Colin kept backing off. “What are you looking at, Jenny? What guys—what do you mean? Jenny, there’s nobody there.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” I said. “And they can hear us, too, so for Christ’s sake put a sock in it.” I was just saying that to keep him quiet—I didn’t think Kirke’s gang actually could hear us, away off in 1685—but three of the dragoons reined in their horses and looked straight at us, right on the money. One of them had one blue eye and one brown eye; a second man had a scar running from the left corner of his mouth to his left ear. A third was the handsomest man I’ve ever yet seen, except for his mouth, which was like another scar, thin and white, a bloodless welt. I’d know every one of those faces if I saw them again.
“Voices,” the scarred dragoon said. “I heard them.”
The handsome one said, “Cornet Simmons, you’re drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.” His mouth hardly moved.
Colin called, “Jenny, I’m going back to the house. I think my father’s leaving, anyway.”
“There!” Cornet Simmons said. “There, by the stump. I heard a bloody voice, I tell you.”
There wasn’t any stump where I stood, but he was staring right into my eyes. His were a streaky blue—he was drunk, back there in the seventeenth century, hunting rebels on the Yeovil road—and he kept blinking and shaking his head… but he saw me. I know he saw me.
The dragoon with the mismatched eyes laughed suddenly: one short machine-gun burst. He sounded closer and clearer than the other two, I don’t know why. He said, “Ghosts, it’s ghosts you’re hearing, Simmons—and why not? Country’s full up, as many of them as the Colonel’s made around here.”
“Aye, that’ll be it,” the handsome one said. “Ghosts. Close ranks, Cornet Simmons. Business in Yeovil tonight, and Taunton after. Close ranks.”
He didn’t raise his voice, but the last two words cracked out across three centuries like bones breaking. The scarred dragoon hesitated for a little—then he wheeled his horse and followed the others, who were already trotting on into the fog. But at the last moment he spun the horse on its hind legs—practically popping a wheelie— and rode at me, grabbing for his sword hilt. I can still hear the soft whir the thing made coming out of its sheath. Behind him, the handsome one shouted something, sounding really pissed.
I couldn’t move. I stood still and watched him coming for me. God, when I write this I remember so much I’ve never told even Meena—the crusted blood in his mustache, the slobber flying from his horse’s mouth, the glint of somebody’s sunlight along the sword blade, the funny deep, humming sound he was making in his throat right up to the moment when the sabre swept through my throat. No, I didn’t feel a thing—though the berry bushes just behind me hissed and rustled—but maybe the people he killed like that in 1685 or whenever didn’t feel anything either. Anyway, he swung his horse around, stared right at me one more time, made one last sort of half-pass with his sword before he put it away, and then he cantered off after the rest of the Lambs, whistling loudly through his teeth. I heard someone yelling back at him, but I couldn’t see the others anymore.
I stood where I was, with the walnut orchard drifting slowly into place around me again while I just shook. Colin was long gone, probably already telling every Lovell within range that I was a serious double-barrelled loony, and I saw his point myself. Seeing Tamsin, talking to her, having feelings about her… well, you could call that a special case, and you could even say that about Judge Jeffreys—at least I could. But meeting Kirke’s Dragoons on a road that only a ghost remembered, and believing that one of them was aware enough of me to try to kill me—no, I never told Meena about that. I never told anyone until now.
Mister Cat came flowing out of a bush, one of those same berry bushes that Cornet Simmons’s sabre had set swaying. He did his stiff-legged Frankenstein walk over to where the dragoons’ horses had been standing. Would have been standing, if they and the old road had really been there. He sniffed the ground very carefully, and then he scratched it hard with his back feet, as though he’d just taken a major dump. Then I knew that I’d seen what I’d seen, and I picked him up when he sauntered back to me and said, “Thanks. I was having a bad ten minutes or so there.”
I put him on my shoulder, and we started back through the walnut orchard, me trying to think of something nice and sane to say to the Lovells in case they hadn’t left yet. Suddenly Mister Cat stiffened, spat, got a grip (my right shoulder looked like a dart board for two days), and made an entirely new sound, like a bandsaw seizing up in wet wood. I had no idea he could make a sound like that.
I turned to see where he was swearing, and got a quick glimpse of Mrs. Fallowfield’s little pink dog-thing scuttling away from us among the trees. Mister Cat wanted down in the worst way, to rend and devour, but I wouldn’t let him. I said, “Forget it, leave him alone, we’ve got enough troubles.” But Mister Cat bitched about it all the way home.
Twenty-four
That summer Sally landed a gig as musical director for a women’s choir in Yeovil. I liked that, because I could usually go with her and visit with Meena while she was working; and Meena liked it because she knows more about the Byrd and Bach and Dowland stuff Sally had them singing than I do, and I was raised with it. Meena thinks my mother is the best piano player south of Horowitz, and Sally’s flattered by that, as who wouldn’t be? It doesn’t make me jealous to watch them together; but sometimes it does make me wish that I understood my mother’s music—really understood, down deep the way my best friend does. I talked to Tamsin about that once. I said, “Maybe it’s not possible if it’s your mother.”
Tamsin smiled. I don’t really expect anyone ever to smile at me the way Tamsin used to do. “Dear Mistress Jenny,” she said, “my mother was such a gardener as Dorset has never seen. There was no flower, native or no, robust or tender, failed to thrive under her hands. Our folk swore that Squire Willoughby’s gardens flourished as they did because even the most delicate, contrary bloom fair worshipped my mother, and would have budded in the deeps of winter to please her. Yet it was never so with me—I admired flowers well enough, but there was no intimacy between us, no liaison. And I sorrowed greatly over this—oh, not for myself, not for the poor blossoms that dropped their petals and began to die the first moment I looked at them—but because I so, so wanted to know the truth of my mother’s joy in her garden. But I never could, Jenny. I could only look on and admire, and wonder.”
“I guess,” I said. “But I just wish—”
Tamsin’s face changed then, closing against me as I’d never seen it do since the day we met. She said, “Child, never speak to me of wishes,” and that was the end of that.
Anyway, Meena and I spent a lot more time at those choir rehearsals than I’d ever bargained for, scrunched in bare-metal folding chairs at the back of the auditorium while Sally took those women through four bars of some cantata over and over again. I told Meena everything I could—I honestly didn’t hold much back, except the stuff I thought would only worry her—and she listened carefully to all of it and told me how much the whole business worried her. “It’s you and him now,” she said one evening. “It’s not simply a matter of helping Tamsin anymore, is it? It’s you and him, and I hate it, Jenny.”
I said, “I read a story once about the way some cowboys used to trap wild horses by walking after them, slowly, day after day after day. After a while, the horses would get so frightened, so bewildered, finally they’d just stand still until the men caught up with them. That’s exactly what he’s doing with Tamsin. Waiting until she gives up and comes to him. He’s told me.”
“But she won’t do it,” Meena said. “All this time, and he hasn’t seen her once. She can hide from him, she has the whole farm—”
“He can wait forever,” I said. “She can’t. I’m starting to understand a little bit, Meena, the way the Pooka said I had to. It’s the painting—he got himself into that portrait of her, and I think somehow that connects them, that’s why he’s bee
n able to hang on or come back, whichever. Or maybe it’s because she didn’t leave when she was meant to—maybe that left a door open for him, like the Pooka said. I wonder what would happen if we could steal the painting and just destroy it? That might be all it takes to set her free.”
“And him, too?” I didn’t have an answer. “Besides, Edric Davies is in that picture too—in her face, in her eyes. He’s not painted in, but he’s there. What would happen to him, wherever he is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how any of that stuff works.” We sat without talking for a while, listening to Sally trying to get her sopranos to sing on pitch. Finally I said, “The Pooka told me the Wild Hunt would tell me what I needed to know. How do you ask the Wild Hunt for advice?”
“E-mail,” Meena said. “Faxes.”
Actually, the Wild Hunt hadn’t passed over Stourhead in weeks, almost as long as I hadn’t seen Tamsin. You mostly hear the Hunt in the autumn and winter, not too much in spring. I asked Guy Guthrie why that was so, and he peered over his glasses at me and said, “A lot of people would tell you it’s because that’s when the geese are traveling south, and between their carry-on and perhaps the howling of a winter storm…”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what Evan thinks.”
Mr. Guthrie grinned. “But you don’t. And what do I think?” He wouldn’t say anything more until the tea was ready—he makes tea the way Evan rumples his hair and Mr. Chari plays with cigars he doesn’t light half the time. At last he said, “Well, if I thought much about such things, I suppose I’d think that more folk everywhere die in the cold months, as the year dies, and perhaps the Wild Hunt have their best pick of poor souls to hound through the sky then. Perhaps they seek them on the other side of the world, come springtime. There’s not a great deal known about the Wild Hunt, I’m afraid.”
I asked him, “Do they… are they on their own, or does someone, somebody—”
“Direct them? Ah now, I can’t tell you that for certain either, nor how they choose their quarry. Some say the Devil’s their master— in Cornwall they’re called the Devil’s Dandy Dogs—and that you can find refuge from them in churches, in prayer. Others will have it that there’s no sanctuary once they’re on your track. Living or dead, saint or sinner—no sanctuary.” He took off his glasses and leaned forward, one hand scratching behind Clem’s ears, but his old blue eyes as intent on me as Cornet Simmons’s had been. “Why do you need to know, Jenny?”
I think I told him I was working on a folklore project for school. I’m not only a bad liar, I’m an over-elaborate one. I don’t think he bought it for a second; but just before I heft, he said, “There’s one other belief about the Hunt. I’ve only come across it a few times, and only here in Dorset. Supposedly they can be summoned— called down and actually set to run a victim to his death—by someone who knows the proper spell, and has the required force of personality to achieve it. But it’s a risky thing to attempt, as you might imagine, and in any case the pursuit only lasts for one night. So there’d be a bit of a chance of escape that way. I don’t know if you’ll want to bother with that one for your project, though.”
Between that and what the Pooka had said about the Wild Hunt, I started finding myself looking out for them, listening for them, almost in the way that I looked for Tamsin all the time, and with just the same result. The only thing assuring me that she and Miss Sophia Brown hadn’t vanished for good was that Judge Jeffreys hadn’t. I saw him most often in the morning and early twilight, never far from the Manor: solid-looking enough that you might take him for an ordinary person on first sight, but casting no shadow, motionless, waiting for Tamsin the way nothing human ever waited. He didn’t speak to me anymore, but sometimes our eyes met from a distance, and the patient, patient hatred in him would slam into me right below my ribs. He might be dead as roadkill, but that hatred was every bit as alive as I was.
One day in mid-August, when Dorset’s as hot as it ever gets, and the poor sheep lie down in each other’s shade, Julian and I were out on the downs, him trying to teach Albert to fetch (Albert does not do dog stuff), and me flat on my back, same as always, eyes almost closed, trying not to think about anything but a couple of blue butterflies about to settle on my forehead. Then they were gone, and I was staring straight up at Mrs. Fallowfield. Practically nobody looks good from that angle, especially a bony old woman in a big fur cap, with no hips. She said nothing but, “Scones. Five minutes. Bring the boy.” And she tramped off, the way she always did, as though she were breaking a trail through the snow for people to follow.
Julian hadn’t ever met Mrs. Fallowfield. He came running up to watch her leaving, and when I told him who she was, he wanted to know if there was a Mr. Fallowfield. I said I didn’t think so, and Julian said, “I’ll bet she ate him. I’ll bet that’s what happened.” But he’s crazy about scones, so he hauled me to my feet and hustled me after her. We didn’t get there in five minutes—you can’t possibly, from the downs—but it wasn’t Julian’s fault.
She made it in five minutes, though. I’d swear to that, because by the time we arrived, she had those scones and muffins hot from the oven—no microwave, no toaster—and set out on her kitchen table, along with half a dozen kinds of jam and tea with clotted cream. Her farmhouse was a funny little place, wedged into a grove of white-flowering elder trees. Mrs. Fallowfield said it was about a hundred years younger than the Manor, but it felt older, maybe because it hadn’t ever been remodeled, or had anything added to it, so it was all one thing: dim and damp smelling, not much bigger than a three-car garage, with ceilings so low that even Julian could touch them if he stood on tiptoe. I remember a few dried flowers shoved into a medicine bottle on the window, and candleholders everywhere, although she must have had electricity. Everything was built around the oven, which was huge enough to heat the entire farmhouse, and probably half her orchards as well. It wasn’t any witchy lair, nothing like that—only musty and close and worn out. The scones were the best I ever had, though.
Mrs. Fallowfield watched us eat, but didn’t say much. I didn’t see her pink dog-thing around anywhere. When Julian asked her if she’d always lived here, she answered him, “That I have, boy. Always.” When he asked if anyone lived with her, to help her take care of the farm, she gave him a major Look and didn’t answer—just stuck out an arm and indicated for him to try and bend it. Julian told me later that he could have swung on it, walked on it, done handstands; that arm wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ll bet she pumps iron,” he said. “I’ll bet she’s got a weight room back there somewhere.” I said he ought to ask her, but he never got the chance.
A storm hit while Julian and I were getting ready to leave, with me not a bit wiser about why she’d asked us there in the first place. It blew up with no warning, the way it happens in Dorset, and all we could do was wait it out. Mrs. Fallowfield gave Julian a crumbly picture book that looked as though King Arthur had teethed on it—Julian loves anything old—and she had me sit with her at that one kitchen window to watch the storm. The rain was coming in practically sideways, and the wind was shaking the house so hard that it groaned in the ground like trees do. Mrs. Fallowfield leaned forward, so I could hear her, and said, “Nothing to be feared of. She’s got deep roots, this house.”
Actually, what she said was “thikky hoose,” like the boggart, but I had the feeling she’d done it on purpose—just as she’d spoken in Tamil to Meena—and not slipped back into Old Dorset talk. The more I saw of her, the less I could make her out; all I couhd tell was that she knew it, and she enjoyed it. “Put up wi’ worse, house has,” she said now. Then she added something I couldn’t catch, because of the wind, except for the last words: “… and worse yet coming.”
“What?” I said. “What worse?” Mrs. Fallowfield only grinned at me with her long gray teeth and turned away to look out the window. I repeated it—“ What worse?”—but she didn’t answer. Instead she suddenly reached back, grabbed my arm and pointed it where she
was staring, into the roiling violet heart of the storm. She still didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
I heard them before I saw them; or maybe it was that I couldn’t take in what I was seeing right away. They weren’t in the clouds, but just below them, so that the lightning flared over the faces of the Huntsmen and made their spears and harness twinkle, for God’s sake—green and red and blue, like decorations spinning on some horrible Christmas tree. There were dogs racing ahead of them, but they weren’t any more like real dogs than the beasts they rode had anything to do with horses. Too many legs, some of them—like Mister Cat’s midnight playmates—too many laughing red tongues, too many faces that were nothing but bone and teeth and fire-filled eyesockets. I pulled back from the window, but Mrs. Fallowfield wouldn’t let go of my arm.
“Look, ”she ordered me, and I looked. Some of the Huntsmen were men, some women, some neither, some never. Some wore armor and helmets; some were stark naked, carrying no weapons at all, stretched along their mounts’ necks like spiders. I couldn’t make out any faces, not until Mrs. Fallowfield pointed with her free arm, and then I could see them all. I still see them, on bad nights.
Julian dropped his books and came running to be with me, but Mrs. Fallowfield said, “Back you, boy,” and he stopped where he was. But I could feel him being scared and lonely, even though he couldn’t see the riders, so I put my hand back for him to hold. He grabbed onto it, and the three of us stayed like that, while the storm pounded down on Mrs. Fallowfield’s old, old house and the Wild Hunt bayed and screamed overhead.
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