Peter Beagle - Tamsin

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.”

Nobody. Not even Meena. All the way down the stairs—all the time I was putting the barriers back in place—all during dinner— as soon as I had a minute to myself I was going to call Meena and tell her everything about Tamsin Willoughby, my own ghost on the third floor. I almost did it the next time I saw her at school, and I almost did it when I spent a whole weekend in London with Meena and her parents. But it was like Julian and me with the boggart, only more so. Keeping secrets, knowing something that no one else in the world knows, no matter how powerful or smart or beautiful they are—it’s deadly addictive. At least it is for me, and it’s something I’m going to have to watch out for all my life. Not that a secret like Tamsin is likely to come along ever again. I know that, too.

I wanted to go right back up there the next day, after I got home from school, but I didn’t. It wasn’t so much that I thought she’d mind; it was more me needing time to believe , to take in what I’d seen, who I’d been talking to—where I’d been, in a way. Because, up in that little hidden room her father had built to hide Church of England ministers… up in that room, there were moments when Stourhead Farm was practically just built, and the first crops just in the ground, and Roger Willoughby was out front roaring at his neighbors about overgrazing, and Tamsin and I were giggling together about whom we’d like to be hiding up here, never mind any chaplains. That’s the way it felt, anyway; and for days—three or four weeks, anyway—even after I came down, I was sort of seasick in time, not completely sure of when I was. Julian noticed it, but he didn’t know what he was seeing. Like me.