Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Well, he did,” I said. “He came back, all right, and he buried Francis Gollop in a wheatfield. But I don’t know what became of him after that. Tamsin won’t ever say.”

  “She died,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Maybe that’s all that happened.” There was one little sugary cake left, and he waved it to me, but I wrapped it in a paper napkin to take home to Julian. A kid gives you his damn gorilla, you have obligations.

  I said, “I don’t believe that. And you don’t either.” Mr. Guthrie didn’t answer right away. Clem wandered over and slobbered on my shoes. I scratched his ears, keeping Julian’s cake well out of range. Once Mr. Guthrie started to say something, but then he didn’t. The old stone cottage got really quiet, but not scary. You could hear a clock ticking somewhere, and smell something on the stove, and a bird scratching for shelter under the eaves. I studied a framed photograph on an end table: three little girls, each one holding a doll. They must have wanted them in the picture, too, the same way I still don’t like to be in a photo without Mister Cat. I need all the diversions and evasive maneuvers I can get.

  “Do you know anything about Judge Jeffreys?” Mr. Guthrie finally asked me. I told him what Tony had told me about the Bloody Assizes, and he nodded his head, but he was sort of shaking it at the same time. He said, “You can’t imagine him. You can’t imagine what he did here. The Irish still damn each other with the Curse of Cromwell, because of the terrible way he drove them off their land, and the thousands and thousands who were killed when they resisted. We in Dorset could call down the Curse of Jeffreys on our enemies, but we never would—no one could deserve that, and it’s no name to be conjuring with. Oh, I talk about him to the tourists all the time, but I don’t think about him, do you see? I don’t like to think about him.”

  He was looking flushed and agitated, and old for the first time. He saw me seeing it and snapped his fingers to call Clem, calming himself some by smoothing the dog’s messy coat. I almost didn’t hear him when he said, “Jeffreys knew the Willoughbys. I’m sure he knew Tamsin.”

  My entire inside turned to ice-cold mashed potatoes, that fast. When I could talk, I said, “No. No, he couldn’t have. Roger Willoughby stayed out of the Rebellion, they didn’t have anything to do with it. I know that.”

  Mr. Guthrie’s northern accent was getting stronger, and his rough, easy voice had turned pinched and harsh. “Jeffreys convicted an eight-year-old girl of treason. He raved at her in his courtroom until she collapsed and died. He didn’t care who was involved with Monmouth and who wasn’t. King James had sent him down to make an example of Dorset—he was after the whole county, not just a handful of miserable peasants. He was a bloody terrorist, Jenny. Guilt or innocence didn’t matter tuppence to Judge Jeffreys.”

  Clem yelped, and Mr. Guthrie looked down at his hand, clenched hard in the dog’s fur as though it were somebody else’s hand. He let go and petted Clem, crooning and apologizing to him. I said, “You can’t be sure. That he actually knew them. Her.”

  “He kept a diary,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Not a real diary—more of a schedule, you’d call it. A few scribbled notes on the trials—you wouldn’t want to read those—but most are social things. Visitors, dinner invitations. He was a very popular dinner guest during the Assizes, the judge was.”

  I stared at him. I said, “That’s crazy. With everything he was doing every day?”

  “Well, that’s precisely why.” Mr. Guthrie made himself smile. “Just you think about it. Here’s a man can send anyone, anyone he chooses to the gallows or worse. Commoners can’t offer him an evening’s entertainment, but the gentry can. Wouldn’t you want to keep in his good books—make certain he doesn’t decide you might have thought about supporting Monmouth, even for five minutes together? Oh, take my word, they fought to have him to their homes, people like the Willoughbys, people far greater than they. That’s how it was then, during the Bloody Assizes.”

  I didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me. I looked at my watch to see when Sally would be back to pick me up. Mr. Guthrie said, “His journal is in the County Museum. There are several entries for the Willoughbys.”

  “She wouldn’t have had anything to do with him,” I said. “I don’t care how many times he came to dinner, I don’t care what he could have done to her family, she wouldn’t have talked to him, looked at him. You don’t know her.” I was getting red-faced myself, I could feel it—not gracefully around the cheekbones like Mr. Guthrie, but pop-eyed and smeary and awful. I said, “I’m sure that sounds incredibly dumb, saying I know someone who’s been dead for three hundred years, but I do.”

  “And I know George Jeffreys—Baron Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys of Wem,” Mr. Guthrie answered. “Haven’t I looked in his face, forty years, time and time, and seen what that poor little girl saw? Haven’t I looked in his face?”

  He was on his feet now, though I don’t think he knew it, and he had to grip the back of the chair to steady himself, he was trembling so. For a moment I was sure he meant he’d actually seen Judge Jeffreys, just as I saw Tamsin. But then he went on—quickly, as though he knew what I was thinking—“There’s a portrait in the Lodgings. Ask them to show you.”

  It got awkwardly, embarrassingly quiet again after that, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say, except to ask if I could have some more tea. Mr. Guthrie seemed relieved to go and make it. I sat there, so caught up in imagining Judge Jeffreys at Stourhead Farm, dining with the Willoughbys in the Manor, that I kept forgetting to stroke Clem. Then he’d shove his head into my hand for attention, and I’d get back to my job. But all I could think about was Tamsin, Tamsin looking across the dining table, seeing that man staring at her. Because he would have stared. And she’d have looked straight back into his face, like Mr. Guthrie, and seen what she saw. I didn’t taste that second pot of tea at all.

  Sally was tired from teaching when she came to get me, and I felt guilty about it, but I talked her into taking me by the Judge jeffreys Restaurant, back in Dorchester. The Restaurant is on High West Street, around the corner from the Antelope Hotel, where they held the Bloody Assizes. It’s a three-story, half-timbered building, all stone and oak, over four hundred years old, and it’s so real that it looks absolutely fake, if you can figure that. Judge Jeffreys’s picture is on the sign hanging out front, but you really can’t make much out of it, except that he’s wearing a wig. I’ve passed it any number of times without giving it any thought, even after Tony told me about the Assizes.

  But upstairs, in the Lodgings, where he slept and wrote in his journal and where people probably came to beg him for their lives, or their children’s lives—upstairs they have the portrait Mr. Guthrie was talking about. It was late, and the Lodgings part was closed, but the restaurant people knew Sally—she eats there a lot, in between pupils—so they showed us up and left us alone. And we stood there and looked at Judge Jeffreys together.

  The thing I wasn’t the least bit prepared for was that he was pretty. I can’t say it any other way—he was out and out pretty, that mad, evil man. And he was young—the painting wasn’t done at the time of the Assizes, but maybe seven or eight years before, so he’d have been around thirty at the most. It’s almost a woman’s face: delicate, calm, even thoughtful, with big heavy-lidded eyes and a woman’s soft mouth. You can’t possibly imagine that face screaming and raging and foaming—which is what everybody says he did—sentencing people by the hundreds to be hacked into pieces, and ordering their heads and quarters boiled and tarred and stuck up on poles all over Dorset. There’s no way you can see that face doing those things.

  I told Sally that, and she said, “Well, you know, in those days portraits didn’t necessarily look much like the people who were paying for them. Oliver Cromwell’s supposed to have told a painter that he wanted to be shown warts and all, but I don’t think that was ever much of a trend. I’ll bet nobody was about to chance painting Judge Jeffreys the way he really looked.” She put her arm around me—I guess because of the w
ay I was staring at the portrait. “Too bad they didn’t have Polaroids back then, huh?”

  But he did look like that. He looked exactly like that.

  Nineteen

  The Wild Hunt was out almost every night that second winter in Dorset—or that’s the way it seemed, anyway. Most of the time I’d be awakened, not by the horsemen, but by Julian scrambling frantically into bed with me, or by Mister Cat slamming through the window I always left partway open for him. Once or twice Meena was staying over, so it would be all of us huddled together: Mister Cat hissing and growling, Julian trying not to whimper, and Meena doing her best to stay cool and logical. Which is tricky when you’re dealing with that crazy howling and baying and laughing, all riding on an icy wind that never seemed to come from any one place. Nothing with feathers sounds like the Wild Hunt, and everybody knows it. I know everybody knows it.

  And Meena heard the other thing one night—that awful, hopeless almost-human wail crossing the sky just ahead of the Hunt. Julian didn’t hear it, but Meena’s face went almost transparent, as though you could see right through her brown skin to the trembling underneath. She said, very softly, “We have demons in India, demons with a hundred terrible heads—even demons that can be gods at the same time, it depends. We don’t have that. We don’t.” She wasn’t over it in the morning, like Julian; she didn’t get over it for days. It’s still the one time I’ve ever seen Meena afraid.

  Other people were hearing the Hunt too—there was even a squib in the Dorchester paper about it. The Colfaxes, next farm over, said their chickens couldn’t sleep and were off their feed; and at school everyone told me their parents were really spooked and pretending not to be. It didn’t matter whether they believed in the Wild Hunt or not—it was there. People are different about stuff like that in England.

  I’d been frantic to go find Tamsin the same night after I’d talked with Mr. Guthrie and been to the Lodgings with Sally. But I couldn’t, not then, and not for more than a week. There was school, and there was fixup stuff around the Manor—as there is to this day, it’s never done with—and there was always the farm. The Lovells had clamped down hard on Evan’s hiring budget, so Tony and Julian and I got pressed into more fieldwork than anybody’d bargained for. In some ways the no-till business was easier for us than deep plowing would have been; in other ways it was a lot more delicate, because you have to use exactly the right amount of fertilizer—you can’t slather it on anymore—and we had to be sparing with the seeds because the new kind Evan needed were really hard to come by that first year. And the weather never quit being mean and messy. That’s another thing that accounts for a lot of Thomas Hardy.

  Finally I had the Manor more or less to myself one afternoon— Evan and Sally were working, Tony was locked in his studio, and Julian was at a school friend’s house, the two of them totally involved in some experiment I didn’t even want to think about. I couldn’t find Mister Cat anywhere, so I figured he must be off with Miss Sophia Brown. The Wild Hunt never bothered her, by the way. If it got too noisy overhead, she might open one eye and yawn, but that was it. You could plop Miss Sophia Brown down on an iceberg, and she’d probably burst into flame.

  I grabbed a paper clip and went up the east-wing stairs to the third floor. It was as comfortably desolate as ever, dim as it was, even in midafternoon, I could actually see Mister Cat’s footprints in the dust on the floor. I found Tamsin’s door, straightened the clip, poked around in the lion’s left eye, heard the double click, and I was in the secret room. I could do it almost as fast now as Miss Sophia Brown could pour herself through the panel.

  Tamsin wasn’t there. I called for her a few times, which was silly, and then I wandered around the little room, investigating the bedframe-chest combination, staring at the painting of Roger and Margaret Willoughby for a long while, looking for Tamsin—and finally I sat down in her chair. I felt like her, a little bit, sitting there, looking out into a world that couldn’t see me. I saw the chestnut tree, and the clouds heaped up like fresh laundry, and I saw the back of a woman going into the dairy, and William slogging past in the mud with a feed sack on each shoulder. I thought about New York, I thought about having been in Dorset for a whole year and a half, and about being practically fifteen and a Fourth Former, and what Marta and Jake would say if they could see me doing no-till farming. Tamsin’s chair was more comfortable than I’d expected, and the room was warmer than it should have been, considering the weather outside. I fell asleep.

  When I opened my eyes, I was looking straight into Judge Jeffreys’s face.

  It was the portrait at the Lodgings come perfectly to life: robes, brown wig, white lace at the throat, gentle expression and all. Even the hands were right, long and graceful and… reposeful as Tamsin’s hands. It’s a good thing I saw the eyes before I screamed, because I’d have brought the whole east wing down. But the eyes were angled, golden, mocking, and I didn’t scream. I said, “Evan warned me you had a really crude sense of humor.”

  Judge Jeffreys shrugged lightly, and the Pooka said, “My humor suits me well. What else should concern me?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” I said. “But could you please look like something different? Anything, I don’t care what—just not him, okay?” The Pooka shrugged again, and became Mister Cat, crouched at my feet, tail whipping back and forth. I yelled that time—not screamed, there’s a difference, just yelled ‘Wo!’—and the Pooka chuckled. I can’t describe that sound, as well as I came to know it: The best I can get into words is that there’s never any smile in the Pooka’s laughter. But he did change himself into Albert the sheepdog, and I was grateful for that.

  I said, “You ever turn into things that hide under bathtubs?”

  The Pooka sat back on his haunches and lolled his tongue out, which is the other thing Albert can do. “No fear, Jenny Gluckstein, I do not often come peeping at you or yours. I am here with word for Tamsin Willoughby.”

  “Sorry, she’s in a meeting,” I said. “You want to leave a pager number or something?”

  The main trouble with shapeshifters is that it’s too easy to forget what they really are and get careless. The Pooka didn’t turn into some other form, but slobby old Albert suddenly reared up over me like a grizzly bear, drooling blood, those giveaway eyes gone streaky-red and his chipped yellow teeth bulging his mouth. That time, all right—that time I screamed, and I knocked Tamsin’s chair over, trying to get to the door… and then it was just old Albert again, the only dog who smells like a wet dog when he’s dry. The Pooka said, quite calmly, “I am no billy-blind, Jenny Gluckstein.”

  “No,” I agreed. I was pretty shaky. I said, “I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know where Tamsin is.”

  “With the dancer,” the Pooka said. “She watches the dancer.”

  I couldn’t take that in. “Tony? You mean she’s in Tony’s studio right now?”

  Albert always seems to be grinning like an idiot, but the Pooka was definitely overdoing it. “Indeed, she had always a great fancy for galliard or brawl, or even a running-battle, such as men dance with swords. It often comforts her to watch the dancer.”

  And like that I was jealous. My God, I was roaring jealous, howling jealous, Gaynor Junior High School jealous—horribly, disgustingly jealous. Tamsin belonged to me—I was her comfort, nobody else. I didn’t have a minute to brace myself; it rushed me like one of those waves that slams you down and tumbles you in so many different directions you can’t remember which way the air is—there was a moment where I was really fighting just to get my breath. It was absolutely horrible, and I was so ashamed.

  And the Pooka knew. He didn’t say anything, but I took one look at that stupid old dog’s face and I couldn’t look at him again. I said, “Would you mind? Somebody I don’t actually know, please.”

  The Pooka nodded politely, and turned into something that would have had me wetting my pants at some other time. It was more or less a naked human from the waist down—and so hairy I couldn’t tell if it was male or fe
male—but the upper part was like a huge stoat or weasel, with a weasel’s short clawed forelegs, a weasel’s humped back, masked face and pointed muzzle, and a mouth way too full of white teeth when it put its head back to laugh at me. It said, “Will this do, Jenny Gluckstein?”

  The weird thing is, I couldn’t be bothered with it. The way I was feeling right then was so much worse than any monster the Pooka could have come up with that I just nodded and said, “Fine, sure,” as though he’d been a waiter asking me if my dinner was all right. I said, “How come Tony can’t see her?” Because I’d have known if Tony had seen Tamsin. I can’t say why I’d have known, but I would have. Jealousy has its own awful magic.

  The Pooka said, “Not everyone is given to see such as Tamsin Willoughby. Indeed, not every ghost can perceive another. As for your brother—”

  “Stepbrother—”

  “Your brother sees his own ghosts,” the Pooka said. “Dances yet undanced, paces invisible to others that he must set down on the air for them. There is no room in his vision for Tamsin Willoughby, just as you cannot espy the spirits who come to partner him when he calls.” He gave me a weasel’s chattery grin, and added, “And so be easy, Jenny Gluckstein.”

  I had myself pretty much under control by then. The shame and anger at myself hadn’t gone anywhere, but I figured I could face them later. “Well, if you know where she is, why didn’t you go there to give her your message? Why come to me?”

  “The message is as well for you.” The Pooka came closer. He smelled like an entire weasel, not just half of one, and he towered over me in this shape, but I wasn’t afraid. He said, “You are the first she has ever spoken to.”

  “I know that,” I said. “Mr. Guthrie told me.”

  “It was not wise, that.” Far beyond the cold, thoughtless flare there’s always something a little like sadness in the Pooka’s eyes, only it’s not safe to look for it. He said, “Wisdom is no concern of mine—but for the dead to linger so long that they come to have speech with the living… this is not right. The least of boggarts would know that.”