I still don’t know why Julian took to me from the beginning, at Heathrow. He’s the only person in my life who’s ever walked right up to me like that. I mean, even Jake and Marta took awhile, and Meena wasn’t sure she’d ever like me, that first term. But that ten-year-old English kid in his school uniform coat… Day One. There was one time, exploring, when he just had to jump from rock to rock across a stream we found running through a sort of little hollow—what they call a coombe here—because that’s in Winnie-the-Pooh, too, and of course he fell in and I had to get him out. Not that it was so deep—he could have waded across—but he caught his foot under something, and he twisted it trying to get loose, and I got soaked through hauling him to the bank. He went around for days telling everyone how I’d saved him from a watery grave. First I thought he was doing it to get up Tony’s nose, but then I realized he meant it. He was so proud of me, and so proud of himself for being saved. Julian.
He did something for me once, something he’ll forget way before I do. It was the day Sally and I went to Goshawk Farm Cattery to see Mister Cat for the first time. I’d been agitating about it from the moment we hit Stourhead, but there was too much to do right away, and Evan needed the car every day. Finally Sally and the wheels were free at the same time, and she drove me to Dorchester, which is where Goshawk Farm is, right on the outskirts. It was a really nasty, windy day, raining on and off, the beginning of Dorset autumn.
Mister Cat wouldn’t speak to me. He knew me, all right, but he wouldn’t look at me. I’d expected him to be in a wire cage, like the one he’d traveled in, only bigger, but it was more like a cat motel room, with things to scratch and climb on, and dangling things to jump at for exercise, with its own outdoor run for good weather. And he wasn’t going hungry—his coat was the glossiest I’d ever seen it, and he’d put on a little weight. But he couldn’t even be bothered to make that evil warning noise at me again. He just turned his back and curled around himself, and closed his eyes.
Sally tried to help. All the way back to the farm she told me one story after another about people she knew who’d had to put their pets in quarantine, and how some of the animals felt so lonely and angry that they wouldn’t come to their owners when it was time to pick them up. But of course they all forgave them in time, and Mister Cat would forgive me, too. Fairy tales, like the ones she told me when I was little, and all her stories had happy endings.
When we got back, it was near dark. Evan had dinner waiting, but I just went to my room and lay on my bed. I didn’t cry—I told you, I don’t do that much. It wasn’t like being mad at Sally on West Eighty-third Street, which you could sort of enjoy all the time you were feeling miserable. This hurt, it hurt my stomach, and no matter which way I turned, it kept on hurting. My throat got so swollen and tight, I might as well have been crying, only I couldn’t. I just lay there.
I wasn’t asleep when Julian came into the room—by then I was sure I’d never want to eat or sleep or talk to anybody again. He pushed the door open very slowly—I could feel the hall light on my eyes, but I kept them shut tight. It doesn’t matter how quietly you try to move in my room, the way the floor squeaks, but Julian seemed to wait minutes, hours, between each step, until he was by the bed. I heard this froggy little whisper, “Jenny? Are you really, really sleeping?”
I didn’t answer. A moment later, Julian put something down beside me, right on my pillow, brushing my face. It smelled pretty funky—not bad, just old, and somehow familiar, too. I heard Julian squeaking back to the door, and the door squeaking shut again. I didn’t turn the light on, but after a while I reached out for whatever he’d left on the pillow. The moment I touched it, I knew. That damn one-eyed, beat-up stuffed gorilla he’s had practically all his life—slept with, chewed on, probably peed on, too, more than likely. Trust Julian—every other kid has a bedtime bear, but Julian’s got a gorilla named Elvis. I grabbed that thing, and I shoved my face hard into its stinky, sticky fur, and I cried my eyes out until I fell asleep.
So that’s how Julian got to be my baby brother. The last thing in the world I needed right then, but that was it.
It’s noisy in the country, in a strange way. You hear more sounds, just because of the stillness, especially at night. Instead of tuning out, the way you absolutely have to do in New York, you start tuning in, whether you want to or not. I don’t mean just the geese going over, and the frogs and crickets and so on, and the cocks just as likely to start crowing at two in the morning. I got so I could hear a well pump cutting off and on and off, out beyond the dairy. Some frosty nights I’d even hear twigs snapping in the thickets, and that would be the deer foraging, eating the tree bark. And when you hear a cold, clear, sharp sort of yelp, with almost a metallic shrill to it, that’s not a dog, that’s a fox. It’s always a little sudden and scary, that sound, even when you know what it is.
The Manor makes noises, too, the way all old houses do, settling in the ground—“working,” that’s what they say here. I’ve always thought it sounds like the little grunts and mumbles and sighs somebody makes getting comfortable in bed after a hard day. Even the West Eighty-third Street apartment made those, so that wasn’t anything to be edgy about, most nights.
But every now and then. Just every now and then, from the first night, I’d hear something that didn’t fit. Not so much the patter of little feet, or little snickery voices (you can always tell yourself it’s mice running and squeaking), and not ghosts wailing or dragging chains around—no Halloween stuff like that. A sound like rushing water, in the air right above my bed. A sound that might have been somebody sweeping a floor, back and forth, over and over, in the middle of the night. A whisper so low I couldn’t make out one word. But that was the one that always woke me up; that was the one I was scared of hearing when I went to bed. I’d have asked Julian if he ever heard anything, but I didn’t want him to get scared, so I didn’t.
There were smells, too—that cold vanilla the electrician smelled in the Arctic Circle, and a dark-toast one almost like Mister Cat. And just once in a real while I’d think I saw those same huge golden eyes from the dream outside my window. Only I couldn’t ever be sure whether I was awake or dreaming when I saw those. They didn’t frighten me, for some reason—I always wanted to go toward them—so maybe that was dreaming. I still don’t know, even today.
There was one sound that everybody knew about, not just me— a sound that used to bring Julian flying into my room whenever we heard it. It usually had to be a really fierce night, with thunder and lightning, rain smashing into you like hailstones, wind shaking the house, stripping and snapping the trees—I mean, the works. Then you’d hear them, high over the storm, the hounds baying and the horses screaming—and people laughing, too, these terrible, hungry yells of laughter. That’s what always got Julian, that laughter. He’d shut his eyes and cover his ears and burrow his head into me, hard, so it really hurt sometimes.
Evan would tell us it was just the wild geese calling to each other, the same as ever, only the wind was distorting their cries. He’d say, “Every country in Europe has that same legend—the Wild Hunt, the Wish-Hounds, the Chasse Gayere, the Sluagh— huntsmen and their dogs chasing after the souls of the dead. It’s the geese, all of it—nothing but the wild geese, the wild weather, and a little wild imagination.” And Julian would nod and be cool, but he’d spend the rest of the night in my room, and it was always nice to have the company. Because both of us knew what geese sounded like.