Tamsin

Twenty-five

Except that we were both wrong.

She wasn’t anywhere in the Manor—and by now I knew how to search that house. He must have been searching, too, though I never saw him. The billy-blind said he wouldn’t be able to come into Roger Willoughby’s secret room—anyway, that’s what it had sounded like he was saying—but the billy-blind hadn’t just seen Judge Jeffreys beckoning Tamsin to her doom, commanding her with no more magic than her name. I wasn’t about to assume there was anything Judge Jeffreys couldn’t do.

But there was a whole lot I couldn’t do. I couldn’t ask anyone for help—not even Meena, not with things gone this hairy—and I couldn’t lurk and slide around home looking as though I were trying to rescue a ghost from a crazy ghost judge who’d somehow condemned her boyfriend to being chased across the sky forever by a howling pack of ghost huntsmen. There is no really good time or way to break something like this to sensible people like Sally and Evan and—all right—Tony. Julian was weird enough to believe me, but he was also entirely weird enough to wind up running the Wild Hunt. Master of the Hounds, or whatever. Uh-uh.

And I couldn’t go to Mrs. Fallowfield, either. That was my first impulse—after all, she’d shown me what had happened to poor Edric Davies, which I’d never have found out if she hadn’t let me see the Wild Hunt with her eyes. But I didn’t dare assume that she was on my side, or on Tamsin’s, or anyone else’s but her own. The one thing I knew for sure about Mrs. Fallowfield was that I couldn’t take one thing about her for granted.

I didn’t tell Meena about Edric, but I did tell her about Tamsin’s face-off with Judge Jeffreys. Meena was too smart to be optimistic: She knew way too much about Indian ghosts. She said, “Jenny, you must be so careful, more careful than ever. Now it’s not just Tamsin—now it’s personal. He will harm you if he can.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Exactly what I needed to hear.” But Meena looked so worried that I told her, “I don’t think either of us are going to see her again, him or me. I think she’s broken free of him, and free of the Manor, too. I really do think that was it.”

Which I didn’t think for a minute, but Meena seemed to feel better, so I felt better. But what I knew was that this time I couldn’t afford to wait for Judge Jeffreys to locate Tamsin, the way I’d been doing. This time I had to get to her before he did, and the only edge I had was that I knew Tamsin better than he did. Or I thought so, anyway, but maybe I was totally wrong about that, too—maybe I didn’t, couldn’t, mean any more to her than any other unreal figure in this half-dream world she’d lingered in. But I had to believe I did; and I had to believe that if dead, mad Judge Jeffreys could call Tamsin to him, so could I. I just had to find the right place and the perfect moment. And the words.

It took a while. The secret room wasn’t it—I had a sense that Tamsin wouldn’t ever come back to that room—and no other place in the house felt right. I was going to have to find the one spot in the seven hundred acres of Stourhead Farm where the daughter of Roger Willoughby might choose to make her stand. Because she wasn’t running from Judge Jeffreys, not this time. She was going after Edric Davies—she was going to find Edric and rescue him from the Wild Hunt, whatever it took, however she could. Like I said, it took me a while to understand, but once I did, then I knew where she’d be.

A lot of stuff got in the way of my finding her, though. It’s funny now, but at the time I was at least half-convinced that it was all Judge Jeffreys’s doing, all the delays and distractions that landed on me together right then. School was starting again, for one thing, and there was farm work to help out with almost every day—hoeing and singling, mostly. (That was one thing about Evan’s new no-till system—the weeds were crazy about it, especially thistles.) And Tony picked that time to use me again as a sort of dressmaker’s dummy for some new dance; and Julian got left off his form’s cricket team and tagged after me more than ever, being miserable and making mournful plans to blow up the school. I talked him down to a scheme involving piranhas in the water supply, but it was so complicated that I think he lost interest. I think.

So between one damn thing and another, it seemed a lot like forever until I was finally free to go search for Tamsin. By then I was out-and-out frantic—and unable to let anyone see it—because there was not only no reason why Judge Jeffreys wouldn’t have thought of the same place, there was one major hell of a reason why he would have. I hadn’t seen him since the shootout in the potato field, but ten angels could have sworn that he’d left town on the two-fifteen train, and I wouldn’t have believed them. For all I knew, he was shadowing me this time; so there was something else driving me to that ruin of a seventeenth-century cow byre, with nothing remaining but a bald scorch mark near where the door had been. Because that was what it was, I knew it for sure now: the footprint of the Wild Hunt, called down by Judge Jeffreys to hound Edric Davies far from Tamsin Willoughby, if he survived at all. That was where they found him waiting for her, as he’d promised he would.

And that was where I went to find Tamsin, one evening after dinner, with everything anyone could possibly stick me with out of the way. Sally stopped me, all the same—I was actually opening the door when she called to me, “Take a brolly, it’s going to rain.”

“No, it’s not,” I called back. “Ellie John says it’s not, and she always knows.”

“Take it anyway—do me a favor.” Sally came close and put her hand lightly on my arm. “Where are you off to?”

“No place special. just walking around, to clear my head. I’ll be back soon.”

“You’ve been doing a lot of that,” Sally said quietly. “Clearing your head. Is everything all right?”

I don’t get great whopping visions and insights into the human condition—I don’t think I’m made like that—but for one moment I did have an image of thousands, millions of mothers all over the world asking their daughters the same question at that same moment. I said, “Fine, I’m fine, really,” and Sally said, “Don’t be out too long, I don’t care what Ellie John says,” and I said, “Right,” and I practically ran out of the house, in such a hurry that I forgot to take the umbrella. It wouldn’t have helped.

Tamsin was exactly where I thought she’d be, though I couldn’t make her out right away. She sat huddled like a sad little girl in what would have been a far corner of the cow byre: All there, all fully present—not like she’d been when Judge Jeffreys was dragging her into him—but so transparent that I felt I could see through her all the way to Mrs. Fallowfield’s house among the elders, or all the way to the seventeenth century… It was a warm night, and very still, but there was heat lightning sputtering on the horizon.

She knew me when she saw me. She said softly, “Mistress Jennifer. So you are come.”

“Jenny,” I said. “No Mistress, no Jennifer. Just Jenny.” I went and sat down next to her, I said, “Yes, I’m come. And we’re going to talk about what happened on the night that Edric Davies didn’t come for you.”

Tamsin shivered—or maybe that was a breeze rising. She said, “Jenny. I know what you did. Until you called to me, I was lost, truly lost beyond your imagining. While I remember anything, I will remember—”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Do you remember what I called? What I told you?”

She didn’t reply for a few moments, and when she did, her voice was very low. “That the Wild Hunt… that they took him. Yes, I know—I know that must have happened, and who it was summoned the Huntsmen—”

I interrupted her again. “This isn’t about Judge Jeffreys—I don’t think so, anyway. Yes, he’s a bad guy, he’s a psychopath, he’s the only real monster I’ve ever met, and somehow he learned how to sic the Wild Hunt on a rival like Edric Davies. But that would just have been for one night, and Edric’s out there still, running the way he’s been running from the Hunt, night after night for three hundred years. Do you understand me?” Because I couldn’t be sure she was taking any of it in, sitting there so wide-eyed. “No way Judge Jeffreys could have done that to him—that took somebody else. Somebody with more power than Jeffreys, a kind of power Jeffreys never had in his whole rotten life. Do you understand?” Tamsin didn’t move or answer me.

“I used to go nuts,” I said, “drive myself absolutely crazy, trying to figure out what Judge Jeffreys could possibly have whispered to you when you were… you know, at the last. Then I got to wondering about you—if you maybe said something to him.” I waited, but she didn’t say anything, so I just plunged ahead, point-blank. “Do you remember? It’s really important, it might explain everything. Even a couple of words.”

No answer, no sense that she was trying to remember a thing more than she wanted to. And suddenly I was really pissed at her, Tamsin or no Tamsin. I shouted at her. I said, “Damn it, you owe me a damn effort! I’m knocking myself out to help you learn the truth, even though I don’t want to, because once you do learn, you’ll go wherever you go, and I’ll never see you again. But I’m doing it anyway, because it’s the right thing for you, and I love you. Now you think, and you think hard, and you help me for a change!” I could have cut my tongue out, even while I was yelling, but I only stopped because of what was happening to her face.

When people write about living people facing up to something shocking, some awful memory that’s just come back to them, they always have them turn pale, bloodless, or else they get weak-kneed and have to sit down, or press their hands against their mouths and start to cry. Tamsin didn’t do any of that, and it wasn’t that her face got twisted with horror or distorted with fear, like in books. Tamsin’s face stopped, the way she always talked about herself stopping. I’d seen her go really still at times, but that softly pulsing ghost-light would be there, if you knew how to look. But this was different, this was something so else I don’t think anybody’s yet got the right words for it. They just call it the stillness of death.

“O, Jenny,” she said. “O, Jenny.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t breathe.

“O, Jenny,” Tamsin said. “I cursed him. I cursed my love.”

I was the one who began to tremble, the one who put her fingers to her dry, cold mouth. There was a half-moon rising behind clouds. The wind was definitely picking up, and I could smell rain. Tamsin said, “Jenny, I remember.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t, you don’t have to, I’m sorry.”

But she didn’t hear me. “I was in such despair. I so needed him to be there—to be here, where we are—and he was not, and he had sworn, sworn to me… And I was frightened, Jenny—frightened of being abandoned to Judge Jeffreys, frightened of such things as he might do to my family—and then I was sick and all a-fevered, and truly not in my proper senses. Jenny, my Jenny, I remember.”

Her eyes were burning. I never knew what that meant before. She was growing more and more clear and solid—I couldn’t see through her anymore. She said, “I spoke evil words against Edric. I cursed him for deserting me, and I vowed that he should wait as I had waited, wait on forever and forever for someone who never came. Jenny, do you understand me now?”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, no wonder you forgot.” My teeth were actually chattering, dumb as that sounds.

Tamsin said, “The last breath of a passing soul has such power— the power of a transient angel, of a momentary demon… And I loosed it against him. It was I sent him to his eternal torment—I, not Judge Jeffreys. My doing, my doing—three hundred years.” She was rocking herself slowly, like a grieving old woman.

The big, warm drops of rain were starting to fall, one at a time, but Tamsin couldn’t feel them, and I didn’t care about them. Of all the damn, damn things, I wanted to see Evan. Evan would think of something. I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what we can do to save him.”

Tamsin smiled at me. I know I’ve written all over the place about the way I felt when she smiled, but this one didn’t turn my heart and my insides gooey: This was a smile like Marta’s, like Jake’s, on my last night on West Eighty-third Street. An old friend saying good-bye.

“Do, Mistress Jenny?” she said. “Why, there is nothing for you to do, having aided me so far beyond my deserving. What I do now is for me.”

And with that the storm broke, and the Wild Hunt came.

There wasn’t a lot of rain, not like when Julian and I were caught at Mrs. Fallowfield’s farmhouse. This was mostly wet wind, but it was the strongest wind I’ve ever been out in. It knocked me back down when I tried to stand, punching at me from every side; it slashed my hair across my face and into my eyes so it stung like mad, and it shook me the way I’ve seen Albert shake a poor little mole to bits before he tossed it up and swallowed it. I saw Tamsin’s face, bright as the moon, if there had been a moon. She touched her right-hand fingers to her remembered lips, blowing me a kiss—and then she was gone, swept away by the wind like a rag snatched off a clothesline.

I screamed after her—couldn’t hear myself, of course—and then did something a lot more useful, which was pushing myself to my feet. The Wild Hunt was tight overhead, shrieking and banging and yammering like the D train barreling uptown, but for once I hardly paid any mind to them. I had one glimpse of Tamsin, not being driven by the wind but riding it to meet the Huntsmen, flashing like a meteor, up and out, on an angle that would intercept them somewhere over the downland. Then I lost sight of her for good, and I sank back down in total despair, because there wasn’t any way for me to catch up, to be with her when she turned to deal with the Wild Hunt and fight them all for Edric Davies, if she had to. I’d always figured I would be there at the end, without thinking much about it, but I wasn’t going to be, and I couldn’t even cry about it, because of the damn wind. I think that’s the lowest I’ve ever been—though I’m sure there’s worse waiting, as Mrs. Fallowfield would say.

The black pony materialized slowly out of the storm, as though it were drifting up from the bottom of the sea. It looked at me out of its yellow eyes and remarked, “I had thought better of you. Slightly better.”

That got me on my feet fast enough. I yelled, “Pooka!” and stumbled to him against the wind, but he backed away, shaking his shaggy head. I kept yelling, “You have to, you have to! I have to get to her!”

“Do you remember her words on the day we met?” The Pooka’s voice was as calm and low as though the Wild Hunt weren’t still raging over us, and his mane weren’t trying to whip itself loose by the roots. “She warned you never to trust me, never to mount my back, for I would surely hurl you into a bog or a briarpatch and abandon you there. I am still what I am, jenny Gluckstein.”

I put my hands on him. I said, “I know, but I can’t worry about it now. just try to dump me someplace near where she’s gone.” And I grabbed his mane and scrambled aboard, not giving myself time to reconsider anything. I was braced for matted, soaking horsehair, but the Pooka’s back was completely dry, even warm. I actually yelped in surprise, and the Pooka slanted one eye back at me in the usual wicked amusement. Then he took off.

I’m not a big horse person, and I never have been. I know young girls are all supposed to go through a stage of thinking about nothing but horses, but there wasn’t a lot of that on West Eighty-third Street. The boys both like horses better than I do, and Meena’s nuts about them—it’s the only time she’s ever boring, when she starts in on horses. Not me. I used to have a thing about snakes, though, when I was really young. I still like them.

But the Pooka isn’t a horse. The Pooka is the Pooka, and he didn’t run like a horse at all. He didn’t gallop, he bounded, like Mister Cat, like a lion or a cheetah, the way I’ve seen them on nature shows. He was in top gear around the second stride, driving off both hind legs together, with his back bowing under me, moving in great flowing leaps that melted together into a hunter’s glide that felt as though it could outrun the Wild Hunt itself. I flattened myself along his neck, because the storm and his speed together would have had me on the ground in a minute if I’d tried to sit up like a real rider. It was hard to breathe: All I could do was grab onto his mane, and bury my face in it, while we tore through orchards whose branches almost raked me off his back, fields that I could only pray he wouldn’t trample, pastures where sheep gaped sleepily up at us and the wind froze my fingers and pounded at my face. I knew where we were, more or less, but I was as groggy and stupid as those sheep. All I could do was hang on.

The Wild Hunt was downwind of us, their nerve-numbing howl making me want to throw myself off the Pooka’s back and crawl away into the dark and wet, where they’d never find me. But each time I opened my eyes, we’d drawn closer to that terrible rainbow, because the Pooka was traveling. The half-moon was a crayon scrawl on the horizon, and the trees on both sides of us had blurred into a sort of grayish tunnel, but I could see the Hunt clearly—and I could see Edric Davies now, running and running in the black sky. The Huntsmen were so close behind him that it seemed to me as though they were playing with him, that they could have caught him any time they wanted to, but maybe not.

What did he look like, Tamsin’s lost lover? What do you think you’d look like after three hundred years like his? Horrible, right. I’ll tell you what’s horrible. What’s really horrible is that I’d seen worse. I see worse than Edric Davies damn near every day, and so do you—on TV, in newspaper pictures, in photographs we get so totally used to that they don’t make us puke our guts out every time we look at them, the way we should. There’s only so much you can do to a person, to a human body, even if you’re the Wild Hunt or Judge Jeffreys. I grew up knowing that, and you probably did, too.

The Pooka said quietly, under the storm and the Huntsmen’s baying, “It ends here.” And I saw Tamsin directly up ahead of us, standing in a field of young corn. Her head was thrown back, her hair fallen loose—though she hadn’t wasted any time remembering how it would have blown around—and she was stretching her arms up toward the Wild Hunt, and Edric Davies. She was calling, crying out words, but I couldn’t hear them, because of the wind.

But the Wild Hunt heard. The riders out in front, so close on Edric Davies’s heels, swung away from him, banking straight down toward Tamsin. The others followed as they caught sight of her, filling the sky with their spears and their skulls and their screaming laughter, lunging forward over their mounts’ necks as if they couldn’t wait to get at that small white figure in the cornfield. But she never took one step backward—she kept on beckoning, challenging them down, away from Edric to her. I was too dazed and too scared to be proud of her then, my Tamsin. But I dream that moment sometimes, these years later, and in the dream I always tell her.

Then the Pooka dumped me. Nothing dramatic about it—he just stopped dead and I shot over his head at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and landed on my butt in soft mud, practically at Tamsin’s feet. I jumped right up, howling like the Wild Hunt myself, but the Pooka actually bowed his head to me and I shut up. He said, “Here is your friend, and here is the Wild Hunt. This is your affair, not mine. Tend to it, Jenny Gluckstein.”

And he was gone, exactly that fast—I thought I spotted a frog hopping away through the cornstalks, but it was dark and crazy, and you can’t ever tell with the Pooka, anyway. Tamsin hadn’t turned her head for a moment, because the first of the Huntsmen had touched down, the wet earth hissing under their horses’ feet. The rest were circling like stacked-up planes, coming in one by one, as they must have done when Judge Jeffreys called them to the cow byre where Edric Davies waited for Tamsin Willoughby. The corn was smoking where they trampled it, and I wondered, somewhere far off, what I’d say to Evan when nothing ever grew in this field again.

They didn’t keep up their racket once they were on the ground. Even the hounds quieted down and dropped back alongside their masters, and the horses—or whatever they were—stopped foaming flames, though they kept on growling very low, meaner than the dogs. Tamsin just stood there, solid as a living woman, smiling as each rider dropped to earth and moved in on her. You’d have thought she was welcoming company at the front door.

I didn’t know what the hell she had in mind, and the Wild Huntsmen were as hung up as I was. They kept advancing, but they did it slowly, fanning out a little bit, as though she were Sir Lancelot or someone, ready to leap at them and mow them down five and six at a time. I was just behind her, shaking so hard I could barely stand, watching them come on.

I’ll never know who they were. Who they had been. I’ll never know how you get to be a Wild Huntsman, nor if you have to be one forever. What I remember—this is weird—is their smell. If Tamsin smelled of vanilla, you’d have expected these guys and their beasts to smell all meaty and hairy and blood-sticky, like the lion house at the zoo. They didn’t: Close to, even the worst of them, the ones with no real faces, but only a smeary collection of holes and skin and cindery snot—even those had the faintest smell of the sea, of fishing boats, and sails drying in the sun, the way you see them at Lyme Regis. Maybe they were all old pirates— who knows? The one thing I’m sure of is that I can’t ever be afraid of anyone again. The Wild Hunt gave me that.

Tamsin spoke to them, proud and clear over their fearful stillness. She said, “I take back what belongs to me. You have no claim on him, nor did you ever. The evil was mine alone, and long will I be in atoning for it. I take Edric Davies back from you now.”

The Huntsmen didn’t do anything. They sat their horses and stared at Tamsin, and not one head turned when Edric Davies walked between them to her side. I’d lost sight of him when the Pooka dumped me, so I’m not sure exactly where he’d been, but I can tell you that he walked as though he were afraid the planet would buck him off at any moment, back into the sky. Tamsin hadn’t glanced at me once in all this time, but Edric did as he passed me; and although he looked like an entire train wreck all by himself, he winked at me! He winked, and I saw what it was that Tamsin had loved three centuries ago. She took her eyes off the Wild Hunt for the first time, and she and Edric stood there looking at each other, and they didn’t say a thing. Not a hello, not a cry of pain or sympathy, no apologies—not one single word of love. They just looked, and if somebody ever looks at me the way the ghost of Edric Davies looked at the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, that’ll be all right. It won’t happen, but at least I’ll know it if I see it.

By and by, Tamsin turned her attention back to the Huntsmen. “We will go,” she said, haughty as could be. “You will pursue Edric Davies no further, nor me neither. You have no power here. Go back to your home beyond the winds—go back to the bowels of the skies and trouble us no more. Hear me, you!” And she stamped forward, right at them, and swung her arms the way Sally does when she’s shooing Mister Cat out of the kitchen.

For one crazy minute, I thought she was going to get away with it. The Wild Huntsmen seemed paralyzed, in a funny sort of way: They might almost have been human, ordinary Dorset people, sitting their shuffling horses in the rain, sneaking sideways peeks at each other to see if anyone had a clue about what they ought to be doing next. A couple of them even backed away, just a step, but that’s how close she came. I really thought she’d make it.

Then Judge Jeffreys screamed.