Tamsin

by Peter S. Beagle

  It didn’t last very long, considering how many of them there were, arching from one horizon halfway to the other, like the opposite of a rainbow. The storm dribbled and piddled off toward Dorchester, and the Wild Hunt faded with it, though the Huntsmen’s howling still flickered around the sky after they were gone. Julian came up close beside me, and Mrs. Fallowfield patted his head clumsily. “There, boy,” she said. “There, boy.” But she looked at me for a long time before she spoke to me. Before she finally said, “You saw.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.

  Because I’d seen too much and not enough, both. I’d seen the tattered human figure flying before the Wild Hunt, and heard that desperate, hopeless scream once again, even through their clamor. I couldn’t talk—I could barely breathe—and I couldn’t look away. Once, in some science experiment back at Gaynor, when I touched a piece of dry ice, it stuck to my fingers, and the cold actually burned them. Mrs. Fallowfield’s blue eyes were like that: They hurt my eyes, they hurt my chest and my mind to meet, but I had to, until she let go. At last she nodded herself, and said again, “You saw. Go home now.”

  I don’t remember leaving her house. I don’t remember a thing about walking home with Julian, except that suddenly we were in front of the Manor, and he was still holding my hand tightly and saying, “I don’t think I like that old woman, Jenny. Do you like her?”

  “Who cares if I like her or not?” I said. “It doesn’t matter if we like her.” And I pulled loose from him and took off, running past Sally—who’d been frantic about us being caught out in the storm—upstairs to my room. I didn’t just lie down on my bed, I crawled into it, clothes and shoes and all, and I pulled the blankets up as high as I could, and I lay there not thinking, not thinking, until Evan came and got me for dinner. He asked me if I was all right, didn’t believe a word of what I told him, but didn’t say anything. Evan’s good that way.

  I was perfectly charming at dinner. I talked a lot, and I made jokes, and I took turns with Julian talking about Mrs. Fallowfield’s scones and her weird house.Julian did mention that we’d thought we’d heard the Wild Hunt, but I didn’t back him up on that one, and nobody else paid much attention. Sorry; Julian.

  Sally had her Yeovil choir that evening, but I didn’t go with her. I went up to the third floor, to Tamsin’s room—with Mister Cat following me every step of the way—and I let myself in with my bent paper clip, like always. Tamsin wasn’t there. I sat down in her chair and watched Mister Cat sniffing out every corner of the room for Miss Sophia Brown, as though she had her own smell for him, ghost or no, the way Tamsin smelled of vanilla to me. Finally, reluctantly, he came over and climbed into my lap, looking weary. I’ve never seen Mister Cat look just like that. Lazy, yes; pissed off, sure—but not tired and sad. I stroked his throat, and under his chin, but he didn’t purr.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Same here.” I raised my voice a little and spoke to Tamsin, wherever she was. I said, “I’ve seen him. I’ve seen Edric Davies. I know what happened to him.” Then I sat still as Roger Willoughby’s secret room darkened around me until I couldn’t see the chestnut tree outside the window, or the window itself, or even Mister Cat silent on my lap, but not asleep.

  I couldn’t find her.

  Stourhead Farm is about seven hundred acres, maybe a little less—I’ve already said that. That sounds like a lot, but I covered every damn one of them on foot, looking for Tamsin. Sometimes Meena was with me, but more often I was by myself, just trudging from one fence to another, from the creepy fringes of the Oakmen’s Wood—which was the way I thought of it now—to Evan’s walnut orchard where I’d seen Kirke’s Lambs; zigzagging between fields, cutting across the downland, actually getting lost in sudden fogs a couple of times. Once I found a place that Evan himself hadn’t ever seen: a kind of brambly mini-meadow, covered with a kind of grass whose name I forget, but which doesn’t grow anywhere else on the farm. There were wild apple trees, too, most of them dead, but a few still putting out papery blossoms, almost transparent. I wondered if Roger Willoughby had ever seen them, or if he’d missed them, too, like us. It would have been wonderful to find Tamsin there.

  The worst of it was that I couldn’t feel her. I’d gotten much better at that over time: sensing her presence even when she wasn’t around—in the house, out in the fields, it didn’t matter. Sometimes I could feel her wanting me, needing my company, needing to be around me, which was a sensation I’m not about to try to put into words, but it made me more vain than I’ll probably ever be again. Now, nothing—a kind of nothing I never knew existed, because you have to have lost something incredibly precious for that, and you have to have not quite known how precious it was. I hadn’t ever taken Tamsin for granted—not ever—but I hadn’t known.

  And watching him waiting for her didn’t help. He had all the time in the world; he didn’t have to move, or think, or pretend to be living a normal human life with a family and a best friend and a cat, with chores to remember, and conversations to keep up. All he had to do was wait for Tamsin to come to him, like those cowboys. He knew she’d come.

  I wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been for Mister Cat. And even he wouldn’t have known if not for Miss Sophia Brown. I’ll never have a clue where or when she finally showed up—the important thing is that the two of them found me in my room one bright, windy afternoon, trying to get into the sari that Meena gave me to practice with. They didn’t have to jump around me, or yowl meaningfully: The moment I saw that fluffy blue shadow whose feet never quite touched the floor, I was back in my jeans and out of the house, running like a maniac after the two cats, who were flashing across the courtyard, scurrying between barns and tool-sheds as though their tails were on fire. I almost knocked Ellie John over, almost stumbled into a half-dug drainage ditch, did crack both shins on a wheelbarrow heaped high with fresh cowshit, and swivelhipped around Wilf’s billygoat so fast he had no chance for a clear shot at me. This one time in my life, I moved the way Mister Cat’s always been trying to teach me to move. I think he’d have been proud of me, if he could have been bothered to look back.

  Tamsin was in Julian’s potato field, of all places. Julian’s got no interest in gardens, but he was experimenting to see if he could grow potatoes the size of pumpkins, which he was getting really close to before he got bored. His patch was right at the base of a hillside, with KEEP OUT notices everywhere, so the place looked like a construction site. Tamsin came drifting down that hill and through Julian’s warning signs, and I never saw anything more beautiful in my life. When I dream about her today, most often that’s the way I see her.

  He was there, standing at the edge of the potato field, watching her come toward him. I have to say that he’d put on his Sunday best to receive her: not his judge’s robes, but a long deep-red coat with absolutely dozens of little buttons, a kind of broad white cravat around his neck, and a curly brown wig that fell down past his shoulders. Gloves, too—fringed gloves, like a movie cowboy. He looked grand. He looked like a perfect match for Tamsin.

  She didn’t seem to be awake. I mean, her eyes were open, but it was as though she couldn’t remember sight, or didn’t want to. Something was moving her down that hillside and slowly across Julian’s potato patch toward him—moving her like a chess piece, like a shadow puppet—and it wasn’t her own will. She was lovely in a way I’d never seen her before—she might have been all those shivering, transparent Dorset twilights bent into a human shape—but she was dead twice over like this, somehow: doubly gone, both from the world and from herself. I’m saying all this now, ages later, but at the time I didn’t think any of it. I just knew that she didn’t look like Tamsin, and I ran.

  It is true, that thing that happens in dreams, where you run and run harder than you ever could awake, but it’s like running in water, and you can’t get anywhere. I ran toward that damn potato patch, waving my arms and calling like that woman I used to see on Eighty-third Street, shouting at the cabs—and I’ll swear
to this day that it took me hours to get a few yards closer to Tamsin… Tamsin and Judge Jeffreys, him standing and smiling and waiting for her, and me yelling, “No! Don’t go near him! Stay where you are, I’m coming! Tamsin, no!” until my voice shredded. I sounded like Julian by the time I reached his first KEEP OUT sign.

  Neither of them paid the slightest bit of attention to me. Tamsin floated to a stop in the middle of the field, and they faced each other for the first time in three hundred years. Judge Jeffreys said her name— “Tamsin Willoughby” —just that and no more. In his mouth, in that voice like dead leaves, it sounded like a curse, like a witch’s spell.

  Which you could say it was, I guess, because it started her moving again. The ocean-colored eyes were completely without light, empty of any memories; and the closer she got to him, the less of her there was—she was so barely there that sometimes I couldn’t make her out at all against the green hillside. A cobweb after rain, a breath on a freezing day—even those don’t tell you how it was to see her like that. My heart hurts now, just writing this little about it, and it always will.

  It hurt to see Miss Sophia Brown, too. There was a lady who could have given Mister Cat lessons in cool: nothing in this world or that one ever ruffled her fur, or disturbed her poise for half a second—whatever the act, she’d already caught it, she’d been to the show, thank you very much. But now she was frenzied, hysterical, looking back and forth from Judge Jeffreys to me, meowing so desperately that I almost heard her. Miss Sophia Brown was asking for help, and she was asking the wrong person.

  Judge Jeffreys spoke Tamsin’s name a second time. No mad laughter, no “Ha-ha, me proud beauty, I have you in me power at last!” Her name, nothing more, softly, but it cracked across her like a whiplash, and that ragged remnant of Tamsin Willoughby twitched toward him again. And right around there I went seriously crazy.

  I threw myself between them—and that’s definitely the word, because I tripped over something and fell flat in Julian’s potato patch, practically at Judge Jeffreys’s feet. (He wore high-heeled red boots, I remember, with big floppy red bows on them.) Judge Jeffreys didn’t look at me, not even when I stumbled up and started shouting at him, “Get away from her! Get away!” I actually grabbed a rock—or maybe a potato, who remembers?—and threw it at him, catching him right below that elegant nose, bang on the mouth. Of course it went on through him and hit an old outhouse, but it’s the thought that counts. I placed myself in front of Tamsin—as nearly as I could guess where she was—and I yelled, “You can’t touch her! You’ll have to walk over me first! Try it! Go ahead, just try it!”

  Yes, I know people only say things like that in movies, but that’s all that comes to mind when you’re crazy. Me, anyway. So there I was, screaming my head off, snatching up fistfuls of stones and earth and God knows what and hurling them at the ghost of a seventeenth-century psycho with great taste in clothes. I did get his attention at last, though I can’t say how: he took that savage focus off Tamsin long enough to give me another long, narrow smile. He said, “How now, girl? I cannot touch her, say you? But I will touch her—here, in your sight—as the wretch Edric Davies never had power to do, not with all her guiltless connivance. For I will make her a part of myself—I will make her a sharer in myself, intimate equal in deed and memory, until there shall remain no singular Tamsin Willoughby, but a greater Jeffreys withal, a Jeffreys enhanced, not merely possessing the object of his desire, but including her. See now, how ’tis accomplished. See now.”

  I’m slow about some things. I know I am. Meena would definitely have caught on faster than I—hell, Julian and Tony both probably would have—about the reason for Tamsin’s looking so dreadfully changed, and why he hadn’t needed to hunt her down. He had been hunting her, all these silent, motionless weeks—he’d been drawing her back to him, wherever she fled over Stourhead Farm’s seven hundred acres, by the pure power of want, by the power of hating Edric Davies beyond death, beyond whatever waits for everyone as he’d waited for Tamsin Willoughby. I don’t know if a ghost’s ever done that—stopped the whole bureaucracy of passing on, whatever it is—right in its tracks, but it shows you what’s possible if you really put your mind to it. Inspiring, actually, in a way.

  And I can’t believe—not now—that any ghost could do what he was out to do: just assimilate, just consume another ghost, take another spirit into itself. But I don’t know the rules now any better than I did then, and I don’t want to know. All I’m saying is that back in that potato patch, with the sun going down and Tamsin dwindling to nothing while I looked on, I believed him. If I hadn’t believed him, maybe I’d never have thought to do what I did. I’ve wondered a lot about that.

  I caught the tiniest glimmer of a white dress out of the corner of my eye, and I turned away from him and called out—and there wasn’t much more left of my voice than there was of Tamsin—“He gave Edric Davies to the Wild Hunt! That’s what happened, that’s why Edric couldn’t meet you! The Wild Hunt’s got him!”

  Nothing happened. Nothing happened to me, anyway, though that wasn’t Judge Jeffreys’s fault. For one instant I saw him as he must have looked in his courtroom: not when he was foaming and raging, but right at the moment when he pronounced the death sentence. The story is that he’d get suddenly quiet—weary, almost regretful—and that’s when you knew you’d had it. That’s the way he was gazing at me now, as though he really would have spared me if he could. The Wild Hunt couldn’t have been any more frightening than that look.

  I wasn’t even sure if Tamsin had heard me—if there was enough Tamsin left to hear me—so I shouted again, “It’s true! I’ve seen him! Judge Jeffreys must have called down the Wild Hunt to take him, I don’t know how. That’s why you’re still here—because Edric needs you! We have to save him!” I didn’t mean to say we, it just came out.

  And this time she heard. She began to back away, she began to pull against whatever was reeling her in; she began to remember her own real shape, the color of her hair and her skin and her clothes, her own texture in the world. I saw her growing Tamsin again around that last poor fragment of herself, until she was facing me, as solid looking as him, with her wide eyes full of what I’d just told her. She didn’t speak, but she knew me. She knew us both.

  Behind me Judge Jeffreys whispered, “No matter. It begins again.”

  “Oh, no, it doesn’t,” I said. I turned around to say it right into his delicate, sad, handsome face. “No, it doesn’t, because she knows now. Finally, she knows what she’s supposed to do, and she’ll fight the Wild Hunt and you to do it. And I’m going to help her. You’ll never get near her again, not if you hang around another three hundred years. You’ve had your shot.”

  “My shot?” He laughed outright then, for the first time. I wonder if I’m the only person in history who ever heard Judge Jeffreys laugh. He said, “Fool, what need for me to wait another hour, when all that woman’s immortal soul yearns to lose itself in mine a thousand times more than it yearns for heaven? This is the moment she was born for, and nor you nor Edric Davies, nor any multitude of devils like you will keep Tamsin Willoughby from her destiny. Behold it now.”

  He stretched his left arm out toward her and he beckoned. He didn’t say a word, just crooked his forefinger once, smiling that sleeping-snake smile of his. Miss Sophia Brown opened her mouth for what must have been the longest, most despairing cat wail I never heard. Mister Cat pressed as close against her as he could, considering that she wasn’t there, trying to comfort her. And Tamsin vanished.

  For a moment my insides fell off the World Trade Center, because I thought that was it—all over, all over—I thought she’d merged with him, her tender ghost-light lost forever in his endless night. But then I saw the look on Judge Jeffreys’s face, and I heard the wordless sound he made, and I wheezed, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I scooped up Mister Cat, and I danced through that potato field with him—and I’d even have tried to pick up Miss Sophia Brown, too, but she’d disappeared the instant Tams
in did. She probably wouldn’t have cared for being half-strangled and waltzed with, anyway. Mister Cat loved it.

  And Judge Jeffreys came completely unglued, as though he were back in his court with a whole gang of Monmouth’s rebels facing him, instead of just me and Mister Cat. It was a Rumplestiltskin fit, a Wicked Witch of the West tantrum; it was Captain Hook dithering between rage and panic, slashing the guts out of the nearest pirate at hand. “Devils, devils—devils, imps, demons and cacodemons! I am God’s own, and by the holy names of Jesus and His Father, I charge you—back, back to your burning cesspools, back to your stinking pits of abomination, back to your eternal filth and vileness! Tamsin Willoughby is mine to me, and not all Hell itself shall keep us from being joined as we were destined to be joined! Not all the loathsome might of Hell shall keep me from her!”

  You don’t have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believed in 1685—all you have to do is see his face, hear his voice when he says the word… and then you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people. I don’t mean I understood any of that right then—just barely do now—but at that instant I understood Judge Jeffreys, and why I ought to be even more frightened of him, dead or alive, than I’d known to be. There’s a lot to be said for never quite grasping the situation.

  Then it was gone, that one flash of comprehension—and so was he, with his last words hanging in the air like the burned-out skeleton of fireworks—and I was running for the Manor, still hugging Mister Cat against my chest, knowing beyond any doubt where Tamsin had to be, and knowing that he knew, too.