Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  Robe or no robe, I was freezing, and my throat was closing up on me. I got her out of the bathroom and into my room, and we just sat together on the bed, with Tamsin’s voice going on in the dark, soft and toneless, and I couldn’t even put my arm around her. “Courting me, from the very first—there, at my parents’ table, before their eyes—and taking such grand pleasure in his knowledge that there was naught they could do against my Lord Justice George Jeffreys. And leaning forward, whispering, offering slips of orange between his fingers, like to a man feeding a pet bird. I see him still, Jenny. I see him now.”

  “He was sort of handsome, wasn’t he?” I said. “Pretty eyes.” Tamsin was staring at me. “I mean, in his pictures, anyway.”

  If nobody ever again, for the whole damn rest of my life, looks at me the way Tamsin did then, I’ll be just as happy. I honestly thought she might never be going to speak to me again, but after about a year she said, “Pretty eyes. So they were—nor did he ever take them from me in all that time, not for two minutes together. Edric would be playing, and the portraitist daubing and scratching, my father snoring—and those pretty eyes so softly on me…”

  “He came to see you being painted?” I should have figured that—Meena would have. “So he saw Edric, and… he saw Edric and you?”

  “He saw everything.” She began to sound a little more like the Tamsin I knew then, speaking faster and with a bit of expression back in her voice. “Aye, he knew the truth of us, I think before we did! He never spoke word to Edric, but whiles that gentle gaze would rise to take the two of us in—never more than a moment, a single breath— and Jenny, the pit, the fiery, filthy cavern just below that gentleness! Afterward—him having taken his leave at last—I’d weep and shiver all night, and bite my fingers with fear, and no way Edric could ever come to comfort me. And one still night—once only, somewhere in the house—I heard my mother weeping as well.”

  I felt like Edric, unable to cross three hundred years to hold her and say, It’s all right, it’s all right. I won’t let anything bad happen, as though that would have helped. All I could do was ask helplessly dumb things like, “Did he ever get you—I mean, were you ever alone with him?”

  “Always,” Tamsin said. She was turning her hands over and over in her lap, and she looked like a child being scolded for something she hadn’t done. She said, “Jenny, when he was in this house, it made no matter who else was here. Not servants, not my parents—not Edric, even. Dissolved, vanished, every one, leaving me alone… there was nothing but him, no one to stand between us, do you take me? And no hope, for all knew he would surely ask for me when his horrible Assizes was done, and who in Dorset would say Judge Jeffreys nay? Who would dare?”

  She tried to grip my hand, and I felt that little cool breath that sometimes happened between us. “Do you wonder I fear him still, Jenny, even to speak of? Do you wonder I forget?”

  “No,” I said, “no, of course not, of course I don’t.” Her smell had changed—not vanilla now, but sharper, drier, almost making me sneeze. I took a gamble. I said, “But Edric said nay, didn’t he? No, I mean. Edric dared.”

  A big, fuzzy moth was thumping and flopping against the window, just crazy to get to the faint ghost-light, which was the only brightness in the room. I pushed again, like the moth. “You did run away. You made your plans, just like the first time, and you ran away together. Tell me, Tamsin.”

  I didn’t call her often by her name; maybe that’s what got her attention. She looked straight in my eyes, and her voice grew stronger, with a calm pride in it now. She said, “Yes. We chose our night once again.”

  I didn’t exactly jump in the air and yell my head off for Guy Guthrie and Julian—“I was right! Yes! They did run away! I was right!”—but I came pretty close. Tamsin said, “No ladder to my casement, no whistles or birdcalls for signal. We were to meet in twilight, at a crumbling old cow byre to which my parents knew me accustomed to walk in the evenings. Little margin it left us before our flight were noticed—but the portrait was near done, and Edric had two days’ hire left at best. No choice, you see.”

  Outside, in the hallway, Sally: “Jenny? You still up, babe?” Nights when she can’t sleep, she prowls like old Albert, making certain that all her sheep are tucked in safely. I mumbled something about working on an oral presentation for school. She didn’t especially believe me—I can always feel that with Sally—but she just called, “Well, get some sleep sometime,” and left it alone. I really, really like my mother.

  “I was clever, Jenny,” Tamsin said. “I walked out to the byre the day before, and there concealed a portmanteau containing a change of clothes and sturdy shoes as well. No food—Edric was to bring that—and no keepsake but a miniature of my sister, Maria. Which was not theft, for my father gave it me.” Tamsin was always picky and precise about things like that. After a moment she added, “I saw the Black Dog that day.”

  Better and better. I hadn’t even thought to put the Black Dog in the story. “He came to warn you not to go,” I said. “But you went anyway.”

  Tamsin was far away, not looking at me now, but ages beyond me. “I cannot tell you his errand, nor how I responded, for I hardly saw him at all, so full I was of plans and dreams and terrors. Next day’s weather was cool and blowy, with a smell of rain. My father and brothers were in Dorchester, not to return till late afternoon—my mother was advising a friend’s daughter on her wedding. I came down the stairs for the last time as bold and trembling as though I were already a bride myself, saying farewell to all I loved, all I understood, walking away with my husband. I wept, dear Jenny, and I blessed my family a dozen times over and begged their forgiveness, and I walked away.”

  I saw her, you know. did. Probably partly because of the way ghosts change when they remember something that intensely—but I’ll swear forever that it was more than that. Her eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them, bright as flowers in moonlight, and she was there in them, three hundred years before—she was on the stairs in this same house, so frightened she could hardly stand up, and so wildly happy, and so brave. It was there still, that moment, in her own eyes.

  “But you didn’t go to meet him? What happened?” My voice sounded like a dry little cricket chirp, far away. The room had grown darker; or maybe that was Tamsin’s brightness gathering— I don’t know. I thought she’d take a long time answering me, but she didn’t.

  “I did set forth to meet Edric,” she said. “But he was not the one I met.” Miss Sophia Brown appeared on her lap half a second before Mister Cat eased through the window and poured himself into mine. They were both looking very pleased about one cat thing or another, and promptly settled down to washing each other’s faces. Tamsin said, “I had taken but a dozen steps beyond my doorstep when he was there. Smiling, bowing over my hand, murmuring that he should be properly disappointed to find my family gone from home, but could not, so enchanted was he at this chance to speak with me in sweet solitude.” Her voice had dropped into a nasty dry whisper, like insect wings rubbing together, and she kept going back and forth between that voice and her own as she talked.

  “I told him that my parents would return quite soon, and that he might await them within and welcome. He answers me, nay, but he’ll pass our farm quite by and rate such hospitality poor stuff indeed if I’d not bide him company a while. And truly he means more by that than the mere words. There’s naught in England to hinder him from declaring my father Monmouth’s fellow and agent—naught but his fancy for me, and well he knew I knew it. We looked each other in the eyes, Jenny, and both of us knew all.”

  She laughed suddenly, which spooked me about as much as if she’d cursed or screamed. “Aye, there was a droll moment, if you will, set snug in horror like a currant into a Yorkshire pudding. I told him I was in the habit of my evening stroll, and he replied on the instant, he was bound to convoy me, to see me safe from just such vile rebels as he’d that day been sending by the score to meet their black Master in hell. And ere I could
speak, there’s my arm tight through his, and him guiding me down the path to the byre where Edric waits for me.” She looked at me as though she’d just now remembered I was there, and she smiled, almost mockingly. “As good as a play, is’t not, Jenny?”

  And it was that, all right. I couldn’t speak for seeing her: alone, arm in arm with that soft-eyed monster, him bending down to her, breathing on her, moving her along… and her unsuspecting lover in the cowshed: a rebel himself, or the next thing to it. I just about managed to croak out, like Julian, “What did you do?”

  “Do? I did nothing—a blessed wet rock did it all. The rain had begun—my ankle turned—I fell, drawing him down with me.” The laugh was closer to a gasp this time, as though she was falling again, right there. “He bore me back to the house, arranging me on a couch, and propping up my ankle, tender as a nurse—indeed, I believe he would have salved and bandaged me, had I let him. And all the while crooning to me, vowing he’s never been so ensorcelled, and I must truly be a witch, and he knows what to do with witches. And then he laughs, to show ‘twas all meant as lovetalk. I think it was, Jenny. God’s mercy, but I think so.”

  She stood up, pushing Miss Sophia Brown off her lap (the Persian reacted just as indignantly as though she’d been a real cat), and walked to my window. I’ll always wonder what she saw, standing with her back to me, looking out into one night or another. I could see the moon through her left shoulder.

  “He spoke to me of marriage,” she said quietly. “Marriage and hanging—the same voice, the same passion, ’twas all one to that man. Oh, aye, he was already wed, but what of that? his wife was rotten with consumption, unlikely to last the year. I would be a baroness, the lady wife of the Lord Chief Justice, living a life as far above this jumped-up croft as it would be above a shepherd’s hut. Land, society, horses, servants—and him merely the first among those, ever at my side, as now, asking only my love and approval.” She turned, and when she smiled this time I saw the crooked wolf tooth. “Oh, it does come back in your presence, my Jenny,” she said, “it comes back. There was a reason the cats brought you to me.”

  “And all that time you were worrying about Edric,” I said. “He was carrying on, proposing to you and everything, and you must have been just frantic, thinking about Edric—”

  Tamsin laughed a third time, and this one came out dry and small and rueful. “Oh, aye—nor was I the only one. For of a sudden, between this fond word and that, Judge Jeffreys’s hands were gripping my arms like fetters, and his face was kissing-close to mine so I could only see his eyes—his great, gentle, terrible eyes. His lips did hardly move when he spoke to me again, saying, ‘And as for that twangling fool in the cowshed, you need have no dismay on his score. He never purposed to wait your coming, but was gone from there ere you had set out. And I know this, Mistress Willoughby, because I passed that way coming here.’ His hands on me, Jenny. I cannot feel, and yet I feel them now.”

  I felt them myself. I said, “He knew? About Edric and Francis Gollop and everything?”

  “He knew,” Tamsin said. “He held me there, and he told me what he knew, and told me further what fate Edric and my father merited, who had knowingly harbored a damned rebel against His Majesty James II—aye, and even dared remove the body for the Christian burial it had forfeited, in direct violation of the King’s own command. Oh, Jenny, Jenny, it comes back.”

  How can I write what she looked like—my Tamsin—made so bright by her own memory, and cringing away from it at the same time? She said, “He went on, on, half raving, half singing—now swearing eternal adoration, now threatening horror to my entire family if I were denied him. After a time I but half heard him, Jenny, so hard was I listening for my father’s returning—and for Edric as well, come at last to carry me safe away. But there was no one, and the rain fell harder.”

  I couldn’t just sit still. I dumped Mister Cat, stood up and went to her, standing as close—kissing-close, she’d called it—as maybe the Judge had been that day; so close that the ghost-glimmer seemed to fall right on me, like moonlight. Tamsin touched my hair, but I couldn’t feel it.

  “I ran,” she said. “The moment those hands loosened on me in the slightest, I was up and out, splashing and sliding toward the cow byre once again, for I would never credit that Edric had abandoned me. Behind me I hear him calling furiously, but I dare not look back, hard as it was to keep my balance on the wet stones. I fall, I fell—the ankle turns grievously under me a second time— and I was near crawling when at last I reached the byre.” She turned away, back toward the window. There hadn’t been any rain that day, but the buildings and fences and bits of machinery I could see were all glinting in the moon like new grass.

  Tamsin said, “Edric was not there. My portmanteau was there still—and his traveling bag beside it—but not he. I stand in the rain, holding to the byre door, staring and staring within—and then I truly run, Jenny, lame ankle and all. I cannot say where I ran, for my wits were as gone from me as Edric, whose name I shrieked into the storm until I fell. This time—or perhaps the next, or the next—I lay where I’d fallen.”

  I couldn’t say anything, and she didn’t speak again for a long while. “ ‘Twas the Pooka found me, else I’d have stopped there. He’d taken the guise of my brother Hugh, but I remember yet those yellow eyes looking down at me as he carried me home. My mother put me to bed.”

  Saying that, she suddenly realized that I was standing barefoot beside her, and she got really upset, almost angry with me. “Get into bed yourself, child, at once! Am I to have you catching a chill and dying of it”—and that was the one time she used the word— “as I did? That I’ll not have.” Just the way she’d said it to the Pooka when she came flying to rescue me. In the middle of everything, I was absolutely thrilled.

  “That’s how it happened,” I said. “It really is like my story, sort of.”

  Tamsin blinked in puzzlement at that, but she went on talking. “I lingered some days—just how long, I cannot say, for they swam all around me, the days, in and out, like fish. My parents and brothers were always at my bedside, whenever I should open my eyes; and he came every day, his labors at the Assizes done, to clasp my hand and gaze tenderly upon me by the hour. But my mother made sure never to leave me alone with him, dread him as she might, for she guessed something of what had passed between us. Indeed, it was he who was nearest when I drew my last breath in this world.”

  I’d gotten into bed by then, and she meant to sit on the edge, but she couldn’t do it. It was as though she’d suddenly forgotten sitting, forgotten what bodies have to do so they can sit down on a bed, or in her own chair in her little secret room. She looked frightened—anyway, I think she did, because she was beginning to fade, and it was hard to be sure. I said, “Tell me. Tell me what you remember.” Because I knew it was important, though I couldn’t have said why, not then.

  She tried to tell me. “He spoke,” she said. “He leaned close—for a moment he was Edric, but the eyes… the eyes betrayed him…” Like the Pooka again, I thought weirdly. Tamsin said, “He whispered to me. He took both my hands in one of his, and he leaned over me, and he whispered…”

  And she was gone.

  I couldn’t even call after her, for fear of waking someone. But I couldn’t just fluff my pillow and crash, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, because I knew what I’d dream. So I sat up and hugged my knees—and Julian’s gorilla—and I thought about things until morning came.

  Twenty-one

  Spring came the way it does in Dorset, like a really small child hiding behind a curtain to pounce out at the grown-up world for a moment, and then dash right back into cover. Tony’s mustache actually took hold, and Julian quit sleeping with the stuffed turtle that was Elvis’ successor. The first no-till crops looked promising—although Evan kept warning us and the Lovells that there’d probably be a yield hit this year, until the soil got used to the new regime. But when he spaded up a chunk of black dirt, it crumbled pretty easily in
his hand, and there were a lot of earthworms, which even I know is a good sign. Evan said it was too stiff by half, wouldn’t be proper for a couple of years yet, but he looked happy.

  The April nights were way too cold to go walking with Tamsin, so I mostly went to her room (which was cold enough—we didn’t have any heating in the east wing then), or in Tony’s studio, where she used to watch him practicing and sigh now and then: a long, liquid, three-hundred-year-old adolescent sigh that used to embarrass me even more than it made me jealous. Tony never heard it, never noticed it at all, and tried really hard not to notice me. I envied him his gift and his devotion, and I envied him Tamsin’s worship; but for once that seemed to be happening far away, in some other region of myself. I had bigger, scarier fish to fry.

  She didn’t remember a single word that Judge Jeffreys had said to her on her deathbed. She didn’t even remember a lot of the things she’d already told me; that’s how hard she shrank away from thinking about that man, three centuries later. I made things worse because I kept asking her if it could have had anything to do with Edric Davies. Because I couldn’t get rid of the idea that Judge Jeffreys might have met him at the cow byre on his way to the Manor to make his awful proposal to Tamsin. And Edric might have been younger, and maybe even stronger, but he wouldn’t have stood a chance. I knew that much.