Judge Jeffreys. The billy-blind kept warning me. Meena, he’s not gone, the way she told me—he’s somewhere close by, and the more restless she gets, the more active, so does he. And she knows it, or she halfway knows it, and she’s so frightened she can barely hold herself together. That’s what I think, anyway.”

We were in the Charis’ kitchen, and Meena was showing me how to make a pillau. Over her shoulder she said, “You think he might still be here, still waiting on earth, because of his obsession with her? Is that how it is with ghosts?”

“Is it? You’re the one who grew up with them—you tell me. I’m just starting to wonder if maybe she’s held here because of some obsession of her own. Something to do with Edric, with what happened to him. I don’t know, Meena.”

“In the south they put coconut milk in with the stock,” Meena said. “My mother doesn’t do that, but I like it. Do you know what I wish?” I didn’t say anything. Meena said, “I’d like to see that painting of her.”

“I asked her about it once,” I said. “She didn’t have any idea where it might be, after so long. I’ve looked for it a few times, but if it’s in the house I’m not seeing it. Anyway, I don’t know what help it’d be. She says the guy was a rotten painter.”