Peter Beagle - Tamsin

We were at the house by then, and Evan walked in without saying another word to me. I waited around outside for a bit, hoping for a quick moment with Tamsin. But she didn’t show, so I went up to bed, waiting for Mister Cat instead. No luck there, either. I lay awake forever, holding Julian’s funky old gorilla, with my head too full of too many things to think straight about any one of them. I’d have settled for snickery little voices in my bathroom right then, just for the distraction.

But I must have fallen asleep sometime, because I was awakened by Mister Cat going round and round with something outside. I know that sound he makes when he’s in a fight: low and evil, like a saw cutting bone. I stuck my head out of the window and yelled for him to get up here, and he came scrambling in a moment later, while something I couldn’t see clearly scuttled out of sight under Evan’s Jeep. Mister Cat was panting hard, and his eyes were as red as the Black Dog’s. There was blood high on his chest. I wanted to look at it, but he backed away from me and settled down to licking the wound, still growling to himself. He was still doing it when I dozed off again.

He was fine in the morning, cool and sleek as ever, though he still wouldn’t let me inspect the slash on his chest. I went into my bathroom and started doing things with my hair, trying to see what bangs would look like. I got Julian to help me move the bed.

A couple of weeks later, Christopher Herridge told Meena his family would be moving to Africa in September. Meena cried more than ever, and I felt terrible, because I’d known , and maybe I could have found some way to warn Meena even a little, to soften the blow. But I hadn’t said anything, because Evan had warned me billy-blinds don’t always get things right. More secrets.

I didn’t see Tamsin for some while after that night. Every evening I’d find some reason to wander off to the places where we usually met, but she wasn’t ever there. Once I even went up to the third floor and spent maybe half an hour walking back and forth outside the secret door. I could have opened it and walked in, but I didn’t. It’s hard to explain why now. Most of me missed Tamsin in a way I’d never missed anybody—not Marta and Jake when I started school here, not even Mister Cat when he was in quarantine—but one small part of me was scared utterly out of its mind, because this was getting too big for me, and I knew it. One night I had a dream about that big golden-eyed creature Tamsin called “old friend,” and another night I dreamed about the Other One. She’d told me he was gone, vanished, but the dream didn’t think so. I was back at her door, and this time I pushed it open, and he was waiting, sitting in her chair. I didn’t see his face, but it was him.

To keep from thinking about her so much, I started being helpful around the Manor. I cleaned up my room without anyone’s having to ask me, and then I went ahead and cleaned the boys’ rooms, which got them both mad at me—Julian especially, because his spiders got loose. After that I hung around Sally, volunteering for every damn thing she needed done—washing, cooking, weeding her little kitchen garden and stirring up the compost pile—even refinishing musty old furniture or running errands to Evan out in the fields, when she couldn’t stand it and had to get rid of me. I made everybody really nervous during that stretch, including Mister Cat. He’d either disappear for the whole day—probably with Miss Sophia Brown, whom I didn’t see either—or else he’d follow me around, saying sarcastic things in Siamese, which he only ever speaks when he’s really mad, or when I’ve surprised him. Mister Cat hates surprises.

Tony was the one who called me on it. He just came straight up to me one afternoon when I was out hanging laundry and asked, “All right, what have you done?”

I had a mouthful of clothespins, so I had to mumble, “Drying your damn legwarmers, you really want to know. And your sweaty old Fabrizios.” Tony goes through tights like Julian through crawly things.

“You’re being good,” Tony said. “You’re being unbelievably, unnaturally, abnormally good. Julian’s the same way when he’s done something really awful nobody knows about yet. Let’s have it, Jenny.”

I got furious, of course. Tony can still do that to me once in a while, sniffing out something absolutely true and getting it totally wrong. I said I wasn’t up to anything, and hadn’t been up to anything, and what the hell did he know about anything, and about Monmouth’s Rebellion—did he think old Roger Willoughby might have been involved in it? Tony’s harder to sidetrack than Evan, but you can do it.

“Roger Willoughby? Possible, but I doubt it, rather. He wasn’t gentry-born, but he wasn’t a little Dorset yeoman, either. He’d have known what the Stuarts were like, and he’d probably have waited to see how things fell out.” He rumpled his hair, exactly like Evan, and added after a moment, “But I’d bet at least some of his farmhands took off with Monmouth, poor sods. Why do you want to know?”

“Just curious,” I said. “Just wondering about stuff.” Tony gave me the kind of look Mister Cat gives me when there’s only dry kibble in his dish, but he left it alone. I went on hanging laundry and thinking about Tamsin. As much as she’d told me about herself—family, childhood, the farm, the Black Plague, even the name of her horse—there were pieces missing. I could feel their shapes sometimes, when we were together, actually feel the empty outlines of things she wasn’t telling me. I didn’t know if she’d been around for the Rebellion, or what she’d thought about it when it was happening. Or why the billy-blind had warned her twice to sit still—or why she hadn’t come inside on a wild night, and died of it, for that matter. I didn’t know what questions I ought to ask her, and I didn’t know what questions I didn’t want to hear the answers to. Only that I wanted to be with her.

Late one July afternoon, I went off for a walk by myself, feeling glumpy, which is one of Julian’s words for being stupidly miserable. Meena’s mother had been supposed to drop her off with us to stay the weekend, but something family came up and she had to cancel at the last minute. Between that and not being sure if I’d ever see Tamsin again—and not even knowing where the hell my cat was—I was glumpy enough to realize that I hadn’t been this glumpy in a pretty long while. Which only made me glumpier, dumb as that is.

There’s a place I still go to when I’m feeling like that. It’s on the downs, above the sheep pasture, what’s left of a shepherd’s hut. No roof, one wall, a few foundation stones, a few rainy splinters of a floor. Evan thinks it’s a hundred years old, no more, but it could just as easily be from Tamsin’s time, you can’t tell. I hike out there, and I sit on the ground with my back against that last wall and the sun on my face—or the fog, either—and I watch the butterflies and feel sorry for myself. Love it.

I was amazed to see the black pony grazing peacefully right by the old hut. There’s never anything bigger than a rabbit on that long slope, except for the sheep, away off—but there he was, stocky and small as the New Forest ponies, and black as Mister Cat himself, almost purple in the shadow of the wall. No saddle, no bridle, no shoes, mane and tail stiff with burrs, he never looked up as I came near, being so careful not to spook him. “Look at you ,” I said, keeping my voice really low. “You’re wild—you’re a genuine wild horse. Hello.”

The black pony didn’t even flick his ears. I said, “You’re also a mess . I’ve got a friend named Meena—she’d spend a whole day currying you, combing you out. Me, I couldn’t care less, I’m not much into horses, Just shove over a bit, I want to sit down.”