Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  Tony said, “They’re supposed to be descended from the Armada horses.” I guess I blinked, because then he said, “The Spanish Armada. Some of the ships broke up in a storm, and the horses swam ashore. In 1588.”

  “I know about the Spanish Armada,” I said. Tony nodded and didn’t say anything more. Evan caught my eye in the rearview mirror. He winked at me, but I didn’t wink back. He said, “Jenny, you want to be very careful if you see a black one—all black, like your cat, without a white hair on him anywhere. It might be a pooka.”

  I wasn’t going to say a word, but I couldn’t help it. I said, “A pooka?”

  Evan grinned at me. “Very magical creature. The country people say it can change into almost anything—an eagle, a fox, even a man, if it wants to. But mostly you meet it as a fine black pony, absolutely black, inviting you to get on its back and take a ride. Don’t you do it.”

  And he didn’t say one thing more, just to make me ask. Evan does that. I held out all the way through the New Forest, before I mumbled, “Okay, why shouldn’t I?” And when he just raised his eyebrows and waited, I said, “Why shouldn’t I go for a ride on a pooka?”

  “Because it’ll toss you right into a river, or into a bramble patch. That’s a pooka’s idea of a good joke. They aren’t as dangerous as Black Annis or Peg Powler or the Oakmen, but you don’t ever want to trust one. Very warped sense of humor, pookas have.”

  Julian giggled. He said, “Maybe our house’ll have a boggart, wouldn’t that be splendid?”

  Tony punched his shoulder lightly. “We’ve already got one, thanks very much.”

  Julian got really pissed then. You couldn’t ever tell what’d get to him in those days. He hit Tony back, hard—he could get in a good shot because there was a lot less stuff piled on him than on either of us—and he started yelling, “I’m not a boggart, I’m not a boggart, don’t you call me a boggart!” He’s a lot better now, but you still have to be a little careful with Julian. Don’t ever tell him he’s got curly hair, for instance. He hates having curly hair.

  Sally handled it pretty neatly, considering she was just learning how to be a stepmother. She leaned into the backseat and caught both of Julian’s hands, very gently, but really quickly. Sally’s got big hands for a woman—she can reach tenths on the piano, and she can do card tricks and shuffle a deck like Maverick or somebody. She asked him, “Tell me about boggarts. What’s a boggart?”

  Tony answered her. “It’s a sort of brownie. Lives in your house and plays stupid tricks.” Julian lunged for him again, but Sally had him. “Julian,” she said. “I’m a Yank, I don’t know anything, you tell me. Why is it so terrible if someone calls you a boggart?”

  Julian wasn’t exactly crying, but his nose was running and he had to swallow a couple of times before he could talk. He said, “Boggarts are ugly—that’s why he’s always calling me that. They’re small, and they’ve got warts and bumples and all, and they like to live in the cupboards and under the floor. But they’re not always mean—you can make friends with a boggart if you’re really nice to him. You leave milk out for them, and things. I just thought it would be funny if we had one.”

  Tony started to say something, but Evan caught his eye, and he shut right up. Evan said, “Well, if it’s not a boggart, it’ll be something else, likely enough. Dorset’s full of ghosts and hobs and bogles, and things that go boomp i’ the nicht. And Stourhead Farm’s been around long enough that we’ve probably got a grand mob of them already settled in. Some of them probably knew Thomas Hardy and William Barnes.”

  (This is probably going to come up again, so I have to put in that I didn’t know who he was talking about then. I do now, because Meena’s made me read all her Thomas Hardy books. He’s all right. I can’t stand William Barnes.)

  Evan told us stories the rest of the way down, as the land got steeper and greener and the poor little Escort kept overheating. I can’t remember all of them, but he talked about bullbeggars and Jack-in-Irons, and the Wild Hunt, which was scary, and about the Black Dog, and a weird thing called the Hedley Kow. With a k. He was good, better than Norris even—he did the different accents, depending on where the stories came from, so Julian kept sniffling and giggling all the time, and Tony forgot to be superior and just sat there glued, I could tell. That’s the thing about Tony. He really thinks nobody can read what he’s feeling—he really works on it—but everyone always knows.

  I dozed off a third time in the middle of a story about someone called The Old Lady of the Elder Tree. I was actually trying to stay awake, because it was interesting, but I fell asleep and dreamed about Mister Cat. In the dream the quarantine was over, and I was coming to get him out of his cage, and he stood up and put his paws on my face, the way he does. It was so real and sweet that I woke up, but it was just Julian asleep on my shoulder with his hair brushing my cheek, and we were at Stourhead Farm.

  Six

  So far, the hard part about writing a book isn’t telling what happened, even if it happened a long time ago—it’s trying to call back, not just the way you felt about the thing that happened, but the entire person who felt that way. Writing about the early days at Stourhead Farm is like that.

  After six years, Stourhead’s just ordinary, I guess that’s the only word. When I’m here I can wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window, and if there’s an old floppy cow named Lady Caroline Lamb looking back in at me, that’s as ordinary as the sound of Evan’s old floppy Jeep on the far side of Spaniards Hill, or the way the air around the kitchen well sort of trembles, because of the electricity from the pump. As usual as Tony dancing between the cabbage rows, when he’s not off touring somewhere, practicing his entrechats or whatever in the South Barn with Mister Cat and a bunch of chickens for an audience. Natural as hearing Julian, who’s the only one of us home now, bugging Eflie John or William or Seth to let him drive the baler. Ordinary as not feeling Tamsin anywhere in the house, ever again, when I wake.

  But I can’t get to Tamsin yet, although that’s really all I want to write about. Meena says I absolutely have to describe what Stourhead Farm was like when Evan and Sally took it over, and the trouble they had bringing it back to being a working farm, the way it is now, and especially how everything was for me back then, being snatched right out of New York and plopped down on this raggedy ruin of a Dorset estate. And she’s right, I know that—that’s what you do when you’re writing a book. But it’s hard.

  First off, it was a ruin, Stourhead—even a West Eighty-third Street child could see that. Not that I knew what a real farm was supposed to look like, except you had to have cows. But I didn’t need to notice that half the fences were caved in like old people’s mouths, or that the two barns and all the little sheds and coops and pens were dark and soft looking, as though they’d been rained on for years, and that what wasn’t rotting was rusting, from the plows and harrows and stuff like that to the well casings and even the wheelbarrows. All I had to do was watch Evan’s face, seeing his eyes going back and forth between Sally and those crumbly barns, between the boys and the scrawny chickens scratching around their feet, between me—still sitting in the car when everyone else had gotten out—and the house, “the Manor,” people around here still call it. I just looked at his face, and I knew he was feeling like pure pounded shit, and I was glad.

  You see, he hadn’t really thought about anything but the soil. Evan’s like that. He can scoop up a handful of earth and sniff at it, even taste it, and tell you what it’ll grow and what it won’t, and what it just might grow if you add this or that or something else to it. And he’s always right, always—the same way some people can tell you where to dig for water or what the weather’s going to be tomorrow, that’s how Evan is with dirt. But it hadn’t ever occurred to him how it would be for his boys, for Sally and me, to be living right on that dirt, in a falling-down house at the end of the world. All that planning and dreaming with Sally, and it just hadn’t come up.

  Sally was good. I didn’t k
now to be proud of her then, but I am now, when I think of her standing and staring across a rutty dirt road and a stretch of baby-barf-colored dead grass at the house that had looked so great in the Polaroids. I couldn’t see her face, but she said in this perfectly daily voice, “Come on, Jenny, let’s go. We’re home.”

  Everybody carried a couple of suitcases or boxes, because you couldn’t drive right up to the house back then. You can now, of course—it took Evan a year to find the original carriageway about two feet down, under three centuries’ worth of guck—but I’ll always remember the lot of us, heads down, nobody saying a word, just schlepping our stuff across that dirt road toward that old, old house that didn’t want us. I remember Sally shifting a duffel bag to carry it under her right arm, so that she could reach out with her left hand to take hold of Evan’s arm. The way he looked down at her I’m really not a total idiot. I knew damn well, even then, that Norris hadn’t ever looked at her like that.

  And I remember the windows. There were so many of them—round and long and square and pointy—and because the sun was slanting down behind us, all those windows were blazing up as though the house was full of fire, you couldn’t look straight at it. There was one small, sharp window on the third floor that didn’t reflect the sun at all. It looked absolutely black, surrounded by all those others, like a hole in the sky, with the darkness of space showing through.

  Julian was walking really slowly, hanging back more and more, until Sally looked around for him and let Evan go on ahead so she could take Julian’s hand. Then I wished I was a scared little English kid wearing a dumb school cap whom she didn’t even know a week ago, and then I got mad at myself for feeling like that. So I grabbed his other hand and just marched on up to the house. To the Manor.

  For a farmhouse, it’s enormous, the biggest house I’m ever likely to live in, the biggest house in this part of Dorset, and when it was built in 1671, it was the biggest in the whole county. But Dorset’s never run to mansions, even in the towns—it’s always been farms and villages, like in Hardy’s books, and Stourhead was always a farm, from the beginning. So compared with some of those humongous old piles they run tour buses out to, the Manor is a studio apartment. But compared to it, my cousin Barbara’s house in Riverdale, that she was so snotty-proud about, is a broom closet in a Motel Six. I hope she reads this.

  I’ve already said I don’t know how to describe rooms and interior decoration, and the same definitely goes for houses. The Manor has been built and rebuilt and burned down once—I think only once—and then it was rebuilt again and added to and added to, until nothing exactly fits with anything, which is just how the English like it. Anyway, the house has three floors, with a sort of east wing and a sort of west wing, and then there’s what everybody still calls the Arctic Circle, the central section, where you come in. Tony was the one who started calling it that, the Arctic Circle, because that part of the house is on the original stone foundation, and you can’t ever get it really warm, even today. But when we moved in, that was the only part of the house that worked, with running water and some electricity, and a cooking range the size of a pool table. I can still see us all clumped together there, hanging on to our bags and stuff, everybody trying to think of something cheery to say. Everybody except me, I mean.

  Sally finally managed it. She said, “Well, a gas range, that’s great! I’d much rather cook over gas.” And Evan gave her this incredibly, unbelievably mournful look and said, “Actually, love, it’s a wood stove. I’ll show you how to work it, it’s not that hard.” And after that, nobody said anything for the next year and a half.

  Finally Julian announced in that creaky little voice of his, “Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m going exploring.” And before anybody could grab him, he was out of there, his chunky new school shoes rattling on the oak floors. (That’s one thing about the Manor, it’s got fantastic floors—they’re so old and hard, even the termites break their teeth on them. When this house dissolves, those floors will still be hanging in the air.)

  Tony said, “I’ll get him,” and Evan said tiredly, “No, he’s right, let’s look around this museum. There’s supposed to be a caretaker here somewhere, but I think the boggarts got him.” So we all went trooping after Julian, with our footsteps echoing up stairs and down corridors, in and out of one room after another, with the boys already fussing over who was going to sleep where. They’d always had to share a bedroom; there was no way in the world they could deal with that kind of abundance. Nice word.

  I couldn’t take any of it in myself. I’d never in my life been in a house like this one. Farm or no, you could have dropped our old apartment into some of those rooms without raising dust or knocking over a plant stand. And then there were some no bigger than bathrooms, narrow as coffins, which is what they really looked like. Evan said those were for the servants. First useful thing I learned about the seventeenth century.

  What else is important to put in about the first time I saw the Manor? The smell, of course, I should have done that right at the start. Not just because the house was so old, but because of the way the different families running the farm had been letting it go to hell for the last hundred years or so. So you had the old smell, which is one thing, and you also had that dark, dead-cold mousey smell of the layers of neglect, no getting away from either of them wherever you went. Six years of cleaning, six years of repairing and replacing, scraping and painting, digging away at those layers, and some days I can still taste them, both of those smells.

  We didn’t get above the second floor that day because the third was closed off then, which everybody thought was just as well. It was, too, and not just because we were all absolutely worn out by that time. But all I’m going to say about the third floor right now is when Julian was home on his last holiday, he found a whole new room we’d never seen, a little tiny chamber like a lady’s dressing room, tucked away behind a door about as wide as an ironing board. There were a couple of semisecret passages, too, but they didn’t go anywhere. The third floor’s like that.

  It made me think of Tamsin, when Julian found that room, because that was how

  No, I’m scratching that out, that has to wait. I’m still talking about that first day. We brought all the other stuff in from the car and dumped it in the front parlor, which Sally’s got looking great now, but which was just bare and gray then, with nothing on the floor but a dirty rag rug and a beat-up harmonium in a far corner. Evan broke up a junky old table and got a fire going, but it didn’t help much, because the ceiling’s way too high. He stood up from the fireplace with his back to us, and took a really long breath before he turned around. “Well, my legions,” he said. “Doesn’t look much of a bargain, does it?”

  Tony said, “It’s not so bad,” and Julian said, “It’s big,” at the same time. Sally just laughed. She said, “Darling, it needs work, I knew that. I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t need work.”

  “The farm doesn’t,” Evan said, “not so much.” Then he laughed himself and said, “Well, yes, it does, it needs a deal of work, but I can handle that. It’s this house. I knew it was going to be hard for a bit, but I didn’t quite realize how hard. I want to say I’m sorry, everybody.” Then he looked straight at me and added, “Especially to you, Jenny. You didn’t need this on top of all the rest of it. I’m very sorry.”

  So, of course, now everybody was looking at me. I could have killed Evan, and at the same time I felt guilty and horrible, because he was really trying to be nice. Sally put her arm around me and she said, “Jenny’s all right.”

  Tony said, “We’re all all right. We none of us thought it was going to be a dizzy round of pleasure.” And Julian growled, “It’ll be like camping out. I love camping out.” So now I had to say something, but the best I could manage was, “Well, I don’t care, I wasn’t expecting… and I just let it trail off there. The absolute best I could do then.

  “All right, then,” Evan said. “What’s for dinner?”

&n
bsp; Because there wasn’t any Chinese fast-food place around the corner—there wasn’t any corner—and the nearest grocery would have been back in Sherborne, which is the nearest real town, which we’d passed through when I was asleep. But we did all right with the leftovers from the car, and after that we worked out who’d sleep where for now, and which bathrooms were usable—Evan got the boiler going, so there was hot water anyway, even if it was exactly the color of New York sidewalks. And then everybody went to bed early. Because there wasn’t anything else to do.

  Tony and Julian were downstairs, trading rooms every five minutes. I was on the second floor, in the room right next to Sally and Evan’s. The way I was feeling, I was really hoping they’d put me in one of those mean little servant garrets, so I could catch TB or something. This one smelled major mildewy, like all the others, and the lightbulbs were so dusty you could tell they’d been dead for years. But it had ceilings so high I couldn’t see them in the darkness, and big windows for Mister Cat to come and go by—once we finally got them open—and the bed was all right, once I got some West Eighty-third Street sheets on it. It was a brass four-poster, but the canopy was just rags, and I pulled them all off.

  I could hear Sally and Evan talking softly, even though I was really trying not to, I really didn’t want to hear them being private. Evan was saying, “I don’t think money’s going to be the problem. The Lovells are in this for the long haul—they’ll lay out whatever it takes to bring the farm back to life. I’m not at all bothered about that.”

  “But it’s all going to take twice as long as you thought,” Sally said. “Because of the house. That’s the bother, isn’t it?”