For that moment I could actually see Edric Davies. That can happen with ghosts, when they’re thinking of a person who meant as much in their living days as they did to themselves. Tamsin’s face changed—not a lot, but just enough for me to glimpse a pointed, off-center nose, a chin like a football, and cheekbones you could borrow money on. Long dark hair, not quite shoulder length—eyes much darker than Tamsin’s… a quirky face, sort of lopsided. Not at all handsome, but nice. Then Edric was gone and she was herself again, looking a little lonelier for the memory. She said quietly, “But they did. They did, Jenny.”
I didn’t know my throat was hurting until I tried to talk. “He was killed? Francis?”
“At Sedgemoor, fighting on foot against mounted men with swords. Edric found his body in a ditch, still clutching a broken shepherd’s crook. It was over by then, Monmouth already taken, and rebels ordered left where they fell, for the dogs and the ravens. But Edric would not have it so, and he brought Francis by night to his parents on a handbarrow.” She was smiling now, holding Miss Sophia Brown chose. “I was never so proud of him as I was when we buried Francis in a wheatfield, with his music and that broken stick at his side. Even my father said it was well done.”
It was too much. It was all too much, and it was all coming too fast, and it was too real, at three or whatever in the morning, with a ghost sitting on my bed, petting her ghost-cat and remembering. People running and shouting and falling, horses screaming, armored men battering peasants down into the mud of meadows and pastures I actually knew—and Tamsin’s Edric Davies, Edric the musician, who wanted nothing to do with any of it, struggling in the same rainy Dorset darkness as this, pushing his barrow along lanes lined with bodies just like the one he was lugging home… it was still happening in her voice, everything that had really happened here three hundred years ago. It wasn’t me making up a silly story about Tamsin and Edric for Julian—it was real and right now, and I couldn’t handle it. I started to cry.
Tamsin took my face between her hands. It seemed to me that my hot skin cooled just a bit when she did that, but what do I know? I was busy gulping and coughing and hiccuping, trying to hold it all back, because I was afraid of waking people, and because I can’t stand to cry in front of anybody, even her. She said, “Little one, Jenny, hush, hush, there, never mind,” but I couldn’t stop, and she didn’t know what to do—poor Tamsin, how could she? So finally she went back one more time to that song her sister taught her:
“Watercress and quinces,
fit for kings and princes,
who will come and buy?
who will come and buy?
Daughters all are married,
far away they’re carried—
would that one had tarried—
who will come and buy?”
Which gave me time to sniff and burp (I always start burping like mad when I’ve been crying), and wipe my eyes on the sheet, and mutter, “They still wouldn’t let you marry Edric.” Tamsin didn’t answer. I said, “What happened to Edric?”
I think she would have told me right then—no, I know she would have—if Julian hadn’t wandered in, rubbing his eyes and holding a couple of his French comic books. He said, “Jenny? Why are you doing that?”
I didn’t know whether he meant crying or burping, or just being awake—you can’t ever tell with that kid. Tamsin was gone before he was halfway through the door, and my room suddenly felt really dark again, and I almost started bawling again, but I didn’t. I told him, “I can’t get back to sleep, and I’m so tired,” which was true enough. And Julian said, “Me, too. I know what—I’ll make chocolate milk and I’ll read to you!” Julian would sell out the entire British Commonwealth for chocolate milk. I’m just mentioning it now, in case he ever gets into power.
So he went to the kitchen and stirred up chocolate milk for us both, and then he curled up on my bed and read me both of his Asterix books—doing all the different voices, naturally. Mister Cat was pissed at him, because Miss Sophia Brown had vanished with Tamsin the moment Julian showed. But he got into Asterix after a while, and I dozed and woke and dozed until dawn. Julian fell asleep at my feet somewhere along in there.
Eighteen
The rains don’t exactly stop in a Dorset winter—there’s a reason so many places are called Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Piddlehinton, Piddletrenthide, and like that—but they do ease up from time to time. Once he could get out to the fields, Evan started mounding up strips of earth straight across the muddy stubble and rotten leftover bits, everywhere there was going to be any planting. “To keep the soil warm,” he told Ellie John and Seth—right, Seth was there by then—and they stared at him, and then told everybody else about it, and they stared, but they went ahead and did what he told them. The fields looked weird when it was done—welted up like an attack of hives—and the Lovells damn near got hives themselves when Evan invited them to come down from Oxford and take a look. But Evan didn’t care. He was as cool as Mister Cat with the Lovells that time.
“It’s called no-till farming,” he told them. “I studied it fairly extensively when I was in the States. Very much the new thing. Very popular in the Midwest.”
The Lovells weren’t buying. They particularly weren’t buying Evan’s explanation that with this method you don’t do any plowing at all—just lay the seeds down on the ground and walk away. Not really walk away; you need to be using special improved seeds, and just the right amounts of the right kinds of fertilizer. Sometimes you don’t get as big a crop the first year or two, because the ground’s so used to disks and blades harrowing it up. And if it sounds for a minute as though I know what I’m talking about, forget it. I just live here.
Tony and I were on floor-mopping duty when Evan laid it on the line for the Lovells. “I know it’s hard to imagine, after so many millennia of people all over the world doing exactly the same thing with their land. Good soil or bad—you turn it over, you break it up, you hack furrows into it, you sow—you weed, you spray, you harvest, you market, you start over, world without end.” He shook his head solemnly. “All those centuries, basically unaltered. Amazing, when you think of it.”
Masses of Lovells glowered back at him. (Actually, they never came more than three or four at a time, but they always managed to look like an entire Board of Directors.) One Lovell said, “Nothing wrong with that. Civilization’s always built on people farming their land.”
“Civilizations change,” Evan said. “People change. And land changes—that’s what I’ve been trying to make you see. This soil, this earth we’re standing on has had the equivalent of a hurricane blowing through it every year for a thousand years. There’s nothing left. I want you to understand this. There is nothing left. The only reason Stourhead Farm and all the farms in West Dorset produce so much as a dandelion, a bloody burdock leaf, is that they’re absolutely saturated in chemical fertilizers. Zombie farms, the walking dead!” The Lovells’ mouths were hanging open like steamshovel jaws. Evan said, “If you’re serious about wanting to restore Stourhead to what it was when the land was young, then you’re going to have to change with the land. This is what’s needed, and this is how I’m going to be managing here from now on.”
A big bald Lovell was the first to stop spluttering. He said, “And I suppose there’s not a thing we can do about it.”
Evan smiled. “You’re my employers. You’ve always got a choice.”
The Lovells didn’t exactly call for a time out and a huddle, but close enough. There was a lot of silent shrugging, grunting, head shaking, mouth twitching, hand spreading, and general eyebrow athletics going on, while Evan leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs, just as though none of their antics meant a thing in the world to him. When he looked over and saw Tony and me leaning on our mops and watching, he gave us a long, slow wink. Cool as Mister Cat.
And he got away with it. The bald Lovell finally grumbled, “Might have said something . . well, in for a penny, in for a pound, hey?” and the rest of them went
along. Evan could have two years to try out his no-till method, with an option for a third year if the second crop at least equaled this last harvest. It didn’t seem like much of a shot to me, but it was plainly all he was going to get out of the Lovells. He told them what kind of new equipment he’d need, and how much it would cost, and the Lovells pissed and moaned some more, but it came out consent. Evan got them to put everything in writing before they left, just in case.
“They could have fired you,” Tony said afterward. “They could have bloody bounced you, right on the spot. We’d have been back bunking in with Charlie.”
Evan shook his head. “They’d lose at least a year and a harvest finding another manager this late—they know it, and I know it, and they know I know. Now, on their way home, they’ll start looking around in a hurry, but it’ll keep them busy for a while. All I’ve done is buy us a bit of time, which was all I wanted. Who’s for chess? Julian, I’ll give you a rook, how about it?” Evan would have made a great chess hustler, like the ones in Central Park, if he weren’t a crazy farmer.
Later, with the rain coming down hard again, with the lights going on and off and the TV completely dead, and everyone piled together in the music room listening to Sally playing Rolling Stones songs the way Bach or Schubert or Mahler would have done them, I asked on an impulse, “Evan, does anybody know anything about Roger Willoughby’s family?”
Evan was leaning against the piano bench with his head resting lightly on Sally’s leg. By now I was almost used to seeing them like that, as though they’d been married forever; it only got to me once in a while, when I was offguard or in some kind of mood. He said, “It depends on what you want to know, Jenny. I could show you a copy of Roger’s will, which is quite detailed about who gets what, and I could describe the changes his oldest son, Giles, made when he took over the farm in 1699. But that’s not what you’re after, is it?”
“No,” I said. Tony was propped on an elbow, thumb-wrestling with Julian, but he was watching me really curiously, which is why he was losing. I said, “What about the other children? There were the two boys and two girls, only one of them died of the Black Plague.” That was a mistake—now everybody was looking at me. Well, in for a penny, like the Lovells. “I mean, that’s what I heard, anyway. I was just wondering about the other daughter, and about—I don’t know… if any of them could have gotten mixed up in Monmouth’s Rebellion or anything like that? Tony doesn’t think so, but I was wondering.”
If human life on this planet ever depends on whether or not I can tell a lie without blushing, humanity had better start packing. I wasn’t even lying—I was just trying for casual, and I can’t even do that without my whole face spontaneously combusting. Everybody was polite about it, though, and nobody asked any of the questions I’d left myself wide open for. Evan did give me a long look, way too thoughtful—Tony gets it from him, it just occurs to me now—but all he said was, “You should talk to old Guy Guthrie.”
Sally stopped playing for a moment. “The man at the market? What would he know about the Willoughbys?”
“Guy Guthrie knows everything,” Evan said. “Everything about Dorset, anyway. The Celts, the Romans, the people who cut the Cerne Abbas Giant in the turf, the ones who lived in Maiden Castle, the ones who went with Monmouth—the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Thomas Hardy, Barnes, the lot. And their ghosts.” I must have dropped my teeth, because Evan smiled his long, slow smile at me. “He collects ghosts, old Guy does. Hobs and bogles too—get him to tell you about the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor—but mostly it’s Dorset history, the bits and loose ends that don’t fit into books. He’ll know about the Willoughbys.”
He did, too. Does, I mean: Guy Guthrie’s still alive, still doesn’t look any more than seventy-five—though he’s got to be ninety— still wears Sherlock Holmes tweeds and ulsters, and still works part-time at the Dorchester Museum, though you don’t see him running the cattle auctions at the farmers’ market the way he used to do. He lives alone in Puddletown, a few miles east of Dorchester, in a stone cottage that smells of old books and a nice old dog named Clem. Sally dropped me off there one Saturday afternoon when she had pupils to see.
Mr. Guthrie served me milky Indian tea, the way they have it at Meena’s house, and little cakes, the kind that taste like sweet sand, and which you can actually feel rotting your teeth while you’re eating them. He’s a tall man, with a big broad face, Crayola-blue eyes, and a hayrick of white hair that used to be red. He poured tea for himself, leaned forward, and asked me, “Now why on earth would a child like yourself be wanting to know about Tamsin Willoughby?”
Sally hadn’t told him about Tamsin—she couldn’t have. She’d simply gotten his phone number and called to say that her daughter was very interested in the history of Stourhead Farm and the Willoughby family. And there he sat, smiling a little over the rim of his teacup, and getting straight to the heart of things first crack. I said, “Well, I didn’t mean Tamsin—I mean, not just Tamsin—”
“Of course you do,” Mr. Guthrie interrupted me. “Tell me, does she still smell of vanilla?” I sloshed tea into my saucer, and Mr. Guthrie’s smile got wider. He said, “I’m sorry, my dear—that was a silly parlor trick, and I do apologize. But you see, Tamsin Willoughby has appeared a number of times over the last three centuries. Always to young women—girls, really, none very much older than yourself—and always accompanied by the scent of vanilla.” Mr. Guthrie was born in the north of England, not the west, so his accent isn’t really Dorset, and people tease him about it, but I liked it right away. He said, “Please do tell me about her.”
I didn’t tell him everything I knew, but just to be able to talk about Tamsin at all was like early spring in Mr. Guthrie’s little parlor. When I said that I’d spoken with her, and that we’d gone walking together, he didn’t answer me for a while. Then he said, very carefully, “As a rule, Miss Gluckstein—ah, Jenny, then—as a rule the sightings of Tamsin Willoughby have usually been very brief, and always occurred within the walls of the Manor itself. And no one has ever reported—ah—any sort of actual conversation with her. Are you absolutely sure…?” He let his voice trail away then, the way people do when they’re too polite to call you a liar, so they offer you a way out. Like in all those English movies Sally took me to, when they leave the villain alone with a drink and a pistol. I said that I was telling the truth, and he gave a sigh, leaned back in his chair, and didn’t speak for another while. But it was a different kind of not speaking.
“The story of Tamsin Willoughby,” Mr. Guthrie said, “is to my mind the most romantic legend between Winchester and Exeter. I call it a legend because the people involved were most real, but every other aspect of the tale is guesswork, there’s no other word for it. It begins with a chap who was apparently engaged to play to her while she was having her portrait painted—”
“Edric Davies,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it—it just came out of me, that fast. Mr. Guthrie looked at me. I said, “He was Welsh—I think.” Because it was his story to tell, after all.
“Edric Davies,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Yes. Yes, he was indeed a Welshman. Of course they fell in love, quite properly—what sort of a legend would this be if they didn’t?—and made plans to elope together, since her family would never have consented to such a marriage.” He stopped, narrowing his eyes, which made them look even brighter. “You know all this, I can see.”
I nodded. “She told me,” I said. “I’m really not making it up, Mr. Guthrie.”
Mr. Guthrie sighed again. “Eigh, dear, I rather wish you were. Because I know what to do with fabrications, Jenny, with all the ridiculous nonsense that always collects around stories like this one of Tamsin Willoughby. I sieve them out, like one of your American goldminers—I shake them up and turn them on their heads, and I shake them some more, and in time all the silliness and all the superstition sift through and sink. And most of the time there’s nowt more than that to the business, but once in a while, once in a while… some bit
of gold is left behind, and that’s what I collect, do you see? Those tiny flecks of inexplicable truth that won’t dissolve, won’t wash away.” He smiled again, a little sadly now. “It’s not a very big collection, for as long as I’ve been at it, but you’re welcome to what’s there.”
As far as he knew, Edric Davies had been lost in Monmouth’s Rebellion. When I told him about Edric’s student, Francis Gollop, being the one who went, and how Edric had gone after him and brought the body home by night, he gave a funny, nice little yelp, the way Julian still does when the crossword puzzle suddenly falls into place. “That accounts for it!” He set his cup down too hard, spilling tea himself, and clapped his hands. “That accounts for it!”
“What? Accounts for what?”
“Why, for the way he disappears from the story,” Mr. Guthrie practically shouted. He hopped to his feet—then saw I didn’t have a clue what he was carrying on about, and he laughed and sat down again. “Jenny, in all the years I’ve been asking Dorset people about the ghost stories their parents and grandparents told them, I’ve come across four versions of the tale of Tamsin and Edric. And in every one of them, Edric vanishes into the Rebellion and Tamsin never learns what becomes of him—nobody does. Maybe he was killed, maybe Judge Jeffreys had him hanged or transported; maybe he simply fled to safety in Wales. I must tell you, it’s never felt right to me. Wrong shape to the story, Edric never coming back. Wrong shape.”
Tamsin Page 20
