But she was frightened almost literally out of her mind, and she couldn’t tell me why. You have to try to understand what that might be like for a ghost, the way I had to. That’s all she was, after all, as I’ve been saying—memory, recollection, mind—and here she was, so terrified of another ghost, or of the person he’d been, that she couldn’t even remember the cause of her fear. I kept pushing and pushing her, whenever I had the chance. “It’s nothing he did to you—it’s Edric, something about Edric.” Tamsin would shake her head vaguely, wearily. “Something he said, then. Whatever he said to you when you were sick, when you stopped. The last thing you heard him say—it’ll come back, think about it.”
But she couldn’t think about it, that was exactly it. I learned even to avoid speaking that man’s name, because each time it would blow straight through her, scattering her like clouds before a Dorset gale, and then I wouldn’t see her for days at a time. I think it took her that long to gather Tamsin again, and each time was harder.
I told Meena what there was to tell about my seeing Judge Jeffreys, including what he’d said about having come for Tamsin. She didn’t agree with me that Edric had to be at the center of the trouble. “Jenny, have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? My father always talks about Occam’s Razor—he can drive you crazy with it. It’s a philosophical idea that says, look first for the simplest solution—don’t make anything more complicated than it has to be. I think you are doing that with Tamsin. It’s that horrible man she is frightened of, and well she should be. He is the one you saw, not Edric. This is nothing to do with Edric.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. I keep wondering—how come he’s back, anyway? The Pooka says ghosts don’t return, once they’re really gone—how did he manage it? It’s important, Meena, some way. I know it is.”
Meena put her hands on my arms. “Either way, you are to stay out of it. Understand me, Jenny.”
She sounded so totally unlike herself—so much older, so tense and bleak—that I gaped at her for a moment. “I have to help her. Nobody else can help her but me.”
Meena gripped my arms tighter. “How will you help her? What plans do you have? You don’t have any plans.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I can’t be with her every minute—it’s all I can do to keep up with her, the way she’s zigging and zagging around the place. But if I can keep a watch on him, if there’s some way I can stay on his trail—”
“No!” Either Meena actually shook me a little or else she was trembling so hard that I felt it myself. “Jenny, this is like me and the Hundred-Acre Wood—I really will drag you away by the hair this time, if I have to. I don’t care about your Tamsin, whatever happens to her—I’m sorry, but I don’t. I care about you.”
For one really crazy minute I almost imagined Meena actually being jealous of Tamsin and me, the way I’d been so wildly jealous about Tamsin’s fascination with Tony. That notion passed in a hurry, and I was just me, flushed and clumsy as always, trying to say something that wouldn’t sound too stupid. “I know you do,” I said. “I mean, I really do know.” Not much, but that’s me, every time. “But he’s dead, and I’m alive—what can he do to me? I’ve never understood people being scared of ghosts. Poor Tamsin can’t even touch me.”
“Tamsin doesn’t wish you harm,” Meena said stubbornly. “You will not go near him, Jenny. You have to promise me.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
We looked at each other. Meena finally sighed, and laughed a very little bit, and stood back from me. “Well,” she said. “In that case.”
If it hadn’t been for Mister Cat, I don’t know what might have happened. He’d plainly been having the same sort of problem with Miss Sophia Brown that I was having with Tamsin. I’d see them together once in a while, and sometimes get a glimpse of her by herself, trotting off on one of those important cat errands that even ghost-cats have. But she didn’t sleep on my bed with Mister Cat anymore, or materialize to join us when we were hunting through the Manor for Tamsin. Mister Cat was distressed about it, too, and kept saying so, loudly and constantly. I told him I couldn’t do a damn thing about it, and he said he already knew that, but still.
Meena and I had started with some notion that the two of us could somehow keep track of Judge Jeffreys’s comings and goings, and stay close to Tamsin that way. Not a chance, not even with school out. Meena spent as much time at Stourhead Farm as she could get away with, but her family had Cotswold-vacation plans, no way out of it; and anyway, she wouldn’t have been able to see Judge Jeffreys—she was just determined to be there when I did. When I look back at us, all I can do is laugh. Now that I can.
One thing that helped was the fact that Judge Jeffreys wasn’t nearly as easy moving around the farm as I’d expected he would be. Tamsin had lived her whole short life there: three centuries dead or not, there wasn’t anything she didn’t remember about Stourhead—at least, when she wasn’t panicky. But Judge Jeffreys stuck pretty close to the Manor when he appeared—maybe because he was afraid of getting lost, maybe just because he knew she’d have to return sooner or later. I still don’t know how it really works with ghosts.
Mister Cat knew. He began to come looking for me, day or night—not even bothering to stay cool, but bursting in with a fullthroated, full-tilt, red-alert Siamese yowl—and I learned to drop whatever I was doing, make whatever excuse I could get away with, and follow him down to the cellar, up to the Arctic Circle, out to one of the barns—the North Barn, usually—or even to Sally’s garden. For his own personal reasons, Mister Cat had taken the case.
And he was always there, wherever Mister Cat led me: tall and still, looking much more like a living person than Tamsin did. Maybe that was because of the robes and the wig (wigs, really—he remembered three or four styles); or maybe it was that he knew what he wanted, dead or alive, so being dead didn’t make any difference to him, the way it did to Tamsin. Meena thought he didn’t know he was dead. She said there were a lot of ghosts like that in India. “They come marching in to dinner and expect to sit down with everyone. Or they get into bed with their wives or husbands, because that’s where they always slept. It’s very sad.”
Nothing sad about Judge Jeffreys, not in his own time and not now. He hung around, pacing a bit now and then, murmuring to himself sometimes, but never the least bit impatient, never anything but waiting. I don’t think he knew for a minute whether he was standing in Albert’s water dish or Sally’s tomato patch, and I know he didn’t see the farm workers as they passed him by, or Evan, Sally, Tony, or Julian, even if he was in the kitchen when we sat down to dinner. Nobody else ever saw him, of course—although Julian kept looking right at him and shaking his head a little, as though there were some insect buzzing around him. But of everyone and everything on the whole damn farm, Judge Jeffreys only saw me.
Even after everything that happened, I still think those were the worst moments of all, those times when he’d stand behind my chair, or beside me while I was washing dishes and talk to me in that rustly voice of his. It wasn’t that he said anything that creepy or terrifying; mostly he just repeated over and over, “I have come for her. Tell her.” But what he felt like, there at my shoulder, whether he spoke or not… I don’t know how to write about that. The best way I can put it is that the presence of him rustled like his voice, like an attic full of old dead bugs: the empty husks of flies in ragged spiderwebs, still bobbing against the window—the beetles and grasshoppers that froze to death winters ago—the dusty rinds of little nameless things stirring on the floor in a draft, crunching underfoot wherever you step. Judge Jeffreys didn’t just sound like that. He was that.