I couldn’t get used to the way she sounded, talking to him—not like my goofy New York single-mom Sally, more like an older person, so thoughtful and mature it always made me feel strange. Evan laughed a little and said, “Well, it’s my fault, I should have stashed you lot back in London with Charlie, and come down here alone, until I got things put shipshape. I knew that, damn it. I just wanted you with me.”
I heard them kissing then, and I curled up tight and pulled that cold, floppy pillow over my ears. I didn’t expect to sleep at all, but I did, straight through, and I had one weird dream after another, all of them full of people I didn’t know. Sometime in the night Sally sat by me on the bed for a while, unless that was a dream, too. I should have asked her then, but I wasn’t about to, and now she can’t remember. But I think she did.
Okay. The first months were solid nightmare, and it’s no good my pretending they weren’t. And I was a big part of the nightmare, maybe the biggest, I know that. I’m not going to go on and on about it, I’m just going to say that I was absolutely miserable, and I spread it around, and if everybody else at Stourhead wasn’t absolutely miserable, too, it wasn’t my fault. I did the very best I could.
But I had help. There was the house itself, to begin with. If I ever knew a house that truly did not want to be lived in, it was the Manor back when we arrived. I don’t just mean stuff like that sidewalk-colored water coming out in smelly burps, or the wood stove smoking up the kitchen every time Sally tried to cook something, or the weird way the electricity was hooked up, so you could turn on the light in my bathroom and blow every fuse in the west wing. Or the Horror Of The Septic Tank, which I am not going to describe, ever. That’s not what I mean.
Since that last sentence, I’ve been sitting here for half an hour, figuring how to explain how all of us were always tripping and falling over nothing at least once a day, as though those beautiful old floors absolutely hated the feet that walked on them. I’m talking about the way you could hear ugly little murmurs in the two chimneys, even when there wasn’t any wind, and the way some corners just ate up light, just stayed cold and shadowy forever, never mind how many lamps you plugged in. And I’m talking about the quick, scratchy footsteps everybody heard right above the Arctic Circle, one time or another, and nobody wanted to mention; and about that east-wing window that wouldn’t reflect the sunlight. We couldn’t even find the room it belonged to, that’s how the Manor was.
Julian was wildly excited about all this at the beginning. He ran around saying, “It’s a haunted house, how splendid—I’ll be the only boy at school living in a real haunted house!” But there were a couple of rooms on the second floor that Julian absolutely would not go into, from the first day. Everybody else did—there didn’t seem anything weird or scary about these two at least—but Julian just stopped right at the door, like I’ve seen Mister Cat do sometimes, and nobody could get him to take another step. He kept mumbling, “It feels funny, I don’t like it.” When Evan tried to talk him into going in, he cried. When Tony teased him about it, Julian hit him. Of course he says he doesn’t remember any of that now.
Oh, there was a caretaker, by the way—I forgot to put that in. His name was Wilf, he looked exactly like the Pillsbury Doughboy in weird rubber overalls and hip boots, and he wandered up from the cellar the first morning we were there, totally and permanently hungover. He had a shuffly, wincing style of walking, as though his head were made of glass, just about to roll off his shoulders and shatter into a million bits. He was supposed to be there just for a couple of weeks, to show Evan where things were around the house and the farm, but he hung on after that, and you couldn’t ever quite get rid of him. Evan fired him once or twice a week, but he didn’t pay any attention.
Evan and Sally worked like crazy people. Evan got rid of the wood stove as soon as he could find someone to haul it away, and we actually did sort of live on pizza and takeout from Sherborne until the Lovells—the family who own Stourhead Farm—put in a new electric range. Which meant replacing all the wiring in the whole Arctic Circle, but they never hassled Evan about that. Besides the electricity, they paid to have the plumbing redone—so between one thing and another the house was a total ruin for months, with tools and torn-out boards all over everywhere, and nests of wires hanging out of the walls, and the men Evan hired to help him tramping around growling at each other, scattering pipe ashes on the floors and taking tea breaks every ten minutes. They mostly had ponytails and big thick yellow mustaches, and I never could tell them apart.
They also quit a lot. Most of the time it was over ordinary stuff like the pay or the hours or the tea breaks, but not always. One guy quit because his tools kept disappearing on him, and I think he tried to sue the Lovells about it. And there was one who just didn’t show up for work one morning, and he never did come back for his tools. Later on, he wrote Evan and Sally a letter, trying to explain, but it was mixed up and misspelled, and full of ramblings about sad voices, and music he couldn’t hear, and about “puddles of cold air,” and something like invisible fur brushing his neck all the time. There were a couple of others who talked about the voices and the cold air, too, and a man who said he kept smelling vanilla the whole time he was rewiring the Arctic Circle, and it made him so nervous he had to stop. Evan said most of them drank, and just kept hiring new ones.
Tony said, “Maybe we really do have a boggart,” but he said it out of range of Julian’s feet. The two of them are going to hate this, because it makes them seem as though they were fighting all the time, but back then they were. Julian was always the person who started hitting and kicking and crying, but Tony usually had it coming, one way or the other. That’s the way I remember it, anyhow.
“Well, it just might be,” Evan said. The weirder the question, the more seriously he answers it; that’s another way Evan is. “There’s certainly something playing tricks in the kitchen lately, and if it isn’t you two—”
“It’s not, it’s not!” Julian rumbled, and Tony said quickly, “Well, I just took a couple of the chocolate biscuits, but I didn’t knock all those bottles down—”
“And I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t draw those pictures in the flour!” Julian was shaking his head so hard it actually made me dizzy to look at him. “And I didn’t throw the eggs around, and I didn’t make the horrible mess under the sink, and the fridge wasn’t my fault—”
Evan sighed. “I wish I could blame that on a boggart.” We’d already had two different refrigerators put in by then, and neither one could keep stuff cold for more than a day. There wasn’t a thing wrong with them—each time all the food went bad, Evan had an old man come down from Salisbury, but all he could ever figure was that the electricity was screwed up some way. Which didn’t make any sense, with the new wiring; but the last time he came, the Salisbury man rubbed a finger alongside his nose and closed one eye (I’d read about people doing that, but I’d never actually seen it), and told Evan, “There’s some houses, ones that was here before the electric, they don’t like the electric. They’ll be fighting it, squeezing at it, trying to choke it off all the time. It’s fighting the electric, this house, that’s what’s happening.” Evan called somebody else the next time, but it didn’t make much difference.
Me, I was flat out hoping for a dozen boggarts, and fifty pookas, and a whole herd of Hedley Kows, and all those other creatures Evan had told us about on the drive down. Anything that would make it absolutely impossible for us to stay on at Stourhead, anything that would force us at least back to London, even if we couldn’t go home to New York—was for it all the way, no matter how messy or how scary. Anyway, I was for it until the thing that happened in my bathroom.
Sally used to tell me that the English air would do wonders for my skin and, besides, my skin wasn’t nearly as horrible as I thought it was. All I knew was I’d been sprouting torrid new English zits from Heathrow on, and I was developing a hunchy slouch, the way tall girls get, from sneaking past mirrors. Except one, the mirror in my bathr
oom, where every night and every morning I’d face off with my face one more time. I try any damn thing anybody said might work—all kinds of ointments and soaps and masks, stuff that made my skin tight and flaky, stuff that smelled like rotten eggs, other stuff that was supposed to soothe your skin, only when it dried on you it hurt… I don’t like talking about that time. It was years ago, but it comes right back.
Anyway. I was leaning in close to the mirror, doing exactly what Sally always said not to do, which was squeezing a thing on my forehead which was forever boiling up in the exact same place. (Meena says that it was probably my third eye trying to get me to pay attention, but what it looked like was a zit about the size of an M&M. A bright red one.) Once I got it open, I was going to clean it out with alcohol, and I didn’t care if it burned. I hoped it would burn—then maybe the damn thing would get the idea and leave me alone. And then I heard the voices.
Not words, mind you. I didn’t hear real words, just two voices, one of them squeaky as a Munchkin, the other one a bit deeper, definitely slower—still shrill, mind you, but with an explaining sort of tone, like Tony whispering to Julian about what was happening in a movie. He was really patient with Julian that way, even in those days when he was calling him a boggart.
I swung around, but I couldn’t see anything. It was a small bathroom, no shower even, and no hiding place except in the shadows behind the old lion-foot tub. That’s where the voices were coming from.
I took just a step toward the tub, and I said, “Who are you?” And if that sounds brave or anything, you can hang that notion up right now. I wasn’t afraid of anyone who spoke in tiny squeaks and could hide behind a bathtub. What I was afraid of was that if I wasn’t really careful I was going to start understanding them, because I was almost making words out already. And that was the last thing I wanted, to understand squeaky voices behind the tub.
They went silent for a minute when I spoke, and then they started up again, both of them, sounding excited now. I could have screamed—I felt a scream working its way up through my chest—but that would have brought everybody in, and I didn’t want Sally to know I’d been digging at zits. Probably sounds incredibly dumb, but there you are, that was me. I took another couple of steps, and I stamped my foot down really hard, so my toothbrush rattled in the glass. “I can see you,” I said. “You might as well come out of there. Come on, I’m not going to hurt you.” I threw that in because my voice was shaky, and I didn’t want them to think I was scared.
What that got me was a flood of giggles. Not squeaks, not talk, and not real giggles, either. Nasty little titters, the kind you’re supposed to hear off to one side when you’re walking down the hall. I know those. In school I never let it get me, but then—in that old bathroom, in that strange, smelly old house, with them, whoever they were, spying on me picking my face, and snickering about it, I just lost it, that’s all. I ran at the tub, stamping and kicking out like Julian when Tony’d been teasing him one time too many. It’s a good thing there wasn’t anybody there, or I’d have trampled them flat, I didn’t care if they were Santa’s elves. But they were gone. I heard feet skittering off somewhere in a corner, but no voices, except for Sally in the hall, calling to know if I was all right. I said I was.
That night I lay awake for hours, wishing more than ever that Mister Cat was with me, snoring on my stomach, and I tried to stay cool and decide whether I was going crazy, which I’d always almost expected, or whether there really were boggarts running around in my bathroom. Crazy was comforting, in a way—if you’re crazy, then nothing’s your fault, which was just how I wanted to feel right then. Boggarts were scary, because if they were possible, and possible right here in this house, then all kinds of other stuff was possible, and most of it I didn’t much want to think about. But it was interesting, at least, and crazy isn’t interesting. Handy, I could see that, but not interesting.
When I did fall asleep, I didn’t dream about boggarts exactly. I dreamed that Julian and I had shrunk down to the size of boggarts, and that big people were chasing us with sticks. I don’t know why sticks, but that’s not important, that wasn’t the frightening part. There was something else in the dream, too, something or someone with big yellow eyes, such a raw, wild yellow they were practically golden. Big, big eyes, with a slitty sideways pupil, filling up the dream. We couldn’t get away from them until I woke, all tangled in my sweaty sheets and listening for voices. But I never did hear them again, not those.
Seven
Meena keeps saying this is where I should put in all the stuff about Stourhead Farm, but it’s hard to know where to start. First off, it’s in the country—not that country means much when you’re twenty miles from Julian’s Taco Bell pretty much wherever you are. But when you’ve lived your entire life in downtown Manhattan, waking up to hear cows wondering when they’re going to be milked instead of police sirens, and hearing wild geese yelling overhead instead of jackhammers tearing up West Eighty-third and Columbus, and hearing the plumbing burping like mad because there’s some kind of air pocket in the well instead of drunks puking and crying right under your window… well, that’s it, that’s country. Maybe not to Willie Nelson or Thomas Hardy, but to West Eighty-third and Columbus, it’s country.
Okay, Meena. You can trace Stourhead Farm back to 1671, when Roger Willoughby bought a big piece of a rundown manor—freehold, that’s outright, not like being a tenant farmer. He wasn’t a farmer, he made his money selling supplies to the Royal Navy, but he had all kinds of ideas about farming in his head, and he couldn’t wait to try them out. He wrote letters to the newspapers, he wrote pamphlets on how you could get double yields by rotating the crops just so, and how to breed bigger Dorset sheep, and why everybody in west Dorset should quit growing wheat and raise millet instead. Evan says everybody in west Dorset sat back and waited to see him go under. That’s when they took to calling his big new house “the Manor,” to make fun of him. Roger Willoughby was from Bristol, and in those days he might just as well have been from Madras, like Meena. It’s different now, like everywhere, but not that different. Dorset doesn’t change as fast as some other places.
Well, he didn’t go under, Roger Willoughby. He couldn’t do anything about the sheep—they’re still pretty small—but he must have had some sense about farming, because Stourhead stayed in his family for almost three hundred years. They weren’t gentry, and they weren’t absentee landlords, buying up farms they never saw. They lived on the land, and they always seemed to have their fingers in it, messing around with some new notion. Roger Willoughby planted barley and oats at first, and then peas—and he did try to plant millet, but when it just wouldn’t take, he went back to wheat, like everybody else. Because he might have been a Prodigious Romantic—that’s what Tamsin called him—but he wasn’t crazy.
It’s not a big farm, maybe seven hundred acres. In the States, that’s like a playpen, a backyard, you can’t even make it pay for itself. But it was big enough for this part of Dorset in Roger Willoughby’s time. It used to be bigger—I don’t know how much—but the Willoughbys sold off some corners and slices over the years. Especially in the nineteenth century, when there was a long run of terrible weather, and a bad slump in farm prices. Stourhead just went straight downhill from about 1900 and never really recovered. The last of the Willoughbys sold out after World War II—I think there were four or five owners after them, each one more clueless than the one before. When the Lovells took over, the place was probably the exact same wilderness it was when old Roger Willoughby moved in.
The Lovells were always business people, just like the Willoughbys were farmers. (In England, people always know what your family’s always been.) The ones who own Stourhead actually live near Oxford—Evan mostly goes there to meet with them these days, because they don’t come down here nearly as often as they used to when we were first at Stourhead. Back then they practically lived with us, showing up in red-faced coveys to hold big conferences with Evan about their plans to have Stourhead
at least breaking even in a couple of years, and maybe making a profit after that. Evan thought they were as prodigiously romantic as old Roger Willoughby, and I used to hear him telling them so, over and over.
“You can’t turn a farm as exhausted as Stourhead all the way around that fast,” he kept saying. “I’m not talking only about the physical aspect—the barns and the outbuildings and that—I mean the land itself. Your topsoil’s a disaster area—it’s starved for nitrogen, it’s been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet.” One Lovell or another usually started spluttering right about this point, but Evan would just go straight on over him. “You need a fourth well, and very likely a fifth—that’s simply not negotiable. Three wells were just fine in good King Charles’s golden days, but nothing’s what it was back then, including your water table. That’s why the corn’s not growing—that, and the fact that it’s the wrong strain for this acid soil and this climate. And where you do have enough water, in the upper meadows, you’ve got yourselves a proper little marsh bubbling along. The only malaria swamp in England, I shouldn’t wonder.”
The Lovells would always wind up asking Evan if he thought it was possible to salvage the farm at all. And he’d tell them what he always told them: “Yes, but you can’t do it overnight, and you can’t do it on the cheap. It’s going to cost you money and a great deal of time, and if you’re not willing to invest both of those, you might just as well chuck it in and sell the place for a Christmas-tree farm.” Those are really big in Dorset, by the way. I don’t have any idea why.
Watching him with those people day after day was like seeing a whole different Evan, in a way. I mean, he still talked quietly, and his hair was always still messy, and he sometimes actually wouldn’t remember to come in when it rained, because he’d be thinking about something. But he knew what he was talking about—that was the big difference—and all those Lovells knew he knew, and that he didn’t care what they thought, this was the way it was. You can’t fake being like that. I’ve tried.
Tamsin Page 7
