Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Meanwhile there were finals coming up, and Julian forever after me about helping out on the farm, and Meena having a kind of long-distance love affair with Christopher Herridge, who sang in the mixed choir Sherborne Girls shares with the boys’ school. What I mean by long distance is that they mostly just gazed at each other across a lot of heads and pews and violins, singing their hearts out. It was very romantic and doomed, because however large a fit Chris’s family might have had about him dating an Indian girl, it would have been a sneeze, a hiccup, a burp, compared to what Mr. and Mrs. Chari would have done if their daughter brought an English boy home to dinner. So Meena cried a lot— Chris was as cute as they come, no question—and we hung on the phone for hours, me doing my best to console her. Really trying, too, because I was wildly jealous of Chris, and I knew it, and wanted to make up to Meena for that, some way. I’d have days at a time, back then, when it was just impossible to be human, whichever way I turned. I still have them, once in a while.

I kept Tamsin to myself—even from myself, in a way, because I’d make a point of not thinking about her at all until I was in bed at night. Then I’d lie there and wonder what she was thinking about right at that moment, sitting in her chair watching the moon coming up, not knowing or caring whether it was tonight’s moon or tomorrow’s, or a moon from a hundred years ago. Most nights Mister Cat would be on my bed, but sometimes he wasn’t, and I’d be sure he was out with Miss Sophia Brown, being shown around all the old secret places of Stourhead Farm. And I’d decide one more time that Tamsin never meant to come find me and show me things—she’d just been being polite, the way ladies were raised to be in sixteen-whatever. She was probably off with the cats herself, none of them wasting a single minute on me. Around then I’d indulge in one quick sorrowful sniffle and go to sleep.

I’d been braced for disaster when the exam results were posted, so they didn’t look too bad the way they came out. Thanks to Julian, I sneaked through maths, just barely; thanks to Meena, I did better than that in my science classes. I was dead in Spanish, never mind that I had the best accent of anybody—I don’t understand pluperfects and past imperfects in English . But I ate up Literature and World History, and British History, too—I did almost as well as Meena, who’d been raised on that stuff. I was terrible in Games. Could have been worse.

As for Stourhead, I still wasn’t paying a lot of attention, for all the grunt work Julian had me putting in, but crops were coming up thick and fast everywhere you looked, so I figured the farm had to be back in business by now. But Evan wasn’t a bit happy. I’d hear him talking to Sally at night, always saying the same thing. “I knew it was wrong, from the beginning. I was trying to impress the Lovells—showing off, just bloody showing off, after all that talk about not expecting miracles. I should have gone ahead and done what I was meaning to do in the first place. But the Lovells would have backed off, and I was afraid of losing the situation before I even got started. But I knew , Sally.”

I’d usually have tuned out by then—I really don’t like eavesdropping. Besides, I wanted to go on knowing as little as I could get away with about Stourhead Farm, even if I had to live there. So I had no idea what was bothering Evan, and I managed to keep Sally from telling me, which she’d have done in a second. I’d lived through an English winter and an entire year of English school. I had my cat, I’d picked up a best friend and—face it—a kid brother; I’d met a boggart, and I knew a ghost. Dorset or no Dorset, I had a summer coming to me.

And we actually had a genuinely hot summer night, somewhere around the middle of June. Dorset does not have a whole lot of hot nights, no matter what the day was like. Come sundown the temperature drops off fast, and the air always feels moist, even when it hasn’t been raining. That’s because of the Bristol Channel—you can’t ever get away from the Channel in Dorset, even inland. It’s not unpleasant, itjust never feels to me like real summer.

But that evening was pure funky, sticky, breathless asphalt New York. My clothes felt as though they’d been ironed right onto me. Everybody wilted, even Sally, who can look like crisp lettuce in the worst weather. Julian got some kind of prickly rash all over him, and fussed until he had to go to bed. Evan and Tony kept making more lemonade, drinking so much of it that you could almost see it evaporating out of their pores, like a mist. Mister Cat flopped down on his side with his legs out behind him, the way a dog does, looking small and damp. When I sat by him and petted him, he rolled over, away from me, so I stopped. Too damn hot even for that.

Finally I got up and walked a little away from the Manor by myself. I felt like Mister Cat: too hot to be around people. The moon hadn’t risen yet. I stood still under a tree whose leaves weren’t stirring an inch, and listened to utterly nothing, which was the strangest thing of all. I’ve already said that it’s noisy in the country, once you know how to listen, and a completely silent country night is scary in a special way. No insects, no frogs, no owls, not so much as a creak or a clunk, or a faraway scurry—none of those nameless nightsounds you get used to, living on a farm. And the silence builds and builds, until it becomes a sound by itself, until it’s just like one of those West Eighty-third Street jackhammers, and all you want is for it to stop . As though something were going to fly apart, burst, split wide open, any minute now, but you can’t tell what it’s going to be. Like that.

Tamsin came toward me through the trees. I hadn’t noticed it up in the hidden room, but outdoors in the darkness there was the faintest sort of glow about her, greeny-violet, the way seawater gets at night sometimes. You can see it a surprising way off, and at first you think it’s fireflies. Miss Sophia Brown didn’t have it—I can’t say if even all human ghosts have it. The three I ever knew did.

“Good evening to you, Mistress Jenny,” she said. “You see, your name remains.” She was wearing a different gown to come out in, this one puffy at the sides, with something almost like a bustle in back. I didn’t like it as much as the first one, but she’d remembered bunches of ribbons over her ears, and those looked lovely. She dipped me a curtsy, and I actually made her one back, which is tricky in shorts.

“I didn’t know you ever left the house,” I said. “Your room.” It was different talking to her outside: She seemed more alive, if that makes any sense—dangerous, even, in a way.

When she smiled at me, I felt her remembering me, just like those ribbons in her hair. “Oh, I may go where I choose, so I remain within the bounds of Stourhead.” Close to, glimmering under those old trees, she looked like a beautiful moth. “But what odds the freedom of a prison?”

There was a soft bitterness in her voice that I couldn’t have imagined. I said, “I didn’t know you felt that way about… I mean, it’s your home.” I sounded like Julian.

“Aye, so it is. And will be while it stands—and after.” Tamsin put her hand on my arm, the first time she’d ever touched me. I didn’t feel anything, but I stared at her fingers against my skin the way people stare at newborn babies. “ Oh, look at the perfect little nails, the darling little toes !” Tamsin said, “But Jenny, do we not every one leave home when it comes time to find another? A father’s home for a husband’s—is that not so? And that in turn for a third, for the long home where all will meet again at last. All, all… except such as are bound, ensnared, barred away forever from such joy.” The moon was just beginning to rise, and I could see her hand tightening on my forearm, but there was absolutely no sensation.