Peter Beagle - Tamsin

I didn’t know how to tell her that I’d been afraid of opening her door and finding the Other One waiting in her chair. I muttered, “We’ve been helping to get the harvest in.”

Tamsin nodded. “Aye, we did just so, even when I was small. It rained the same then, if that’s any comfort.”

“And I’m trying not to rouse you,” I said. Tamsin looked at me as blankly as any living, breathing human could have done. I said, “That’s what the billy-blind warned me about. He told me I was waking you up, the way we talk and visit and go for walks, and that rousing you meant rousing something else, other things, I don’t know what he meant. Maybe you do. I don’t know anything—I just want to keep you safe. From whatever.”

Tamsin went on petting Mister Cat and Miss Sophia Brown, and she didn’t answer me. It was too hard to keep my eyes open, so I let them float shut. Tamsin began to sing her sister’s nursery song:

I opened my eyes again when she sang my name. She was smiling, and there was never one damn thing I could do when Tamsin smiled. It’s hard to say why, especially when you figure that we’re talking about a guess of a memory of a smile—how does a ghost recall teeth, or what happens to the eyes when the mouth corners turn up? But maybe that was exactly it; maybe Tamsin’s smile got me the way it always did because three hundred years of Tamsin went into that smile. Anyway, all I could manage was to say, “I’ve missed you. I miss you more than I miss anybody —people back in New York, anybody. But you’re supposed to sit still, the billy-blind kept saying it. I just don’t want to get you into trouble.”

Tamsin patted my leg through the blankets. I didn’t feel it—I wanted to, but I didn’t—but she did, some way, I could tell. I could. She said, “Jenny, I have never missed but four folk, if by that you mean being more aware of their absence than of my own presence. Now of those four, three are as long stopped as I—my father and my mother and and she actually mumbled the next name— Edric —on purpose, like me when I don’t want to be understood. For just that moment, just that moment, Tamsin Elspeth Catherine Maria Dubois Willoughby was exactly my age.

She went on, really quietly, “But that fourth—that fourth is a child from the colonies, a living girl whose world can only be one of my dreams, but whose soul somehow takes my soul by the hand. Dear Jenny, it is too late for the billy-blind. I am wakened, and I am already in trouble, and there’s naught for it but to see it through, come wind, come weather. Yet I am glad—is that not strange?”

I was wide awake myself now. I sat up in bed, joggling Mister Cat, who didn’t like it. “Well, it’s my fault, so I have to see it through with you. And even if it weren’t and I didn’t, I would, you know that.” Tamsin smiled at me again. I said, “But you have to tell me some things. You know that, too.”

“Yes, Jenny,” Tamsin said, but she didn’t say anything else for what seemed like a long time. Outside, one of the cocks crowed, but not because the day was dawing, like in the old song—cocks go off like car alarms, at all hours. It was raining again, so maybe that did it. I couldn’t hear any other night sounds through the rain, but for a moment I thought I heard what might have been the click of unshod hoofs across the new driveway, and I wondered if the Pooka was watching the house. I hoped he was, though I couldn’t have said why.

Tamsin said, “Edric Davies is a musician?” That happened a lot—her meaning to state a fact and having it come out a sad little question. I actually said, “No!” before I could stop myself— that’s how totally I’d fixed my face for Edric being a Welsh fisherman. I said, “You mean, like my mother ?”

“Indeed, just so.” Tamsin was really delighted by the idea, you could see. “A music master, like your mother, teaching his art and playing for grand balls and brawls alike, all through the county. My father would have my portrait done when I turned nineteen, and Edric was thus engaged for my entertainment while I must sit for the painter. So it was.”

Another musician. Up to here in musicians my entire life, and here comes another one—keyboards, yet. A fisherman, a sailor, a gypsy tinker would have been more romantic than one more damn piano player. “Shall I say what he sang, Jenny? I tell his songs over to myself, like a nun with her beads, and could name you every one, when I cannot always recall the hue of my own hair. ‘Lawn as white as driven snow,’ ‘Ombre de mon amant,’ ‘Vous ne sauriez, mes yeux,’ ‘Still I’m wishing,’ ‘What can we poor females do?’—you see, you see how I remember?”

I’d never seen her looking the way she looked now. It wasn’t just that she was absolutely clear, perfectly distinct, as solid and real and alive for that moment as Mister Cat snoring between us. What it was was a light, that faint, faint ghost-light all around her, growing bright enough to throw my shadow on the bed. I don’t believe in angels and halos, and I’ve never seen anyone’s aura, but Tamsin looked like all that stuff when she talked about Edric Davies.

“My parents quite approved of him,” she said. “As singer, as musico—as a gentleman, even, for he was better educated than they, while never making show of it, and they’d have been shamed to have him eat with the servants. But had they known what was passing between our eyes, while the hired dauber toiled away and my mother knitted in a corner…Jenny, we said no word of it to each other—what need? It was our good fortune that the painter was slow and clumsy, and cross with it, and must be forever scratching out and starting over. My father grew impatient, but as for Edric and me, we’d have stopped time and the world in that music room, could we have done so. Perhaps we did. I think sometimes we did.”

I didn’t know how to take it. I never used to get squirmy about other people’s big romances—as many crushes as I saw Jake Walkowitz through, let alone Meena’s broken heart over Chris Herridge. But this was something altogether else, this wasn’t anything I knew anything about, and I didn’t even know how to look back into Tamsin’s eyes. I said, “So you ran off together.”

Tamsin sighed so softly that I almost didn’t hear her, because of the rain. I still don’t understand how ghosts can make sounds at all. “We had such plans, Jenny. It was to be Bristol first, then to Cardiff, where Edric had family, and where we might be married— and then London, oh, London! There was work for a musician, and friends who might yet arrange an introduction at Court—for James does prize music, I’ll grant him that.”

She’d do that sometimes, slipping between past and present, like a radio at sundown, when the little faraway stations start coming in. Now she said, “I love him so, and dare tell none. I fear to sleep—what if I should cry out his name, and my mother or a servant hear? My parents will be destroyed to lose me, and I will surely be destroyed to think of them finding me gone—but there’s naught for it, Jenny, there’s naught for it. Bristol first, then, tomorrow night, and chance the elements.” The rain started falling harder right on those last words. Dorset weather is very dramatic.

“And you got caught in the storm,” I said. It was working out practically the way I’d made it up, except maybe for the duel. But Tamsin shook her head, coming back to the present tense so hard that her outline shivered like a candle flame.