"Tamsin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beagle Peter S)

Ten

I haven’t worked on this for a few days now. Tony’s dance company made it as far west as Salisbury for once, so we all spent the weekend there and caught every performance, even though he only danced in a couple of numbers. And then he came home with us and stayed until Sally and Evan took him back to London, leaving Julian and me in charge of each other. Julian wants to see what I’ve written in the worst way, and I keep moving it around, hiding it from him, stashing it at Meena’s sometimes. Even Meena’s just seen a few pages, because it’s not ready. I’m stuck between who I think I was and who I think I am, between what happened to me and what I think really happened. All I wanted was to get it all down and done with, and now I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one who’s not ready.

Trying to write about seeing the ghost of a Persian cat doesn’t exactly clear the mind, either. As I’ve already said, if ghosts were possible, maybe it was all possible, everything—boggarts, Hedley Kows, UFOs, alligators in the sewers. Mrs. Chari, Meena’s mother, was in an earthquake once, and she said it felt as though the ground under her feet had all turned into water. That was how I felt after Mister Cat brought his new girlfriend around. I didn’t tell Meena after all, or Sally, or anybody. Not because I thought about whether they’d believe me or not. I just did not want to deal with it. I didn’t want to tell myself, even.

But I did come within that much of telling Tony. A few days after all this happened, he found me in a back pasture getting a cricket lesson from Julian. I can hit—I don’t see how you could not hit, with a flat bat—but I can’t pitch worth a damn. Bowl, I mean. Julian was showing me how to turn my wrist so the ball bounces away from the batter, when I looked around and saw Tony watching us. That made me nervous, but he wasn’t interested in making fun of me. He waited until Julian asked him if he wanted to play, and then he said, “Not right now, but I’d like to borrow Jenny for a bit. I’m trying to work something out, and I need a partner. Just for a few minutes, I promise.”

“I can’t dance,” I said. My heart started pounding, and I was running with sweat, that fast—not because of Tony, but because of the whole idea of dancing. “Take Julian, take Wilf—take Albert. You don’t want me, believe me.”

Both of them ignored me. Julian said, “You can have her, but only if I get to watch. I want to see Jenny dance.”

“Not a chance,” I said, just as Tony said, “Done, it’s a deal. But you have to be quiet.”

They were still arguing about whether it would be all right for Julian to giggle if he didn’t actually say anything, while I was being hustled off to Tony’s studio. I didn’t put up much of a fight, mainly because I was curious about what Tony actually did when he was pacing around in front of all his mirrors, mumbling to himself and slamming doors. And there was one stupid little part of me that kept wondering if maybe I could dance—if maybe panicking twice on the gym floor at Gaynor and running to the girls’ john both times to have dry heaves and cry in Marta’s lap didn’t mean I couldn’t learn a few moves. Maybe I wasn’t born to boogie, but to float; maybe the moment Tony took my hand I’d know. I wondered if he’d try to lift me, and that was scarier than ghosts or the third floor.

It didn’t work that way, of course. He just needed a body, something to take up space in his imagination while he paced and mumbled. All I did was stand in one place, and Tony moved me or moved around me, depending. Julian would have done just as well, only Julian got bored early on and went to practice his googlies. Tony didn’t notice. Every once in a while he’d spin away from me, or he’d suddenly leap straight up and turn in the air, and come shivering down like a butterfly, and you could see the whole shiny floor turning into some kind of flower for him to land on. Then he’d be Tony again, shaking his head, really mad at himself for some reason I couldn’t imagine. It took a lot longer than a few minutes, and he hardly said one word to me, but I didn’t mind. I liked him like this.

Once, when he was either taking a break or trying to work something out—anyway, he was just sitting and staring—I asked him, more or less the way Sally had asked me, “Is it better for you here?” He blinked at me. “Better than London, I mean. Would you still rather be living in London?”

Tony can look at you sometimes as though he hadn’t quite realized just how stupid you were until right now. “For God’s sake, I could be studying in London. Studying with real dancers, watching real groups every night. Meeting people—learning all the things I’m never going to learn here.” He stalked away from me across the room, and then he turned around and came back to stand really close. “Of course, I’d never have a room like this in London, so whatever I learned wouldn’t do me a bloody bit of good, because I couldn’t take it home and practice. So it’s six of one, half a dozen of another, I suppose. Why do you want to know?”

“No special reason.” I took a deep breath. “About the Manor—I was wondering, just out of curiosity—” God, I’d make a terrible spy. “Do you ever hear any noises at night? I mean, you know—noises?”

Tony practically smiled, which he was not doing a lot of in those days. “The Manor’s a very old house. They make noises.”

“I don’t mean those,” I said. “I mean… I mean feet, damn it! Giggles.”

I was expecting him to laugh at me, but all he did was sit down on the floor and start doing stretching exercises. He said, “When I knew we were positively coming here, no way out of it, I went to the library and got out a lot of books on Dorset. History, agriculture, folklore, the lot. Do you know that there are two whole books on Dorset ghosts alone? The county’s up to its neck in hauntings, revenants—everybody who’s anybody has a Phantom Monk, or a screaming skull, or a White Lady. Noises? I think if this house doesn’t have a ghost, Dad ought to sue the Lovells for breach of contract. Or something like that.”

It was the most he’d ever said to me since we’d been at Stourhead, except for when he was throwing Mister Cat out of the studio. He realized it at the same time I did, and went back to stretching. I was getting up to leave quietly when he added, “A lot of them date from 1685, the Dorset ghosts. Because of the Bloody Assizes, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” I said. “What’s an Assizes, and why were these so bloody?”

Tony sighed. “They really don’t teach you anything in those American schools, do they? I thought it was just British chauvinism. You wouldn’t know about Monmouth’s Rebellion, then?” I just shook my head. “Okay. Charles Stuart—that’s King Charles II—had an illegitimate son named James. No big deal, as you’d say—quite common with kings, especially Charles. He acknowledges him, brings him to court, makes him the Duke of Monmouth, all very civil. Not that he’s got a chance of succeeding to the throne—that’s for Charles’s brother, the Duke of York, also named James. You are following this so far?”

“James II,” I said. “The Glorious Revolution, 1688. They teach us a few things.”

“Oh, very good,” Tony said. I couldn’t tell whether he meant it, or was being sarcastic. I can now, usually. “Right. James II becomes king in 1685, over any number of objections—mainly because of his being a Roman Catholic, but also because he was always a nasty, treacherous piece of work. Charming, though, when he wanted, like all the Stuarts—they lived on charm. Anyway, Monmouth— that’s James’s half-brother, the other James—has been hiding out in Holland, because of maybe being involved in the Rye House Plot, but we can skip that part. Well, James II hasn’t been James II for ten minutes before Monmouth’s landed in Lyme Regis and starts raising an army to overthrow him.”

I said, “Wait a minute. Lyme Regis? The tourist place, where we went for Easter?” We spent a weekend, and it rained, and Sally caught cold showing me where they’d filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

“They hadn’t invented tourists then,” Tony said impatiently. “It was a port, they built ships, and Monmouth was big in the West Country, don’t ask me why. He went up to Taunton, in Somerset, and declared himself king, but his real following was right here, the Dorset people who met him on the beach. Farmers, miners, fishermen, a bunch of Dorchester artisans and shopkeepers—they were all mad about Monmouth. That old Stuart charm.”

Most people get flushed and red when they’re telling you something they’re really excited about. Tony always gets very pale, even sort of shaky sometimes. He said, “They really did start a rebellion, Jenny, right here. They were sure the upper classes hated James as much as they did, and they thought the gentry would join them, you see, with their horses and guns and their money and their private armies, and they’d all sweep on to London together. But it didn’t happen.”

He got up again and began moving—turning, stooping, swinging around, not quite dancing, but almost. “It didn’t happen. Most of the noble types just never showed up, and Monmouth scarpered, did a bunk, headed for the border, the way the Stuarts always did. Left his little low-class believers out there, high and dry, and the king’s soldiers came down and crushed them, ate them alive. But James II wasn’t finished with Dorset. He was going to show Dorset, once and for all, why you do not ever, ever mess with a king. He sent them Judge Jeffreys. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys.” A fast spin, not a pirouette, but close to the floor, like a top, pointing at me as he came up out of it. “And that’s your Bloody Assizes.”

When you grow up in New York, and your mother’s absolutely crazy about old movies… Something clicked, and I said, “Captain Blood. Errol Flynn’s a doctor, and he helps someone who’s been hurt—”

“In Monmouth’s Rebellion—”

“And there’s a Judge Jeffreys in a wig, who sends him off to be a slave on a plantation. That Judge Jeffreys?”

“The very same. He set up shop in Dorchester, at the Antelope Hotel, and he had hundreds of people hanged, drawn and quartered—” He stopped, and he looked even paler than before. “You know what that was?”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. I didn’t know, not then, but from his face I knew I didn’t want to.

“No. All right. But he had their bodies boiled and tarred, and their heads stuck up on poles, and there were hundreds more whipped and transported to the West Indies. Oh, he had a grand time in Dorset, Judge Jeffreys did.” Tony leaned against the wall and started putting his shoes on.

“What happened? Afterwards, I mean.” I remember I felt dazed, giddy—maybe from what he’d been telling me, maybe more from the way he told it, the way he looked and sounded. He grinned at me, and this time he definitely was being sarcastic.

“Right, I forgot, you’re an American—there has to be a happy ending around here somewhere. Well, in another three years, here came the old Glorious Revolution, and James II left town hastily, and went into business as a public nuisance, which was the family trade, you might say. Judge Jeffreys suffered agonies from kidney stones, and died in the Tower.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s a happy ending, anyway.”

Tony shrugged. “Didn’t stick any heads back on any necks.” He picked up a towel, mopped his face with it, and turned the light out. As we walked to the door, he said, “But I’d think it left a deal of angry ghosts around this part of Dorset. Noises would be the least of it.”

Locking the studio—he did that to keep Julian out, and me, too, probably—he said, “Thank you for working with me,” which was nice, as if we actually had been dancing together. I thought he might ask me again, but he never did.

Mister Cat didn’t bring his Persian lady around to my room again. We sort of didn’t talk to each other for a while—just came and went on our own business, me as much as him. We’ve had secrets together since I was little, but this wasn’t like that. It’s lonely when you know something nobody else knows, but it’s exciting, too. That’s the other side of the ground turning to water under you. Stourhead Farm felt like a completely new place, where every sound might mean something different than I’d thought—where suddenly every thing, not just cats or people, might be some kind of ghost from three hundred years ago. I really did want to tell people about it, and I really didn’t. If that makes any sense at all.

One thing was certain—whatever it was that was playing games with us, wasn’t likely to get bored any time soon. During the winter it had been an on-and-off kind of thing—stuff in the kitchen spilled and slopped or just vanished, a few mornings running, then nothing for a whole week or two. But come the warmer weather— about the time Mister Cat got sprung from quarantine—the boggart started expanding its horizons. Fuel lines breaking in the tractors and balers all the time, irrigation pipes coming apart, just where they were the hardest to get to, whole sections of Evan’s fences collapsing for no good reason, Sally having apples drop on her head when she wasn’t anywhere near the apple trees, something terrorizing Albert, the sheepdog, so on some days he wouldn’t come out of his kennel, let alone go back to the pasture. As for the marshy upper meadow that Evan kept trying to drain… well, never mind, you get the idea. Julian said to me once, “I’m glad we know it’s just a boggart. Otherwise I’d start worrying.”

What’s funny is that we really did know. Evan and Sally made a pass at sounding like rational, realistic parents, talking about coincidences and logical possibilities, but nobody paid any attention, including them. This wasn’t West Eighty-third Street, this was old, old Dorset, and what we had had to be a boggart; and the only chance you have with boggarts is catch them in the act. All the tales say they’re night creatures, so Sally set up a kitchen-watch rotation, making sure that she and Evan had the graveyard shift, and not even scheduling Julian at first. But he threw such a fit about being left out she finally penciled him in with me, from eight to eleven. I told him to bring his Snakes and Ladders game, because he’s such a bad loser and a worse winner that I figured we’d stay awake, one way and another.

The first nights, nothing, not on anybody’s watch. Evan said that figured. “He knows we’re on guard, so he’s going to sit tight for a while, considering. But he’ll make his move soon, because he has to. Boggarts can’t resist a challenge from humans, that’s how they are.”

I remember Sally asked, “What’s with this he all the time? What if it’s a lady boggart?” Evan said they were always male in the stories, and Meena—her parents let her sit up with Julian and me one night—said that in the little town where her father was born there was a lady boggart, or brownie, whatever, that swept out the temple at night. “Nobody ever saw her, but the priests would leave a bowl of milk out for her, and in the morning the milk would be gone and the temple would be clean. All the years my father lived there, every night, the same.”

Tony wanted to know how the priests could tell the Indian boggart was a female, if they never saw her, and Sally said because she cleaned up after herself, which you couldn’t get a man to do at gunpoint, never mind a male boggart. Evan said, “Right, then, we’ll just call him it, let it go at that.” Julian said he wanted to play Snakes and Ladders, so he and I and Meena played until Sally relieved us, and we didn’t see a thing. That whole first week, it must have been.

But maybe ten nights into the boggart patrol, the weather suddenly turned bad. We’d had a week or so of pure summer, which is about the way you get summer in England—a week at a time, scattered around through the other seasons. That night we got rain like horses galloping on the roof, and we got thunder that felt as though someone were pounding the Manor with a huge baseball bat. Evan and Sally were actually out in the storm, trying to protect the new sapling fruit trees, and Julian was scared for them, and I kept telling him they’d be okay, just play already—and in the middle of all that racket, we heard someone laughing. Not a nasty, tittering kind of laugh, like the ones I’d heard in my bathroom— this one was deep and loud enough that Julian and I both heard it through the thunder. We turned around so fast that we knocked over Julian’s Snakes and Ladders board, and we saw him.

It was a him, all right—I’d have known that much even if he hadn’t had a beard, just from the way he stood there with his thumbs in his belt and his head back, looking around our kitchen as though everything in it was his. I’ve seen three-year-old boys stand like that on playgrounds—you can’t miss it. He wasn’t any bigger than a three-year-old, either: He came about up to Julian’s chest, not counting his silly Seven Dwarfs hat with the green feather. He was dressed like a cross between the Seven Dwarfs and Robin Hood, in a kind of loose red smock, but with the belt, and brown leggings underneath, and heavy little boots, ankle-high— I’d have taken them for Doc Martens, except I don’t think they make them in boggart sizes. And there wasn’t a thing else in the world he could have been.

Julian had grabbed my hand, and I could feel him trembling right down my arm and into my stomach. He whispered, “Jenny, he came out from under the stove! How could he do that?”

I didn’t answer. I just held his hand with both of mine, trying to stop his shaking. Julian said, in this small, sad voice, “I don’t like this, Jenny.”

The boggart looked at us for the first time. You could tell he was really, really old, but I can’t say exactly how I knew, because he didn’t have any gray hair, and no wrinkles at all, just a few lines on his skin, which was red-brown, the same color as the new lettuce fields closest to the Manor. He had a face like a goat’s face—long and high-boned, with the little curly beard, and with big dark-red eyes, wicked eyes. I don’t mean evil, I mean wicked. I know the difference now.

“Dun’t ye goo a-ztaring,” he said. “There’s rude. Yer ma’d noo like it.”

That’s the way he sounded to me the first time I heard him speak. He had a deep voice for someone so small, but it didn’t seem out of place coming out of that face, that big chest like my father’s. He said again, “Dun’t goo a-ztaring at me. Else I’ll turn the pair of ye into crabapples and toss ye to the piggies. I will zo.”

Julian gave a tiny whimper and burrowed against me with his eyes shut tight, like Mister Cat. It took me a couple of tries to make my voice work, but I said, “We don’t have any pigs, and you’re nothing but a dorky boggart, and you can’t turn us into anything,” all in one croaky rush. I don’t know how I got it all out—I was just mad because he was scaring Julian, and enjoying it. Boggart or no boggart, I know that look when I see it.

The boggart’s eyes twinkled. I’ve heard people say that all my life, but until then I’d never seen anyone actually do it. Like a birthday-cake candle flickering far down a tunnel. He said, “Maight be I can, maight be I can’t. Dun’t be in such a fluster to chance en.” He pointed at me with a thick, stubby forefinger. “Mind yerse’n, or what boggart’s doone’s naught to what boggart will do.” And he grinned at me like a horse with a mouthful of gray and black teeth.

“Oh, please,” I said. “Trashing the kitchen every night, breaking down fences, throwing apples at people—that’s about your speed. You’d be hot stuff at Gaynor Junior High.” Julian was starting to get interested: He sat up, still huddling close against me, and gaped at the boggart. The boggart made a face at him—Julian yelped and dived into my lap again—and the boggart laughed.

“Noo, noo, tha’s naught but what boggarts is zet to do on this earth”—only it came out thik yearth—“no harm in it, ner zpite.” He was waving that finger at me, dead serious as Mrs. Wolfe at Gaynor used to get when she thought we weren’t paying enough attention to the Congress of Vienna. “But ye—tak shame to yerself, ye ought, grieving yer ma zo wi’ yer zulks and yer pelts and yer mopen to be off back wheer ye do coom vrom. And her a-worken and a-werreten hersen to plain boone vor to mak thikky farm be home vor ye, be home vor ye all. Tak shame, ye Jenny Glookstein!”

That’s the best I can get it down, and that’s all of that I’m about to do. I’d never heard old-time Dorset talk before, except in little scraps, like when Ellie John says a shriveled-up apple’s all quaddled, or says she doesn’t ho about something, meaning she doesn’t give a damn. Or when William says the weather’s turning lippy, which means it’s going to rain. But nobody talks like Thomas Hardy people, they haven’t for ages. Evan says it’s because of radio and TV and movies. He’ll go on forever about how regional dialects ought to be treated like endangered species before everybody winds up sounding just like everybody else. But that’s what people want, most of them. I knew that in grade school.

Anyway, I was so startled by his coming on like Jimmy Cricket, the voice of my conscience, that I forgot to be scared. I yelled at him, “I don’t believe this. You’re the one who makes my mother’s life hell, and it’s all my fault? Okay, that is chutzpah.” Let him chew on my native dialect, see how he likes it.

The boggart wasn’t fazed a bit. “Noo, I do like yer ma, I do like her fine—she’s a rare goodhussy, for an outlander, and pretty wi’ it. There’s bottom to en.” It took me the longest time to figure out that hussy just means a housewife in Dorset talk, and bottom’s like honor, integrity. “But she’s noo raised her darter right, there’s her zorrow. Proper darter, she’d a-zet hersen first thing to riddle out what in t’world might please a boggart. For us can be pleased, aye, us can be sweetened, na great trickses to it—any ninnyhammer’d a-figgured en out by naow. Any ninnyhammer as cared, that’s to say.” And he gave me that horse grin again.

I was catching on slowly, more to the rhythm than the words. I said, “There’s a way to make you leave us alone? What is it, what do you want? Tell me, I’ll be on it—five minutes, tops. What?”

But the boggart just shook his head. “Ben’t that simple, can’t be. Think, gel, use yer nogger—think like boggart, think like me.” He folded his arms across his chest and stood there, reaching up now and then to play with his little beard, looking more self-satisfied than I’ve ever seen anyone look. Including Mister Cat.

Beside me Julian whispered, “Milk.” The storm was still banging away at the house, rattling the windows until I thought the old frames would come apart, and Julian had to raise his voice. “Milk. Ellie John says her mother always leaves milk out for the—the Good Folk.” He ducked his head back down so fast that I hardly heard the last words.

That got a snort out of the boggart—it sounded like somebody sneezing with a mouthful of hot soup. “Milk? Noo, that’s all trot, that is—what’s boggart want wi’ milk? Is boggart a suckling piggy, then? Is boggart calf or lamb, chetten or poppy? Noo, and not Good Folk neither. Try us again, Joolian McHugh.”

Julian couldn’t manage it, but he’d got me thinking about the handful of fairy tales I still remembered in bits and pieces. I said, “Wait, wait a minute—hold it… Shoes! That’s it—we make you a terrific pair of shoes, and you’re so happy with them that you dance all over the kitchen, and you never come back. That’s it, right? Has to be.” But the boggart was spluttering and stamping his feet before I was half through.

“Shoes, is it naow? Shoes, like them great clumsy hommicks you folk wear, and me wi’ a grand pair of kittyboots of me own?” And he held them up, first one, then the other, to show Julian and me the perfect little sort of cleats on the soles, and the way the soles nestled into the uppers, as though there weren’t any stitches at all. They were old, like him, but the best cobbler in Dorchester couldn’t have matched them. Let alone us.

“Again! Try us again!” He was having a fine time, spinning on his heels, jumping up and down. I hoped he’d stamp his way through the floor, like Rumplestiltskin. Julian was whimpering again, and right then I wanted Sally more than I had in a long time—and Evan, too—because this was all way more than I could handle. But I didn’t want Julian any more scared than he already was, so I put my arm around him and told the boggart, “Enough already, we give up, we don’t want to play anymore. Just for God’s sake tell us what would please you, so we can take care of it, and you can stop messing with us, and we’ll all be pleased. How about it, okay?”

I had a feeling that wouldn’t cut a lot of ice, and I was right. The boggart got really mad then. He stopped jumping around, and he grabbed off his dumb little feathered hat and slammed it down on the floor. “Noo, Jenny Glookstein,” he said, and that weird deep voice had gotten very quiet, and scarier for it, “noo, ye’ll play awhile wi’ boggart yet, acause I say ye will. Ye’ll goo on a-thinking what might soften boggart’s heart, what might charm boggart to leave ye be. Acause I say so.” And he took a couple of steps toward us, and Julian—I’ll always remember this—Julian wiggled out from under my arm and wiggled himself in front of me. Scared as he was. I’ll remember.

I never saw Mister Cat. You don’t, until he’s there. He hit the boggart like a bolt of black lightning out of that storm, landing on his shoulders with all four sets of claws out and busy. The boggart squealed and lurched forward—and here came Miss Flufibucket, Miss Dustbunny, that Persian ghost-cat, flashing up from underneath to rake at his face… with real claws? I couldn’t say, even now, but the boggart screamed like a trapped rabbit, falling flat, arms wrapped wildly around his head. Mister Cat pounced on his chest, holding him down, and the Persian stood off, ready for a fast slash anytime he raised his head. You’d have thought they’d been doing this sort of thing forever.

Julian was chanting, “Mister Cat! Mister Cat! Mister Cat!” like a mob cheering at a football game, but I made him stop. Mister Cat was making that creaky-door, mess-with-me-and-die sound, the way he’d done to me in Heathrow, and the boggart was absolutely cowering and crying, “Gi’m off me! Gi’m off me, missus! Boggart niver meant noo harm, boggart was on’y spoortin-like—gi’m off and ye’ll nivver see boggart more, I zwear!”

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. To somebody two feet high, Mister Cat has to look like Bagheera the Black Panther on a bad-hair day. Although the one who seemed to scare him more was the Persian—he wouldn’t even look at her, but kept making funny signs with his fingers, more or less in her direction. Whatever they were supposed to do, they didn’t. The Persian just watched him, licking her left front paw now and then. I wondered if a ghost’s tongue could taste ghost-fur.

Julian was tugging my arm, whispering, “Jenny, don’t believe him, don’t believe him! He didn’t say he wouldn’t bother us, he just said we wouldn’t see him do it.” Julian’s going to be a lawyer— I don’t think I’ve mentioned that.

“Got it,” I said; and then, to the boggart, “Okay, you, shut up and listen. Shut up, or I’ll have my attack cat eat your face.” Mister Cat might lose interest any time now, and I had to move before he strolled off somewhere with his hot date. In my toughest, meanest New York voice I said, “Now. No more bullshit. You tell us right now what we have to do so we don’t have any more aggravation from you. Right now, buddy, or that sweet kisser is lunch meat.” Jake and Marta wouldn’t have stopped laughing for a week.

It did wonders for the boggart, though. He scrunched behind his arms even more, and started babbling so fast I couldn’t understand him at first. “Zpectacles! Zpectacles, it is, so boggart can see past’s nose again. Boggart’s old, he is, boggart’s eyen ben’t what they was—zpectacles, they needs! Laive a pair on t’mat and boggart’ll trouble ye no more.” Mister Cat growled in his throat right at that moment, and the boggart yeeped—can’t find another word for it. “Nivver no more! May kitties coom get me if I lie!”

I looked at Julian. He nodded. “They have to keep their promises. Ellie John told me.”

“Okay, then,” I said, still doing the New York gangster. “One pair of eyeglasses, onna mat tonight. Just remember, duh cats know where youse live.”

I bent down and picked Mister Cat off the boggart. Mister Cat didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue about it. The Persian never moved, and I wasn’t about to touch her, not in my entire life. Again it struck me that the boggart seemed more frightened of her than he was of Mister Cat. He watched her all the time he was getting up and finding his hat, practically groveling if she so much as flicked an ear. I said, “She won’t hurt you,” but the boggart plainly wasn’t buying, and I got the feeling that he had reasons older than I was. He backed slowly away, still hunched and ready to run—then all at once he straightened up, set his hat on his head, and gave us the horse grin one more time.

“For yer ma’s sake, a single word of advice, like. A warning.” He pointed at the Persian, shaking his finger the same way he’d done at me. “Ware t’servant, ware t’mistress—and ware T’Other Oone most of all.” And you could hear the capital letters on T’Other Oone. Believe it.

“The mistress,” I said. “Who’s that? The Other One—I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s the Other One?”

But the boggart laughed like a bathtub drain, and did a sort of weird skip-jig on the kitchen floor. “A single word, a single word, I said, and that ye’ve had. To’morn’s to be zpectacles waiting for boggart on mat—and so farewell, Jenny Glookstein, farewell, Joolian McHugh. Farewell, farewell.”

And he was gone, the way I’d thought only Mister Cat could vanish. Julian insisted he went back under the stove, flattening himself out—“Like a piece of paper, Jenny, didn’t you see?”—and slipping in through the little space there was. Sally and Evan came sloshing in just then, and Tony came down, and we all got busy running around bringing them towels, making tea, putting their Wellingtons and their rain slickers in the bathtub. They were all over mud, even with the slickers, and Evan had a huge bruise on one cheekbone where he’d fallen over something in the dark. But they’d saved the new fruit trees. There wasn’t a thing on the planet more important, right then.

They sat there in the kitchen, laughing and holding hands, looking flushed and scratched up, and really tired, looking like kids—looking the way Julian and I should have been looking, instead of sneaking glances at each other and agreeing without a word that we wouldn’t talk about our night for a bit. The Persian was as gone as the boggart, but Mister Cat was sitting between us, tail curled around his feet, looking utterly bored and sleepy. Julian picked him up and held him tight, practically strangling him, the way he used to hug that gorilla he gave me. Mister Cat usually hates that kind of thing, but hejust purred and purred, while Evan and Sally drank their tea and picked little twigs out of each other’s hair.