Tamsin

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 female—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.”

I remembered the way Mr. Guthrie had looked at me when I said that Tamsin talked to me. I said, “Then you tell me where she’s supposed to be. Because she doesn’t know.”

The Pooka shook his fierce weasel head. “Not here. It is dangerous, it makes wrongness, and in time other wrongness follows. Somewhere a single stream runs backward—one tree flowers in deep winter—in one nest a hatchling devours its parent. A door meant to close behind Tamsin Willoughby bides open.” He didn’t say anything more for a moment: We just stood looking at each other, me and this completely impossible creature in a room only cats could find. The Pooka said, “This concerns me.”

“Well, me, too,” I said. “Whatever it means. Look, she knows she shouldn’t still be here—it’s not like she wants to stay. Something’s holding her, there’s some kind of reason. Maybe you ought to be concerned about that, instead of trees and doors and baby birds.”

The Pooka looked at me for a long time. Weasels have eyes like round maroon pinheads, but the Pooka’s eyes were as yellow as ever, and just as deep with danger. The weird thing was, though, that he also seemed the least bit uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—which was ridiculous. We hadn’t spent a lot of quality time together, but if there was one thing I already understood, it was that the Pooka doesn’t get embarrassed. He’s the Pooka.

What he finally said was, “That is not in my power.”

I said, “What? Oh, please.”

The Pooka actually almost smiled, I think—it’s hard to tell with weasels, even big weasels with human legs. He said, “I do not lie about such things, Jenny Gluckstein. If I could have been of help to Tamsin Willoughby, I might well have done so long ago, but I cannot. It is forbidden, which is only to say impossible. She is not of my world.”

“Please, ”I said again. “She’s a lot more of your world than she is of mine or anyone else’s. She’s like a damn tour guide to your world, for heaven’s sake.”

“Tours… I have seen such things,” the Pooka said, which surprised the hell out of me. Though I guess it shouldn’t have, when you think about it. “But this guide belongs no more to the world she reveals than do those who trudge behind her. Quick or dead, Tarnsin Willoughby remains human, and even I” —and when the Pooka said even I, you heard it— “even I cannot guide her in her turn. I might as well be the Black Dog, silently foreboding, or I might be the billy-blind, forever offering the right advice at the wrong time.” The weasel-head leaned over me; the Pooka’s golden eyes drew me up and in. The Pooka said, “Quick or dead, there’s no helping a human, but if anyone is to succor Tamsin Willoughby, it must be you.”

And if anything could have snapped me out of the blank enchantment the Pooka’s eyes always laid on me, that was it. I jumped back, right away from him. I yelled, “What?”

“Only you. And no chance of that unless you come rightly to understand her plight—which you do not, no more than she.” The Pooka got bored with the weasel and became a little gray rabbit with yellow eyes. He said, “Listen to the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt will tell you what you must know.”

“The Wild Hunt,” I said. I’m not even sure the words actually came out. The rabbit sat up on its haunches and began washing its face and fluffing its whiskers, just the way cats do.

“Listen to the Wild Hunt, Jenny Gluckstein,” it said again. Then it turned and leaped straight through that pointy dark window, in a flurry of wings that looked too big to fit. And left me standing alone in Tamsin’s room, which didn’t smell at all of vanilla when she wasn’t there.

So that was also the winter when I learned a lot more about Tony’s dancing than I ever expected to. If Tamsin was spending time in his studio, maybe I wouldn’t be so jealous if I were there with her, at least trying to understand what she got out of it. Tony was not crazy about the idea, even though I’d already been in his damn studio, and let him try out his moves on me, and generally behaved a lot better than his brother. I could have told him that there was a ghost watching him get into his tights and put on the legwarmers that Sally had knitted for him, but I didn’t. It took us a while, but we cut a deal. I promised to sweep the floor when it needed doing, and absolutely never to comment unless asked. And not ever to bring Mister Cat.

Personally, I think he’d been ready for a long time to have someone see him practicing. He just would have liked it to be someone who understood what the hell he was trying to do. Sally and Evan both love music, but even Sally doesn’t know much more about dance than I do. Poor Tony. Working by himself in a real vacuum—no one to study with, no one to talk to him or trade ideas with, hardly ever getting even a glimpse of real dancers—he finally had to settle on me as an audience, the best of a bad lot. Maybe.

And he couldn’t know that he had another one, a better one than all his family put together. I didn’t see Tamsin the first time I dropped in when he was working. (I’m saying “dropped in” because I tried hard to make it casual—just sort of sidling through the door, don’t mind me, and sidling over to sit in a corner.) I could smell her, but it took a while before I made her out, almost invisible on a chair that Tony was using for some of his stretching exercises. She wasn’t more than a few inches away from him— when he braced his foot on the chair to bend over it, he actually stepped through Tamsin’s own foot, and the hem of her white dress. It was a nightgowny sort of thing, and she looked like a little girl in it, staring up at Tony as he touched his forehead to his knee, then straightened, then did it again, and again. Usually he wears a headband when he works, but he didn’t have it on that day, and his sweaty brown hair kept flopping into his eyes. Once or twice Tamsin lifted her hand, as though she wanted to brush it away.

It took me a while to get her attention, because she was so totally caught up in watching Tony at work. He didn’t do anything terribly glamorous or dramatic: It was all fits and starts—a slow half-turn here, a sudden little run there, or a burst ofjumps, and then most likely a shake of the head and a mumble, and he’d be trying it over a different way. It wasn’t dancing, it was making a dance, which is about as boring as making anything, unless you’re the one doing it. Believe me, I know.

But Tamsin couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop breathing with him, if you can imagine that, considering that she didn’t breathe. The more she watched, the clearer she grew, until she was practically as distinct as Tony, and still he was too absorbed to notice her. He was using the chair as a center to work around, now spinning away from it, now sort of bouncing off it, now actually picking it up and dancing with it—holding Tamsin in his arms, though he didn’t know. He didn’t see her, and she didn’t see me, and there was a moment when I really couldn’t have said just whom I was jealous of.

Then it was past, and Tamsin did notice me, and came to be with me in my corner while Tony went on dancing with the chair. She didn’t look like such a little girl now, but someone closer to my age, or Meena’s—that’s it, she looked like Meena watching Chris Herridge playing football. She said without looking at me, “Oh, Jenny, but he’s a springald, your brother—a gerfalcon, if ever I saw one—”

“Stepbrother. You know he’s my stepbrother.” I was whispering as low as I could but Tony said, with his head practically touching the small of his back, “No comments from the cheap seats. That’s part of the deal.”

“La, stepbrother then, what of it?” I’d never seen Tamsin this wound up. “Jenny, I’d no notion—we never had such a mode when I…” Tony was scribbling something on a yellow pad—he has his own kind of dance notation—and Tamsin watched him at it, fascinated, not taking the least note of me. “How Edric would love this,” she whispered, so low I could hardly make it out. “Edric would play such music for such dancing.”

“He’s just practicing, for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen, I have to talk to you.” Tony turned and pointed at me. He didn’t say anything, but I shut up and waited it out, until he’d worked himself down to a dripping rag—Tony never knows when to quit, even now that dancing’s what he does all the time. Then he said, “That’s it, show’s over,” and limped off with a towel around his neck to take a shower. I really thought Tamsin was going to follow him, but she came outside with me instead.

February still, but this was one of those gentle afternoons that Dorset slips in now and again, even in the middle of a miserable Dorset winter. Two of those in a row, and tiny green and white things start peeking out of the mud, and I always want to run around pushing them down again and yelling at them, “Don’t fall for it, stay low, it’s a trick!” It is, too, always; but right then it was what people here call a soft day, with a breeze pushing against me like a dog’s wet nose. Tamsin’s white dress seemed to flutter a little, even though it couldn’t have.

“He’s there every day,” I said. “But you know that.” Tamsin didn’t answer. I said, “I’ve never seen anybody that obsessed about anything. I mean, school’s just something that gets between him and that studio.”

We were walking down toward the dairy, and Wilf passed me, humping a couple of fence posts along on his shoulders, actually doing something. He gave me a weird look, hearing me talking to myself, and turned around slowly to stare after me, so the fence posts clonged against a metal stanchion. Somebody yelled at him to bleeding-Christ watch it.

Tamsin said again, “Edric would have played and played.” She was quiet now, and maybe not as distinct, as different from the air, as when she’d been watching Tony. She said, “Jenny, it is not any dancing I know, what your brother does. I see no form or course to it, no rule that I might follow, no design that I understand. And yet… and yet I dance, Jenny. Past any fathoming of mine, I see your brother dancing, and I, too, I, too…” She put her hand to her breast, as though she could touch herself. “I feel, Jenny. It cannot be, but I feel.”

I was good then. I like remembering that I was all right. It didn’t matter if it was Tony’s dancing and not me being with her that made her remember she was somewhere still human, the way the Pooka said. I looked straight at her, shimmering in the pale sunlight like dew along a spiderweb, and I said, “Yes, Mistress Tamsin. I know you do.”

I headed us back toward the chestnut tree where I’d been writing to Marta the day I met Tamsin, a hundred years ago. I sat on the damp ground, and Tamsin floated down beside me, careful and precise as any well-brought-up, young seventeenth-century lady settling herself. I said, “He’s Judge Jeffreys, isn’t he? The Other One. I have to know, Tamsin.”

She vanished. Instantly. One second of the purest terror and plain shock I’ve ever yet seen on a human face, whether you could see bare chestnut branches through it or not—the next second, so gone you could practically hear the air snapping to behind her. I jumped to my feet and yelled after her, top of my voice, not even thinking what I was doing, “You come back here! Tamsin Willoughby, you come back!” To this day, I can’t believe I did that. Three people and a goat whipped around and gaped, and Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown strolled out of the dairy together and gave me a Look. Mister Cat almost seemed to be apologizing for me. “She gets like that, it’s embarrassing, I’m sorry. Just ignore her.”

But I wasn’t letting Tamsin get away with it. After dinner that night I went to the secret room—Tony wasn’t in his studio—but she wasn’t there. I plunked down in her chair, bound and determined to wait her out, until it got… I guess scary’s the only word. I’d never been frightened in Tamsin’s room before: But this time, as the last light went, all the shadows seemed to be drawing in around that chair, and each of them looked more like Judge Jeffreys than the one before. I knew how stupid it was, but knowing didn’t help. The night mist was gathering, and it made a soft, raspy sound when it stirred against the window. I knew that couldn’t be happening either. My mouth was getting drier and drier, and I kept feeling like I had to pee. You can’t think straight when you’re like that. The mist was coming into the room, through the leaks around that ancient window frame. It felt cold and sticky, and it smelled of sour bedsheets.

Between one rustle and the next, one more tongue-tip of cold air against the back of my neck, I just suddenly lost it. I ran out of the room, down the hall, with the old dust not quite muffling the echo of my footsteps, and down the stairs, and I didn’t stop running until I almost fell over Julian. He was trying to get a rubberband-powered model plane to take off and fly straight down the corridor, but it kept spinning in circles on one wheel. Julian never has any luck with things like that.

“Trample me and I’ll put a curse on you,” he warned me in that rasping little rumble of his. He was into putting curses on people then—I think he got it from EllieJohn. “All your hair will fall out, and you’ll always want to sneeze, only you won’t be able to.” Evan used to go on at him about it, but it never did any good.

“Don’t talk about curses,” I said. “Not here. Just shut up about curses, Julian.” I think I was actually shaking. I know I was yelling.

Julian looked really hurt for a moment—I’d never once raised my voice to him before—and then he saw, the way he still does sometimes, even now that he’s a foul teenager, and he just came and leaned against me without saying anything. He got something sticky and permanent on my sweater, but what the hell.