“It? What, the Wild Hunt? No, you mean the Other One, that’s it, right?” Mister Cat hissed in my ear, because I was losing my cool again, but I was miles past listening even to him. “What then? What then are we talking about? What can’t it know? What’s waiting for Tamsin?” I was reaching for him, I was actually going to grab him and shake him. I wonder what would have happened if I had.
Headlights bouncing off the sky; the sound of a truck engine climbing the hill. Evan and Sally. The billy-blind and I stared at each other in absolute silence for a moment. I couldn’t read his eyes at all, but he didn’t seem angry at me. He said, “You go back to school, don’t be asking that big Whidbey girl for help—she don’t like you above half. And sit near the window in that Spanish class.” He had to yell that last bit after me, because I was already heading for the house, with Mister Cat bounding along beside me. We were in bed—me still in my jeans, but with my eyes tight shut— by the time Evan and Sally came in.
Neither of us slept that night, not me and not Mister Cat. He knew a lot better than I what he’d been challenging, and now he crept under the blankets with me and snuggled into my armpit, and stayed there. But every time I looked at him, his eyes were open, and all night he kept moaning really softly to himself, no matter how much I petted him and told him what a hero he was. He only stopped doing it after Miss Sophia Brown showed up toward morning—she just appeared, popping into sight like a silent movie projected on a bedsheet. I almost jumped out of bed when she got under the covers, too, and curled herself right next to Mister Cat. But I didn’t, and that’s the way the three of us stayed until the first cocks went at it before dawn. I remembered a snatch of an old, old ballad Evan sings with Sally sometimes:
“The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
The channering worm doth chide…”
I don’t know what a channering worm is, or what it’s chiding about, but the song’s about ghosts. Miss Sophia Brown stood up and stretched herself, just like a real cat, and she gave Mister Cat’s nose one quick lick and disappeared. And I fell straight off to sleep, and got a good five or ten minutes before Julian barged in to tell me it was stupid canteloupes for breakfast (Julian hates fruit), and he wanted to go visit Albert and the sheep afterward. There are days, even now, when I’m quite proud of myself for letting Julian live. Because there were options.
Seventeen
We started school again sharp at the beginning of September, and we landed running. The English don’t believe in easing you back into the classroom—I had all I could do just to keep halfway even with people who must have been studying all summer. The boys were pretty much in the same mess: Tony hadn’t done a thing but dance, and Julian had mostly been doing very weird experiments and reading Asterix comic books in French. As for me, there’s not much to say. I was ready for something that fall, but it wasn’t Sherborne Girls.
As the billy-blind had advised me, I kept away from Penelope Whidbey, and grabbed a seat by the window in Spanish class. (Yes, my grades did go up—not a lot, but some.) When anyone asked me how I’d spent the summer, I’d roll my eyes and sigh, and do my best to look too expensively debauched for words. It didn’t work worth a damn—everyone knew I didn’t have a boyfriend—but I liked doing it anyway, just because I’d never have dared to try it at Gaynor. Meena said it embarrassed her, but it made her laugh, too. Which was good, because Chris Herridge was gone, and they hadn’t even been able to get together for a decent farewell scene. She hardly spoke in class, and hardly ate at all, and she stopped making any sound when she cried, which bothered me more than anything else, I don’t know why. So then I started clowning around, especially at school, doing and saying every silly thing I could think of to get her at least to smile. I got called for it a lot, until Meena made me stop. But it did help—after that, sometimes, I could just look at her across a classroom and she’d giggle a little. So that was something.
The Dorset rains were even worse that fall than they’d been the year before. They actually started before harvest was quite over, which meant we were all helping out in the fields—Sally cancelling her piano lessons, the boys and me right after school, and Evan and the hands going nonstop, dawn to dark, getting in as much of the crop as we could. It was muddy and cold and endless, and miserable, and I broke all my nails, but I still did as much work as Tony and Julian. Then we went and helped with the Colfoxes’ harvest. They had a bigger farm, but not as many workers, and they lost more than we did.
I’ve never been that tired. It got so just lifting my feet to get from one field to another—one row to another—felt like way more trouble than just standing still in the rain forever. I didn’t catch cold, like Tony, or pull a muscle in my back, like Evan. What I did was, I stopped thinking. I stopped thinking about everything except slogging along this row, cutting things off stalks, scooping sodden blue-black things up from the mud, wiping rain out of my eyes, moving on to that row. I learned more about Thomas Hardy that harvest than I ever learned in any literature class. A lot of his people stop thinking, too.
One of the things I didn’t think about was Tamsin—Tamsin and the night world she’d introduced me to. No, that’s not true. Sometimes, when I was most worn out, it was really easy to see myself being one of the people who’d have worked for Roger Willoughby, and all the Willoughbys after him: trudging their hills, plowing their fields, talking old Dorset, having children, losing half of them at birth, living on bread and cheese and beer, and whatever they could glean after the harvest; getting through one winter like this after another the best way they could—and still somehow feeling like part of the Willoughby family. It confused me—I didn’t know if Tamsin was to blame for the way they lived, just for being a Willoughby, or whether she’d never had any more choice than any of them.
I worked until we’d saved what we could from the rains, and then I had to catch up with my schoolwork, which took until practically Christmas. Either way, it was weeks before I went back to that secret room that Roger Willoughby had built to hide his chaplains in.
I saw the Pooka twice. He was different each time: Once he was a little red fox in the shadow of a tree, watching as Tony and I were trying to salvage a few scrawny ears of corn from the muck; and the second time he was a deer stepping as elegantly as Mister Cat along a row of soggy cabbages, nibbling here, noshing there. Tamsin was right—you couldn’t mistake the eyes, even at a distance. And when he looked straight at me he knew me, just as Tamsin had said he would. He didn’t speak, or come toward me, or do anything that a fox or a deer wouldn’t have done, but it was him. I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t thrilled either. I was too damn tired.
Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown went on being an item, though nobody knew that except me. Nobody else ever saw them together. Some nights I’d have no cat in my room, because he was out somewhere in the wind and rain, carrying on with her; some nights I’d have them both piled together on the quilt, and I’d just lie there watching them sleep, the live cat and the ghost, and Julian’s gorilla. At least Miss Sophia Brown looked asleep, but of course I’ll never know. Tamsin never exactly slept, I know that, but she did doze now and then, in a sort of way. She tried to explain it to me once.
“Jenny, have you known it ever, that zone between aware and asleep when dreams float through you—or you through them—as though you and they were of the same substance? Beyond control, beyond words to name them, yet there’s an exchange, a penetration, for all one knows them to be baseless phantoms. So with me, often, as I wait by my window. And is what I see truly what is? or are these visions of what has been? what might be? I can never tell.”
She was sitting on the edge of my bed when she said that. I’d felt her there, as deeply as I was sleeping—the way I always felt Miss Sophia Brown—and I opened my eyes to see her petting the cats. They purred and stretched under her hands the way cats do when anybody, an ordinary person, strokes them. Everything’s different with cats.
Tamsin gave a sort of half-embarrassed laugh
, nothing like the way she usually laughed. She said, “In fair truth, Jenny, you and your Mister Cat are my touchstone, my Pole Star, my ground bass of existence. But for you two, I’d have no notion at all of which way lay reality, happed round as I am in my dreams and my neardreams. This is why I came seeking you tonight.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that I’d been afraid of opening her door and finding the Other One waiting in her chair. I muttered, “We’ve been helping to get the harvest in.”
Tamsin nodded. “Aye, we did just so, even when I was small. It rained the same then, if that’s any comfort.”
“And I’m trying not to rouse you,” I said. Tamsin looked at me as blankly as any living, breathing human could have done. I said, “That’s what the billy-blind warned me about. He told me I was waking you up, the way we talk and visit and go for walks, and that rousing you meant rousing something else, other things, I don’t know what he meant. Maybe you do. I don’t know anything—I just want to keep you safe. From whatever.”
Tamsin went on petting Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown, and she didn’t answer me. It was too hard to keep my eyes open, so I let them float shut. Tamsin began to sing her sister’s nursery song:
“Apricocks I’m selling,
peaches, plums and melons,
who will come and buy?
who will come and buy?
Daughters I’ve so many,
Jean and Joan and Jenny,
selling two a penny—
who will come and buy?”
I opened my eyes again when she sang my name. She was smiling, and there was never one damn thing I could do when Tamsin smiled. It’s hard to say why, especially when you figure that we’re talking about a guess of a memory of a smile—how does a ghost recall teeth, or what happens to the eyes when the mouth corners turn up? But maybe that was exactly it; maybe Tamsin’s smile got me the way it always did because three hundred years of Tamsin went into that smile. Anyway, all I could manage was to say, “I’ve missed you. I miss you more than I miss anybody—people back in New York, anybody. But you’re supposed to sit still, the billy-blind kept saying it. I just don’t want to get you into trouble.”
Tamsin patted my leg through the blankets. I didn’t feel it—I wanted to, but I didn’t—but she did, some way, I could tell. I could. She said, “Jenny, I have never missed but four folk, if by that you mean being more aware of their absence than of my own presence. Now of those four, three are as long stopped as I—my father and my mother and and she actually mumbled the next name—Edric—on purpose, like me when I don’t want to be understood. For just that moment, just that moment, Tamsin Elspeth Catherine Maria Dubois Willoughby was exactly my age.
She went on, really quietly, “But that fourth—that fourth is a child from the colonies, a living girl whose world can only be one of my dreams, but whose soul somehow takes my soul by the hand. Dear Jenny, it is too late for the billy-blind. I am wakened, and I am already in trouble, and there’s naught for it but to see it through, come wind, come weather. Yet I am glad—is that not strange?”
I was wide awake myself now. I sat up in bed, joggling Mister Cat, who didn’t like it. “Well, it’s my fault, so I have to see it through with you. And even if it weren’t and I didn’t, I would, you know that.” Tamsin smiled at me again. I said, “But you have to tell me some things. You know that, too.”
“Yes, Jenny,” Tamsin said, but she didn’t say anything else for what seemed like a long time. Outside, one of the cocks crowed, but not because the day was dawing, like in the old song—cocks go off like car alarms, at all hours. It was raining again, so maybe that did it. I couldn’t hear any other night sounds through the rain, but for a moment I thought I heard what might have been the click of unshod hoofs across the new driveway, and I wondered if the Pooka was watching the house. I hoped he was, though I couldn’t have said why.
Tamsin said, “Edric Davies is a musician?” That happened a lot—her meaning to state a fact and having it come out a sad little question. I actually said, “No!” before I could stop myself— that’s how totally I’d fixed my face for Edric being a Welsh fisherman. I said, “You mean, like my mother?”
“Indeed, just so.” Tamsin was really delighted by the idea, you could see. “A music master, like your mother, teaching his art and playing for grand balls and brawls alike, all through the county. My father would have my portrait done when I turned nineteen, and Edric was thus engaged for my entertainment while I must sit for the painter. So it was.”
Another musician. Up to here in musicians my entire life, and here comes another one—keyboards, yet. A fisherman, a sailor, a gypsy tinker would have been more romantic than one more damn piano player. “Shall I say what he sang, Jenny? I tell his songs over to myself, like a nun with her beads, and could name you every one, when I cannot always recall the hue of my own hair. ‘Lawn as white as driven snow,’ ‘Ombre de mon amant,’ ‘Vous ne sauriez, mes yeux,’ ‘Still I’m wishing,’ ‘What can we poor females do?’—you see, you see how I remember?”
I’d never seen her looking the way she looked now. It wasn’t just that she was absolutely clear, perfectly distinct, as solid and real and alive for that moment as Mister Cat snoring between us. What it was was a light, that faint, faint ghost-light all around her, growing bright enough to throw my shadow on the bed. I don’t believe in angels and halos, and I’ve never seen anyone’s aura, but Tamsin looked like all that stuff when she talked about Edric Davies.
“My parents quite approved of him,” she said. “As singer, as musico—as a gentleman, even, for he was better educated than they, while never making show of it, and they’d have been shamed to have him eat with the servants. But had they known what was passing between our eyes, while the hired dauber toiled away and my mother knitted in a corner…Jenny, we said no word of it to each other—what need? It was our good fortune that the painter was slow and clumsy, and cross with it, and must be forever scratching out and starting over. My father grew impatient, but as for Edric and me, we’d have stopped time and the world in that music room, could we have done so. Perhaps we did. I think sometimes we did.”
I didn’t know how to take it. I never used to get squirmy about other people’s big romances—as many crushes as I saw Jake Walkowitz through, let alone Meena’s broken heart over Chris Herridge. But this was something altogether else, this wasn’t anything I knew anything about, and I didn’t even know how to look back into Tamsin’s eyes. I said, “So you ran off together.”
Tamsin sighed so softly that I almost didn’t hear her, because of the rain. I still don’t understand how ghosts can make sounds at all. “We had such plans, Jenny. It was to be Bristol first, then to Cardiff, where Edric had family, and where we might be married— and then London, oh, London! There was work for a musician, and friends who might yet arrange an introduction at Court—for James does prize music, I’ll grant him that.”
She’d do that sometimes, slipping between past and present, like a radio at sundown, when the little faraway stations start coming in. Now she said, “I love him so, and dare tell none. I fear to sleep—what if I should cry out his name, and my mother or a servant hear? My parents will be destroyed to lose me, and I will surely be destroyed to think of them finding me gone—but there’s naught for it, Jenny, there’s naught for it. Bristol first, then, tomorrow night, and chance the elements.” The rain started falling harder right on those last words. Dorset weather is very dramatic.
“And you got caught in the storm,” I said. It was working out practically the way I’d made it up, except maybe for the duel. But Tamsin shook her head, coming back to the present tense so hard that her outline shivered like a candle flame.
“A storm, yes—a storm it was indeed, but not the one we knew to beware.” She put her hands on mine, so that I could see our fingers laced together even if I couldn’t feel it. “There came a man to Lyme Regis. Lyme Regis, the eleventh of June. I could never forget that, not if I had been stopped t
wice as long as I have. I’d forget Edric’s voice ere I forgot the eleventh ofJune.”
And I knew. Tony hadn’t told me the date, and we hadn’t gotten up to it in British History, but I knew. I said, “Monmouth’s Rebellion.”
“Was that his name? Monmouth?” Tamsin thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Very like. There were folk who followed his banner, crying that he should be king. My father was not of their number.” She laughed a little. “He said to me, ‘Catty, never you go trailing after a Stuart, not one step. The best of them love their dreams, the worst love none but themselves, but no Stuart born cares for you, or for me, or for any of the poor fools who love them. Follow a moontouched zany, follow an ignis fatuus, but never a Stuart. Mind what I say, little one.’ ”
It was making sense, it was even better than my story. I said, “But Edric followed him. Edric went with Monmouth.”
“No, not Edric,” Tamsin said. “Not he, but his pupil, Francis Gollop. For Edric did take students, as does your mother, and Francis was all his pride. A yeoman’s son, nothing more, but he would learn the harpsichord, and Edric told me often that Francis had the same gift of love as his own for the music he played. He said… he said that was better than having clean hands, better than quick, slender fingers. Oh, Jenny, I do remember everything!”
There was joy in her voice, but more pain—even I could tell the difference, even back then. It woke Miss Sophia Brown up, or whatever; anyway, she came and put her paws around Tamsin’s neck, the way Mister Cat does with me. “Right. So this Francis joined Monmouth’s Rebellion. But Edric didn’t go with him.”
“Nay, Edric went after him. Francis’s mother came pleading to him, on her knees, that he would bring her son home—but be sure that Edric would have gone to find him had she never done so. For he was greatly fond of the boy, and had no mind to lose him to such madness. ‘What cares music who’s king?’ he would ask me, expecting no answer, and getting none. ‘Thieves, murderers, the lot of them, crowned and uncrowned alike. Francis’s left hand, Francis’s improvisations—these are worth all the thrones of all the world, all the kings and queens, all the bloody wretched seaports, frontiers, principalities. And the worse for that idiot boy if he doesn’t know it. I’ll fetch him straightway back, for his mother’s sake and my own. The kings shall not have this one.’”
Tamsin Page 19
