“What was she speaking?” I demanded. “What language was that?”

“Tamil,” Meena said faintly. “With a Madras accent.”

“What did she say?” Meena shook her head, and then she smiled a little bit herself, almost like Mrs. Fallowfield.

“She said, ‘Keep an eye on her.’ ” I waited. Meena blushed—she can’t even lie by omission. “Actually, she didn’t say her. She said, ‘Keep an eye on that child—she’s not fit to be let out alone.’ But she wasn’t making fun of you, I’m sure she wasn’t. There was something else, something about her.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Let’s go meet your dad.”

I kept going back to the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant whenever I was in Dorchester. Mostly I was with Sally, but she came for tea, and I was there to stare at that portrait of Tamsin. I got to the point where I literally knew every brush stroke that made up that painting, from the hundreds of fussy little ones that created the highlights in her hair and every detail of her gown, to the half dozen or so that put Judge Jeffreys on that gold beaker, watching Tamsin forever with his mild, tender eyes. I wasn’t looking for anything exactly—I was waiting for the picture to tell me something, which is different. And it did tell me something terribly important, but I didn’t understand. I couldn’t possibly have understood then, but I still think I should have.

Tamsin couldn’t tell me a thing, of course. All she remembered of the painting sessions was Edric, and Edric’s music—she didn’t even know that Judge Jeffreys was in the portrait, too, and I could see her forgetting it almost as soon as I’d told her. I actually thought of bringing Tony to look at it, because of him knowing so much about Dorset history, but I decided against risking his curiosity. As for asking the Pooka or the billy-blind… no, there wouldn’t be any point to that. The Pooka was right—it was my problem, my business. And I hadn’t a clue.

The weather got warmer, even in Dorset. Wheat and barley, corn and peas and hay were popping up in Evan’s unplowed fields, fruit trees were blossoming overnight, and Meena and I had to start dodging football and field hockey again. Mister Cat was shedding his first real winter coat all over my room (he’d never needed to grow one in New York), and swaggered Stourhead Farm like Roger Willoughby. Sally finally got her first vocal student, in Frampton; Tony actually found a ballet class in Dorchester started up by a retired, slightly alcoholic Sadler’s Wells dancer; and Julian the Mad Scientist discovered what happens when you run experiments involving the electrical conductivity of water in the Male Faculty toilets at Sherborne Boys. Evan yelled at him about it, but it made him a celebrity for the rest of the term, and I was proud to be his sister.

Me, I went to see Guy Guthrie again, to ask if it seemed the least bit odd to him, Judge Jeffreys’s face being reflected in Tamsin Willoughby’s portrait. But the most even he could tell me was that the thing had always had a strange sort of reputation, almost from the time it was painted. “Maybe it’s owing to her dying so soon after, or perhaps it does have to do with Jeffreys—hard to say these days, when he’s become such a cash crop for Dorchester. In any case, the last Willoughby left it for the Lovells, and the Lovells gave it to the Restaurant.” He chuckled suddenly. “Very nearly the day it opened, as I recall.”

I said they certainly didn’t take much care of it, and Mr. Guthrie nodded agreement. He said slowly, “They’re afraid of it, too, I think, but they don’t know why. They won’t put it upstairs, in the Lodgings—they keep it in shadow, they never clean it, and I think they’d leave it for the dustman tomorrow, if they could. But it’s Dorset history, it’s part of the atmosphere they sell—they can’t quite make themselves get rid of it. I don’t know whether that’s any use to you, Jenny, but it’s the best I can do.”

Well, it was and it wasn’t. It convinced me that I was right to feel the weird way I did about the portrait, but it didn’t get me any closer to understanding why. So I finally gave up on it, and on the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant, and on anybody being much help to me but me. And I went looking for Tamsin.

It was still chilly to be walking out at night, but there wasn’t much choice if I wanted to be with her, restive and fretful as she’d become. No more sitting in her chair, both asleep and awake, decades at a time—now she was truly haunting the Manor, wandering endlessly, upstairs and down, leaving a hint of vanilla in the laundry, or the Arctic Circle, or Sally’s music room; giving Julian scary, bewildering dreams and giving Evan a sense of being constantly followed in the fields by something he didn’t want to turn around and see. Tony complained to me that lately he couldn’t concentrate in his studio well enough to choreograph jumping jacks for a Phys Ed class. He blamed me for it, which figured.

As for Sally… Sally just watched me and didn’t say much. It’s taken a long time for me to realize that I’d probably never have learned how smart that woman is if we hadn’t moved to England. She knew something was going on, and she knew me, and she almost felt the connection somewhere. She’d have understood Tamsin better than I ever did, my mother.

One flukey warm evening in May, I spotted Tamsin from a distance, whisking across a cornfield like a scrap of laundry blown off a clothesline. When I ran to catch up with her and she turned to face me, for a moment I was more frightened than the Oakmen could have made me. She was tattered, as though dogs had been tearing at her, ripping away her memories of herself. There were holes between shoulder and breast, I remember, and another one gaping below her waist… and you couldn’t see through them—there was nothing on the other side. I read about black holes now, where comets and planets and all the light in the universe get sucked in forever, and I think of those holes in Tamsin.

“Who are you?” Her voice was like a wind over my own grave.

“It’s me,” I said. Squeaked. “Tamsin, it’s me, it’s Jenny. Don’t you remember?”

She didn’t, not at all, not at first. Her eyes were still Tamsin’s bluegreen eyes, practically the one undamaged thing about her, but I wasn’t there. And I was twice as scared then, feeling myself being drawn into those black holes, and all I could think of was to squeak out those first lines of the song her sister Maria had taught her:

Nothing… and then—very, very slowly—she came back. It’s hard to describe now. It isn’t that she became clear and whole and solid, recognizing me, because she didn’t; what happened was that the old transparency returned, little by little, until you could see irrigation pipes and skinny young cornstalks through her, and I was as overjoyed as if she’d come back to me in the flesh. The holes—or whatever they really were—faded as her memories knitted themselves back together; when she looked at me again, her eyes took me in, and she smiled.

“Mistress Jenny,” she said. “I’faith, but how much older you’ve grown since last we met.” It hadn’t been that long at all, though I surely felt a deal older than I had when I’d run after her. “Jenny, did I know you at first? You must tell me truly.”

“No,” I said. “Not right away.” Tamsin was already nodding. I said, “What is this? What’s happening to you?”

She wouldn’t quite look at me, and that was just about more than I could bear. I held my hands out to her, which was something we’d gradually begun to use as sign language for a hug. I didn’t think she’d remember, but she put her own hands out, slowly. She whispered, “I do not know. It comes on me often now.”