Peter Beagle - Tamsin

Clem yelped, and Mr. Guthrie looked down at his hand, clenched hard in the dog’s fur as though it were somebody else’s hand. He let go and petted Clem, crooning and apologizing to him. I said, “You can’t be sure. That he actually knew them. Her.”

“He kept a diary,” Mr. Guthrie said. “Not a real diary—more of a schedule, you’d call it. A few scribbled notes on the trials—you wouldn’t want to read those—but most are social things. Visitors, dinner invitations. He was a very popular dinner guest during the Assizes, the judge was.”

I stared at him. I said, “That’s crazy. With everything he was doing every day?”

“Well, that’s precisely why.” Mr. Guthrie made himself smile. “Just you think about it. Here’s a man can send anyone , anyone he chooses to the gallows or worse. Commoners can’t offer him an evening’s entertainment, but the gentry can. Wouldn’t you want to keep in his good books—make certain he doesn’t decide you might have thought about supporting Monmouth, even for five minutes together? Oh, take my word, they fought to have him to their homes, people like the Willoughbys, people far greater than they. That’s how it was then, during the Bloody Assizes.”

I didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me. I looked at my watch to see when Sally would be back to pick me up. Mr. Guthrie said, “His journal is in the County Museum. There are several entries for the Willoughbys.”

“She wouldn’t have had anything to do with him,” I said. “I don’t care how many times he came to dinner, I don’t care what he could have done to her family, she wouldn’t have talked to him, looked at him. You don’t know her.” I was getting red-faced myself, I could feel it—not gracefully around the cheekbones like Mr. Guthrie, but pop-eyed and smeary and awful. I said, “I’m sure that sounds incredibly dumb, saying I know someone who’s been dead for three hundred years, but I do .”

“And I know George Jeffreys—Baron Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys of Wem,” Mr. Guthrie answered. “Haven’t I looked in his face, forty years, time and time, and seen what that poor little girl saw? Haven’t I looked in his face?”

He was on his feet now, though I don’t think he knew it, and he had to grip the back of the chair to steady himself, he was trembling so. For a moment I was sure he meant he’d actually seen Judge Jeffreys, just as I saw Tamsin. But then he went on—quickly, as though he knew what I was thinking—“There’s a portrait in the Lodgings. Ask them to show you.”

It got awkwardly, embarrassingly quiet again after that, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say, except to ask if I could have some more tea. Mr. Guthrie seemed relieved to go and make it. I sat there, so caught up in imagining Judge Jeffreys at Stourhead Farm, dining with the Willoughbys in the Manor, that I kept forgetting to stroke Clem. Then he’d shove his head into my hand for attention, and I’d get back to my job. But all I could think about was Tamsin, Tamsin looking across the dining table, seeing that man staring at her. Because he would have stared. And she’d have looked straight back into his face, like Mr. Guthrie, and seen what she saw. I didn’t taste that second pot of tea at all.

Sally was tired from teaching when she came to get me, and I felt guilty about it, but I talked her into taking me by the Judge jeffreys Restaurant, back in Dorchester. The Restaurant is on High West Street, around the corner from the Antelope Hotel, where they held the Bloody Assizes. It’s a three-story, half-timbered building, all stone and oak, over four hundred years old, and it’s so real that it looks absolutely fake, if you can figure that. Judge Jeffreys’s picture is on the sign hanging out front, but you really can’t make much out of it, except that he’s wearing a wig. I’ve passed it any number of times without giving it any thought, even after Tony told me about the Assizes.

But upstairs, in the Lodgings, where he slept and wrote in his journal and where people probably came to beg him for their lives, or their children’s lives—upstairs they have the portrait Mr. Guthrie was talking about. It was late, and the Lodgings part was closed, but the restaurant people knew Sally—she eats there a lot, in between pupils—so they showed us up and left us alone. And we stood there and looked at Judge Jeffreys together.

The thing I wasn’t the least bit prepared for was that he was pretty . I can’t say it any other way—he was out and out pretty, that mad, evil man. And he was young —the painting wasn’t done at the time of the Assizes, but maybe seven or eight years before, so he’d have been around thirty at the most. It’s almost a woman’s face: delicate, calm, even thoughtful, with big heavy-lidded eyes and a woman’s soft mouth. You can’t possibly imagine that face screaming and raging and foaming—which is what everybody says he did—sentencing people by the hundreds to be hacked into pieces, and ordering their heads and quarters boiled and tarred and stuck up on poles all over Dorset. There’s no way you can see that face doing those things.

I told Sally that, and she said, “Well, you know, in those days portraits didn’t necessarily look much like the people who were paying for them. Oliver Cromwell’s supposed to have told a painter that he wanted to be shown warts and all, but I don’t think that was ever much of a trend. I’ll bet nobody was about to chance painting Judge Jeffreys the way he really looked.” She put her arm around me—I guess because of the way I was staring at the portrait. “Too bad they didn’t have Polaroids back then, huh?”

But he did look like that. He looked exactly like that.

The Wild Hunt was out almost every night that second winter in Dorset—or that’s the way it seemed, anyway. Most of the time I’d be awakened, not by the horsemen, but by Julian scrambling frantically into bed with me, or by Mister Cat slamming through the window I always left partway open for him. Once or twice Meena was staying over, so it would be all of us huddled together: Mister Cat hissing and growling, Julian trying not to whimper, and Meena doing her best to stay cool and logical. Which is tricky when you’re dealing with that crazy howling and baying and laughing, all riding on an icy wind that never seemed to come from any one place. Nothing with feathers sounds like the Wild Hunt, and everybody knows it. I know everybody knows it.

And Meena heard the other thing one night—that awful, hopeless almost-human wail crossing the sky just ahead of the Hunt. Julian didn’t hear it, but Meena’s face went almost transparent, as though you could see right through her brown skin to the trembling underneath. She said, very softly, “We have demons in India, demons with a hundred terrible heads—even demons that can be gods at the same time, it depends. We don’t have that . We don’t .” She wasn’t over it in the morning, like Julian; she didn’t get over it for days. It’s still the one time I’ve ever seen Meena afraid.

Other people were hearing the Hunt too—there was even a squib in the Dorchester paper about it. The Colfaxes, next farm over, said their chickens couldn’t sleep and were off their feed; and at school everyone told me their parents were really spooked and pretending not to be. It didn’t matter whether they believed in the Wild Hunt or not—it was there . People are different about stuff like that in England.

I’d been frantic to go find Tamsin the same night after I’d talked with Mr. Guthrie and been to the Lodgings with Sally. But I couldn’t, not then, and not for more than a week. There was school, and there was fixup stuff around the Manor—as there is to this day, it’s never done with—and there was always the farm. The Lovells had clamped down hard on Evan’s hiring budget, so Tony and Julian and I got pressed into more fieldwork than anybody’d bargained for. In some ways the no-till business was easier for us than deep plowing would have been; in other ways it was a lot more delicate, because you have to use exactly the right amount of fertilizer—you can’t slather it on anymore—and we had to be sparing with the seeds because the new kind Evan needed were really hard to come by that first year. And the weather never quit being mean and messy. That’s another thing that accounts for a lot of Thomas Hardy.