Tamsin

Twelve

She was sitting in a chair with her back to me, looking out that window. The Persian was on her lap. I remember wondering crazily if a ghost could feel the ghost-weight of a ghost-cat, since I hadn’t felt a thing when the Persian jumped up on my bed. Because there wasn’t any more question about the woman than the cat—I could see the window through her, and the chestnut tree through the window; and when she put the cat down and stood up to face me, I saw that her hair and skin and gown were all the same color, a kind of pearl-gray, but with a light in it, the way rain clouds can look when the sky’s almost purple behind them. She said, “Jennifer. Aye, I thought it would be you to find me.”

I’d expected her voice would be as tiny as the Persian’s meow, but actually it was clear as could be. Low and soft, but absolutely clear, with just a bit of what sounded almost like a Southern drawl. I couldn’t answer her. I just stood there.

She smiled at me, and I guess that has to be when I fell in love with her. There was so much loneliness in that smile, but there was amusement, too, and understanding. She wasn’t anything more than understanding; she was held together by memories of understanding, memories of laughter. No, of course I didn’t know all that then. I didn’t know anything, except that my life was never going to be the same again. And that was fine with me.

“I am Tamsin Willoughby,” she said. With the chair behind her, I could see her better as she moved toward me. She wasn’t tall— my height, maybe an inch more—and I couldn’t have said much about her hair or her eyes (except that they were as delicately slanted as the Persian’s), because everything was that glimmering gray color. And I can’t say—even now—whether she was beautiful or not. Her face was a little round, and her mouth was probably too wide, with maybe a bit too much chin below it. But I couldn’t stop looking at her, and I couldn’t speak, not for the longest while. Tamsin just waited, never looking impatient, never looking as though she was patiently being patient. Time didn’t mean anything to Tamsin—that was the first thing I ever really learned about her.

And the first thing I ever said to her, when I could talk, was, “How do you know my name?”

She laughed then, in a funny, breathless sort of way, like a child who’s been running for no reason, just to run. “La, indeed”—she really did say that, la—“and how should I not know it, with you and your family abounding this way and that, filling the air with all your sweet riot—your jests, your labors, your songs, and your quarrels?” She pretended to count on her fingers. “Your father is Evan, your mother Sal, your brothers Anthony and Julian. As to Graymalkin here, I confess myself witling.”

“His name’s Mister Cat,” I said. Graymalkin’s out of Macbeth, which we had at Gaynor, in Introduction to Drama, so I knew. “And Evan and Tony and Julian aren’t my family.” I’d never said it just like that, not even to Sally when I was really pissed. I said, “They’re my step-family, sort of.”

Close to, I could see that the grayness had a slow pulse to it— clearer… dimmer… clearer… dimmer—like a heartbeat. Tamsin was looking at me altogether too shrewdly, considering she was dead and we’d just met. But all she said was, “You’re not of Dorset—no, nor of England neither, I think. You’ll be from the Colonies.”

“The Colonies,” I said. “Oh. Right. The Colonies. America, yes. There was a revolution. We’re an independent country now. I guess you wouldn’t know.”

Her hair was a mass of corkscrew curls, drawn up on top and spilling down over her right shoulder. It didn’t move when she shook her head. She said, “This house has not always stood empty, Mistress Jennifer—there have been a mort of other voices than yours passing my door, crying the news below my window. Well I know that Romish James is departed, and the Hanovers come long since, and those weighty men who visited my father by night as surely dust as I. Colonies gained and lost, powers arisen and fallen away, alliances sworn, alliances broken, poor Dorset long losel as a Jacobus… What may be the year now, child?”

I told her. It looked to me as though she swayed for a moment, but maybe that was just that come-and-go pulsation of the grayness. “So late? So late, and here am I still, when I should be as gone as James and… and Edric Davies, and him.” I hardly heard the last few words, they came out in such a whisper. “Art certain, Mistress Jennifer?”

“I’m certain,” I said. “And please, I wish you wouldn’t call me Jennifer. I’m Jenny—no mistress about it. Everyone calls me Jenny.”

Tamsin Willoughby smiled a second time, and everything in me just dissolved into marshmallows and Silly Putty. I have never been one of those girls who’s always getting huge crushes on older girls, but Tamsin… It wasn’t that she was so pretty—Meena’s way prettier, if you want to measure these things. Maybe it was just the plain fact of her being a ghost, and smiling at me across three hundred years—I can’t say it wasn’t. But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me—me, Jenny Gluckstein—like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing—recognition is something else.

Tamsin said, “Jenny, then. You must remind me when I forget— and I will forget, because that is what I do, that is all I am. You would think—would you not?—that after so many, many years, surely there would be naught left me to forget, who’d seen but twenty summers when I… when I stopped.” She always used that word. “Yet the voices under the window do tell me names, speak of changes and wonders—teach me songs, even—and I learn these things for a little, then, swiftly forget them, too. As I forget why I must be here at all.”

Writing the words down the way she spoke them, it looks pitiable somehow, as though she were asking for sympathy. But that wasn’t the way they sounded, not for a minute, and it wasn’t in the way she carried herself, nor the way she looked at me. The Persian cat was rubbing against her foot, and that was weird: one see-through impossibility comforting itself by making contact with another. I asked, “Who’s she? My cat’s practically left home because of her.”

Tamsin really laughed then, and it sounded like rainwater plinking off leaves and flowers after the storm’s gone by. “Her name is Miss Sophia Brown. I could never forget that, as long as we have been together. She’s all grand hogen-mogen one minute and a flirting flibbergib the next, but we fadge along pretty smartly—at least until your fine black gentleman presented himself. I’ve never known her gloat so upon a lover.”

“Me neither,” I said. “Mister Cat’s got a girlfriend back home, but I think she was just using him. The thing is, he’s alive, and your Sophia Brown… I don’t know. I wouldn’t exactly say they had much of a future.”

“La, what odds makes that to a cat?” Miss Sophia Brown and Mister Cat were standing nose to nose, both of them purring in complete satisfaction with their own taste in pussycats. As we watched, Mister Cat began washing Miss Sophia Brown’s face, and if there wasn’t anything actually there to be washed, or held still with a paw behind her right ear, he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if ghost-cats got hairballs. I decided I wouldn’t wonder about that.

Tamsin said, very quietly, “Cats have no cares for who’s quick, who’s… stopped. Shall we be like them?”

We looked at each other. I said, “You smell like vanilla.”

Tamsin’s eyebrows went up, but one corner of her mouth twitched just a bit. It seemed to me that she was looking maybe a bit less transparent—I could even see something like color in her face, and in the long, close-waisted gown she was wearing, or dreaming she was wearing. “I smelled you,” I said. “When I was with Julian.”

She’d forgotten. She stared at me for a long moment: flickering, halfway fading, then pulsing stronger as it came back to her. “Candles and singing—a strange tongue, but a sweet air. Aye, I do recall me.”

“That electrician kept saying he smelled vanilla in the Arctic Circle—in the kitchen, I mean. Was that you? Were you bugging the workmen, too, like the boggart and the rest of them?”

“Bugging.” Tamsin said the word a couple of times, as if she were nibbling it, turning it over with her tongue. “Bugging—ah, as t’were a harassment, a plaguing, a botheration. Nay, child, that was never me—I but spied betimes upon your hirelings as they hammered and tore at my house, vaporing endlessly the while. By and by I’d no heart to watch further, so I came away and left them to it. Are you contented with their work, Mistress Jennifer . . Jenny?”

I couldn’t tell if she was angry or not about what we’d all been doing to the Manor. I said, “Evan—he’s my mother’s husband—Evan got hired to get this place going again as a real farm. To bring it back to life. It needed a lot of upgrading.”

Tamsin didn’t bother exploring upgrading. She said, “To bring it back to life. As though my home, my land, had stopped along with me. It is not so—you and yours know nothing of Stourhead Farm. I warrant you, there’s more true life within these walls, between the fences that your stepfather spends his days butting together—aye, and walking your bean rows and apple orchards a’ nights—than you’ve encountered in all the days of your own little life. Gorge me that, Mistress Jenny!”

Right then she looked practically solid, which is what happens to Tamsin when she gets excited or worked up about something. Her eyes were wide and bright—they were blue-green, I could even see that now—and her voice made the cats look up, just as they were settling into some serious necking. All I could think to mumble was, “Well, the plumbing really did need some work, it was pretty old. And the soil’s old, too. Evan says the crops weren’t growing because the soil was so tired. We had to do something.”

Tamsin stared at me. After a moment, her eyes quieted down, and she smiled just a bit. “Truth enough, Jenny Gluckstein. I ask your pardon. The land is wearied indeed, and my fine house is a ruin, a daggy relic of antique times—as am I.” She was starting to go filmy gray again, still pulsing slowly between this room and somewhere else. She said, “Truth for truth, I am greatly glad of you and all your family—of your stepbrothers’ tumult and your mother’s music. I am the better for commotion, the better for aught that rouses me, fetches me away out of this cloister of mine. Othergates, I sit as you found me, Miss Sophia Brown dozy on my lap—moonrise on moonrise, year on year, age on age—until the forgetting shall have me altogether. But that must not happen, must not…”

Her voice was floating away, dissolving, and I was afraid that she would, too. I asked, “What is this room, anyway? It doesn’t have a real door, and you can’t see in the window, just out.” There was hardly any furniture: just the chair, and a contraption in the corner like a trunk, but with a bedframe for the lid. The painting I’d seen from the doorway was a portrait of a big, ruddy man in a wig and a long sort of waistcoat, standing next to a shy-looking woman wearing a black gown and a frilly white linen cap on the back of her head. I asked Tamsin again, “What kind of a room is this?”

Tamsin looked a little surprised. “This? This is Roger Willoughby’s priest-closet. Nay, we were no Papists, but my father—though he was always good Charles’s man—saw Rome bound to come in with James, and persecutions with it, and nothing would do but we must build our own hidey-hole for our own chaplain, should we ever have one. My father was a prodigious romantic, you must know, Jenny, with a headpiece full of notions my poor mother never fathomed. But we loved him dearly, she and I, and it grieves me still to think how he suffered when …”

She didn’t finish, and I didn’t know if I ought to prompt her to go on. I didn’t have any idea what the rules were with a ghost. Did they only have so much juice at a time, like a car battery? Would they just fade and go out if you pushed them too much? When she sat alone with her Persian cat in this room, years at a time, the way she said—was she visible then? I said, “When you died—stopped, I mean. That must have been really awful, watching him mourning for you.” Tamsin didn’t say anything. I thought I should probably change the subject, so I asked, “Who’s the Other One?”

Tamsin looked at me as though I were the ghost and she’d just seen me for the first time. I said, “We had some boggart trouble a while back. The cats took care of him”—Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown were chasing each other around the room, playing tag like kittens—“but he told me to beware of the servant and the mistress—I guess that’s you and your cat—and the Other One. Who’s that, when he’s at home and properly labelled?” I picked up that last bit from Julian.

A ghost can’t really turn pale, but Tamsin came close. She put her hands out toward me, and I think she’d have grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me if she could. She said, “Child, Jenny, never ask me that again. Never ask again, not of me nor of any—not of yourself, do you understand me? Promise me that, as we stand here. Jenny, you must promise, if we are to be friends.”

Her fear—and she was terrified, ghost or no ghost—had brought her back to being untransparent enough so that I could smell that odd whisk of vanilla, and even see a bit of a dimple under her left cheekbone. Her hair was a kind of darkish blond, and her eyes had gone deep turquoise, but the exact shade kept changing as I looked into them, as though she couldn’t ever quite remember the color they’d been. Something about that twisted my insides, and I’d have promised her anything to comfort her. I said, “Okay, I won’t. Cross my heart, spit twice, hope to die—I won’t ask about the Other One anymore.”

I knew I’d break that promise when I gave it. Sometimes I think Tamsin knew, too. But she cheered up right away, and after that we just talked, watching Miss Sophia Brown and Mister Cat taking turns ambushing each other, until I really did feel that we were like that, totally unconcerned with who was alive and who wasn’t. I told her about New York and my friends there, and Norris, and how I’d felt about Sally marrying Evan and dragging me off to Dorset—I was pretty honest, anyway—and about the boys, and Meena, and the Sherborne School, and even about grubby old Wilf and his goat. And Tamsin listened, and laughed, and grew more and more visible—more present—until her hair and the flows of her gown swayed with her laughter, and I couldn’t see through her at all, although maybe that was because the room was getting darker. And I actually forgot what she was, just for that little time. I did.

For her part, Tamsin talked mostly about Stourhead Farm, and about Roger Willoughby. “City man, merchant, son and grandson of merchants, why he should have so fancied the life of the soil, who can say? Yet my father believed with all his heart that anyone, man or woman, may learn anything he truly wishes to learn, if only his enterprise be a match for his desire. And if that were never so for any other, yet it was true for my father. For he was no farmer, but he made himself over into one, and never was poet or painter gladder in his trade. Indeed, I never knew a happier man.”

I thought she might turn sad again, the way she had the first time she spoke of her father, but instead she giggled suddenly, sounding just like Meena when she tries to tell a joke and always cracks up before she gets to the punchline. “Jenny, he labored like any hero to cozen his neighbors into draining their grasslands— into daring, even for a season, to fertilize their fields some other road than letting their cattle do it for ’em. Nay, but surely you know farmers by now”—and she dropped into an old-Dorset voice, like the boggart’s—“Nah, nah, zir, mook’s your man, there’s nothing beats your good ripe mook for not overztimulating the zoil, d ’ye zee?” We were both laughing into each other’s eyes, and the cats turned around to hear us.

“They heeded not one word of his advice,” Tamsin said. “They went on farming as they were used, and my father farmed as he would, and time proved him the wiser, though I was not there to see.” She looked away then, out the window. I could hear Tony and Julian calling to each other somewhere.

I asked, “How did it happen? I mean, you dying—stopping—when you were only twenty?” I didn’t know if that was something else I shouldn’t ask her, but you can’t be always changing the subject, even with a ghost. Tamsin’s face did change when she turned back to me—I saw her mouth thin out and her eyes lost some of their color—but she answered clearly, “A flux of the lungs, it was, a catarrh that grew to a pleurisy, then to a pulmonary phthisis. And no one to blame for it but my own bufflehead self, for lacking the wit to come inside on a wild night. Not a soul else to blame, and well-deserved.”

That was all she said about it. Julian was yelling for me now, and when I looked at my watch I was surprised to see that it was coming up on dinnertime. I picked up Mister Cat, who wasn’t pleased about it, and looked at Tamsin over his black head. She said, “We will meet again, Mistress Jenny.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s good. Can I just come and see you here, like Mister Cat?”

Tamsin smiled. “Indeed you may. Or I might become Miss Sophia Brown and seek you in your own chamber. You’ll not be afeard?”

I shook my head. Tamsin reached to stroke Mister Cat’s throat, and he closed his eyes and purred as though he felt it. I said, “Could I ask you one thing? When you talked about all the life in this house, and running around at night all over Stourhead Farm, I was wondering… what kind of life did you exactly mean?”

Tamsin looked at me long enough without answering for Julian to bellow twice more. Finally she said, “I will show you. When I come to you, I will show you.”