Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Tamsin introduced us, very formally, like people meeting at a party or a fancy dinner. “Jenny, this is the billy-blind. The billyblind, I have the honor to present to you Mistress Jennifer Gluckstein.” I almost didn’t mind the Jennifer when she said it.

I’d had a lot of practice with curtsies by now, so I made him a really deep one and he put his right hand flat on his belly and bowed. Then he straightened up fast and said, “Oughtn’t wear your hair all strained back like that, child—doesn’t suit, doesn’t suit. Take my advice, you’ll comb it forward.”

He had a Dorset accent, but not old Dorset, not like the boggart. You could hear the Z’s buzzing around in there, and the I’s wanting to come out like oi , but I didn’t have any trouble understanding him. What I did have trouble with was the whole notion that a two-foot-high Robert Newton was telling me what I ought to do with my hair. I said, “Look, Mr. billy-blind, I really appreciate your interest—”

Well, he turned absolutely pink at that. Fuchsia. He pulled himself up as tall as he could, and he actually stamped his foot as he shouted at me, “I’m noo Measter billy-blind! You call me the billy-blind, same’s her does, that’s what you call me! I am the billy-blind!”

I took a step back, he was so angry, but Tamsin moved in in a hurry. “The billy-blind, she’s but young and meant no harm. I was just so myself when first we met, you’ll remember.”

That calmed him down a bit, and he tidied his cravat and smoothed out his vest. “I do that, I remember. No bigger than the billy-blind, you were, and no more manners than a hedge-pig.” Now he was all mush, that fast, with real tears in his eyes. He bowed to me again and said, “Your pardon, Mistress Jennifer—”

“Jenny—”

“Mistress Jenny, then. You’ve all my apologies, but you’d do better to take my advice about your hair. And now I’m at it, yellow’s noo your color. Green’s what you want, mind me, greens and blues. The billy-blind knows.”

And he just went on like that, nonstop. He told me my sinuses would clear up if I ate red clover, and that I wouldn’t keep waking up with headaches if I moved my bed to the other side of the room. “And there’s noo use in your friend, the dark girl, greeting her eyes out for that boy in choir. W’ole family be gone away come fall, moved off to Afriky somewhere. You tell her the billy-blind said so.”

I said I would. The billy-blind gave me a really long stare, studying me all up and down. His eyes weren’t Disney eyes at all, but they weren’t wicked either, like the boggart’s. They were more like jewelled passages leading a long way backward or a long way forward, I couldn’t tell which. He nodded suddenly.

“Aye, you’d be needing the billy-blind’s counsel, the pair on ye.” He was looking at Tamsin now. “You want to sit still, that’s what you want. Sit still , don’t be running about so.” Giving a ghost lessons in deportment sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of, but Tamsin nodded. The billy-blind turned back to me. “You,” he said. “You’ll do best to stay away from that place. And stop eating them grapes.”

I couldn’t take it in. I gaped at him like a baby bird. I said, “ What place? And what’s wrong with me eating grapes?”

“You’ll be eating them all,” the billy-blind said calmly. He went back to talking with Tamsin, and I was too busy blushing to hear what they were saying. Because it’s perfectly true about me and grapes. I always mean to leave some, but I’m just not reliable.

I was going to ask him again about whatever place I was supposed to stay away from, but right at that moment I heard Evan’s voice saying, “Jenny? Is that you?”

Tamsin went out the way a match goes out, and the billy-blind was through the window and gone in a blur of eggplant. I turned and saw Evan standing in the doorway, absently rumpling his hair the way he was always doing. He said, “We were getting a bit anxious.”

“I lost track of time,” I said. “Sorry.” I’d gotten a lot better with Evan by then. I didn’t blame him anymore for wrecking my life— I even had long stretches when I thought maybe he hadn’t wrecked it at all. But I didn’t like him knowing that, and I had an uneasy feeling he did. I’d invested a lot of time and thought and energy in hating Evan. I wasn’t ready to call it a waste and let it go. That’s how I was then.

“I was looking for something,” I said as I came out. Evan gave me a funny look. Back then the North Barn was more of a glorified storage shed, all farm machinery and things under tarpaulins, and mysterious old barrels like the one the billy-blind had been standing on. But Evan didn’t push it, and we started back toward the Manor together.

Even in the darkness I could see he was looking tired. He said, “Your mother worries about these night walks of yours. I do myself. It’s easy to step into something, a furrow, and break an ankle, if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I’m careful,” I said. “I really do know this place pretty well by now.” Of course the moment I said that, I tripped—not in a hole, but over Mister Cat, flopped right down in my path, the way he does sometimes. He yowled at me, and I yowled back at him to watch it, stupid cat , and he scatted away into the brush with his feelings hurt. I figured we’d make it up at bedtime.

Evan started to say, “I think it’d be a good idea if you had someone—Julian or Tony—” but I headed him off by asking if he knew what a billy-blind was. You can almost always sidetrack Evan with a question like that, about legends or folklore. The boys do it all the time.

“Billy-blinds?” He shook his head and smiled a little. “Lord, I haven’t heard that word in years. Who told you about billyblinds?”

“Just a friend,” I said. “Someone at school. She said they’re supposed to give advice?”

Evan laughed. “That they do. Your billy-blind absolutely lives to give advice. Doesn’t matter what subject, never mind the time or the place or the person—the billy-blind will tell you what to do, whether you ask or not. It’s their nature, and there’s only the tiniest problem with it. They aren’t always right.”

I asked if there was only one billy-blind at any one time, like the phoenix. Evan said he’d never heard that, nor that you had to call each one the billy-blind. “But maybe it’s different in Dorset. There’s a lot of regional variation among British boghes. Like the way our boggart just vanished—I’ve never heard of that before. You maybe make a deal with boggarts, but you don’t get rid of them.”

He was glad we were talking, and it was easy to keep him from asking any more questions about me wandering the farm at night. I felt a bit guilty about that, and guilty all over again for not telling everyone what had really happened with the boggart. But Evan was telling me a story about a Yorkshire family who moved from their farm to get away from a boggart, only to find that they’d brought it along with them. And I was thinking of Tamsin, and wondering again who Edric was, and what the Black Dog and the billy-blind knew that we didn’t. And where Tamsin was supposed to be, instead of here, where I wanted her to be.

All the same, I was feeling guilty enough that I actually asked Evan a question about himself before we reached the Manor. “What is it that’s not going right with the farm? I hear you and Sally talking, but I don’t understand. It’s looking great, as far as I can see.”

Evan stopped in his tracks and blinked at me. I don’t think he could have been more amazed if Tamsin had walked up to him and tried to bum a cigarette. He messed his hair again, sighed, stared around vaguely, and finally said, “Jenny, people have been plowing up this land for over three hundred years, and the soil’s exhausted, played out. It’s losing topsoil, it’s starved for nutrients, and what it’s been given is bloody rivers of chemical fertilizers. I went along with that style of farming this whole last year, because the Lovells expected it—because the land’s literally addicted to it. Maybe it looks good to you now, but the yield’s half what it should be, and it’ll be less next year, less than that the next. It’s my fault, and I know what I have to do. And I’m scared to do it.”