Tamsin

Twenty-two

Tamsin scolded me about the Oakmen. I’d thought Meena had really worked me over, but after Tamsin got through, there wasn’t enough left to recycle. “Witling, gommeril, logger-head, are you mad then? After all my cautions, to walk in that accursed wood of your own choice, knowing? Mistress Jenny Gluckstein, what can have possessed you? What cloud came over your brain-pan, tell me?” There was a lot more. She was so furious that she lost all her usual transparency—she looked as solid as Sally while she was laying into me. I was so fascinated to see her like that, I know I missed some great seventeenth-century words.

It didn’t help at all when I pointed out that I’d only gone in a little way, and only after Meena—that I couldn’t let her go alone just because she wouldn’t pay any attention to my warning. Tamsin ran right over that one. “Never gainsay me, child— it was for you to keep her out of danger in the first place. There’s where you should have laid hold of her hair, the very moment she spoke of entering the wood.” Oh, she was sizzling, she was wonderful!

In time she cooled down (though she remembered how angry she’d been—and why—well after I expected she’d have forgotten). She stood in front of me and touched my cheek, the way she’d done with Meena.

“Jenny,” she whispered. “My dear Mistress Jenny, do you not yet know that I fear losing you even as I fear…” She didn’t finish, but started over. “Dear Jenny, you well know the perils of your own world, but now you walk somewhat in mine as well, and you must heed what little I can tell you of it. There are worse than Oakmen abroad in what you call night.”

“I love it,” I said. “I don’t care what’s running loose in your world, I love it a lot more than mine. I love walking around at night, even when I’m not with you, just knowing. Even in the daytime, everything’s different, because I know.”

“No,” Tamsin said sharply, “no, you do not know,” and we were right back at why I shouldn’t have let Meena set one foot into the Hundred-Acre Wood. But her heart wasn’t nearly as much in it: She kept fading, reappearing, fading out again, as though she were being pulled back and forth between her own time and this one, memories grabbing at her this way, things she wanted to tell me yanking her back the other way. Finally she just gave up and vanished, but even that wasn’t quite right—she didn’t blink out instantly, but lingered for a moment, a soap-bubble Tamsin, with dust motes falling through her sad eyes. I didn’t see her for days after that.

I saw the Pooka a lot that spring, though: never again face-to-face in a room, but always from a distance, in the shape of a bird, a hare, a badger rolling along on its toes, a young red deer with the velvet still on its antlers. He might not be able to be any help to Tamsin, but he was definitely keeping watch on the farm—or on her and me. Meena said from what I told her about him, the Pooka reminded her a little of Hanuman, the Monkey King: wise and strong, and very mischievous, but always on the side of good. I wouldn’t have gone that far—I still wouldn’t, even after what he did for us—but I was glad to see him. More glad than not, anyway.

Because something was moving around Stourhead Farm that spring, just as the billy-blind had warned me, and finally even I could feel it. It wasn’t only my on-and-off dreams about Judge Jeffreys, and it wasn’t Mister Cat’s occasional nighttime go-rounds with things that always seemed to have too many legs and weren’t ever there when I went down in the morning to check out his body count. It wasn’t even the Wild Hunt baying across the sky time and time—once I even halfway slept through it, I was getting so used to them. It was Tamsin.

She was increasingly restless, in a way I’d never seen before. By now I knew her as well, I guess, as you can know someone who died three hundred years before you were born. I usually knew where she was likely to be if I couldn’t find her in her room or Tony’s studio—out talking to those beech trees of hers, or curled in Evan’s swing with Miss Sophia Brown, and probably Mister Cat as well. Once in a while she liked to be in the kitchen when Sally or Evan was cooking. She couldn’t explain exactly why to me; one time she said, “I have no sense of smell, but an imagination of smell—can you comprehend such a thing, Jenny?” I couldn’t. Tamsin said, “Besides, there’s comfort in a kitchen, always, for me as much as any other.” That one I did understand.

But lately I couldn’t tell, not only where to find her, but just how she’d be when I did. I’d see her sometimes in places where I’d never come across her before: walking the fields among Evan’s workers, or sitting at Sally’s piano with her poor transparent hands stretched out over the keys, as though she could make them move up and down by plain will. Most often, when I spoke to her, she’d wheel around, looking absolutely terrified, and vanish. It would take me forever to get her to come back, and then generally she wouldn’t know me, sometimes for a couple of days. Once she didn’t even know Miss Sophia Brown.

The worst thing was, I had a terrible feeling that I knew why it was happening to her. She certainly didn’t, and there wasn’t any point asking the Pooka or the billy-blind—neither one of them was worth a damn at saying anything useful straight out, anyway. So I talked to Meena.

I’d kept my promise about that, even though I was so much in the habit of not saying a word about Tamsin to anyone that it was really work. But it was worth it, too: Not just for the plain relief of dropping all my fears and confusions in someone else’s lap, but because of who that someone was. I said, “It’s the Other One, Judge Jeffreys. The billy-blind kept warning me. Meena, he’s not gone, the way she told me—he’s somewhere close by, and the more restless she gets, the more active, so does he. And she knows it, or she halfway knows it, and she’s so frightened she can barely hold herself together. That’s what I think, anyway.”

We were in the Charis’ kitchen, and Meena was showing me how to make a pillau. Over her shoulder she said, “You think he might still be here, still waiting on earth, because of his obsession with her? Is that how it is with ghosts?”

“Is it? You’re the one who grew up with them—you tell me. I’m just starting to wonder if maybe she’s held here because of some obsession of her own. Something to do with Edric, with what happened to him. I don’t know, Meena.”

“In the south they put coconut milk in with the stock,” Meena said. “My mother doesn’t do that, but I like it. Do you know what I wish?” I didn’t say anything. Meena said, “I’d like to see that painting of her.”

“I asked her about it once,” I said. “She didn’t have any idea where it might be, after so long. I’ve looked for it a few times, but if it’s in the house I’m not seeing it. Anyway, I don’t know what help it’d be. She says the guy was a rotten painter.”

“This isn’t an art class. Watch now—when you put the rice in for frying, you have to do it with your fingers, so the grains fall separately. Watch, Jenny! I still think it might tell us something the painting.

So we went looking. Whenever Meena was over for an afternoon or a weekend, we slipped off and went through the Manor—east wing, west wing, all three floors, and every damn room we could get into, including my lady’s chamber, just in case Roger Willoughby’d been into hiding more than chaplains. Nothing. Meena was all for scraping off some of the older portraits, on the chance that the one of Tamsin might have been painted over, but I was afraid to try that. We did pry a lot of them out of their frames, though; and we spent a whole miserable day in the cellar, digging blindly around under incredibly dirty drapes and sheets, and layers of rotting cloth that crumbled away to black powder the moment you touched it. Nothing. Wherever that portrait of Tamsin was, if it was still in the house, we’d never find it.

It wasn’t in the house. It was hanging on the wall in the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant.

I’d never gone in, out of pure snobbery, so I wouldn’t have known. Meena had, and she’d actually noticed the picture, but of course she didn’t recognize it. The only reason I ever saw the thing was that Sally dragged me into the Restaurant one afternoon when we’d been shopping for a long time, and I was suddenly hungry enough that I didn’t care where we ate. Even under the sign with that man’s dreadful gentle face on it was all right with me.

The portrait hangs in a dark corner at the rear of the Restaurant, so I didn’t see it until I was on my way to the john. Then I about wet myself right there, but the ironic thing is that I forgot I had to go. I just stood staring at the painting—not seeing it, you understand, just gaping, slowly realizing what it was. Because there couldn’t be two like that: Tamsin Willoughby, nineteen years old, but looking not much older than me—maybe because the loose white gown she wore was a bit too big for her—with her hair done up high in tumbly curls, the way she remembered it, and her eyes full of someone who wasn’t on the canvas. I don’t know how the painter got it, as awful as he was supposed to be, but somehow you could see Edric in the turn of her neck and the lift of her chin. Just across the room, playing for her, trying like mad not to turn his own head, and turning anyway.

It took forever for Meena and me to get into Dorchester together, until we managed to arrange to meet her father at the university for dinner. That gave us time to have tea by ourselves at the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant, and we stood in front of the portrait of Tamsin for a long time, neither of us saying a word.

“Is that really how she looks?” Meena’s voice was very quiet and young.

“Yes,” I said, “exactly. Except sometimes, when she forgets.”

We didn’t say anything more for some while after that, and then Meena said, “There’s somebody else.”

I said, “What? No, there isn’t. Where?”

Meena pointed. The painter had posed Tamsin in a chair with a tall, narrow back and no armrests. There was a small table to her right, with a book open on it, and to her left a bigger table with some kind of beaker made of copper, or even gold; the painting was too old and dirty to be sure. Meena said, “Look at that. Closely, Jenny.”

In the surface of the beaker—and you had to squint to be sure it wasn’t one more smudge on the canvas—I could just dimly make out a face. Only part of a face, really, but I didn’t need more than a part. I felt my hand at my mouth, though I couldn’t remember how it got there.

“He’s in the portrait,” Meena said. “The painter put him in.”

I didn’t waste time saying no, no, impossible, it couldn’t be. It was him, all right. Maybe the painter thought it helped the composition somehow; more likely he did it out of flattery; most likely Judge Jeffreys ordered him to do it, and who was going to refuse? But why did the Judge—the Other One—why did he want to be in Tamsin’s portrait? The man might have been completely loose in the flue, but when it came to Tamsin he didn’t do anything without a reason. So we just stood there, Meena and I, looking and wondering, while our tea got cold.

On our way out of the café to meet Mr. Chari, we ran into Mrs. Fallowfield. I was always running into Mrs. Fallowfield back then. She lived alone on a tiny farm not far from ours, mostly growing apples, pears, cherries, and I think walnuts. How she managed everything by herself, nobody could quite figure, but she never hired anyone to help with the harvest, or with the grafting and fertilizing either. A tall, skinny woman who could have been sixty or ninety-five, all knobby bones and bundles of gristly muscle, with no lips—just a down-curving slash, like a shark—and bright, hard blue eyes. She wore jeans, thick woolen shirts, and army boots, winter and summer, and she always had a kind of Russian fur cap crammed on her head, rain or shine, summer or winter. With earflaps.

I didn’t like her much, but Mrs. Fallowfield liked me, in her extremely weird way. The reason for that was that one time the yippy little dog she always carried in a pocket of her duffel coat—it looked like a kind of pink possum with mange—got lost and wound up at Stourhead Farm, with Albert the collie about to turn him into dog jerky. Albert’s very territorial. I scooped the nasty thing up—it bit the hell out of my finger—and took it home to Sally, who called Mrs. Fallowfield, and she came right over and got it. I still remember shivering to see it scuttle up her sleeve like a mouse and dive into her pocket. I’d never seen a dog do that before.

“Thank ’ee,” she said to me. “I wun’t forget.” And God knows she didn’t. She kept turning up, from then on, in the fields, or stumping along a back road or a Dorchester street—where she didn’t belong any more than a boggart would have—or crossing our land to check out Evan’s no-till technique. And somehow she’d always come by at just the right time to stop me and ask how I was doing in school, or how a city girl was getting along on a Dorset farm these days. Her voice went with the rest of her: It sounded like chunks of coal rattling down a chute. But I’d stand and answer her questions as politely as I could. I was always polite to Mrs. Fallowfield.

This time she just grunted, “Nut seen you in here before, I han’t. Who’s this one?”

I introduced Meena. Mrs. Fallowfield gave her one swift up-and-down sweep with those small blue eyes, but didn’t say anything. I said, “We go to school together. We were just in for tea. Very nice tea. Great scones.”

Mrs. Fallowfield’s dog—or whatever—stuck its head out of her coat pocket and yipped at me. I’d saved his miserable life, and he hated my guts from that day. She scratched his head with a hairy forefinger, tilting her head and squinting sideways at me. She said, “Been looking at ’er.” It wasn’t a question.

“Her,” I said. “Yes. Never saw that picture before. We were supposed to study it for class.” I’m a really stupid liar when I’m nervous, but that’s the only time I lie.

Mrs. Fallowfield said harshly, “Right bad ’un, she was. Family suffered untold grief, along of that girl.”

I wasn’t having that. I didn’t know I wasn’t having that until I heard myself saying, “That is not true.” Meena says I turned absolutely white, which would be a change anyway. I said, “Tamsin Willoughby loved her family! She never did anything to harm them! She was the one who suffered, and she’s still suffering, and you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” I didn’t even realize what I’d done until I saw Meena’s face, I was that angry.

Mrs. Fallowfield didn’t answer me. Instead she smiled, which I’d never seen her do before—I’m not sure anybody ever had, from the work her face muscles had to do to squeeze out a kind of pained twitch around her mouth. But it wasn’t a mean smile, and the blue eyes seemed somehow larger for a moment. Just as hard, but maybe a little larger. Then she turned her head and said something to Meena—not in English—and Meena’s mouth fell open, and Mrs. Fallowfield clumped on into the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant.

“What was she speaking?” I demanded. “What language was that?”

“Tamil,” Meena said faintly. “With a Madras accent.”

“What did she say?” Meena shook her head, and then she smiled a little bit herself, almost like Mrs. Fallowfield.

“She said, ‘Keep an eye on her.’ ” I waited. Meena blushed—she can’t even lie by omission. “Actually, she didn’t say her. She said, ‘Keep an eye on that child—she’s not fit to be let out alone.’ But she wasn’t making fun of you, I’m sure she wasn’t. There was something else, something about her.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Let’s go meet your dad.”

I kept going back to the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant whenever I was in Dorchester. Mostly I was with Sally, but she came for tea, and I was there to stare at that portrait of Tamsin. I got to the point where I literally knew every brush stroke that made up that painting, from the hundreds of fussy little ones that created the highlights in her hair and every detail of her gown, to the half dozen or so that put Judge Jeffreys on that gold beaker, watching Tamsin forever with his mild, tender eyes. I wasn’t looking for anything exactly—I was waiting for the picture to tell me something, which is different. And it did tell me something terribly important, but I didn’t understand. I couldn’t possibly have understood then, but I still think I should have.

Tamsin couldn’t tell me a thing, of course. All she remembered of the painting sessions was Edric, and Edric’s music—she didn’t even know that Judge Jeffreys was in the portrait, too, and I could see her forgetting it almost as soon as I’d told her. I actually thought of bringing Tony to look at it, because of him knowing so much about Dorset history, but I decided against risking his curiosity. As for asking the Pooka or the billy-blind… no, there wouldn’t be any point to that. The Pooka was right—it was my problem, my business. And I hadn’t a clue.

The weather got warmer, even in Dorset. Wheat and barley, corn and peas and hay were popping up in Evan’s unplowed fields, fruit trees were blossoming overnight, and Meena and I had to start dodging football and field hockey again. Mister Cat was shedding his first real winter coat all over my room (he’d never needed to grow one in New York), and swaggered Stourhead Farm like Roger Willoughby. Sally finally got her first vocal student, in Frampton; Tony actually found a ballet class in Dorchester started up by a retired, slightly alcoholic Sadler’s Wells dancer; and Julian the Mad Scientist discovered what happens when you run experiments involving the electrical conductivity of water in the Male Faculty toilets at Sherborne Boys. Evan yelled at him about it, but it made him a celebrity for the rest of the term, and I was proud to be his sister.

Me, I went to see Guy Guthrie again, to ask if it seemed the least bit odd to him, Judge Jeffreys’s face being reflected in Tamsin Willoughby’s portrait. But the most even he could tell me was that the thing had always had a strange sort of reputation, almost from the time it was painted. “Maybe it’s owing to her dying so soon after, or perhaps it does have to do with Jeffreys—hard to say these days, when he’s become such a cash crop for Dorchester. In any case, the last Willoughby left it for the Lovells, and the Lovells gave it to the Restaurant.” He chuckled suddenly. “Very nearly the day it opened, as I recall.”

I said they certainly didn’t take much care of it, and Mr. Guthrie nodded agreement. He said slowly, “They’re afraid of it, too, I think, but they don’t know why. They won’t put it upstairs, in the Lodgings—they keep it in shadow, they never clean it, and I think they’d leave it for the dustman tomorrow, if they could. But it’s Dorset history, it’s part of the atmosphere they sell—they can’t quite make themselves get rid of it. I don’t know whether that’s any use to you, Jenny, but it’s the best I can do.”

Well, it was and it wasn’t. It convinced me that I was right to feel the weird way I did about the portrait, but it didn’t get me any closer to understanding why. So I finally gave up on it, and on the Judge Jeffreys Restaurant, and on anybody being much help to me but me. And I went looking for Tamsin.

It was still chilly to be walking out at night, but there wasn’t much choice if I wanted to be with her, restive and fretful as she’d become. No more sitting in her chair, both asleep and awake, decades at a time—now she was truly haunting the Manor, wandering endlessly, upstairs and down, leaving a hint of vanilla in the laundry, or the Arctic Circle, or Sally’s music room; giving Julian scary, bewildering dreams and giving Evan a sense of being constantly followed in the fields by something he didn’t want to turn around and see. Tony complained to me that lately he couldn’t concentrate in his studio well enough to choreograph jumping jacks for a Phys Ed class. He blamed me for it, which figured.

As for Sally… Sally just watched me and didn’t say much. It’s taken a long time for me to realize that I’d probably never have learned how smart that woman is if we hadn’t moved to England. She knew something was going on, and she knew me, and she almost felt the connection somewhere. She’d have understood Tamsin better than I ever did, my mother.

One flukey warm evening in May, I spotted Tamsin from a distance, whisking across a cornfield like a scrap of laundry blown off a clothesline. When I ran to catch up with her and she turned to face me, for a moment I was more frightened than the Oakmen could have made me. She was tattered, as though dogs had been tearing at her, ripping away her memories of herself. There were holes between shoulder and breast, I remember, and another one gaping below her waist… and you couldn’t see through them—there was nothing on the other side. I read about black holes now, where comets and planets and all the light in the universe get sucked in forever, and I think of those holes in Tamsin.

“Who are you?” Her voice was like a wind over my own grave.

“It’s me,” I said. Squeaked. “Tamsin, it’s me, it’s Jenny. Don’t you remember?”

She didn’t, not at all, not at first. Her eyes were still Tamsin’s bluegreen eyes, practically the one undamaged thing about her, but I wasn’t there. And I was twice as scared then, feeling myself being drawn into those black holes, and all I could think of was to squeak out those first lines of the song her sister Maria had taught her:

Nothing… and then—very, very slowly—she came back. It’s hard to describe now. It isn’t that she became clear and whole and solid, recognizing me, because she didn’t; what happened was that the old transparency returned, little by little, until you could see irrigation pipes and skinny young cornstalks through her, and I was as overjoyed as if she’d come back to me in the flesh. The holes—or whatever they really were—faded as her memories knitted themselves back together; when she looked at me again, her eyes took me in, and she smiled.

“Mistress Jenny,” she said. “I’faith, but how much older you’ve grown since last we met.” It hadn’t been that long at all, though I surely felt a deal older than I had when I’d run after her. “Jenny, did I know you at first? You must tell me truly.”

“No,” I said. “Not right away.” Tamsin was already nodding. I said, “What is this? What’s happening to you?”

She wouldn’t quite look at me, and that was just about more than I could bear. I held my hands out to her, which was something we’d gradually begun to use as sign language for a hug. I didn’t think she’d remember, but she put her own hands out, slowly. She whispered, “I do not know. It comes on me often now.”

“There’s a reason,” I said. “There has to be. Something’s happening, and maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it means you’re breaking loose, about to get out of here at last. To go wherever you’re supposed to be.” But I said it pretty lamely, because I was afraid it was true, and it’s hard to sound encouraging about something you hope isn’t going to happen. Even if you’re ashamed of yourself.

Tamsin shook her head. “I would know if that were so. This is far other, this is a rending such as I have not known, and each time there’s less of me comes back able to say where I have been.” It was turning chilly: A little wind blew through her, and I smelled her vanilla and the musty scent of the green corn together. Tamsin said, “Jenny, I am afraid.”

“I’ll help you,” I said. “I will. We’ll stay together, I’ll watch you every minute, some way, so any time it starts coming over you, I’ll be there, I’ll remind you.” But it was crazy, and we both knew it. Tamsin didn’t say anything. I said, “It’s my turn to make dinner,” and we started back toward the Manor, but she vanished before we were out of the cornfield. I called her name, and I thought she answered me in the wind, but if she did, I never caught a word.

The cornfield was pretty near the Manor—I could see the lights and both chimneys from where I stood—but with Tamsin gone the house seemed as far away as New York, and with a deeper, colder sea between me and it. I wasn’t scared, but I was afraid that I was going to be, so I walked fast—not running—and I kept telling myself that I’d be home in a minute, in a warm kitchen with people all around me and Sally pissed because I was late. And I was practically on top of the Black Dog before I saw him.

I can feel him now, most of the time, the way Tamsin could. It’s a little like smelling rain a whole day away, or like knowing the phone’s going to ring. But then he was just there in front of me, where he hadn’t been a second before: big as a Harley-Davidson, and so black there has to be another word for it; people just call him the Black Dog because they don’t know the real word. Nothing—not a cave, a mine, not the bottom of the ocean, not even deep space—is the color of the Black Dog.

“Get away,” I said. “No hard feelings, but the last thing I need right now is one more bad omen. Excuse me, okay?”

He moved aside to let me by, but when I started on, he walked along with me, pacing me exactly as he’d done at the Hundred-Acre Wood. I was really losing patience fast with mythical creatures, and I told him that as he padded beside me. “What the hell use are you, for God’s sake? Go around predicting all kinds of trouble and danger without ever telling people what to look out for—what good’s that? I’d rather not know, you know that? You wouldn’t be any damn help if trouble showed up right now, anyway.” The Black Dog watched me out of his red eyes as I bitched at him, and he seemed to be listening, but he never made a sound.

He stayed with me past the front gate, past Evan’s swing and Sally’s garden. That did shut me up in time, because whatever he was supposed to be warning me against, it had to be near. When he stopped, I mumbled, “Sorry about the Oakmen,” and he gave me one last fiery stare before he stepped away into the shadow of a shed. Mister Cat shot out of it in a hurry, turned, and hissed at him, then stalked over to me to complain about the company I was keeping these days. I picked him up and started toward the house.

I was close enough to hear dishes clattering and Julian singing “I’m ’Ennery the Eighth, I am, I am”—which is my fault, because I taught it to him—when somebody said my name, and I turned.

He was standing almost exactly where the Black Dog had vanished. He wore the same robes and wig that he had on in his portrait, the one upstairs from the Restaurant. I could see his face clearly in the light from the kitchen—pale and handsome and young—and he was smiling at me. His voice was dry and whispery, just the way Tamsin had said—it sounded like tissue paper burning. I shouldn’t have been able to hear it from that distance, but I could. He said, “I am here. Tell her.” Then he bowed to me and snapped off—you could practically hear the switch click—and Sally called for me, and I went on into the house and did the best I could to help get dinner together.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. Sometime between moonset and dawn, Mister Cat woke up on my bed, stretched, growled, went to the window, made his prepare-to-meet-your-Maker-however-you-conceive-him noise, and launched himself. I said a word I’d learned from Tamsin and threw on my bathrobe.

It was a good thing I was awake, because what Mister Cat had backed up against the right front tire of Evan’s car was Mrs. Fallowfield’s repulsive little pink dog-thing. It was whimpering and showing its fishy teeth, while Mister Cat lashed his tail, deciding whether he wanted steaks or filets. I grabbed him up, tossed him in the house, grabbed Mrs. Fallowfield’s dog, slapped its nose when it tried to bite me, and sat down on the front step to wait for Mrs. Fallowfield. I figured she’d be along any time now.