Colin was telling me how many different kinds of walnuts there are, and why English walnuts are the best, but I was hearing the soldiers talking to each other. They sounded very far away, but so did he; their voices were deep and thin at the same time, and distorted, as though the tape were dragging, but I could make out most of the words. They were talking about the rebels.

“… Sedgemoor, the week after Sedgemoor… ah, you should have seen the colonel then. Hanged a hundred of them in the market at Bridgewater—practically with his own hands, he did…”

“… Codso, do you tell me that? You weren’t with him in Tangiers—”

“… Aye, Tangiers, and no bloody Bishop Mews there to prate of innocence and force him to spare the lives of such filth…”

“… A gallows every three miles—every three miles, a gallows and a chopper and a cauldron of pitch, you’d see this country quiet fast enough…”

“Jenny? Jenny, did you know that your American pecans are from the same family as walnuts?”

I snapped. I forgot where I was. I hissed at him, “Colin, shut up! Don’t you know who these guys are?”

It’s amazing, when you think about it, but I’ve never yet had anyone look at me as though I were genuinely crazy. I mean, when you really think about it, there should have been dozens by now. But all I’ve got is the memory of Colin, gaping at me and starting to back away, honestly expecting me to start drooling and foaming and jump at his throat. I guess he’ll have to do. He said, “Jenny, what are you talking about? They’re just walnut trees.”

They were, too, and I knew that. I knew that, that’s what I’m trying to explain. But I knew those soldiers, too, just as surely as I knew what was ripening on those trees. Tony had told me all about Colonel Kirke’s dragoons—“Kirke’s Lambs,” they called themselves—and it wasn’t something you forget once the history test is over. Kirke’s Lambs were the military equivalent of Judge Jeffreys, a lynch mob in uniform. Judge, jury, and executioners, the whole crew, and they didn’t even need to wear wigs. When I imagined people like them being turned loose in the Colonies, a century later… I don’t think I’ve ever been that proud again of being an American.

Colin kept backing off. “What are you looking at, Jenny? What guys—what do you mean? Jenny, there’s nobody there.”

“Oh, yes, there is,” I said. “And they can hear us, too, so for Christ’s sake put a sock in it.” I was just saying that to keep him quiet—I didn’t think Kirke’s gang actually could hear us, away off in 1685—but three of the dragoons reined in their horses and looked straight at us, right on the money. One of them had one blue eye and one brown eye; a second man had a scar running from the left corner of his mouth to his left ear. A third was the handsomest man I’ve ever yet seen, except for his mouth, which was like another scar, thin and white, a bloodless welt. I’d know every one of those faces if I saw them again.

“Voices,” the scarred dragoon said. “I heard them.”

The handsome one said, “Cornet Simmons, you’re drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.” His mouth hardly moved.

Colin called, “Jenny, I’m going back to the house. I think my father’s leaving, anyway.”

“There!” Cornet Simmons said. “There, by the stump. I heard a bloody voice, I tell you.”

There wasn’t any stump where I stood, but he was staring right into my eyes. His were a streaky blue—he was drunk, back there in the seventeenth century, hunting rebels on the Yeovil road—and he kept blinking and shaking his head… but he saw me. I know he saw me.

The dragoon with the mismatched eyes laughed suddenly: one short machine-gun burst. He sounded closer and clearer than the other two, I don’t know why. He said, “Ghosts, it’s ghosts you’re hearing, Simmons—and why not? Country’s full up, as many of them as the Colonel’s made around here.”

“Aye, that’ll be it,” the handsome one said. “Ghosts. Close ranks, Cornet Simmons. Business in Yeovil tonight, and Taunton after. Close ranks.”

He didn’t raise his voice, but the last two words cracked out across three centuries like bones breaking. The scarred dragoon hesitated for a little—then he wheeled his horse and followed the others, who were already trotting on into the fog. But at the last moment he spun the horse on its hind legs—practically popping a wheelie— and rode at me, grabbing for his sword hilt. I can still hear the soft whir the thing made coming out of its sheath. Behind him, the handsome one shouted something, sounding really pissed.

I couldn’t move. I stood still and watched him coming for me. God, when I write this I remember so much I’ve never told even Meena—the crusted blood in his mustache, the slobber flying from his horse’s mouth, the glint of somebody’s sunlight along the sword blade, the funny deep, humming sound he was making in his throat right up to the moment when the sabre swept through my throat. No, I didn’t feel a thing—though the berry bushes just behind me hissed and rustled—but maybe the people he killed like that in 1685 or whenever didn’t feel anything either. Anyway, he swung his horse around, stared right at me one more time, made one last sort of half-pass with his sword before he put it away, and then he cantered off after the rest of the Lambs, whistling loudly through his teeth. I heard someone yelling back at him, but I couldn’t see the others anymore.

I stood where I was, with the walnut orchard drifting slowly into place around me again while I just shook. Colin was long gone, probably already telling every Lovell within range that I was a serious double-barrelled loony, and I saw his point myself. Seeing Tamsin, talking to her, having feelings about her… well, you could call that a special case, and you could even say that about Judge Jeffreys—at least I could. But meeting Kirke’s Dragoons on a road that only a ghost remembered, and believing that one of them was aware enough of me to try to kill me—no, I never told Meena about that. I never told anyone until now.

Mister Cat came flowing out of a bush, one of those same berry bushes that Cornet Simmons’s sabre had set swaying. He did his stiff-legged Frankenstein walk over to where the dragoons’ horses had been standing. Would have been standing, if they and the old road had really been there. He sniffed the ground very carefully, and then he scratched it hard with his back feet, as though he’d just taken a major dump. Then I knew that I’d seen what I’d seen, and I picked him up when he sauntered back to me and said, “Thanks. I was having a bad ten minutes or so there.”

I put him on my shoulder, and we started back through the walnut orchard, me trying to think of something nice and sane to say to the Lovells in case they hadn’t left yet. Suddenly Mister Cat stiffened, spat, got a grip (my right shoulder looked like a dart board for two days), and made an entirely new sound, like a bandsaw seizing up in wet wood. I had no idea he could make a sound like that.

I turned to see where he was swearing, and got a quick glimpse of Mrs. Fallowfield’s little pink dog-thing scuttling away from us among the trees. Mister Cat wanted down in the worst way, to rend and devour, but I wouldn’t let him. I said, “Forget it, leave him alone, we’ve got enough troubles.” But Mister Cat bitched about it all the way home.