Peter Beagle - Tamsin

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 …”